“It’s great. And I feel great. I feel better now. You know how it is. Just like that.” Sonia says to her husband, the dear man of her house, and she turns to him and gently puts her hand on his arm.
AND THAT NIGHT, AFTER the kids pass out in their bunk-beds downstairs, goodnight Tom, goodnight Mike, sleep well, who loves you? who loves you the most? one more kiss, one more kiss; then after Sonia and Dick finish watching a sitcom on TV, after Sonia drinks a warm chamomile tea, after Dick sips his scotch on ice, after they brush their teeth, relieve their bladders, and slide into the clean white, cotton sateen sheets Sonia put on that very day, Dick leans into Sonia’s face and kisses her. First he kisses her on her cheek, on the part of the cheek that is right next to her mouth. Then he moves in closer to her lips, touching the corner of her mouth with his mouth. She turns toward him now, in the dark, her eyes closed, and he leans his upper body over hers and turns his face so his nose won’t get in the way and he pushes his mouth against hers and, open-mouthed, they kiss. Their tongues reach out and taste, and damn, if it doesn’t taste good. Damn if it doesn’t taste like warmth, like booze and like that familiar flavor that is each other. This is not a night when Dick will fart obscenely in bed next to her, pretending not to, and Sonia, despising him, will snap her magazine angrily into a perfect tent in front of her face. Nor is it a night, like so many before this one, where Sonia, stinking of sweat from the summer heat, from the sweat of fear and the sharp stink of bile and vomit, is so disgusting, no, not disgusting, so terrifying, terrifying in her foreignness, in her stink, in her pale, ugly, possum-in-a-trap look on her face, that Dick just wouldn’t look at her.
Those first three months are over. Those three months of hell, where Dick would just pretend she was not there, gone. Done. She’d be there, and he’d pretend, just like he did as a child when his father was yelling, or his mother was yelling, that the person in question was not there. Dick’s imagination is so powerful and has always been so powerful, that he can play this trick in his brain very well and Sonia knows this about him, even if he doesn’t know it about himself.
No, not tonight. Tonight he had looked at her on the couch, lazing with him in front of the TV, and she could feel his appreciation, his desire. She feels she is the woman he fell in love with. She feels his eyes on her and she’s the same young woman she was fifteen years ago, she’s no different than she was when she was barely twenty. The bones in her face are strong but womanly, her mouth feels wet and inviting, her eyes are smart but slightly troubled, definitely knowing. Often thinking of something dirty. She’s still his dirty-minded college girl. And this, in the dark now, now that she is over that first part of her pregnancy, now that she no longer repulses him, hates him, now that she is resigned to her body and the strange creature inside of it, this bud of a person that he planted in her womb, now that this baby isn’t torturing her anymore, now she wants to get fucked. Her skin is powdered with stardust, it’s fucking moist, damn it, and sparkling, and her eyes are wet like a healthy cat’s, glowing at her husband in the dark, open now, looking at him while their tongues stroke the insides of their mouths like they’ve never tasted each other before.
How could kissing this man be anything that ever happened again? After years of marriage, years of just fucking, not that anything’s wrong with that, but years really where they would never, ever have kissed. Preferring to get straight to the part that matters, kissing having bored them, kissing having been something of the past. Kissing not being on their minds but they still needed to get off. His balls would fill. She was the nice lady next to him who empties them for him. She often felt his gratitude, but she had stopped feeling his wonder. Excitement. Urgency. Except during these precious months when she was pregnant with their first son. And their second son. And then again, later, when the nursing starts and her breasts fill with milk. These special interludes, when Sonia is not quite Sonia, but something very close. And now, again, this gift. This time, this fleeting moment in their banal lives.
Here he is, his hands on her breasts which are so swollen, so sensitive she moans and pulls away slightly and she loves her own tits right now so much, she can’t believe they are hers. A few months ago they were dried out, with tired nipples that lay nearly flat against her ribcage. Her breasts, when she’s not pregnant, were never as fleshy as her upper arms. It would be jangly arms and flat breasts. Now she can only see breasts. She has breasts! Serious breasts. He has one in his hand and another in his mouth and she’s shaking now, because all those hormones that are making her breasts grow into these beautiful flowers are making them raw with nerves. He’s being gentle with her, she feels. Well, he’s trying to be gentle, precisely because she’s making it clear, Sonia is, how painful her swollen breasts are. He squeezes and sucks them and she can’t stay still, she’s just squirming, it’s uncomfortable but undeniable, she breathes out the word ouch, and she puts her own hand on them to protect herself, but also to feel them herself. Because these breasts are a gift from God, the God who gave humans the ability to reproduce, and to feed their young. These tits are blessed and she wants to hold them too.
He arches his entire body over her now, he’s up on his knees, not leaning his body on hers, no, looking right at her, and he locks his mouth on hers again and fuck, she’s kissing her goddamn husband. She wants to lick out the inside of his fucking throat. And then he puts his finger in her pussy, just like that, and she’s wet and warm. She nearly comes right then. But he pulls away from her and takes a deep breath. On his knees now he grabs his dick hard and pushes at it. Oh, man. Her skinny legs are splayed out from the bowl of her small hips, and in the dark she stares at his enormous erection. Jesus. She can’t look at it. She looks away. If he puts his dick in there now, she’ll just come right away and that is not what she wants to do. But what else can they do now? He could eat her pussy, but she doesn’t really want that, strangely, and she’s pretty certain he won’t, for some reason. It’s about his dick tonight, about the effect she’s having on his dick. He turns her over and she can feel him assessing her ass, which he loves, always professing his love for her ass. But it’s calming him a bit, Sonia can feel his body relax, her ass is familiar, not strange and new like her breasts right now and it’s not her fucking wet pussy staring at him either. But she can’t help herself, she lifts it up at him and there’s no hiding from what’s underneath it. He leans over her and he rubs his dick on her like a cat in heat and then she’s rubbing her ass back at him, Sonia feels like begging him, she is begging him with her ass, begging him to stick it in her, which he does — sticks it into her — and he leans over her and takes each one of those breasts in his hands. And then he grabs both breasts in one hand, smashing them together hard, and she lets out a short cry, and with his free hand he grabs her head and twists it around toward him so that he can shove his tongue down her mouth again. Damn. Damn. Oh, if she were only always pregnant!
Oh, if she were always four months, five months, even six months pregnant! Not one or two or three! And not seven or eight or nine! But that middle time, this middle time, how she loves it, how she can’t believe it’s her, how ripe she is, how womanly, how soft and precious and giving and forgiving she is! Oh, if she could only stay this fleshy, this wet, this ready. If only she were always in a dark room, if only her breasts were always like this in a dark room. Then, then her life would be perfect. Locked away in a dark room, a room which only her husband had the key to, permanently four months pregnant.