Though the doctor had taken care to close the door of her room, he and Alex had not moved far enough beyond it. Hsiao-ling could hear their conversation all too well.
"No more children ever?
"I'm sorry, Mr. Betancourt. The necrosis ruined her uterus beyond repair. This isn't something we can fix surgically."
"What about...transplants?"
"Uterus transplants? I'm afraid there's no such thing." The doctor paused. "There's another complication."
"Yes?" The tension in Alex's voice had risen to an unbearable pitch.
"Your wife's vagina suffered considerable damage, as well. The nerve tracks to it have been badly compromised. Sexual intercourse will be quite painful for her."
"Can you fix that, at least?"
"That damage is beyond repair as well. I'm very sorry, sir. We've done all we can."
Hsiao-ling was still in the throes of grief over her stillborn son. That Adam had been a ten-pound monstrosity, head and neck fused to his torso and features barely recognizable as human, was irrelevant. She'd loved and anticipated him from the instant of his conception. To learn that childbearing had been struck from her future forever was a blow for which she was unprepared. Her sobs returned at full force, escalating swiftly into a piercing scream.
Alex burst into the room at once, scanning left and right for what might have so upset her. His clenched fists, his combat-ready stance, and the ruddy intensity of his tear-streaked face gave him the aspect of an avenging angel.
An angel in mourning.
***
Hsiao-ling felt Alex's erection against the small of her back as he clasped her silently in the darkness. She could almost feel him willing it to subside.
He'd been unnaturally quiet and distant ever since he'd brought her home from the hospital. Uncharacteristically, he spoke only when necessary. He made no attempt to converse, not even small talk at dinner. He wouldn't even speak of his candidacy for tenure, up to then the most exciting prospect in his life. She'd done her best to maintain complete normality in their household, to make him feel that all was as well as it could possibly be, but her efforts had brought no perceptible response.
She knew that her sorrows were his as well. He'd wanted children quite as much as she. He'd agonized with her through the final difficult months of what they'd thought was a basically normal, if somewhat outsized pregnancy. He'd screamed in pain with her as the obstetrician struggled to relieve her of her necrotic burden. As if more were necessary, at twenty-six years of age their days of physical intimacy, the greatest joy of their lives together, were done forever. She mourned them just as intensely as he.
Such tragedies had sundered other marriages. Not many young husbands are equal to the stress of sleeping beside a loving young wife whose body is permanently out of bounds.
That Hsiao-ling found herself thinking along those lines a single week after her return home terrified her beyond endurance. She willed it away with his unwanted erection and sought the refuge of sleep. It was slow in coming.
***
Hsiao-ling could not concentrate on her work. It wasn't the muted conversations among her fellow research assistants, nor the low hum of activity as they moved around the lab, nor the buzz of the thousands of
muscae domesticae
awaiting their turns in the irradiation unit. She could not force her mind off the aching emptiness in her loins.
Knowing her condition, Alex would not act to soothe that ache. Knowing his tenderness, she could not ask him to ignore her agony for her sake...or his.
He has to be suffering almost as much as I am.
The knowledge blocked all other thought from her brain.
"Are you all right, dear?"
Her head jerked around to find Chen Nyuk-hsi hovering over her. The chief investigator's face was a mask of polite concern. Hsiao-ling smiled formally and made to return to the work before her, but the older woman halted her.
"We heard about your loss, of course."
Of course. The university hospital hardly even pretends to protect patients' privacy.
"I'm quite all right, thank you, Professor."
Nyuk-hsi's smile was as
pro forma
as Hsiao-ling's own. "I just wanted you to know that if you need anything...money, a place to stay..."
Hsiao-ling was shocked out of her pretenses. "What? Why on Earth...?"
Nyuk-hsi shrugged as if to say,
What else can you expect?
"I just wanted you to know that you're not alone, dear." But as the chief investigator turned away, Hsiao-ling caught the curve of her lip that conveyed an entirely different message.
Serves you right for marrying that
guey low faan.
***
When Alex next left their bed, shortly after retiring, and headed to the bathroom, Hsiao-ling waited a few dozen seconds, slipped out from under the covers, and followed him.
She cracked the door open as delicately as she could. He took no notice. He stood half-crouched over the toilet, eyes closed and a fist clamped over yet another raging erection, pumping himself desperately and muttering "Come on...come on..." as if trying to cajole his body into granting him relief. The look of desperation on his face was heavily laced with anxious regret.
Hsiao-ling's inchoate, vaguely Christian Deism was far less restrictive than Alex's straitlaced Catholicism. Yet she knew how difficult it was for him to seek release in such a fashion. She could feel his agony at the need. She swung the door back the rest of the way and entered. He stopped at the sound, straightened and turned a flaming red face toward her.
Before he could utter a word, she reached up and laid a finger against his lips.
"Shhh."
He stood motionless as she ran her fingertips lightly over his body and descended to kneel on the cold granite tile. The head of his penis bobbed before her eyes.
He was beautiful, a smooth, unobtrusively muscular, and perfectly proportioned representative of his sex. Hsiao-ling had thought him beautiful from moment she first saw him. She'd known better than to say so from well before they met. Few men are equal to being called beautiful. They have great difficulty bearing the burden of good looks, far greater than women. Most are made acutely uncomfortable by being praised for them.
As brilliant and tenderly loving as he was, he hadn't needed to be good-looking. From the day they met he'd treated her like a pearl of infinite price, a treasure to be protected from all harm regardless of the cost. Yet he was beautiful, in every sense. He deserved to know her love, and to feel it.
She took him into her mouth.
He gasped and twitched. His hands went immediately to the sides of her face. She'd never fellated him before, and had only a vague idea what she ought to do. She went slowly, caressing the head of his penis with her lips and tongue, then taking in as much of the shaft as she could and laving it with a gentle, rotating stroke. His flavor was salty, mildly musky, and not at all unpleasant.
His legs began to quiver. Her hands traveled around his hips to his buttocks in leisurely and loving exploration as she ministered to him with her mouth. When she found the cleft, she parted his cheeks and ran a single fingertip down the groove. He spasmed, driving the head of his penis past her glottis. With no warning, his whole length slid down her throat.
She suppressed her impulse to gag and expel him, used the muscles around her throat to massage and encourage him. On sudden impulse, she slipped her fingertip into his anus and lightly stroked his prostate.
He cried out and came with explosive force, clutching her head manically and sending a thick stream of semen down her throat. She milked him as best she could with her throat muscles, just as she'd done with her vagina when they were working on conceiving Adam and all was right with the world. His first spurt of seed was followed by a second and a third as he whimpered and shook against her.
The aroma of his semen permeated her sinuses. It lulled her into an erotic trance. All that existed was his body, her finger lodged in his anus and his penis lodged in her throat. All that mattered was his pleasure, and the pleasure she could take in eliciting and heightening it. All she wanted was to make him come again and again.
Presently she allowed him to withdraw, looked up at him and smiled. He was wide-eyed, trembling with the force of his orgasm, too overcome to speak. She laid her face against his groin and hugged him gently.
"I love you," she said.
***
"Why?" he whispered in the darkness.
"Because I love you. I don't need another reason, do I?"
He stroked her back and shoulders. "No, but -- Hsiao-ling, what could I do for
you?
"
She chuckled. "Be my husband. Love me as you've loved me since we first met. Come home to me in the evening and hold me at night, just like this. I don't need anything more than that, Alex."
He was briefly silent. She intuited the reason for his distress exactly as he spoke it.
"Hsiao-ling, I want to give you pleasure too. I want -- I know we can't make love any more, but there must be something!"
She slid one hand along his torso, took his flaccid member in a gentle grip. It twitched and began to stiffen. "Alex, what would you call what we did in the bathroom? Wasn't that making love?"
"Well..."
"Do you remember just after we got married, before our fellowships came in, how carefully we had to budget every penny?" She found the coronal ridge with her thumb, probed for the indentation, and rubbed it gently. "There was no margin, toward the end of every month we feared we'd be unable to pay the rent, and we'd cut back as hard as we had to, to be sure all our obligations were covered? Remember how I would complain now and then, about how spartan our lives were?"
