“Good morning, honey.”
Josh turned toward her, smiling, then turned red when he saw her naked body. He was still such a prude. Sarah didn’t know how any man could be married to her for ten years and still be so sexually inhibited.
“Do you have to walk around naked all the time? What if some pervert is looking through the windows with a telescope right now?”
“This is Vegas. If a guy wants to see a naked woman he can see better bodies than mine for a handful of ones and a two-drink minimum.”
“But why would he if he can see yours for free?”
“I’d be flattered if someone were going through all that effort just to see me.”
Josh walked over to the windows in the kitchen and then in the great room and shut the blinds. Sarah giggled.
“You really do think someone might be looking. That means you still think I’m hot. Wanna fuck?”
“I made pancakes.”
Josh smiled wide like a proud parent as he held up a plate of crispy bacon, fluffy eggs, and three blackened pancakes.
Sarah smiled back. At least the bacon and eggs looked good.
“Thank you, sweetheart. Maybe we can fuck after breakfast?” She winked at him, then took the plate and plopped down at the kitchen table. She didn’t even have to look at Josh to know that he was turning red again. He embarrassed so easily it never ceased to amaze her.
“Maybe you can lick butter and syrup off me?” She smiled at him and he fumbled a plate and almost dropped it. Sarah laughed.
“You are so wild.” Josh laughed.
“That’s why you married me.” She winked at him again and shoved a piece of bacon in her mouth.
“There’s someone moving in across the street.”
“I know. I saw him when I was upstairs. It looks like it’s just some guy moving in by himself.”
“He didn’t see you, did he? I mean, you had some clothes on, didn’t you?”
“If he can see through the blinds, two stories up, in the daytime, then he’s Superman.”
“In other words, you didn’t have a shirt on?”
“Relax, nobody saw me.”
She thought about the way the new neighbor had looked up at the window and another cold chill ran over her.
“Well, do you think maybe we should go introduce ourselves?”
“I guess that means you don’t want to fuck me?”
“Sarah, is that all you think about?”
He had concern in his voice when he asked the question, as if he thought Sarah was crazy, some kind of nymphomaniac. Josh had asked her many times in the past if she’d ever been sexually assaulted or abused. He had almost insisted that she had been. It was the only explanation he could think of for her powerful sex drive, using his self-help-book psychology. Men always figured that a woman had to be damaged in some way if she had a stronger libido than theirs. It was one of those male-chauvinist things that pissed Sarah off.
Josh was even worse than most men when it came to that because he himself had been molested as a child. He had told her about it once and then made her promise never to bring it up again. He had been one of the apparent thousands of young boys who had been molested by a priest. His mother had sent him to Bible camp for the summer and one of the camp counselors, a popular young priest, had dragged him out into the woods every night for eight weeks. The camp counselors would tell all the kids what to say in their letters home and then read each one before they mailed them, destroying any that mentioned sexual abuse or any displeasure at being at the camp at all. They had all apparently been in on it.
Josh had come home and told his parents. They had freaked out and sent him to a home for troubled kids, where he’d been abused again by one of the older boys who’d anally raped him at knifepoint and one of the youth counselors had forced him to perform oral sex. This time he told no one. Eventually, he had his growth spurt and beat the hell out of the older kid. The counselor had left him alone then too.
Nothing happened to the priest who’d started it all. He got away with what he’d done for twenty years, and then one day they’d been watching TV when his picture had flashed on the screen, along with a story about how he’d been accused of molesting young boys going back more than a dozen years.
“More than twenty years.” Josh had corrected the newscaster. Then he’d told Sarah the story. It had explained a lot, his shyness and timidity in the bedroom and his defensiveness around the entire Catholic child-molestation issue. Josh was still religious but avoided church like the plague though he still called himself a Catholic. Sarah didn’t get it.
“How can you believe in a God who would let his own representatives do this? If he does exist, he might as well not exist for all the difference it makes.”
“God had nothing to do with that,” Josh said.
“But I thought God had something to do with everything?”
“He didn’t have shit to do with that! That was just a man. One sick, twisted, evil man.”
“But didn’t God create the man?”
“God gave man free will.”
“How can there be free will if God is all-knowing? If God already knows everything you will ever do from birth to death before he ever creates you, then he created you specifically to do those things because he could have not created you or created you with a different nature. I’m just saying, an omniscient creator and free will are sort of incompatible concepts. Omniscience is more compatible with determinism.”
“You’re going to have to dumb it down for me a little. I didn’t go to graduate school. But it sounds to me like you’re saying that God wanted me to be raped by a priest? Is that what the fuck you’re saying?”
That discussion hadn’t gone well. They never did. Sarah had tried to discuss his religious beliefs with him a few times but they had all turned rather nasty and ended in shouting matches. Eventually, they had agreed that that subject was taboo, as was any discussion of his molestation. And Josh had slowly begun to open up more and more sexually under her patient guidance and coaxing. Sarah had enjoyed the challenge. It had fed her own need for control.
Sarah had always enjoyed making men uncomfortable with her wantonness, and even knowing the reasons for Josh’s rather conservative attitude toward sex, she still enjoyed teasing him and rarely felt guilty about it even though she knew she should have. Much of her sexuality was an act anyway. If Josh had sex with her every time she asked for it she’d have stopped asking. She considered it a sort of protest against the double standard. A man who wanted sex all the time was a stud. A woman who liked sex was some kind of slut or a victim. And sex abuse aside, she knew that Josh felt the same way. This was just one more annoying manifestation of Josh’s puritanical Catholic upbringing that Sarah had yet to adjust to.
“After barely seeing you all week? Yeah, fucking you is all I can think about. When I stop thinking about fucking you, start worrying.”