Chapter 21 #4
I curve my torso on the table, turn my head to the side with the pad of my thumb tugging down my lower lip, taking in Henry with heavy, hooded eyes.
His fresh-looking face is soft with devotion, a flip of light hair in an eye.
His shirt is untucked, buttoned all wrong at the bottom so that it hangs haphazardly at his collarbone.
He looks undone, tormented in exactly the way I hoped he might be after all these long years without me.
“I’m sorry I told my husband I missed him,” I say. The expression on Henry’s face tells me this is not nearly enough. I stare at the pained part in his lips and I realize what it is he needs to hear. “I’m sorry I have a husband.” That’s it, isn’t it? My gravest offense.
With an anguished groan, Henry collects me by my hair, stands me up, turns me around, walks me backward into the bedroom with his mouth on mine.
If I stopped suddenly or turned around to run, he wouldn’t let me.
It is this thought that propels me over the threshold of the door.
I want to feel so wanted I have no choice, though of course this is everything I choose.
The lights are off, the drapes open, the moonlight casting everything in silver. Henry lifts me by the wrists and throws me on the bed, slips off his shirt, steps out of his jeans.
The snap of his boxer band, and then he stands before me, naked, godlike and indestructible, something knowing and merciful on his face. The fire and the moonlight are too romantic. I need to be tossed around, sordidly fucked while still half dressed. He grabs my ankles and slides me under him.
“I’m not on birth control anymore,” I suddenly remember to say out loud.
Henry wraps my legs around his waist and gives no indication that he hears me or cares.
He rubs the head of his erection over the seam of me until I’m wet enough for him to push partially inside.
I’m mortified by how much it hurts, and tears prick my eyes, not from the pain but because the pain indicates something I’ve found ways to manage before now.
“Fuck, Faye.” Henry doesn’t go any deeper. He scooches us farther back on the bed so he can climb on top of me and put his thumbs in the damp corners of my eyes. He’s staring down at me in astonishment, like he can’t believe everything I told him was true. “I felt that. I’ll go slow.”
I try to turn my head, but he holds me still between his hands, watching me chew a hole through my lip as he slides the rest of the way into me.
I make a sound without opening my mouth, like I’ve just been given some piece of terrible but inevitable news.
Henry moves slow and shallow until I start to relax, and then he rolls over onto his back, bringing me with him.
He puts a pillow in his lap, bunches it down, giving me something textural to rub against. I think about the time he gave me his credit card to buy a new dress, how he gave me a limit and said that for every dollar I spent over it, he would hurt me that many times.
I think about how I spent an extra thirty-one dollars, just to see if he meant it, and how I remembered that he did every time I sat down for the next week—
“You’re so pretty when you’re about to come,” Henry says, because I am damp at the small of my back and my pleasure is concentrated in a perfect little knot at the top of my pussy.
I am nearly horizontal on top of Henry, the silver heart pooled in his clavicle. I’m grinding on him when I should be bouncing. There’s no way he’s not bored. I start to straighten, but Henry hooks his finger through the charm and holds me down.
“I want it from behind,” I protest.
“No, you don’t.”
Henry works his hand between our bodies, pushes the pillow into me. “I want you to keep rubbing your clit on me. I want to be inside you when you come.”
He sounds so earnest, looking up at me with his sweet serial-killer face. I squeeze him between my thighs and I fuck and I fuck and I fuck.
“You get so tight,” Henry says. “Like you don’t want to let me go.
” He does this, he tells me beautiful stories about us that would otherwise turn my stomach.
Like some kind of exposure therapy for true love.
I come for a long time, shaking my head no as Henry insists it’s true, it’s true. We love each other.
Henry rolls me onto my back. I’m exhausted, malleable, slick behind my knees and at the nape of my neck.
He braces himself on his knuckles above me, his hair flopping at his forehead as he pushes in and out of me.
I brush it out of his face, tenderly, because maybe it’s all a little bit true.
Henry’s lips part and his eyes turn to sleepy, twilight slits.
“Let me love you, Faye.” He manages to make it sound like a kingly order.
He holds my chin in his hand, he forces me to look at him, and I promise him I will try.
Then he comes with his mouth on mine, kissing me softly like I am a normal girl, someone who says things like soulmates and making love.
It is as repugnant as it ever was, but I take it. For Henry, I take it.