He watches her undress. Quick, sure fingers undoing buttons and clips, her face stern, hyper-critical of the body incrementally revealed and watched by both of them in the wardrobe mirror. She turns to examine the cauliflowering on her left buttock, tutting softly. Eyes downcast, a crease of mild exasperation in their midst. The middle-aged thickness of her body depresses her. She talks of little else these days, constantly seeking out and discovering fresh flaws. There are impulsive bursts of dieting, perusals of leisure centre websites, but such occasions are fleeting. Her sensuality ever prevails.
She looks up at him without expression before returning to her bedtime routine. Now she sits, takes up her wipes. She is fanatical about her skin.
Cleanse, tone, moisturize...
He watches how intently she looks at herself, recognizes the same pleasure in her self-scrutiny that he feels while shaving. She elevates her chin to get at her neck, showing him the hollow between the blood vessels of her throat. A small diamond pendant sparkles beneath her collar-bone. Her bra is cream, sheer, grubby with fake tan. It had been visible through her blouse at the restaurant. Max, seated opposite her, staring at her tits. Her lip-marked wine glass raised to her mouth, her eyes looking at him above its rim...
Most of the time she doesn't even realize that she is flirting. It is an alpha female reflex, a sensitivity to male potential. His jealousy is tempered with a perverse satisfaction, as if her continued attractiveness to other men is somehow an advertisement for his own potency, the unique qualities that had made her choose him above all others. Yet they had argued in the car on the way home. She had called him delusional. He had called her a whore, a fucking disgrace. They haven't spoken since...
She drops the last wipe in the bin and goes to the bathroom. He reaches across to her bedside locker for her phone. A screen scored with nail marks, her wallpaper a snap of a beach at dusk from their summer in the South of France. His skin crawls with shame as he scrolls through her texts, her call history. Nothing. He replaces the phone as the toilet flushes and reassumes his previous position.
She shuts the bedroom door, eyeing him with suspicion. Her body language is awkward on her approach, her hips free of their usual ease. The mattress sighs as she sits down, finding an echo a moment later in the release of tension as she unhooks her bra. The weight of her freed breasts drags her shoulders forward, a slouch that mimics despondency. His fingers reach out but stop short of touching her.
He recoils as she stands up and throws back her side of the duvet. She mounts the bed, enters in a flurry of warmth and brute presence. A sigh, a drawing up of limbs...The posture is a barring order, a gesture of reproach. Though her back is to him, their intimacy is too well-established for him to be discouraged. Her arse is towards him, radiating heat and he can sense her blood much as he knows she cannot but be aware of the inflammation of his. She breathes slowly, a poor facsimile of a drifting off to sleep. He can feel her alertness, the cold logic of her conscious thought.
He lies down, inches slightly towards her. Her stomach growls with as yet effervescing Solpadeine as she moves an equivalent amount in the opposite direction. When he smiles at the gesture, she seems to relax. He doesn't need to see her face to perceive its softening, its tacit surrender. She is tired, reluctant to fight, willing, for now, to accept his intimations of remorse.
His erection slips out of the vent of his shorts as if in search of her. He can't recall an occasion on which he has not wanted her. Her craving for intimacy is infectious, ever-present, an addiction to a communal rather than an atomized bliss. She makes him believe in the soul. Nothing as good as what they share could ever originate in mere flesh. He sees the sweat of her breasts and stomach, an arm flung across her face, as he makes her come with his fingers in the bedroom of the villa in Arles. It's the physical closeness that makes her come so hard, the sense of being wanted by him, wanting to please him...She has no control over her desirability. He understands this now...
The bed is dressed in the same linen as it had been the last time they had made love. It's meaningless, but the coincidence pleases him. He squirms down further, deep enough to get a view of her body beneath the quilt. The warmth beneath smells of moisturizer, suppressed hormones. A chink of light illuminates the scar above her coccyx. He tries to remember the exact configuration of the effaced tramp stamp but is unable to see beyond a map of Roman Arles. When she knelt before him with her hips raised, it would expand in response to each thrust of his body. He would aim for it at the critical moment but he was a wayward bombardier and invariably overshot. Streaks of come along the damp marble of her lower back...
His glans brushes against the endsheet, twitching with muscle memory. He wets his fingers, touches himself...
I'm sorry...
The words are stillborn on his tongue. He knows better than to compound his offence...
She shifts her body, neither towards or away from him, and inhales sharply through her nose. He lies absolutely still, uncertain of how he should respond to the overture. His paranoia is justified. She is not above deploying lures, false flags. He moves closer, focusing on the down of her hairline, the ball of her vertebra prominens. The length of spine beneath is ominous, arrayed like a stinger awaiting fugitive wheels. A long back, characteristic of her mother's people, showing early signs of the curvature that had afflicted the old lady in her later years. The prospect terrifies her, as does ageing in general. He has seen her web history, the obsessive quality of her investigations into scoliosis, free radicals, HRT. That she believes she may hit upon the secret of eternal youth via the munificence of algorithms breaks his heart...
Forty-five.
The despair in her voice when she states her age...To him, she has never been more beautiful. Where she sees only the corrugation and slackness of middle-age, he sees terminal coherence, the apogee of adult structure and form. She accuses him of blowing smoke up her ass. He has long since given up trying convince her of his sincerity. But there is no question of a choice between the callow girl he had married twenty years before and the woman who now lies next to him. Her mature body is a narrative, its nuance and subtext discernible to him alone. He reads of their shared heritage amongst its peaks and hollows, two strangers growing towards familiarity to the point where it becomes idle to speak of two separate minds and bodies.
Love
is too poor a word; too imprecise. He feels depth of his need for her by imagining her loss, but, as always, his mind stops short. There can be no question of their ever being parted. They will prevail, somehow. He has never doubted the fact...
A blood vessel moves on the side of her throat, less a pulse than a murmur. Her heart, her viscera, her poor womb...Which would prove treacherous? He lowers his eyes to the middle of her back, seeing through flesh and muscle to her kidneys, descendants of those that had done for both her parents. As the heart fails, the kidneys fail; as the fluids mount due to the latter, all the more struggles the former...The dwindling self of the run-up to death, the end of communication...He has seen it four times, both of his parents and both of hers. Her father had spoken of angels above his wife's death-bed but there had been nothing there, a void above a grey, hollowed face finally at peace in the midst of the effrontery of medical hardware. She had clung to him, screaming mucus into the crook of his neck...He knows she had felt his hardness, just as he knows she is aware of it now, drawn some small comfort from its mindless vitality. They had fucked away the week of the funeral, and every funeral since, in the same spirit of defiance and affirmation. They were alive. It was beautiful to be so. It wasn't a victory over death but it felt like one. Tumescence, the burgeoning of fluids, breathlessness...It was as if their bodies were mocking the symptoms of heart failure, reclaiming them on behalf of life. Death is big and ugly enough. If it can give it out, then it ought to be able to take it.
She has been so still up to that point that her turning to look at him over her shoulder seems cataclysmic. He touches a vertebra, encouraged by the impatience he can see in the visible corner of her mouth. It is one of the subtle ways in which she manifests arousal, a system of tells that only he knows. The tiny acceleration in the rise and fall of her breasts, a certain click in her swallowing, a particular diameter of pupil in relation to iris...He moves his hand further up her back, thrilled, as if for the first time, by its indulged sleekness, the perfect fit of the ball of her shoulder in his palm. The tip of his ring finger probes her innoculation scar...
She raises herself on an elbow and docks in the groove formed by his body. Her arse is everywhere, assertive and insistent as it seeks purchase in his lap. She likes to feel his hardness up against her, to measure its quality against that of the muscle and bone of her pelvis. The counterpressure he applies is that of a beaten arm-wrestler. There is no contest. She whips him every time.
He buries his face in her hair and eats a way through to her scalp, feeling her laughter as a vibration in his teeth via the bone of her skull. It is one of her ticklish spots, even more so than the soles of her feet. He had attempted to wash her hair for her once, a grand romantic gesture. Her ensuing hysteria had made her piss the bath. Now he feels her laughter modulate into contented breathing, mimicking the deep and regular character of his own. She moves her hips against his groin like a stripper. He stuffs an imaginary note inside the waistband of her knickers before touching the softness at their centre. Slick, balled cotton...Her bed pants are practical rather than flattering but he would rather see her in them than in her best lingerie. She likes her comfort. Living with him, who can blame her...?
He stretches the fabric, feeling the quickening of her vulva beneath. She gets wet so quickly, so thoroughly, just as she can dry up in an instant. Sometimes passion makes him careless, leaves her raw and stinging inside. He is duty-bound to make amends...
