1.
Madeleine Stewart lay wide awake but exhausted - always exhausted - in the smothering humidity of a mid-summer night. She had cast the single thin blanket from most of her body, but it was no relief; with a very inquisitive four-year-old boy curled up against her shoulder, she had no choice but to wear a shirt to bed, and tonight it clung to her damp skin with an uncomfortable tenacity no less annoying than the unwelcome weight of the blanket. In the moist air of her bedroom, she felt almost like she was trying to breathe underwater. There was not enough air in the stuff that filled her lungs, and each breath of it felt like only half a breath. Tired, unable to relax, and feeling filthy with the warm sheen of sweat that clung to her skin, she had already given up trying to make herself comfortable. Instead, she lay waiting for fatigue to overwhelm her discomfort and drag her off to sleep.
Her mind, too, worked against her. She had been determined not to let it happen - determined to shrug off the bored indifference in her husband's voice when he told her goodnight - but her mind refused to let go of it, and she was left trying to swallow the bitter taste of her own sense of failure, even as she insisted to herself that she had not failed at anything. It was another hot and muggy night, she hadn't slept properly all week, and she was exhausted; somehow, still, she couldn't convince herself that she had nothing to feel guilty about if she wasn't feeling even vaguely sexy tonight, and simply couldn't get herself in the mood to make love. In the near silent, smothering darkness of their bedroom, the weight of Nick's disappointment pressed down on her with terrible gravity; it made itself known with the special presence that only her husband knew how to give it.
Did he think, she wondered, that she wasn't a bit disappointed with their lackluster romance herself? Probably he did. Probably he put it all down to Maddy's own lack of passion, or blamed it on what he called "mommy mode", which, she had learned mostly from context, was his cynical way of saying he thought she was so busy being a parent she was no longer interested in being his wife. If she were a different kind of woman, perhaps she'd have found it easier to come right out and tell him that she was not exactly happy with the humdrum of making love on the couch for the last two years, while their son, who now weighed a mere forty pounds, still managed to take up three quarters of their bed upstairs. She wouldn't have minded a bit of excitement herself. He seemed to be missing that part of the equation; he seemed to think that she, because she admittedly did not have the sex drive she had possessed at twenty-two, must not need to be all that excited - as if to Maddy, sex were only something she gave away grudgingly anyway, and there were no need to concern themselves with exciting her.
It had almost led them to fighting a few times already. In particular, there had been a Friday night not so very long ago, when nearly the same thing had taken place that was happening now. He wanted her - and she was no sex-kitten, but she could still appreciate being wanted - but his advances were unsubtle and a little bit vulgar, and they came out of nowhere. He was not willing to admit it, but he had lost the art of it as surely as she had lost her drive for it. There were no longer any attempts to be discreet, to make her feel as if she had a choice in the matter; he no longer put forth the effort to interest her romantically before he groped at her butt and asked her what kind of mood she was in. Therefore, she no longer put forth the effort to be tactful herself - she told him in no uncertain terms, "I'm not going to want to stay up tonight, Nick - don't bother to get yourself excited."
She did regret it - it was a shot at his ego and she had taken it intentionally, but it had seemed, for the moment, like maybe his ego needed it. He spent the rest of that day all but ignoring her, until they had what could not be called a fight (neither of them wanted to fight around Danny, they very much agreed on that) so much as a "cold war". Snapping back and forth at each other over everything, they had gone to bed angry that night, and in the morning they still were not really over it, though they did their best to let it go, and eventually it passed. By the time they ate their lunch, Nick had decided that his wife might need some time to relax - God bless him for finally seeing it - and offered to take Danny for a drive to the park.
2.
While they were gone, Maddy confirmed to herself that whatever their problem with passion might be, it was not that it was lacking within her. She, a woman of probably the most boring sexual habits in the world, had ignored a sink full of dishes, a hamper full of laundry, and toys scattered from one end of their son's playroom to the other, just to run straight upstairs as soon as her boys were gone and masturbate for most of an hour. She was not generally a woman who spent much time touching herself; in fact, in her life she had done so fewer than a dozen times, and on those few occasions when she found herself feeling too amorous to ignore it, she hid herself wherever she could - almost always in the bathroom, though there had been one incident outdoors hanging laundry which still made her blush fiercely if she thought about it - and she took care of the business quickly. It always left her with a queer feeling of shame for some reason, though she had heard and read all about how normal it had become these days, and how there were even a lot of girls who discussed it openly on the internet.
It was a highly unusual practice for her, but that morning there had been a tickle in her belly that she could not turn aside, and after fighting with her husband over her supposed lack of sexual desire, there was a quiet part of her that wanted first of all to prove to herself she still had some fire in there. It was the first time she had been alone in the house for several months - nearly a year, even - and she was not so entirely unselfish that she had forgotten how to indulge herself a little bit. She stripped her clothing an article at a time, watching the slow hurricane of cotton in a long mirror on the back of the door. No one was there to make her wonder if she was still beautiful, so she looked at her body and tried to believe it was beautiful, even though she had not lost all of her belly after the baby, even four years later, and the stretchmarks there seemed like neon streaks, because she knew they were there and she couldn't help seeing them. Her breasts had grown and remained forever larger, as well - Nick, of course, appreciated this greatly - but they were full and heavy, and they sagged more with every year; they were not the firm young breasts of a twenty-year-old girl anymore, they were the ripe breasts of a thirty-two-year-old mother and housewife, with wide, fading areolae and stretched out nipples which, to her occasional chagrin in public places, hardened like bullets when something got their attention, and were noticeable through even her thickest padded bras. For reasons she couldn't guess, her left breast had remained firmer over the years than her right, and the right one hung lower, more limp. She had also learned, with her husband's help, that the left nipple was much more sensitive, and when they pinched it and played with it, sometimes she could feel the tingle all the way over in the right one.
Seeing them in the bedroom mirror, she could not imagine any man taking an interest in her overworked and lopsided boobs anymore. She cupped them calmly and gave them a little jiggle, unimpressed, but at least not hating them. Taking in the overall picture of Madeleine Stewart, pale and nude in her unlit bedroom, curvy from top to bottom, with a thick tangle of dark brown hair filling up the space between her thighs like brush reclaiming a neglected plot of land, she was not compelled to a strong love or a strong hatred of what she saw - she was everything she had ever tried to be: a mother, a wife, a woman. It was not important to her that she had fallen short of things she hadn't ever tried to be: a sex kitten, a centerfold, a nymphomaniac.
The hungry tickle deep in her womb was a simple matter to deal with; as long as the interest was there, Maddy generally needed very little prodding. She slipped into her bed, pulled the sheet over her body simply to feel it on her skin, and spent forty blissful minutes nursing an orgasm she could have easily been done with in five; she squirmed beneath the sheet and let herself breathe and moan and whisper, "Yes, yes!" because she couldn't believe what her discouraged husband would have her believe: that the fire they had lost was all because of her, all because she had become more a "mommy" than a woman.
What she did that morning was surely not the stuff of a wild erotic novel, but for Maddy Stewart, the wonderful flood of relief that washed over her while she lay naked and shuddering under her soft flannel sheet was a welcome affirmation that she could still be kindled, that she had not forgotten how to smolder and burn. It was the first orgasm she had experienced in two months, and though she had never really thought it possible of such an essentially sinful pleasure, she found that it was extremely therapeutic. By the time Nick brought Danny home that afternoon, Maddy was walking on air, and their "cold war" was effectively over.
3.
Even that orgasm was now three weeks behind her. Her period had since come and gone, and Nick, who was no dummy when it came to noticing the little pink packages she carried in her purse during her period, had also noticed that she was not carrying them now. He was anxious to make love, and a part of her felt that it was her responsibility to acknowledge him, but there was a much louder part of her that understood her husband could, and certainly did, alleviate his needs the same way she had done, and he was not going to die or explode if she couldn't make herself available for him. She had given him a hint, which was in this case akin to a promise, that she would set aside time for them tomorrow, and if he couldn't wait that long, then he, too, knew how to hide behind the bathroom door for fifteen minutes and let off some of the pressure himself. She knew that he did - she had once cleaned up a bit of the evidence from the bathroom wall herself.
Still, she felt claustrophobic and miserable, desperate for sleep to finally quiet her guilty mind and give her peace from the feeling that she was not being the wife she should be for him, and by the time she stopped tossing in their crowded bed, she was so numb with exhaustion that she fell deeply asleep at once.
4.
She stood in the driveway of her childhood home, but she was still thirty-two, and she was still a wife and a mother. She knew these things even though her husband and son were not with her.
It was a bright summer day, warm and clear. Her father stood in the big overhead doorway of their garage, watching her, making sure she was behaving the way a fifteen-
-a thirty-two-year-old girl should. She was the only girl in their big family, the apple of her daddy's eye. It had always been that way. He was worried about the boy-
