Page 48 of Maverick
Neither my childhood version, nor the version I had a bit during my marriage. There’s nothing comfortable or familiar about this. Nothing painful or frightening either.
“Have a seat on the couch,” I say.
She obeys without argument, which I find weird. Maybe I really did screw her brains out. God knows I’m not sure where I left mine.
“You just want to… Watch a movie?”
I don’t want to get into the minutiae of my thought process. I don’t really want to share everything that I was just thinking with her.
“Yeah. I don’t think I could sleep now if I tried.”
She seems to consider that. I grab the remote and fiddle with the TV until I find a streaming service that has the movie that she mentioned.
Then I put it down and sit beside her.
There’s a space of couch between us, which I realize isn’t the customary way to watch a movie with somebody that you just had sex with. But she doesn’t move to close the distance between us, so neither do I.
At first, we just sit there. I’m not really taking much of the movie in. I’m more marinating in the strangeness of all this. That someone is in my house. But I’m sitting with them on my couch.
That I just had sex. That we talked about Sadie. And screwed in my shower.
All of that.
She suddenly makes an exasperated-sounding sigh and scoots closer to me. The movement is sudden, and not at all subtle.
“Yes?”
“Are you distancing me on purpose?” She looks at me.
I’m not doing anything on purpose. I’m not doing it on accident, either. It’s all just kind of happening.
I turn toward her, and then she’s right there. Right within kissing range, and it’s difficult for me to resist cupping her cheek. So I do it. I drag my thumb along her cheekbone, let myself trace the line of her lips. I learn the shape of them. She’s beautiful. It’s hard not to compare her to Sadie. Not because I think anyone compares to my wife, and not because I need to think about her, necessarily, but because that’s just the nature of things when it’s been so long since you’ve had a new partner. I was with Sadie for five years, which means it’s been a whole decade since I took someone other than her to my bed.
It’s been that long since I kissed lips that were unfamiliar. Since I had to navigate the delicate balance of taking a new partner to bed.
And it is a balance.
You have to figure them out. You have to take care of them. You have to work out that whole process.
I’m out of practice.
And back then, every time I slept with someone, I thought it could go somewhere. Even though I didn’t have a goal of fallingin love and getting married necessarily, I hoped I might. I had this dream that I could meet somebody, and that it would fix me. That it would pull me up out of the mire that my childhood had left me in. That the right woman would make me into a better man, and that happened.
Now I know, though, you can’t leave it up to somebody else to fix you. Because the problem is that when they go away – and inevitably they will – you lose all that fixing. All you’re left with is a mess. A huge mess.
All the fragments that you ever had, all the broken parts and pieces. All the ruin.
I would never put that on her. I don’t believe in it, not now.
Not anymore.
So it’s more than just her being a new partner. I’m a whole new person. I want to touch her. Want to taste her. Want to have her again. Want to gorge myself on her as many times as possible. But it’s different. Different than the way that I looked at things before, because I’m different.
She’s the one who doesn’t have experience. She’s the one who’s only in her twenties, I should feel like I know exactly what I’m doing, but I don’t.
Mainly because I lost my mind somewhere back at her cottage, I should never have kissed her. I should never have taken it this far. Twice. Now I’m sitting on the couch with her, touching her face, dreaming about making it happen again. I shouldn’t be doing that either.
It is foolish, and yet here I am.
