I turned away from him and plotted my early-morning escape.
Tom glances at my Frye biker boots, which I’ve left lying on the living room floor rather than neatly standing side by side in the hallway as usual. ” he asks, and I know the untidiness displeases him. These relationships are hermetic ones; they exist, bubble-like, in the confines of an apartment, with occasional excursions into the larger world: a bar to watch the U. play Germany in the World Cup, Les Halles for dinner, Chevys Fresh Mex for lunch.
But my fantasies also didn’t include remaining a virgin until 29.
My fantasies, and there were many of them growing up in an old farmhouse on Goosepecker Ridge Road, surrounded by pasture, hayfields, woods and Dorset sheep, involved love at first sight, followed by tender yet passionate sex — and a lot of it, always satisfying.
We even appear new to ourselves through the other’s admiring eyes.
Nothing we say is brilliant or unique, but attraction makes everything shine.“Kissing you is like kissing a sea urchin,” Jack sneered one afternoon when he was trying to go back to work and I wanted some kind of reassurance from him that he was unable or unwilling to offer.
As I progressed awkwardly, reluctantly, from early adolescence to mid- to late and then into my early 20s without having once been kissed or even asked on a date, I began to submerge myself in my fantasies.
They were so much more pleasurable than the reality of my still living with my parents at age 20, still sleeping in the same bedroom as I had since age 12, still surrounded by the same stuffed animals that I had tucked under the covers since age 5.
We’re new to each other, not just our bodies but the stories we tell.With Tom, the excitement is my opening the door to his slow smile.I notice his silver wedding band only on occasion, sometimes in the kitchen while he’s making broth from cilantro, garlic peels and shrimp shells, sometimes in the bedroom when he reaches over me to bind my wrists to the bed frame.I ask them questions about their marriages, about their kids if they have any.I feel like a voyeur when they talk about their wives, which they do, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes more volubly.