With a grim expression around his mouth he pours water into my glass.
“Earlier. Before I took the dogs out. I was going to get well and truly plastered tonight.”
“Oh, you had plans? I’m so sorry! You should have said! I wouldn’t have stayed!”
I’m not going to let him get away with whatever mood he has dropped into, like into a vat of sadness. Maybe that’s all it is: post-climactic tristesse? Don’t think so. My taunts make him pause; he seems to be looking at the mouth of the bottle hovering over my glass.
“I’m glad you’ve come.” He doesn’t say it as if he were glad. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“But?”
He sighs and pours me my drink. Then, finally, he looks at me.
“But I wish you hadn’t made me come…like that.”
A ball of lead plummets into the pit of my stomach.
“You think that was sluttish of me.”
“What? No! That’s not at all—no!”
“You think a girl who gives head on the first…date—”
The rest of my protest is stifled against his naked shoulder when he pulls me roughly into his arms.
“You’re crushing me!”
“I’m sorry…”
He releases me from his bear hug, and we laugh together, dazed by the intensity of feeling that is between us, and cowed by the misunderstandings that fly thick and fast.
“Let’s not talk,” he says dumbly. He lays a hand on my knee and runs it up my thigh, then both hands, on both legs, and he is so lovely and so sad, and I don’t want to talk either. I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to spoil this. But.
“But what did you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Giles!”
“Look!” He isn’t looking at me; he’s looking at his hands on my knees. “It’s just that Amanda, my ex-wife—”
“Is she your ex-wife?” I ask, a little pissy.
“What? Oh, yes.” He grins. “All over now.”
“Because she wouldn’t give head.”
“No! Well, I don’t know. She said it was demeaning. Eighties’ feminism and all that, but I think she simply didn’t like it. She hated it, frankly, and I hated her turning it into a political issue. Because I don’t think it is that! If she doesn’t want to be so…intimate with me, she doesn’t, but there’s nothing inherently denigrating in a blowjob. Why should there be? Patting someone on the shoulder can be far more denigrating, in a certain context, than—oh, I’m raving again! I’m sorry. I can’t explain.”
“Yes, you can. Do. Please.”
He rouses himself to greater effort, but he still doesn’t look at me, not even when I clasp his hands in mine.
“Well, what I mean to say is that for me…it still feels…special, as if it meant something. I know it doesn’t, so you needn’t tell me how absurd that sounds, but—well, it makes me feel like one of John Donne’s poet-lovers. You suck my life’s spirit from me, from my body, and I’ll be a hollow man who’ll sicken and die unless you give me your spirit in return. I’m sorry, I can’t really talk about it in less high-falutin’ terms!”
“What you’re saying is you’re sorry that you let me have you.” At this, he looks up, surprised at how poignantly I have summarized him. “But you already had me, remember?”
“At Notre Dame?”
“At Notre Dame, and in the observatory, and in your office! My life sounds like an X-rated movie.”
“But that wasn’t the same.”
“How wasn’t it? Of course it was!”
“I’ve never pleased you as you did me, just now!”
He looks like a boy who insists that he has been wronged. He knows it, too, and is ashamed of his insecurity. A few years ago I would have started arguing with him; now I am wiser. I wrap my arms around his neck and snuggle against him. He is warm and smells of arousal. I breathe softly into his ear, making him and myself giggle.
“Do you know, it’s quite ridiculous how sexy you are…even when you’re being silly.”
“Anna—”
I cut him short with a slow, deep kiss.
“Let’s go to bed, Giles, hmm? And bring a pen and paper. Maybe we can start a chart.”
Chapter 36
I WAKE ON A DEEP, INDRAWN BREATH. Ten inches away from my face is a naked male arm, crooked against a naked male chest. The shock of recognition seeps through my body like hot treacle, sluggishly.
I cannot move. If this is post-coital languor, it has merged fatally with my general state of exhaustion. My limbs, absurdly, feel like leaden sponges, my eyelids are swollen with passion, and I think also tears; my brain is a ball of soggy cotton wool.