Chapter 30
Selena
Acouple of evenings after my little meltdown, I’m sitting on the sofa in the den while Ben watches TV.
I have my laptop open, my AirPods on noise-cancelling mode, and a rain sounds playlist going full blast. It’s the only way I can drown out Peaky Blinders and actually get my brain to make sense of the enormous spreadsheet the interior designer and I are jointly building for this refurb.
It would be easier to focus if I just went upstairs, but Ben and I haven’t seen each other all day, and I want to be with him.
Want to—and feel I should. Both of those are true. We’ve only been married for a few months. Time together is important, even if we’re both doing different things right now.
He taps me on the shoulder. ‘You ready for bed?’ he says, the words faint. I nod and remove my AirPods, saving the spreadsheet before shutting my MacBook.
Ben’s lying in bed by the time I complete my (extensive) skincare routine and brush my teeth.
It’s a mild night, but he’s wearing a t-shirt.
He wore one last night, too. I suspect he’s doing it to make me feel more comfortable, and the same push-pull that I’ve been feeling for the past forty-eight hours hits me: mortification that I had a total scene and caused a freakout pushing up against frustration that I have to spell everything out for him.
It’s not that I resent him for not understanding, more that I hate having to articulate weird, private stuff.
I suppose I don’t have to, but the alternative is putting up and shutting up.
Again, I remind myself that this is a seriously unusual situation.
We’re getting to know each other while being locked into a marriage.
And, no matter how crazy I am about him, the practicalities of our relationship are still very new.
Anyone else who’d been dating, sleeping with someone for three and a half months would call that early days, and it is.
It’s the fledgling part of any love story, the getting-to-know-each-other part.
It’s most definitely not the out-of-the-woods part for most people.
It’s the time in a relationship when both of you should be figuring out each other’s foibles and preferences and limits bit by bit, knowing you have all the time in the world.
Most couples don’t work through this stage—and it is work—knowing that failure is not an option. Most don’t do it with a ring on their finger.
I tell myself all this when I get into bed, when really, what I want to say is, ‘Ben, I love you sleeping bare-chested. I love how your skin feels against mine when you hold me. I’m addicted to it.
And I want you to cuddle me every night—but that doesn’t mean I necessarily want to have sex every night.
But the cues feel the same, because the sex often starts with cuddling.
‘So how am I supposed to relax and enjoy you holding me if I don’t think I’m in the mood to actually come and I don’t know how to signal that to you?
How are we supposed to use our bodies to send that message?
Or are we actually supposed to say it out loud?
If you kiss me and I kiss you back, will you think it’s on?
And if I pull away, will you think I’m frigid and useless, no matter what lovely words you said to me the other night, and will you wonder what the hell is wrong with this woman who has you warming her bed and doesn’t want to put out like a porn star every night of the week? ’
Obviously, I don’t say any of that.
The truth is, I’m exhausted. I’m expecting my period any day now.
My brain is its usual, horrible premenstrual mixture of mushy and restless.
I feel like a caged tiger in the week before my period, roaming uselessly round and round whatever room I’m in, feeling like I want to claw the wallpaper off with my fingernails while barely being able to remember my own name.
And the worst of it is that I can’t exactly give in to my total and utter personality failure, because I still have a brand-new, very hot husband to convince that his hitching his wagon to mine for the rest of his life isn’t the most catastrophic mistake he’s ever made.
In short, I have to give my best performance, right when my capacity to perform is at rock bottom.
Jesus, I exhaust myself.
And Ben wearing a t-shirt makes me unaccountably sad.
He clears his throat. ‘Hey, sweetheart, I had an idea, but I don’t want you to think I’m putting any pressure on you.’
Okaaaay. I plaster on a pleasant smile. ‘What’s that?’
‘I’m not trying to fuck you,’ he says hurriedly, ‘but I get the impression the whole renovation thing is a bit of a headache, and I wondered if you’d let me give you a back massage. No strings or happy endings.’ He holds a hand up as if in surrender. ‘Just thought it might help you to sleep.’
I stare at his gorgeous face on the pillow.
He is such a beautiful, beautiful man, and this is an extremely sweet idea.
He’s even pitched it as if I’d be doing him a favour, which clearly isn’t the case.
Nevertheless, I appreciate his use of ‘let me’.
If he’d asked me if I’d ‘like’ a massage, I’d probably say no.
I don’t want to be a bother. But this way, he’s making it easier for me to say yes—and he’s given me a get-out clause right at the start.
I can relax and enjoy his touch without wondering if I need to find my inner sex goddess somewhere inside this ugly, knotted mass that is my mental health this week.
Is this man for real?
This time, my smile is genuine. ‘Yes, please. I’d love that.’
‘That’s what I like to hear.’ He boops my nose. ‘I can be your beck-and-call girl.’
I laugh at that as I clamber up to sitting. ‘Sounds perfect. How do you want me?’
‘On your front and lose the nightie. Do you want it relaxing or, like, vigorous?’
I’m already pulling my nightie over my head.
‘Vigorous, definitely.’ The idea of a light touch when my nervous system is so frazzled makes me want to shudder.
I’d probably punch him. ‘Be robust with me. And maybe take off your t-shirt? I don’t want you getting oil on it,’ I say quickly, but his grin tells me he’s onto me.
‘So fucking predatory. I’m nothing but a piece of meat to you, am I?’
‘Pretty much,’ I say happily as I lower myself down onto my stomach, cactus-ing my arms and turning my face so I can watch him. He tugs off his t-shirt—thank you, Lord—and wanders off into the bathroom. ‘Grab the Bamford body oil,’ I call.
A mere moment later, I’m face-planted into our soft bed, naked, with a gorgeous man straddling me. I’m bracing for a cold trickle of oil down my back, but it doesn’t happen. Instead comes the squelch of his rubbing his hands wetly together. When they find me, he’s warmed the oil.
It’s not just that Ben’s good at this—he really is—but that his hands are so big and so strong compared to the size of my back.
He can cover most of my upper back with both hands; he can apply such incredible pressure with his palms and dig so deep with his fingernails.
Forget sex—this is what I want to happen every night.
Not to mention, I’m in olfactory nirvana thanks to my favourite geranium body oil.
As my husband works me with his magic hands, I sink further and further into the mattress (you’d better believe I had a premium memory foam topper delivered within a week of moving in here).
His fingers glide over my skin, melting the muscle below it into butter.
But more than just the knots he’s untangling, being like this, trapped below him, caged in by his body—his touch speaking to my nervous system in the somatic tongue it understands—feels secure and delicious and perfect.
It’s as if, with every stroke, he’s telling me it’s safe for me to let it all go. To let the tension and spiralling soften, to allow that fizzing in my bloodstream to pop like bubbles on the surface of a glass of champagne.
Through this sensory language of touch, it feels as though our bodies are truly speaking to each other. We’re nothing but the sounds of even breathing and oil-slicked skin on skin. The heat of his hands warms me to my core, almost as if they’re healing me.
As if he’s healing me.
And the longer he continues the massage, the more my experience of it becomes shot through with other sorts of sensory pleasures, tiny sparks of arousal igniting as he lights up my nerve endings until they cover my body in a kind of shawl of stardust. It doesn’t help that I could swear that pressure at the very base of my spine is him growing hard.
It could just be the angle of him leaning forward to rub my neck, but… it doesn’t feel like it.
Beneath him, I wriggle a little and stretch in pleasure. ‘So amazing,’ I mumble.
‘Good.’ I can’t crane my head around to see him, but he sounds gruffly pleased.
He does something magical and fluttery with his fingers along the discs of my spine, and I imagine those same fingers doing something magical and fluttery way further down my body.
I reach one arm down so I can stroke his pyjama-covered thigh.
‘Ben?’
‘Hmm?’
My words fail me. It sounds so stupid, but even though I’m paranoid about his finding me insufficiently horny, it doesn’t stop me from being awkward about actually asking for sex.
Like, what the hell am I supposed to say?
Honey, how about you bury your face down there and give me that happy ending after all?
Yeah, no.
‘Can you lift up for a sec?’ is what I go with.
‘Sure.’ He does, and my bottom is instantly chilly after the perfect, weighty warmth of his body. I turn myself over onto my back and gaze up at him.
‘You can get back down.’
He lowers himself down again so he’s straddling my hips. I don’t miss the way his eyes rake over my naked torso, my breasts. I run my fingernails lightly down over the cotton stretched over his thighs, and he shivers.
‘You’re very good at that,’ I tell him. ‘It was amazing.’
‘Good.’ He leans forward a touch and brushes his hands, with what little oil is left on them, over my stomach. ‘I can keep going. I love touching you.’
‘I have a better idea.’ Our eyes are locked; there can be no doubt as to my meaning, just as there can be no doubt, from the baton in his pyjama bottoms, what was pressing into my coccyx a moment ago.
His smile turns mischievous. ‘This is supposed to be an unsexy massage, remember? I just want you relaxed.’
‘Well, I’m very relaxed. But it wasn’t remotely unsexy.’
‘You sure?’ His hand trails up my stomach and circles my nipple, and I gasp. I’m so present, so fully in my body, that every touch is magnified.
‘I’m deadly serious. Deadly.’ I mean it. Don’t fuck with me, Ben. Just fuck me.
I must be telegraphing my seriousness all over my face, because he chuckles. ‘I’ve got you, sweetheart. Roll over for me again.’ He lifts his crotch up so I can obey, and I smirk at him as I roll over.
This time, he crouches over me, kissing my neck and down my spine, his lips brushing featherlight over me.
I squirm in anticipation as much as in pleasure.
This is it, right? This is the point I was trying, a little hysterically and not at all coolly, to make the other night.
A lot of the time, I need some kind of portal before sex where I can shed the real world and rewire my brain.
Foreplay for the foreplay.
Men don’t seem to need context for sex—rather, the only context they need is I have a penis.
For me, on the other hand, context is everything.
And that context can be I’m on my period, or I’m about to get my period, or I’m tired, or I have too much on my mind, or I have thrush and I’m sore, or even the simplest context of all: I have an actual brain, and my brain is not focused on sex right now, nor is it likely to be in the next thirty minutes.
I spend most of my working days ignoring hunger and thirst and the need to pee, overriding my body’s loudest messages, pushing through, staying locked inside my head—and I need some way to unravel all of that and remember that I do actually have a body before it can orgasm on command.
For once, I am allowing myself to be inside my body. It’s not my weakest link; it’s not the enemy; it’s my best friend. And, as my beautiful husband skates his fingertips over my bottom and slides his hand expertly between my legs, I know this to be true:
Being in my body is my new favourite place to be.