When Wilder glances in my direction as well, he smirks and then pulls on that lip ring of his while his eyes scan down to my breasts, which are currently on display thanks to my low-cut shirt.
Sanders clears his throat, drawing both of our attention to where he’s sitting, perched up on his chair with a baseball glove and a baseball.
“Uh, care to tell me what’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on,” I say with a shake of my head. How I wish I was sitting so much closer to Wilder.
“Nothing’s going on?” Sanders asks. “Why don’t I believe that?”
“Because it’s not the truth,” Wilder says. “We fucked last night.”
Of course he’d just come out and say it. That’s Wilder. Never holds anything back. And even though I can feel a hint of embarrassment creep up my back, I kind of really like that about him.
“You did.” Sanders smiles widely. “Would you like to tell me how it went? I mean, from the way you two are smiling at each other, I’m going to assume it went really well.”
Wilder adjusts the bracelet I made for him that has my name on it, a bracelet that he’s kept on his wrist the entire time. “She’s fucking phenomenal in bed.” Then he looks at me and says, “No one compares. Pretty sure I blacked out last night…and this morning.”
Okay, now my cheeks are really flaming.
“And what about you?” Sanders asks as I fidget in my seat. “How do you feel?”
I glance over at Wilder, and not able to hold back my smile, I answer, “Amazing.”
“Well, this is exactly what I wanted to hear.” Sanders tosses the ball in the air and catches it. “I truly felt like you guys needed a moment to clear your minds, and you did that on your own. You found each other again, talked out some issues, and now you’ve started being intimate once more. Do you feel like you’re communicating well again?”
“For the most part,” Wilder says, eyeing me. “I think there was some holding out on communication last night, but once I pressed, she let me in.”
Sanders turns his attention to me. “Why were you holding out on talking to Wilder?”
“Um, because I just wasn’t sure if he was in the same frame of mind as I was,” I answer honestly. “And I didn’t want to feel embarrassed if he wasn’t.”
Sanders nods his head. “Holding information out of fear is the biggest form of miscommunication, but it’s also the most common. Every relationship, no matter how excellent you are at talking to your partner, experiences a form of miscommunication. It’s human nature. We become guarded, we don’t want to get hurt, we’re unsure of how the other person is going to respond, so we hold our cards close to our chest. We don’t tell the entire truth, which always hurts the relationship in the long run. It’s so incredibly common, so much so that Ellison and I suffer from the same thing at times. It’s one of the biggest issues among all my couples.”
“That makes sense,” Wilder says. “In a world where we live in our phones, it’s easy to hold out, to not practice simple conversational techniques.”
“Exactly. It’s why we confiscate phones while you’re here, because we want you hearing your partners. We want you seeing them. We want you at your rawest form.”
“Well, we were pretty raw last night.”
“Wilder,” I chastise.
“What?” he says on a laugh. “The condoms are fifteen dollars a pack. I wasn’t paying that much to cover up when you’re on birth control.”
The only reason I know he knows that is because he’s seen me take the pill at night before I climb into bed.
He then looks Sanders in the eyes and says, “Fifteen dollars? Really, man?”
Sanders doesn’t even balk at the number as he says, “Capitalism at its finest.”
“How do you sleep at night?” Wilder asks.
“With my wife next to me.”
Wilder nods. “Smooth answer.”
“Thank you.” Sanders sets the ball and glove down and then folds his hands together. “You have three more full days left here. I want you spending them together, working out any other issues that might be plaguing you, and coming up with a plan for how to deal with them in everyday life, because when you return to society, I don’t want you to fall back into your old habits. I want this marriage to work. To thrive. So spend the next few days coming up with that plan, and at the end of camp, I want to hear that plan. Understood?”
We both nod together.
