Page 104 of From Best Friend to Bride
ME: No. He said he doesn’t want anything physical, and I don’t trust myself not to tie him up and have my way with him.
LUCY: Ask him. He might like it. Harvey does sometimes.
ME: TMI.
LUCY: Sorry.
LUCY: Why doesn’t he want a physical relationship with you?
I recapped what he’d said to me this morning.
LUCY: Wow.
LUCY: Does he know you were turned on?
ME: I never said it, but I was definitely acting weird, so he probably figured it out. He knows me better than anyone.
LUCY: Yeah. Well. Who could have imagined this would happen?
Something told me that was a rhetorical question.
ME: What do I do???
LUCY: Fuck him.
ME: LUCY!!!
LUCY: He’s your husband. Fuck him. Every day. On the bed. The desk. In the shower. In the car. Under the stars. On a cliff edge. Next to a river. On that three-hundred-year-old dining table.
LUCY: Just fuck him.
LUCY: Hard and fast. And often.
I really should have known better than to ask a horny pregnant lady what to do here.
LUCY: Or keep crying into your husband’s pillow like a loser.
Yep.
There it was.
ME: I think this conversation has reached its natural end.
LUCY: Goodnight, loser. Love you. xx
Pshh.
Still, I replied in the same vein before putting my phone down and lying back on the bed. I stared at the ceiling, but what good did that do? Fred’s scent was almost wrapping around me from this pillowcase, and I just wanted to curl into it and forget this morning had ever happened.
What had possessed me to start creeping on his crotch? So noticeably, too. Was I a pervert? Was my brain getting addled by all the changes in my life?
Or was it really, truly as simple as Fred was a real man and I was only just now breaking down that wall between best friend and husband? I’d never truly seen him as my real husband. Almost like we were just kids playing house, because that’s what we were doing. It was probably why I’d always been able to flippantly mention his next wife.
Not this morning, though. No. The thought of it had made me feel sick.
It did now, too.
I rolled over and buried my face in the pillow. As I closed my eyes, memories of this morning came to mind, unbidden. Him leaning over the bed, staring at me. On top of me, straddling my hips, pinning my arms above my head.
