Cooper S. Beckett
A LIFE LESS MONOGAMOUS
dedicated to K
for making me realize
it was really about them
1
Ryan found himself captivated by the small crack in the ceiling even as he knew he was supposed to be having sex with his wife. He stared at it, focused on it. Two and a half weeks since their last sexual encounter. That gap of time was a new record for them – at least when period, family, or occasional business trips didn’t factor into things. He couldn’t attribute the waning urge to age, either. As much as he felt old, past his prime, he knew he couldn’t classify himself as “older” with a straight face. While thirty-two may once have been middle-aged, these days it still qualified as quite young. It meant figuring things out. Still unsettled.
Still unsettled, indeed.
Even if he could consider himself old, the fault didn’t lie there. Things had always been like this. He and Jennifer had never been one of those couples that couldn’t keep their hands off each other, not even in the beginning when they’d first started dating. Young when they got together, only eighteen and nineteen, with Ryan older by just a few months. They’d been good kids. They’d waited a couple months before the first fumblings, first blips of fluid, first trembling fingers down pants, perhaps stymied by the fear of pregnancy instilled in them from overzealous sex ed classes.
Jennifer had never seen a penis before she unzipped his jeans in the basement of her parent’s house one warm summer night. She’d told him of her one and only prior sexual experience, which had taken place in total darkness with an excess of clothing. Her wide eyes and open mouth betrayed fear when she unsheathed Ryan. He knew his penis measured just on the happy side of average, so it couldn’t have been fear of size. Instead, he read her surprise as dislike and didn’t talk about it, beginning to wear that pattern of noncommunication into their relationship, setting back their progress around the proverbial bases by another four weeks.
Ryan had learned, through hand jobs from his previous girlfriend, how to keep things from exploding on contact and managed a respectable, though unremarkable, nine minute showing before the end of their first time. The tenor of their sexual encounters was set that day, respectable though unremarkable ever since.
We don’t want to be one of those couples, Ryan’s mind insisted, trying to rouse himself from wondering how he had not noticed the crack before. Perhaps he rarely laid on his back, looking straight up. Only this position when cuddling with Jennifer, when cuddling before—well, before, before what? What were they doing here?
Roughly fifteen minutes before laying her head on Ryan’s chest while he stared at the ceiling, Jennifer had looked over at Ryan from the opposite side of their sectional couch. They didn’t sit so far apart because they disliked being close; it was just for the simple convenience of each having an end table to themselves. She’d held the March issue of Cosmo, far out of date and vastly more insipid than the last issue she’d read almost a decade ago. The magazine had traveled home with her from Dr. Petrillo’s office because she thought that, just maybe, one of the “How to Please Your Man” articles might be helpful.
Because helpful certainly didn’t describe Dr. Petrillo.
The magazine’s newest suggestion perplexed Jennifer, advising that while on a hike with her man, she find a small, flat stone and conceal it, so that later it might be pressed up against his anus. Her eyebrow cocked with skepticism, her hazel eyes narrowed. What on earth would Ryan do if she suddenly pressed a rock against his asshole? Flip out, surely, and not because of sexual prudishness, but because the whole idea was such an “out of left field” thing to do. Strange, unusual.
Though, if it might help…
No. She put down the Cosmo.
“Ryan,” she said, more of an outward breath than an actual vocalization. Again, girl, louder this time! “Hey, um, Ryan.”
He looked away from his game of Super Mario World and offered “Hmm?” with a smile. For a moment, the childlike innocence of the man she had married overwhelmed her, and all at once she felt a distinct discomfort about sexually ravishing him. Not that she had the energy to ravish anyway. Nor the inclination, really. Hell, they’d both be happy with a little missionary and then call it a night.
It’s been too long. We’re becoming one of those couples, she thought, biting her lip hard enough to surprise a yelp out of her.
Ryan hit pause and blinked at her.
“I was just wondering if you wanted to go upstairs.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, hold on, I’ll get to a save point.”
He did, and they went.
But after undressing across the room from one another and climbing under their six hundred thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, Jennifer rested her head on Ryan’s chest, and there they lay: naked, ready, willing, able, not having sex.
With her head high on his chest, every breath he took blew a small lock of her chestnut hair aloft, where it drifted for a moment, then settled back down.
Ryan’s eyes fell to the top of Jennifer’s head, then back to the ceiling where the crack watched them, wondering, he was certain, why the two of them didn’t have more frequent sex.
He didn’t have an answer for that, though when Dr. Petrillo had asked him alone, with Jennifer waiting in the vestibule for her turn to have one-on-one time, Ryan did admit to a wish she’d initiate more. Petrillo found that noteworthy, jotting a rare note onto his pad in a gesture that made Ryan feel a tiny bit validated. Petrillo never shared his own thoughts, just made that occasional small note and a request to “tell me more about that.” Aside from the silly mantra worksheet he’d given them, Ryan had begun to think these sessions a superficial waste of one hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour. Petrillo had never even asked about his sex drive!
Once Ryan’s youthful race to the top of Sex Hill had reached its zenith a decade and change before, his drive to climb the hill had become smaller every time, he knew. It wasn’t for lack of interest, it was just sometimes easier to rub one out himself in front of the computer at three in the morning than wake Jennifer, she of the early work meetings. Also easier, certainly, than trying to coax an orgasm out of his wife.
Ryan frowned. Was that the crux? The orgasm thing? Jennifer had orgasms, they just weren’t very… well, they were few and far between. When they did happen, they weren’t so much fireworks, but more the kind of sparklers you find in the impulse buy section of 7-11 in early July. That’s not fair, he thought. Orgasms are harder for women. Despite the fact that as a woman of thirty-one, Jennifer sat at her biological sexual peak, she also sat under a decade’s worth of pressure to demonstrate her enjoyment.
Probably fakes it in case I can’t stay hard.
His eyes widened. Now why had he gone and thrown that idea into the mix? Thoughts like that served no purpose. None at all! Except maybe to turn up the heat on his own performance anxiety. Of all the things that might need to be dialed up in the valley surrounding this fledgling marriage, he’d prefer his occasional inability to hold an erection didn’t take priority.
With her head on Ryan’s chest, Jennifer could tell that he had some serious thinking going on, the kind with plot twists and mood swings. His breathing and heartbeat vacillated from calm, almost contemplative, to quick and wildly erratic. She wondered what he could be thinking about. Couldn’t be that nervous about sex, could he? Was he worried that the performance anxiety thing would come back? How many times would she have to tell him that it was okay before he’d start believing?