Is This What I Want? (4 page)

“Squeeze,” I said. “Not too hard, just a little.” He obeyed.

He played and experimented for a while, as I let him know what I liked best by moaning with enthusiasm. Appearing pleased when a certain move elicited sounds of ecstasy, he moved to provide the same pleasure to my right nipple.

When his fingers were no longer enough for me, I positioned his face just above my chest and licked my lips.

“Show me how,” he said. I must have looked confused.

He grinned and lifted his shirt above his head and threw it on the floor, leaning back.

Moving my mouth to his nipples, I tried to demonstrate what I liked best, taking breaks to look into his eyes, silently thanking him.

When he seemed sufficiently educated, we traded places and he toyed with my nipples exactly the way I showed him.

When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I moved his head away from my breasts. He removed my panties one leg at a time and spread my legs apart.

“You’re still teaching me,” he said as he moved his face down lower.

“But how? I can’t…”

“Just say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

I nodded and leaned my head back.

At first, it felt perfect. His circling tongue made me squirm and the timing of his up and down motion brought me just to the brink but then his lips were involved and it was too much. The pressure was almost painful. I normally wouldn’t have said anything, but he had asked. How could I deny him?

“No,” I whispered softly. “It was… it was better before. Not so hard.”

He immediately went back to what he had been doing just prior to the discomfort and I felt myself ease back into the pleasure. Before long, my body tensed and I let out the cry he knew so well as the waves washed over me. But instead of moving to take off his pants as he usually did at this point, he kept going, over and over until I had cried out four more times. Still, he went back again and I had to push him away.

“No. No more. It’s too sensitive now. It may even be too sensitive for me to be able to…”

“It’s okay. We don’t have to do anything more. I got my lesson.”

“No way.” I glared at him. “Uh-uh.”

I tore at the button on his jeans and ripped them off, along with his gray boxer briefs.

He sat back and I put a couch pillow under my knees as I positioned myself on the floor in front of him, looking up at his face.

“Now you teach me,” I said.

“You’re pretty good. I don’t think you need a lesson.”

“I’m sure I have room for improvement. You tell me yes or no, or whatever you want me to do, okay?”

He nodded, closed his eyes, and leaned back.

I was excited to think he might help me understand how to please him better.

I started with my usual moves and then heard him say, “A little faster.” I was happy to oblige. Then a few minutes later, “Okay, a little slower now, and can you take more?” I pushed as far as I knew I could without gagging and felt great satisfaction from the sound that escaped his lips.

“Yeah, just like that, yeah. Ohhh.”

I even felt bold enough to try something I had never done but read about a few weeks before in one of those articles about how to please your man. It was licking all around the base and up and down while sucking with your mouth at the same time. It seemed difficult and I wasn’t sure if I was doing it correctly, but I tried my best.

The noises coming from Rick grew louder and he seemed to approve of my new trick. Soon he gave me his familiar verbal warning that it was time and then it was all over.

We lay there for a while, naked, breathing heavy, and damp with sweat in the hot summer air, on our family couch in the living room. I couldn’t help but imagine how horrified Sam would be if he knew what we had just done there. But these were the things parents did that their kids were never to know or think about. The things parents were supposed to do for each other to keep their love alive, which would in turn keep their family strong. Still, I felt a little dirty and conflicted about who I was supposed to be as a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a professor. Then something occurred to me. Our little private lesson had me so enamored with Rick that for the first time in a long time, the thought of Dave never even crossed my mind.

“COME ON, SAMMY,
let’s
go in the pool.”

“I said I don’t feel like swimming today. You go in with Jack and I’ll play Minecraft.”

“But it’s more fun when all three of us go in. He likes when you splash him and push him around on the raft. There are only a few more days of summer. When it’s fall and the pool’s all cold, you’ll wish you went in more when you had the chance.”

He rolled his eyes and sat down on a folded up old Batman blanket on the hardwood floor in front of the TV in the living room, game controller in hand. I gave up for the moment and watched him enter his favorite world, a world I was no part of, a world he was capable of escaping into for hours on end, if I let him.

As I cleared breakfast dishes from the dining room table, I thought about the battles Rick and I had when we searched for a house eight years earlier. At almost nine months pregnant, with swollen ankles and only two huge, muumuu type maternity dresses that still fit, I trudged from house to house arguing with Rick. He wanted a super safe neighborhood. I wanted a decent sized bedroom closet. He wanted a two-car garage. I wanted a home office for my work as an adjunct professor, thinking I’d be able to keep up teaching seven or eight classes a semester even after having kids. And those kids would be the perfect little boy and girl, of course. I now knew that like everything else in life, the fantasy and the reality of having a family are light years apart.

There were heated debates over endless criteria before we compromised and settled on our quaint little one story, three-bedroom, 1,300-square-foot ranch house in the San Fernando Valley.

Above all else, and Rick knew it, I wanted a pool. In the small town where I grew up, in the suburbs of Long Island, New York, hardly anyone had a pool. Except Lorinda Dayton, that is. My second story window in our tall, skinny, two-bedroom house looked right out into her tiny backyard, the entire footage of which was taken up by a small, square “built-in” pool, as we called them. Sagging oval above ground pools were more common, but still rare in our lower middle-class neighborhood.

Lorinda took full advantage of her pool power. Everyone wanted to be her friend so they’d have the chance to splash and play for hours in the only real backyard pool for miles around. I remembered one particularly sweltering day when I offered her the ten dollars that it had taken me a month to save up if she would just invite me to swim in her pool. As we sat on the corner of our block playing jacks, sweat dripping down both our faces, she said, “Nah, I don’t really feel like swimming today.”

I went back into the living room after loading the dishwasher and stood in front of the TV, hands on my hips. “How about just for an hour? You can play video games after.”

“Mom! Stop blocking my game.”

“Pause it then.”

A heavy sigh and more eye-rolling.

“We’ve been swimming every day this week already. Besides, our pool is boring. It’s so small. And we don’t even have a diving board or a slide. Why can’t we go over to Henry’s house? He has the best pool and they have so many cool pool toys too.”

I felt myself cringe a little but didn’t want to let Sam see my reaction, so I moved out of his way and sat down on the couch to collect my thoughts. I flipped through the coffee table book with pictures of animal mothers and babies without noticing the images that had deeply moved me on other occasions.

It felt like Karmic payback that Sam had recently befriended Henry, who he met at another friend’s birthday party. Henry was my ex-friend Jill’s son. For a short time, Jill and I had been very good friends. We talked every day. But the foundation of our connection was that we were both cheating on our husbands. She egged me on as I let myself fall deeper into my infatuation with this charming young man who simply had a crush on a professor he found attractive, a crush that should never have been acknowledged or acted on.

I tried to push the image of Dave’s sweet face, with his green grass eyes and messy, soft brown hair, out of my mind. But thinking about Jill brought me back to that time. It didn’t go on for very long, just a matter of weeks, really, but I completely lost myself. Rick and I were so disconnected then that it had been easy to get lost.

It was all because I ran into a few former students at a dance club that Shelly dragged me to on a rare girls’ night out. Dave was one of them. We had too much to drink. We talked and laughed and suddenly Dave and I were kissing in the back alley behind the club. I worked to leave it at that but he wouldn’t let it go. Before I knew it, we were chatting online and he paid me a surprise visit at school. One thing led to another and somehow I found myself alone with him in his apartment one night. That terrible night when my world crumbled into tiny pieces. As Dave and I took our time starting to get to know each other in new ways, Rick sat at my computer, somehow retrieving the damning evidence I mistakenly believed I had permanently deleted.

Most of what we had shared was in cyberspace, not in person. How could something like that strike such a crushing blow to a marriage? I had only been with Dave in person a handful of times during that period. Ours was more an affair of words on screens. I wondered if most affairs were that way now, with the rapid advances in technology.

In almost four months of therapy and hard work on the long road to repair my marriage, I had come to see getting caught that night as a blessing. Before I could take things too far with Dave, Rick called and told me he knew everything. I would never know what might have happened that night.

Snapping back into the present moment, I realized I hadn’t checked on Jack in his room for a while. When I left him, he was focused on his alphabet puzzle, but I figured he must have moved on by now, hopefully not to something too destructive.

Sam was happily playing his game, unaware of my ruminations and reflections.

A few minutes later, Jack walked ahead of me pushing his fake vacuum cleaner along the hardwood floor of the hallway. We were heading out to the living room together to convince Sam to go for a swim with us. Jack was always up for swimming, just like me. But we didn’t find Sam in the living room. He was in the dining room, which was so tiny it only fit a miniscule square table with four chairs. On that table was my purse. Sam stood with a guilty look on his face, my phone in his hand.

“What are you doing?”

“I just wanted to call Henry.”

I felt my heart rate increase.

“You can’t use my phone without asking.”

“Why not? All the phone numbers are in there so all I have to do is push one button. I found Henry’s mom’s name and boom, she put him on the phone to talk.”

Now I felt beads of perspiration forming at my temples.

“What did she, I mean he, say?”

“They invited us over today. Henry said for you to call his mom to set it up. Can we go? Can we go? Please, please, please, Mom.”

I wondered why on earth Jill would invite us over. Our friendship dissolved when I told her that I cut off all ties with Dave and was in therapy working on my marriage. I was no longer interested in hearing about her secret relationship with Kent, a stay at home dad she met up with regularly for what were supposed to be their kids’ playdates. Wracked with guilt over my own indiscretions, I became increasingly unable to pretend it didn’t bother me that she had no problem at all cheating on her husband. And while I knew I had no right to judge, I wasn’t sure I could trust someone who would betray another mother that way, a woman she was actually friendly with, as she slept with her husband.

I was trapped. I had no good reason to say no to Sam, so I made the call.

“Beth. It’s so good to hear from you. I’ve missed you. So can you and the kids come over today? We can all swim and you and I can catch up.”

“Well, um, it’s really nice of you to invite us, but I have so much to do today, super busy, you know, maybe I could just drop off Sam to swim with Henry?” There was a long pause.

“Well, okay, that would be fine, but I was hoping you could come hang out too. I’ve been wanting to talk to you. Things, um, things in my life have changed and I wanted to apologize for losing touch and well, see how you’re doing. Can’t you and Jack come over for a little while too?”

My curiosity got the better of me. It took a full forty-five minutes to find and pack all the necessary items—swim diapers, floaties, sunscreen, goggles, towels, the snacks my boys like, and so on. Finally, each of us loaded up with as many of the supplies as we could hold, we headed over to Jill’s house. It was in our neighborhood, but in the nicer area with bigger houses and professionally landscaped yards.

I wondered what Jill’s house would look like on the inside. I had dropped Sam off there twice, but both times I’d made excuses for running off without stopping in.

I sucked in hard as I willed myself to knock on the door. Jill seemed genuinely happy to see us.

“Oh my God, Beth, you’ve lost more weight!”

I hated myself for allowing the comment to make me feel so good. But she was one of those naturally thin people who didn’t even have to work at it. I always had to work at it. Had to work my ass off counting calories, running, saying “no” to all the foods I most wanted to say “yes” to.

I wasn’t surprised to see that Jill’s house was spotless. But it was hard to imagine how she kept all that light colored furniture clean. The large living room was full of beige couches and chairs, slightly darker beige walls, and mostly beige Berber carpeting with flecks of mocha and copper. There wasn’t a stain or smudge anywhere.

Apparently, Jill’s two boys didn’t spend much time in this area of the house. They immediately swooped Sam and Jack away to their large toy-filled playroom toward the back of the house.

I thought about how one of the things that Jill and I had in common was the ages of our two sons. It was unusual to find other moms who had kids close to six years apart. It seemed much more popular to pop them out with only two years in between. I wondered if her reasons were the same as mine.

“I don’t know many other families with kids six years apart, do you?”

She picked up the bags and toys that Sam had dropped right by the front door and placed them in a neat pile in the corner of the room as she responded.

“No. To tell you the truth, I actually never meant to have another. James was an oops.” She giggled a little nervously. I didn’t expect her to be nervous too, but I was sort of glad she was. She looked prettier than I remembered. Her moon shaped face seemed to be glowing and her brown hair looked shiny. I thought I remembered more wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead too. I wondered if she was doing Botox. The cost would mean nothing to her husband Connor, given his lucrative work in the porn industry. He had some important behind the scenes job.

Talking about the kids felt like the perfect way to ease back in.

“He wasn’t planned? Really? Wow. That must have been a shock.” I thought about how my own existence could be attibuted to a faulty condom. Then Shelly and her situation flooded my mind and I made a mental note to call and check on her soon.

“It was. But he’s my little sweetheart now, of course. I can’t imagine life without him.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I always knew I wanted two kids, and thought I’d have them close together. But when Sam was born, he rocked my world. He cried and cried. Nothing would soothe him. It took me five years to be willing to risk going through that again.”

She nodded with what I could tell was sympathy, not empathy. It was something in the way her mouth curved up on one side only.

“I can’t imagine. We got lucky. Both boys were easy babies. Slept through the night right away.”

“Really? I can’t imagine that. Sam was so inconsolable for the first six months of his life that if he wasn’t in my bed and/or on my breast, he was screaming bloody murder.”

“Oh, that must have been awful. I didn’t breastfeed. Maybe that’s why. They say formula keeps their tummies more full and they sleep better.”

Part of me wanted to give her a lecture on the many benefits of breastfeeding but I knew there would be no point. She seemed bored with the conversation.

“How about I make us some margaritas?”

I looked at my watch. “It’s only…”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere right?” I hated that saying, but a drink did sound good.

First we checked on the boys, who were making a huge mess in the playroom. Sam and Henry were throwing a Wiffle ball back and forth, knocking over items in its path with every toss. Jack and James were slamming plastic hammers on the little heads popping out of a whack-a-mole game. Jill didn’t seem to care at all.

“Good, they’re entertaining themselves for the moment,” she declared.

Her sunshine yellow and navy blue kitchen was just as spotless as the living room. I considered complimenting the cleaning lady and asking for her number, but Jill would see right through it. She knew it wasn’t something I could afford. In truth, I also felt a little uneasy about the idea of paying someone to clean my home, as appealing as it sounded. It was common among my friends, but it wasn’t something I grew up with. I helped my mother and grandmother scrub toilets and bathtubs, washed all the dishes in our house, and did my own laundry from the time I was eight years old.

When the drinks were ready, Jill raised her glass into the air.

“To enjoying the last days of summer.”

The first sip was such a shock that my face must have looked the way it did when I accepted Sam’s dare to bite right into the lemon he picked from our lemon tree.

“Oh yeah, I like ‘em strong, should have warned you,” she said, without a hint of apology. “Want me to put more of the mix in yours?”

I looked into her kind catlike eyes and was reminded that I actually liked her. There was more to her than being an accomplice to my crimes. She was easy to talk to and non-judgmental. Even in her perfectly neat house I could be myself.