“I love you,” he said. (Was that the third time?)
She shivered.
“What do you need?” he asked again.
Shiloh didn’t know what she needed, and she only sort of knew what she wanted. She didn’t want this to stop. She didn’t want Cary to leave or back out or change his mind.
She touched his rib. “Can I poke you?”
Cary nodded his head. “Yes.”
“Can I pinch you?”
“Yes.” He didn’t blink.
“Can I bite you?”
His cheeks pulsed. “Yes.”
Shiloh pressed her face hard into his shoulder. Cary. This was Cary. He was naked. They were both naked, it was distracting—it was mortifying. She felt like screaming. She felt like knocking something over. She was happy, but too full. Happy in a way that scratched. She couldn’t take this all at once. She needed to build up her tolerance. She needed a circling approach.
She bit the muscle on the side of his neck—just hard enough to be too hard. It made her bones vibrate. Cary took a breath in through his teeth.
Shiloh moved her mouth down and bit him again—her whole body shuddered, and Cary exhaled with his throat tight.
She moved her mouth over his shoulder and did it again. Harder. All of Shiloh’s muscles clenched until she let go—it was just a few seconds. Then she arched her neck back and pinched her shoulder blades together. Shivering, shivering.
When she looked up at Cary, his face had gone slack. He shoved her onto her back and kissed her.
Shiloh held on to his shoulders. She felt like someone had skimmed off her top layer of static. She stayed inside of the kiss. She smiled. Cary noticed. He kissed the corner of her mouth. “There you are,” he murmured.
She looked in his eyes. “There you are.”
The good thing about having sex with Ryan was...
Well, there were a lot of good things about having sex with Ryan. (Just ask the Southwest High School theater department!)
But one of them was that he was selfish.
You could say,“I need this to not be about me,”and Ryan would listen.
He was happy for it to be about him.
When Shiloh told him,“I’ll catch up,”Ryan went ahead. And sometimes she caught up, and sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she just went to sleep.
When they first started having sex, her nerves were always in the way. She couldn’t initiate. She could only come if she was a little drunk and Ryan was a lot patient. (And sometimes if she pretended it was happening to someone else?)
And then Shiloh was pregnant and breastfeeding, and she stoppedwantingsex. She’d still have it. And she usually enjoyed it once they got rolling. But her desire felt buried under a heavy blanket of snow. (Her clitoris was a groundhog that would occasionally peek its head out, yawn, and decide to go back to bed.)
AndthenShiloh found out that her husband had slept with a dozen women while they were together. Going all the way back to college! Two people in the cast of that summer play in the park—the ingenue! The stage manager!
What did that make Shiloh, apart from a fool? (Could a woman be cuckolded? Shehadbeen wearing a suit...)
A fool. A naïf. An incubator.
Neurotic. Barely orgasmic.
Wasted—the way a resource is wasted. Like a faucet left on. Or food that rots before it gets eaten. Something left out on the counter.
