Twenty-Two
T he good thing about my last two failed attempts at not letting hot sex infect me with feelings, is that they both taught me something. I can cross stuff that doesn’t work off my list now. Not kissing makes no difference, and being super filthy doesn’t either. Now it’s just a matter of continuing this process of elimination.
I need to come up with things I can get away with, without feeling like I want to tell him he makes my heart skip a beat, or some other similar cliche that doesn’t actually exist in real life. And I think I have it, once I’m in the library again, away from his hot body and hot face and hot ability to say the gentlest, most soft-boy things and yet still somehow make me lose my mind.
I will just sext all of my desperate need for him out of me.
Or at least, that’s what I tell myself, when he emails me this :
I think I might be addicted to making you come. Either that or I’ve been possessed by some sort of demon, who rules over the part of hell that focuses on being extremely horny. Though maybe that means I should hate horniness?
When I regret to inform you that I do not, not even a little, not even at all.
Yours sincerely, your fake husband, who is very really and actually lusting after you, to the point where he forgot he was supposed to be leading a writing sprint by the lake and had to steal a golf cart to get there in time.
Because what else can I do but reply to it, in kind? I mean, I want to ask him more reasonable things, like where he stole the golf cart from. But when I go to, my fingers just refuse. They type these words instead:
I know I should be trying to cure you of this terrible being-possessed-by-a-horn-demon affliction, but after you made me come so hard I saw God, on more than one occasion, it kind of seems okay to not. I mean, surely that’s the goal of the horny levels of hell – to make you behold the face of the Lord?
Yours sincerely, your fake wife, who is equally and very really lusting after you, to the point where she just wrote a whole short story about fucking a very large and sexy man called Benry Hamuel Seckett, until his eyes roll back in his head.
Though it’s only after I have that I realize what I’ve done. I just focused on the funny and sexy parts. I didn’t think about the story part, until he replies almost immediately.
This Benry fella sounds fascinating. I would love to hear more about him.
Via an attachment, that you could maybe send me, right now.
And then I have to sit back in this creaky seat, and take a breath. Just try to calm myself down, so I don’t do something I regret. Like send an actual editor of whole real books my work, just because he’s kind and funny and makes me believe I can. Because most of the time, I forget that’s what he is. I forget that he’s an important person, who has real power and importance in the world. That he could judge my work unworthy, with actual weight behind it.
And I can’t afford to do that here.
I can’t afford to let him assess my words, while stealthily pretending this is just about sex. Because I know that’s what’s happening, of course I do. It feels like all kinds of things are getting in under the radar, disguised as being really horny. But somehow after a moment of steeling myself, I send it to him anyway. Then I get up, and pace along the balcony of books.
I pick one to flick through, put it back down.
Pick another, and don’t even make it to flicking.
All I do is stand there, staring at it in my hands. Barely sensible of the title, or the author. Convinced, now, that letting an expert in writing read my work was the worst thing I’ve ever done. One time you had sex with a guy in the bathroom of a train to York, got locked in, and had to be led out by the police without your trousers on because somehow in the middle they got flushed down the toilet , my brain reminds me. But my brain is a dipshit.
It knows full well I’m used to things like that.
I’m not used to things like this. Things like this break me out in a cold sweat. They make me want to throw my laptop into the nearest body of water. And I only don’t because I glimpse the subject line of his next email, as I’m in the process of closing things down and getting my things together, for this lake-lobbing excursion.
DO NOT NOW TRY TO PUT ALL YOUR EMAILS IN THE TRASH
Because he knows, of course he does. He doesn’t guess the specifics, but he gets what the urge behind them is. He gets it so much that I sit down too hard into my creaky chair, and click open before I can think another thing about it. Breath held but otherwise pretty okay, as I read what he has to say.
I wanted to only tell you in my reply that you’re too good to be pretending you shouldn’t do this or can’t do it or must only do it secretly in case someone who no longer has any power over you disapproves. But then I got to this part – I say with my pen what I can’t with my body, letting the loops and swirls of every letter lick him in ways I tell myself I don’t want to, waiting for him to waver over words like hot and wet and cunt, always thinking that he won’t, but made desperate by the idea that he might – and I couldn’t think rationally or practically anymore. I couldn’t be an editor, assessing. Your writing is so intense and so visceral, it dragged me to someplace else.
I had to excuse myself, and go back to our bedroom.
And make myself come while pressed against your side of the bed. So I could get the maddening marzipan scent of your hair, while I did it. So I could imagine you with me, doing every dirty thing you detailed in this story. The fingers in his mouth – would you do that while you fucked me? Would you make me suck them, before you stroked your clit? Tell me to take it, to stop when you think I’m going to come, to wait for your say-so?
I can’t decide.
I can no longer tell what’s real and what’s not.
Your wondering husband, waiting with bated breath for you to tell me.
And even though I should hesitate, I don’t.
I write back:
what I’m going to do to you now is real
Then I scramble back to the lodge so fast that I only realize I’ve forgotten half my things, when he asks me where they are. ‘You had a jacket on,’ he says. About ten seconds before I make him forget about anything like that, too.