There's always an awkwardness after making love. It comes not just from the emotional exhaustion, but from the lovers realizing they've just shown who they are in the most intimate and affecting way, and now they're faced with that honesty and its consequences as they try and reassemble themselves and tie their masks back on, knowing that now their lover knows. Now their lover has seen. Now their lover has felt their truth, and what is one to say?
For Arianna it was tears, weeping in my arms as I held her. I didn't ask her what was wrong or why she was crying. I'd felt the force of her release, and her tears now were like the rain after a hurricane blows through: the cleansing rain that marks the storm's passing.
In time she stopped and lay there for a while against my chest, and as she recovered I could almost feel her shame and embarrassment coming over her, making her curl up on herself like a dried leaf. I relaxed my embrace and she extricated herself and sat up. She reached for a tissue from the night stand and dabbed her eyes and blew her nose.
"Oh my," she said. "David, I'm so embarrassed. I'm not normally like this. Really, I'm not. Normally I'm the exact opposite. It's just so strange."
I already had my own ideas on what was happening, but I thought it best that she work things out on her own. But meanwhile, her confusion and dismay were almost painful to see. The least I could do was give her an out.
"You've been under a lot of stress, Arianna. With Ethan, and the lawyers. That's got to have an effect on you."
She thought about that for a moment. "Yes. Yes, that's certainly true. I'm sure that's part of it."
I couldn't resist pressing her. "Then what's the other part?"
She was sitting on the side of the bed, facing the night stand, her breasts hidden from me, her knees pressed primly together. She looked at me over her shoulder.
"What you do to me. The way you make me feel."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. No one's ever made me feel like that. I... I do have some experience. Ethan wasn't my first lover. There were others, but..."
My ego could only take so much stroking before I smiled. "But what?"
She shook her head in disbelief. "You must think I'm horrible. A perfect slut. But that's not it. I'm not. And you're not even my type. I like serious guys more my age who work out and have drive and ambition andโ Oh! No, David, I don't meanโ"
I laughed at her discomfiture. "You think too much, Anna. You worry too much."
She nodded. "I do. I know I do. But that's what's different about you. With you I don't think or worry. With you I justโ I don't know
what
I do. "
"You feel," I said. "That's what it is. I don't let you do anything else. I make you keep still and
feel
."
She stared at me for a moment, considering this. "You think I'm a sub, don't you? You think I like being inferiorโ"
"I don't even want to hear that word, Arianna! I told you. it's just a stupid label."
"Which word? Sub? Or inferior?"
"Either of them. You're obsessed about it, about not being a submissive, and you're being silly. It doesn't matter. I can call you a sub. I can call you a bottom. I can call you a top or a dominatrix or a left-handed Zoroastrian Freemason. What does it matter? What matters is that you feel, and that I can touch those places that
make
you feel."
She stared at me a bit longer, then smiled. She swing her legs up on the bed and lay down and pressed herself against me, snuggling close and putting her head on my shoulder. She began playing idly with the hair on my chest.
"I've never been with a guy who didn't shave his body," she said. "But you have Just the right amount of hair. And it's salt and pepper, like your beard. Did you know that? I didn't know a man's chest hair got gray. It's kind of sexy."
I said nothing, just held he closer. She was facing my side, and now she raised her top leg and slid it over my thighs.
"Is it sick that your age turns me on?" she asked. "Does that mean I have some kind of Elektra thing going on, like secretly lusting for my father or something?"