To be clear, the only nighttime visitor atmytent, in my short-lived expedition days, was a black bear.
“You didn’t have to follow me.”
“I couldn’t stay. Not after you left like that.”
“You should go back. Your mom will give me hell if you don’t.”
“She wouldn’t be mad.”
I let my head tilt.
“She wouldn’t,” he insists.
“Okay,” I say, stepping over the threshold.
Inside, he pulls me close, lips in my hair. “Why didn’t you come find me if you were ready to go?”
Why didn’t I? Was it because this time I didn’t want him to pick me up, tuck me under his arm, and act like his friends were my friends? Because I didn’t want to pretend to have a good time while he pretended not to see how bad of a time I was really having?
I feel us falling into the circular grooves we’ve carved for ourselves, never closer, never further away. Apparently today is the day I try to scratch that record, because before I can think better of it, I blurt, “That was rude of me. To leave. I’m sure people were offended.”
“No one was offended. I’m sure everyone understood.”
I don’t know why I do this to myself.
I always thought “for better or for worse” meant your spouse wasn’t supposed to leave if you got sick. But maybe whoever wrote those words knew how painful a marriage is when it’s only about the better parts of yourself, and the worse has nowhere to go.
All I want is for him to let me in, and let himself out. I want to crack him like a safe, my ear against his heart, listening for the softest, tiniest clicks to tell me my fingers are doing the right work. I’d spend years on it if I had to, getting closer to the combination every time. I’d only have to know I was making progress, and I’d never give up.
But he doesn’t want to be cracked. He wants to believe his marriage is okay, even though I keep asking him to go to couples’ counseling and our house is full of relationship self-help books that I read and he didn’t. We’re a couple worthy of a rom-com, trapped in a misunderstanding that could be solved by a single conversation. Okay, maybe not just one conversation. But it doesn’t matter, because he won’t talk.
“Think I’ll head up to bed.” I don’t want him to swing from party mode into cheer-up-Liz mode. I want to cry myself to sleep against his chest, but tears make him hyperventilate. Except when it’s his mom, crying about his dad.
“Bed?” He slides my coat off my shoulders.
He doesn’t ask for sex with words, only with soft kisses and rough, strong hands to certain spots in a certain order with a certain rhythm. Yet, at some point, he almost always goes off script, finding an unexpected small part of me to lavish attention on. The crook of one elbow; the dimple in my lower back—I get delirious wondering when it will come, what it will be.
Lust murmurs promises in my ear.Don’t cut your last line of communication with him. Maybe sex is how we get through.
Maybe this heat can melt the permafrost that grips the heart of our marriage. In the afterglow, I’ll tell him I’m afraid my lack of magic means nobody will ever recognize me as a person who exists when Tobin’s not in the room. And in return, he’ll confess his tips were crap, and tell me his body aches from doing the things that used to be easy. And together, we’ll find a way out of the mess we’ve made of our dreams.
I let him stroke behind my ears, run his thumbs over my collarbones, push up my skirt and hitch my legs around his waist. He lets me kiss him as hard as I want and breathe in the lingering sense of snowy pine on his skin as we climb the stairs.
“Your wrist’s okay?”
I stroke the arm he broke last summer, rescuing a guest who fell overboard while taking photos in a rocky stretch of rapids. The guy sent him a framed print—magnificent; I want to burn it—to enjoy while he recovered from surgery. Tobin doesn’t complain about his plate and screws, ever, but I see how he babies that arm after trips.
He grabs my ass with that hand, squeezing in time with his wicked smile. Okay, good.
Pushing aside a stack of his mysterious business texts, he lowers us to the bed, rocking me against him like he can’t wait. It’s still unbelievable sometimes, that this man who everybody wants—he wantsme.
He takes my shuddering sigh as encouragement, loosing a sound of desperately sexy impatience at the difficulty of the tiny buttons on my top. He has the best voice, deep and windblown and a little rough from years of making sure people can hear him at the back.
That’s what gets me: his voice, and all the things I imagine him saying. All the words whose shapes would fit perfectly into the spaces in my heart that ache to be filled with things like “I know”and “me too.” It’s not that my body doesn’t feel good to be asked by his body. It’s that the words are missing from this part of our marriage. And every other part.
I flick his hands aside and undo the shirt myself. He traces one finger down my breastbone, into my navel, lingering at the pink bow on my black underwear.
“Hot, Diz. Very hot,” Tobin whispers, as if everything about me is a tiny treasure he’s dying to collect. His clothes go away fast, pulled up and pushed down and tossed aside. His belly is winter white above his boxers, but even without his summer tan he’s sexy in a way most people can only dream of, abs popping as he pushes closer, his eyes sleepy with an almost smile. He’s never stopped looking grateful and a little surprised when the clothes come off, like he’s woken up somewhere new yet familiar and wonderful. It’s one of the things I loved most about him.
