Older story, with a fresh 'edit' to smooth it out a little. Not terribly risque, as these kinds of stories go -- I got distracted by the characters. Occupational hazard...
All characters fictional; all actions involve consenting adults. Please don't read if you think the only proper way to touch someone is "gently"!
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A callous on one thumb kept catching on the dishtowel. It was a little annoying; he'd sand it down later. But for now, there were dishes to dry. Besides, he didn't want to leave her alone just yet. Not that there was anything else he could do; not like she wanted him to do anything. So she just washed the dishes. He just dried. And did his best to ignore the tears on her cheeks.
They'd had to work out what to do in situations like this. Three years ago, when they'd first moved in together, he'd done what he thought a boyfriend was supposed to do. If she got upset, he'd try to cheer her up. If she was frustrated, he'd try to suggest a solution. She'd finally explained that in those situations, sometimes she didn't want him to fix anything. Apparently, from what she'd told him, it was a common "boy vs. girl" thing.
She'd never fully explained what it was, just told him that it existed. Maybe her psychologist had a label for it, but he certainly didn't. He was most comfortable with a wood plane or a carving knife in his hands. Wood he understood; emotions not so much. But in a way, it worked for them: she didn't want to explain, and really didn't need him to "understand," though she'd explained a little.
"Look, honey," she'd said, the morning after a bewildering evening of especially pronounced mood swings, "it's just something that happens. It's like pressure builds up, and every once in a while it comes out all at once. Sometimes I can't stop giggling. Sometimes I can't stop crying. You don't have to go away or anything -- just let me be, though. I don't need you to take care of me when it happens. The last thing I need is another goddamn therapist. And I sure as hell don't want to take care of you when it happens. So please, when it happens, don't make me explain, and don't freak out so I have to bottle it all up to calm you down, OK?"
It took months, but he finally understood that he really wasn't supposed to 'fix' anything. She didn't always want a hug, or a shoulder to cry on. It helped that he'd also come to realize that he was helping, just by being there and not judging, not prodding.
It was only then that she opened up a little about some of the less pleasant things in her background. It was weird to him that she didn't think the outbursts were directly connected. "It's not like I remember something that happened, then start crying about it. It's more like -- like going through all that stretched me inside. I just feel more emotions; I can carry more than I used to. But once in a while you just have to flush the system, you know?"
Maybe she was right about herself -- she seemed to have adapted. Not all the outbursts were negative ones. He'd never known anyone who could get so much joy out of an ice cream cone at the zoo, or cried at every romantic movie. For every time she got blind drunk and sobbed in the bathtub, there was a time she got horny as hell, dragged him into the bedroom, and fucked him like some mythological beast, growling when he tried to be more gentle, and laughing at him when he tried to growl back.
It was a roller coaster ride. But she loved him, and never (or rarely, anyway) displaced anger onto him. When she was 'flushing the system,' she didn't pull him beneath the surface with her. But she freely shared the joy that seemed to be the other side of her dual nature. He tended not to hang around other guys (or anyone, really), but he'd overheard enough banter to think he had it pretty good.
But there was some lingering doubt. OK, sure, she seemed to have found a way to deal with being so emotionally raw, but he worried she was dealing with symptoms rather than causes. While she didn't like to talk during her emotional lows, she was pretty open about her past. He didn't know a lot of detail about some of the things that she'd been through, but it what she had told him ... nobody, he thought, should be able to talk about such awful things happening to them with such dispassion, even boredom.
He would have thought that she'd think that the worst think that had ever happened to her was the rape. But on the surface, it seemed as if the rape seemed to affect him more than her. She never used that word, and he'd never called it that in front of her, but that's how he thought of it. There's just no goddamn way a fourteen-year-old could agree to be with an adult that way. He assumed he'd convinced her to say yes; he believed her when she said it hadn't been physically violent. But that didn't mean she wasn't damaged by it, no matter what she said. In his opinion, the power that bastard had had over her was the attack, a blunt instrument that she hadn't had any defenses against. But the way she talked about it, it was only a crime due to a silly technicality.
But the event he had even more difficulty understanding was what she did remember with something like horror. After the bastard had inevitably dumped her, she'd dated people of a more appropriate age. He'd characterize her back then as half hedonist, half serial monogamist: that is, one lover at a time, but only as long as it kept being casual and fun. Mostly they sounded like decent people. The relationships were pretty shallow, but he guessed that what she'd wanted and needed. In any case, nothing really bad had happened ... from his perspective, at least.
But in her memory, one event loomed large. It still had the power to shake her, literally and figuratively. One night, half-drunk and deeply embarrassed, she'd finally described one night when she in college. She and her boyfriend had planned on a romantic evening -- get some food, get a little drunk, get laid. They'd both been looking forward to it, but he'd overindulged. They'd started to make out when he'd told her he was too drunk to finish off the evening as planned. That really pissed her off. She'd actually been yelling at him when he fell asleep.
So there he was, snoring, oblivious to her glaring at him, when she'd noticed the bulge in his sweatpants. The bastard has an erection! she'd thought. He's probably dreaming about fucking me! As mad as she was, for reasons she didn't really understand, that really turned her on. She was pissed, but horny. Without thinking, she'd climbed on top of him. The way she'd tearfully described it, she hadn't undressed. She'd pulled his sweats down only as much as necessary, pulled her panties to one side, and mounted him -- and had an eye-rolling orgasm almost immediately. Then she pulled free of him, and used her hand to make him come all over himself ... then left him there, and went home.
The next morning, he'd known immediately what happened, and apparently thought it was hilarious... at least until she broke up with him, which she did the next time she laid eyes on him. He felt for the guy -- he'd have been as bewildered as her ex had been. What the boy hadn't known, but he did, was that she didn't break up with him because he'd fallen asleep, but because she was too ashamed to look him in the eye. From her perspective, she'd raped him. Her current boyfriend couldn't quite follow the irony: the woman who didn't bear a grudge against the adult who'd raped her (in his eyes) believed that she was a bad person because she'd assaulted a guy who hadn't minded in the least.
In a way, that was typical of her. What she thought of as significant was sometimes pretty skewed from what people would normally think, and there were subtleties that were really important to her that others might not even notice. She was still deeply ashamed for a school library book she's "stolen" as a teenager -- in reality, she'd just forgotten to return it before she graduated. But she laughed about all the jewelry she'd lifted while she was in high school. She drank like a fish, but wouldn't even stay in the room if someone else was smoking a little weed.
All this was running through his head as he finished drying the dishes. He hadn't even consciously noticed that she'd stopped crying until she touched his arm and smiled. "Quarter?" she asked. It was an old joke between them: thoughts worth only a penny were best kept to oneself, but if one of them had a thought they believed was worth sharing... He smiled back, but shook his head. That was another good thing: they'd had some of the deepest, most personal conversations, but they never pried. At least, he'd learned not to. She did it instinctively.
Instead, he asked, "So, tonight. Food, film, and ...?" It was another private joke. Did she want to get to bed early, or add another 'f' word to the list?
"Yes, please!" She put her hands on his hips, and kissed him lightly. "I can sleep in tomorrow," she said, shyly. He felt himself grin, reflexively. That meant she was interested in more than a quickie.
But that just meant, they could take their time. She'd had a good handful of lovers, and their sex life together was satisfying for both of them. All things considered, she was pretty vanilla. That worked for both of them. Oh, they'd half-teased each other sometimes about doing something more risqué, or even risky. But in practice, even longer evenings were variations on trading oral before intercourse. In the right mood, their dirty talk was a little out there, but it was limited to variations on "One of these days, I'm going to..." which they never actually did. She liked porn in a vague sort of way. He could pick pretty much whatever he wanted, and watching it would turn her on, but not in a "I wish that was me" kind of way. In fact, one of the more adventurous things they'd do sometimes was, if she was getting bored by the porn, she'd start blowing him, half-watching, until it ended. Once in a while, if the scene was particularly graphic, she might pause to grin at him: "Dream on, lover boy," she'd mock, or "No chance in hell!" before she'd go back to what she was doing.
