Chapter 110
BACK IN THE HOTEL ROOM, Paul helped me out of my dress, and we fell into bed.
We’d had too much to drink and might have gone right to sleep except that Bobby and Laura were having very loud sex in their hotel room, and we could hear every moan and groan through the thin wall that separated our headboards.
“Glad someone’s having a good time,” said Paul as we lay there staring at the ceiling.
“You don’t seem very glad,” I said, which was meant as a joke but did not get so much as a chuckle.
“I’m going to bang on that wall, tell them to shut the fuck up.”
“Don’t you dare,” I said. “They’ll be mortified.”
“They should be.”
“Plus, they’re trying to get pregnant again. Laura told me this afternoon.”
“Good for them,” said Paul. “But I’m not sure why that means we have to listen to it.” Still, he didn’t get up. Instead, he turned away from me and folded a pillow around his head.
I lay there for a while, listening to the lovemaking of two people who very clearly had something Paul and I lacked. It didn’t annoy me to listen to them the way it did Paul. In fact, there was something arousing about it, and I could feel my own need bubbling up inside me.
“Do you want to have sex?” I asked Paul, and he didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he turned toward me.
“You want to?”
We hadn’t touched each other since the night I’d kissed Teo.
I know it doesn’t make any sense, but there was a part of me that felt like I was being disloyal to Teo, having sex with my own husband.
But listening to Laura and Bobby, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I needed to rip the Band-Aid off.
That if we had sex, everything else would get easier.
I got up out of bed and went to the bathroom, where my diaphragm was tucked inside my toiletry kit.
“Skip it,” Paul called to me from the bed, but I ignored him and inserted it in the dark.
“Aren’t we going to start trying at some point?” he said as I tiptoed back over to the bed.
“Sure,” I said, but I was just putting him off, and we both knew it. I moved on top of him, and he was already hard.
“Don’t you think—” he started to say, but I put my finger to his lips.
“No talking.”
He liked that. Thought it was a game. “Okay, I’ll play,” he whispered.
The room was dark, and without Paul’s voice in my ear, I allowed myself to go back to the alley in Aggius, to feel Teo’s hands on my face, his mouth on my neck.
I kept my eyes shut tight, imagining a world in which I’d taken him up on his offer, followed him back to his apartment, and wound up in this exact position.
I’m not sure I’d ever been so turned on, and by the time I took Paul inside me, it hardly mattered that he’d barely looked at me all night or that Mary Lou could see right through my charade of a marriage.
We were two bodies hungry for something we could not name, and when I came—the first time I’d ever come during intercourse—Paul looked at me inquisitively.
“Well, that was different,” he said, and I mutely agreed.