Everything was perfect for Danny and Joy until their daughter Jenny, age 10, was killed in a freak accident. Here the story picks up ten years after Jenny's death. I've been writing about these characters for a long time and am pretty intimate with them, so excuse me if the story is too familiar. Sending them into this world of sexual transformation has been a bit of a personal journey as well. An earlier teaser version of this piece,"Till the Morning Comes," has been removed from Lit.
Chapter 1
The candle sat by itself on the kitchen counter, a solid block of wax in a small glass; too small a container for the grief they carried. Joy struck the match. It flared and she put the flame to the wick; the wick caught the flame, and that was it. No prayer, or ceremony; to honor and remember their dead the flame would last twenty-four hours, the light of a short life burning for a short day. Each of their sighs slipped out, mingled, found the dust in the moldings, the empty room upstairs, the railings worn smooth with grief. Danny wrapped his arms around her waist; she held his arms and leaned firmly back into his body.
"Ten years," Joy said. "We'll go say
Kaddish
in the morning."
"She's been dead for as long as she was alive. Junior year at college." Danny said.
"Phi beta Kappa."
"Career planning."
"Gap year."
"Birthright trip."
An advantage of your child being dead is that any future can be imagined. Right after Jenny was killed, imagining all of things she would never get to do exacerbated their grief and made their marriage grim and joyless; for quite a while grief had replaced sex as the currency of their intimacy. Yet you accommodate to your child's death, you adjust, you accrue repeated years without her until the indignity of that loss becomes shadowed by all that has happened since. So as much as Joy resisted, as if living an affirmative life would somehow betray her daughter, life had indeed reasserted itself. Work for both of them grew, their son lived, they found each other in bed again. They celebrated birthdays.
"Jake's doing well." Their sixteen-year-old son was in France on a student exchange program. He'd been gone for a week, to a new world as far as he could get from San Francisco, far from his broken parents, with a suitcase and a backpack and a yahrzeit candle of his own.
"Thank god for that," he said. "At least we have one child alive."
"It's a blessing." Sometimes, Joy almost forgot that it could end instantly. Back then that knowledge had been so pervasive that she had withdrawn emotionally from her son, his vulnerability too much to take. Of all the changes bereavement had put them through that was the one that angered Danny, but he remained steady and his selflessness in the face of her selfishness ultimately had helped Joy find a route out of her pain, into reconciliation with her new life. And that helped her love her son again. And her husband.
"Still," he said. "I wish I could be selfish. So many things to do with her that I'll never do."
"You'll just have to do them with me, Danny."
"The time that I have to do things with you," he said, "I have a very different agenda for." His hands moved to her breasts.
"What, exactly, might that be?" she said. She twisted, nestling against his side, her head in the crook of his arm, slid a hand down his belly, pressing on the emerging stiffness under his zipper.
"I remember," he said, "the night we made her." He thrust against her hand, gripped her butt; she pushed lightly back against his touch.
"That was a nice night," Joy said.
"And an amazing week. Can we do that again?"
"What, exactly?" She loved teasing him. He wanted what he wanted so much.
"You know." His face flushed.
"Tell me anyway." She pressed on his cock encouragingly.
He squeezed it out like a boy showing his mother where he hid the Halloween candy he was supposed to throw away. "You. in Hawaii. . . Naked and available. Your pussy. Your mouth. Ready for anything . . ."
She could shoot him down in so many ways, but she didn't.
This is real for him,
she thought. She felt like a really good wife for knowing that. It's painful for men, the depth of their desire cast against the independence of their women.
". . . especially without my asking."
She turned, leaned away, looked at him. "We've had a lot of great sex, Danny. I'm still relieved that we can love each other again."
"That's been enough," he agreed. "But I want more. I have more. More love. More orgasms. More cock. More licks."
Joy knew that to be true; she felt a vague memory of what that week had been like. A nice memory. "And more sucks, I imagine." Joy had found hat her propensity for giving blowjobs waxed and waned according to an inner rhythm that never had really emerged into her consciousness. Some weeks she'd suck him five times, then go for months where it didn't even occur to her.
He smiled. She frowned. "I'd like to want that again, but it often ends up feeling so lonely." Jenny's absence colored everything.
"I can never fill that loneliness. Please don't be afraid of me. You are desired fiercely. I promise you; you'll be best loved woman in the islands."
"I'm fifty years old," she said.
"You're always twenty-two to me," he said. "And you definitely are in bikini shape."
Joy knew that was true. "You like me in bikinis."
"You bet. And miniskirts."
She lowered his zipper, slipped her hand into his briefs. "You're pretty hard."
"Duh," he said.
"Anything else you want?" She gave his cock another squeeze and it jumped in her hand. He blushed, paused, stammered.
"Pictures," he said. "Videos." He had a new camera.
"Sex videos?"
"Yes." His cock pulsed under her hand. "If you agree. I'd like to see us. You."
They had looked at porn. Joy didn't like the pornstar movies, with the ridiculous huffing and puffing and objectifying dialogue, but some of the home movies had turned her on; seeing regular women enjoying passionate sex with their husbands and friends and/or girlfriends. But she had never imagined herself in one.
"I don't think so. You can take bikini pictures," she said. She could do those calendar-model poses. Arch her back, or something.
"If that's what's okay with you." There was a difficult pause. Every bikini she owned she bought for him.
He wrapped her up, loving. His desire for her still was a big turn-on.
"I'll do my best Danny. It's scary to be so vulnerable."
"It's really hot, though. I promise I'll keep you safe."
Not too safe,
she thought, with a quick rush of blood.
It was complicated, being married.
Chapter 2
As always, Hawaii was magical. Warm air, beautiful flowers, pristine beaches, papaya, pineapple, people at ease. The
ka'ma'aina
spirit is
ruach,
in Hawaiian. It was a relief to let the City wash out of her body. Joy wore the promised short skirts and reasonable bikinis and held her husband's hand walking along the beach and took his arm on their way to nice dinners. Whenever they saw families with college-age daughters they were both wistful and joyous and it made them hold onto each other a little more tightly—Jenny's eternal absence both wounded and armored them. "I wish she was still alive," Danny said, "but I love you and I love the life we have." Joy could not have agreed more, and her husband's vulnerability touched her heart and opened her sex.
True to his word, Danny was easy and Joy didn't feel pressured at all. They kissed a lot and when he slipped his hand under her skirt in a restaurant she smiled at him and let it happen. They made love every morning, and the one time she went down on him he stayed still and let her give only what she wanted. At night when they were tired he would wrap both of his arms around her with her breasts in his palms; she would hold his penis with a gentle pressure that would make him sort of hard, not all the way hard, and that was nice for her, easy, and he liked it, too, he said. Sometime she would put him inside her, when all felt right with the world.
* * *
Then one afternoon it was just Joy and Danny, at the end of a verdant trail high on a cliffside with the sun and the land and the breeze and the ocean. Everything was beautiful. He hugged her from the back and they watched the elements. After a time, she felt a stiffness pressing against the small of her back. She pressed back.
"What's that?" she asked him.
"What do you think?" His mouth was at her ear; his voice quiet, breathy, and the growl of his desire made her shiver.
"A flashlight?"
"No, guess again." She felt it sliding up and down her back. His hands caressed her neck, slipped down her shoulders, slid the sunshirt down her arms.
"A tube of sunscreen?"
"No."
"What is it then?" She giggled. His breath resonated in her chest. Something in her jingled. She let the shirt slip off her wrists. It fluttered to the ground.
"It's a cock."
"Whose cock?"
"Your cock," he said.
"I don't have a cock."
"Yes you do. This one is yours."
"Eeew," she said. "I don't want to have it. I only like to borrow it."
"It's available now." His hands were inside her top, rubbing her stomach. The fabric pulled across her nipples and they stiffened. He popped the snap and slid his hand into her shorts.
"Are you taking my clothes off?"
"Unless you stop me."
"We can't do this here, Danny."
"Why not?"
"Anyone could see."
"Only me, Joy. We haven't seen a soul all day."
He was right. There was a whisper of something tugging at her heart; the memory of the thing that meeting Danny had changed. Before, being in bed with boys was like a wrestling match or a bullfight, where she was both combatant and referee. But Danny had wanted to learn her; that felt like being loved. And that took her to places she never had even dreamed were possible. Wild places. There was Danny, right now, in one of those places, standing about three feet away from her, his shorts tented, their backpacks in his hand.
"Take your top off, Joy." His voice was tightly controlled. His hand reached in invitation.
