Sixty-Nine
Shiloh felt Cary move his cock away from her.
It was a really nice cock. (Not that she was any kind of expert.) Thick and slightly curved. She’d forgotten that until she
saw it again.
Cary had moles all over his chest and a tattoo over his ribs—Shiloh never knew that Cary had a tattoo, and she still didn’t
know what it said. He’d been moving too fast. There was too much to process. This was all just a lot, in general. Sex. And kissing. And apparently they were getting married.
“You can keep going,” she said. “I’ll catch up.”
Cary laughed—but it sounded frustrated. Shiloh decided not to open her eyes.
“Move over,” he said. “Put your head on the pillow.”
They were lying at an angle. Shiloh’s feet were hanging off the bed. She scooted over. Got right. Cary pulled the sheet up
over them. She felt his hand on her waist again, rolling her so that her body was facing him. She went along with it.
“Shiloh.”
Her eyes were open, but she was still looking down.
“Shiloh.”
She looked up. Her eyes caught Cary’s for a second, then dropped to the middle of his nose.
“You okay?”
She nodded. “I just get overwhelmed.”
“Okay.”
“It’s easier if you sort of ignore me...”
“I’m not going to ignore you.”
“Just for a little while.”
“No.”
Shiloh pushed her forehead into his cheek. She felt like crying.
Cary brought his hand up to her back. He rubbed between her shoulder blades. He sighed. After a second, he said, “What do
you need?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s spinning around your head?”
She closed her eyes. She clenched her teeth. Cary rubbed her back.
“I want to light you on fire,” she said.
“Literally or metaphorically?”
“Literally, I think?”
“Why?”
“So I can remember you.”
“Huh...” He didn’t sound alarmed.
She tried again: “I don’t know what to do with you when you get close.”
“What do you want to do?”
Shiloh touched his cheek. She touched his chest—it was hairy, she shivered. She touched his side, where his tattoo was. She
poked his belly. He flinched.
“Are you really going to move back here?” she asked.
“Look at me.”
Shiloh tried to look at him.
Cary looked stern, he looked handsome. She was thinking about the lines on his cheeks and the tan line at his throat and the
fact that he’d stopped to buy condoms, and one time a bottle of wine—and another time Pringles and Cherry Coke. Cary was never
empty-handed.
“I’m going to try,” he said. “I’m going to do everything I can to be with you.”
She shivered.
“Are you cold?”
“No.” Shiloh shook her head. She wasn’t cold, she was weird. She was running 110 on a 220. “I guess we’re just going to get
married, then.”
“Only if you want to.”
“I want to,” she whispered. She found his ear. “Cary, I want you.”
His hand tightened on her waist. “I always want you, Shiloh.”
“You said that before.”
“Because it’s true... Look at me. ”
Shiloh tried to look at him.
He looked handsome. He looked concerned.
“I love you,” he said. (Was that the third time?)
She shivered.
“What do you need?” he asked again.
Shiloh didn’t know what she needed, and she only sort of knew what she wanted. She didn’t want this to stop. She didn’t want
Cary to leave or back out or change his mind.
She touched his rib. “Can I poke you?”
Cary nodded his head. “Yes.”
“Can I pinch you?”
“Yes.” He didn’t blink.
“Can I bite you?”
His cheeks pulsed. “Yes.”
Shiloh pressed her face hard into his shoulder. Cary. This was Cary. He was naked. They were both naked, it was distracting—it
was mortifying. She felt like screaming. She felt like knocking something over. She was happy, but too full. Happy in a way
that scratched. She couldn’t take this all at once. She needed to build up her tolerance. She needed a circling approach.
She bit the muscle on the side of his neck—just hard enough to be too hard. It made her bones vibrate. Cary took a breath
in through his teeth.
Shiloh moved her mouth down and bit him again—her whole body shuddered, and Cary exhaled with his throat tight.
She moved her mouth over his shoulder and did it again. Harder. All of Shiloh’s muscles clenched until she let go—it was just
a few seconds. Then she arched her neck back and pinched her shoulder blades together. Shivering, shivering.
When she looked up at Cary, his face had gone slack. He shoved her onto her back and kissed her.
Shiloh held on to his shoulders. She felt like someone had skimmed off her top layer of static. She stayed inside of the kiss.
She smiled. Cary noticed. He kissed the corner of her mouth. “There you are,” he murmured.
She looked in his eyes. “There you are.”
The good thing about having sex with Ryan was...
Well, there were a lot of good things about having sex with Ryan. (Just ask the Southwest High School theater department!)
But one of them was that he was selfish.
You could say, “I need this to not be about me,” and Ryan would listen.
He was happy for it to be about him.
When Shiloh told him, “I’ll catch up,” Ryan went ahead. And sometimes she caught up, and sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she just went to sleep.
When they first started having sex, her nerves were always in the way. She couldn’t initiate. She could only come if she was
a little drunk and Ryan was a lot patient. (And sometimes if she pretended it was happening to someone else?)
And then Shiloh was pregnant and breastfeeding, and she stopped wanting sex. She’d still have it. And she usually enjoyed it once they got rolling. But her desire felt buried under a heavy blanket
of snow. (Her clitoris was a groundhog that would occasionally peek its head out, yawn, and decide to go back to bed.)
And then Shiloh found out that her husband had slept with a dozen women while they were together. Going all the way back to college!
Two people in the cast of that summer play in the park—the ingenue! The stage manager!
What did that make Shiloh, apart from a fool? (Could a woman be cuckolded? She had been wearing a suit...)
A fool. A na?f. An incubator.
Neurotic. Barely orgasmic.
Wasted—the way a resource is wasted. Like a faucet left on. Or food that rots before it gets eaten. Something left out on
the counter.
What good had Shiloh’s body ever had to offer?
What good did she have left?
What was sex, anyway?
She’d told Cary once that it wasn’t magic. But that had turned out not to be true. Sex was a magic Shiloh couldn’t master.
And he would know some of this—she would have told him!—if he would have taken five minutes to talk to her about it before he proposed.
They should have had sex first, and then Cary could have decided. She would have given him an out.
She’d still give him an out.
There were teeth marks on Cary’s shoulder, but Shiloh hadn’t broken the skin. She rubbed them with her thumb.
Ryan had drawn the line at biting.
Where did Cary draw the line?
Shiloh still felt de-staticked. Simplified, like a fraction. Cary was kissing her with his serious face. His hard-charging
mouth. Shiloh felt swept along by it. She wanted to be.
Cary pulled away. He kissed her cheek. “I promise I got better at this,” he said.
“I don’t think I did,” she said, taking her chance to be honest.
“You don’t have to do anything but feel good.” Cary kissed her ear, then her neck. Then her shoulder. He squeezed her hip.
“Tell me what you like.”
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because then you’ll do it.”
He kissed her shoulder again. “Right...”
“And that will be it. I’ll never figure out what else I like.”
He pulled back to look at her face.
“I think there are a lot of things I might like”—Shiloh was still trying to be honest—“that I don’t even know about.”
He nodded. His tongue was in his cheek. Thoughtful, not angry.
“I feel like I don’t know anything, ” she said.
“Don’t get wound up,” he whispered.
She touched his chin. “We should probably do this a few times and then revisit your brass tacks. You don’t know what you’re
getting into.”
“Shiloh, can I ask you a question?”
“Yes.”
Cary looked very solemn. Like he was bracing himself. “Are you attracted to men?”
“In general?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” she said.
He started to sit up.
“But I’m not attracted to women in general, either!”
Cary was up on one arm, looking down at her.
“There’s just you, Cary.”
“And Val Kilmer.”
“Only theoretically.”
He dropped to his elbow.
“Practically speaking,” Shiloh said, “I can’t think of anyone but you.”
Cary put his hand around her jaw. He sighed, with his eyebrows together. “We’re not revisiting brass tacks. Not on my account.”
“I might be bad at sex...”
“I know for a fact that you’re not.”
“That was old me,” she said, “virgin me.”
“I reject this at a conceptual level.”
“What concept?”
Cary frowned. His eyes tracked up her face and down again. “Can I kiss you while you do this?”
“Yes.”
He kissed her neck again.
“What do you reject?” she asked.
“The idea that you’re bad at sex—the idea that anyone can be fundamentally bad at sex, especially women.”
Shiloh lifted her head up off the pillow. “ Especially women?”
He put his arm around her waist again. “Especially women.”
“That makes it sound like you don’t think women have any sexual agency...”
“I just told you that your only job is to feel good.”
“That’s breathtakingly sexist, Cary.”
He moved his hand to her ass. He hadn’t stopped kissing her. “Do you want another job, Shiloh?”
“Why should you give me a job? Because you’re a man?”
“Because I’m the person you’re having sex with.”
She petted his hair. It was just long enough on top for her to lose her fingers in it. “All right, that’s a good reason. Go
ahead.”
“Your job is to tell me to stop,” he said.
“When?”
“When you want me to stop.” He pulled on the back of her thigh, so that her knee was up on his hip.
Shiloh took a deep breath. “Roger that.”
“Your job is also to give me directions if I need them.”
“How will I know when you need them?”
“You’ll know.” He sucked on her neck.
Shiloh squeezed her eyes closed. She scratched his scalp. “It sounds like my job is to talk to you while you do all the work.”
He pressed his cock into her stomach. “This isn’t work.”
She took another deep breath. “Some of it is work. You’ll see. Everything with me is work.”
“I know what I’m getting into.”
Shiloh opened her eyes, she took hold of his cheeks—she pushed his face away so she could really see him. “ Do you, Cary?”
Cary’s face was flushed. There was hardly any gold left in his eyes. “When have you ever been too much for me?”
Shiloh kissed him then. She held on to the back of his head. She was crying. She didn’t even need to bite him again—she felt
static-free.
Cary stopped holding her. He pushed his hand between their bodies and slid his fingers between her legs.
Shiloh was crazy wet. At least that wasn’t going to be an issue.
She kept kissing him while he pushed his fingers inside of her. He moaned. That made her smile—it seemed so un-Cary of him.
He rolled onto her, spreading her legs.
“Cary?” she whispered.
“What is it, Shy?”
“Could my job be to feel nothing?”
Cary’s mouth was open. His eyes were mostly closed. “Give me more details.”
“Could my job just be to feel whatever I’m feeling?”
His hand was on the inside of her thigh. “Can we agree on ‘good’ as a general direction?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. She grasped the side of his neck.
Cary touched her vagina again. She was open. She was really wet—she could hear it. He pushed his cock in.
Shiloh wrapped her arms around his shoulders.
“Good?” he asked.
She nodded. “It’s good.” She nodded some more. “It’s good.”
“It’s so good, Shiloh.”
Cary had gotten better at sex. Shiloh tried not to think about the particulars.
If she thought too much about the last fourteen years, she’d cry. She was already crying. She cried a lot during sex. Ryan
never minded; he approved of public displays of emotion.
Cary kept her on her back. He kept leaning over her to kiss her cheeks and her forehead. He kept grinding his pubic bone against her clitoris. She kept nodding at him. It was almost enough. It was enough to make her reach for his face and tell him over and over that she loved him. He made her sloppy.
Cary finished inside of her, and she could tell because he closed his eyes tight and groaned. Because she could feel him pulsing.
Because his head dropped like she’d snapped his neck.
He drew his hips away and fell to Shiloh’s side, immediately pushing his right hand into the mess of her.
He looked groggy. She wanted to kiss him while he looked like that. She did. His mouth was warm and loose. He pushed his tongue
past her lips and rubbed her teeth. He rubbed her clit. When she flinched, he rubbed her a different way. She was close—but
close was relative.
“This could take forever,” Shiloh whispered.
“I’ve got fifteen days,” he said.
She laughed. She closed her eyes. “I love you so much, Cary.”
“I love you, too, Shiloh.”
“That’s the fourth time you’ve said it.”
“I’ve said it more than that.”
“No, you haven’t.”
He kissed her neck. He shifted to get more comfortable. “I’ll say it more.”
“You should say everything more. I love your voice.”
“Yeah?”
She nodded. She tilted her hips back.
“Is that good?” he asked.
Shiloh nodded. “You do such good accents.”
He laughed. “Do you want me to do accents in bed?”
“No. I’m just saying... I was just thinking...” She stretched out her neck. “ That’s nice. ”
“Like this?” He kept rubbing her.
“Yes.”
“I like your voice, too, Shiloh.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you going to call me when I go back?”
“Yes.” She was breathing hard. “I’ll call you. Cary, that’s good. ”
“I missed you so much—I love you.”
“Cary, don’t you like breasts?”
“What?” He lifted his head up, but he didn’t miss a beat.
“You haven’t touched my breasts at all.”
“I don’t trust myself yet,” he said. “They’re too good. Sometimes I don’t trust myself to touch you.”
Shiloh started to come. She stretched her neck long. She held on to the sheet.
Cary found her ear. “You’re so good at this.”