It wasn’t like Tom had ever had a routine or anything that basic, but on occasions when he felt like extra effort was called for—her birthday, their anniversary, midterms—there was a certain way he’d begin, and she’d think to herself,Oh, Tom’sfeeling romantic tonight. That’s how things were going. But Rose was caught in a muddle of familiar arousal and heart-piercing confusion.
“This isn’t make-up sex,” she told him as he covered her breast with one big careful hand.
“If you say so,” he murmured, letting his lips just graze the lace edges of her bustier. He was propped up over her in the bed, supporting almost all of his weight on his forearms. All he’d done was run his hands over her body—big, sweeping caresses and gentle kisses—even though she could feel him still hard as a rock through the denim of his jeans.
“Because it feels like you’re trying to have make-up sex,” she said. “And you don’t have to do that.”
She should have given Tom the script in advance. Or at least the artwork. He was undoing the clasps of her garters one by one, fingers soothing the little red marks where the metal clasps had dug into her thighs, and Rose felt like she was going to jump out of her skin.
She took a deep breath. “I’m sure you can tell it’s been a while for me,” she said, trying to understand where he was coming from, “but it would actually help me get out of my head if you’d act a little less like my confusingly besotted ex, and a little more like a guy I just dragged home from a bar.”
“What’s confusing?” Tom asked, lifting his head from her skin. His fingers swept up her inner thigh but lingered just outside of the lace borders of her underwear. If he was thinking of edging her, they werereallynot on the same wavelength.
“I thought this would go a little different,” she said, still trying to sound encouraging. “Like, faster.”
Tom finally brushed a knuckle across her core, a mildly skeptical expression on his face.
“Babe, you’re vibrating like a tuning fork. I assume the losers you drag home from bars don’t care about that, but—”
“How do you know they’re losers?” Rose grumbled, even though she’d never brought someone home from a bar in her life, and he was right about how tense she was.
“Well, because I’m here with you now, aren’t I?” he said, sounding pretty smug for someone with his pants still on.
That’s why I am confused.This? This was exactly what she’d had to offer before. Sure, she hadn’t owned nice lingerie, and she’d never been part of some collective fantasy on the Internet. But any night of their marriage, he could have come home and had exactly this.
This couldn’t be what he wanted.
Rose decided to take matters into her own hands, and she tried to put a hand on his matters, but he shifted his hips back and out of reach.
When she wrinkled her nose at him, Tom finally grunted and undid the fly on his jeans. He took out his wallet and produced a condom from the otherwise empty billfold. Noticing her disapproving look, he flipped it over it for her inspection.
“Not latex,” he promised.
Rose’s relationship with condoms was just as long but even more complicated than her relationship with Tom.
“Do you get tested? I finally found a pill that doesn’t make me sick,” she said, hoping to cut short what was usually a longer talk.
“I get tested all the time,” he said. “But I don’t mind wearing a condom.”
“I believe you,” Rose said, trying to flick it off the bed. He caught it.
“What, did someone else screw up and buy the wrong ones?” he said, managing a small smirk.
Yes, someone had, even thoughI’m allergic to everythingwas one of the first things anyone learned about her.
“Which is why I’m on the pill,” Rose said. This conversation had not previously involved so much persuasive effort on her part. She used her foot to shimmy out of her stockings. She began unhooking the rest.
Tom screwed his mouth to the side. “Babe, I’ve done it raw like five times in my entire life, all of whichyou should remember, and I’m a little keyed up right now. Do you want to have thirty seconds of sex?”
Rose growled in aggravation. It seemed increasingly unlikely they’d be having any sex at all.
“I just—please, Tom. Let’s do something different. I thought it would be different.”
“Different how?” he asked, letting a little of his own worry into his voice. It was a reasonable question, but Rose’s interior swirl of frustrated desire and fear couldn’t articulate that she wished they were two different people entirely.
So instead, she said, “I don’t know, maybe the mean billionaire thing. Pull my hair. Call me names. Jesus, I don’t know. You haven’t done that at least once?”
“Are you seriously into the rough stuff now?” Tom asked, and although his tone was light, there was an edge ofskepticism that made Rose stiffen her shoulders because shecould have been, maybe, for all he knew, she had fifty different floggers back at her apartment and a Saint Andrew’s cross in her breakfast nook.
