aag

I’d been so busy with work, children and whathaveyou that his absence, while difficult, was not altogether horrific.  Until a Thursday, just a random Thursday when I woke up from dreaming about him to a full day of missing him, the feeling so intense that I, the least sentimental person in all creation, buried my face in my pillow to catch any last lingering whiff of his scent.

There was a hint, or at least in my imagination there was a hint.  Utterly clean no matter what filthy acts he’s been doing, backed by sweet and smoke, it’s the most right scent I’ve ever had in my bed.  It makes no sense, but I gave up a year ago on hoping to find sense in any of my closest relationships.

Desolate from the dream, on Thursday I tried to find the words gently to tell him how very intense the missing was without guilting him, or pressuring him, or making him feel like he had to come to me.  “I miss you so much today,” I said lamely, lacking any better way (with words, at least) to express the unexpected pain of the day.

“I miss you too,” he said, but I thought that he was but mollifying me as so many others have do so many times before him.  Halfway through a life I don’t know that it’s possible to see anyone without obstruction from a ghostly ringed halo of the past, even though I don’t always want to.  Even though I try not to.

To some degree I doubted him, but a day later I reclined in bed to watch him strip naked before me.  We should make porn, this man and I, because who wouldn’t want to see a middle-aged man and a thick, unruly-haired woman lock eyes over a cock slid slowly into her mouth?  Who wouldn’t be rapt in enjoyment at the sight of her hands cupping his balls, of his hands in her hair, of her mouth wide open to take him hard and deep against the back of her throat, everyone hoping that this will be the time that she finally takes it all in?

I didn’t. I couldn’t.  But later, with him standing behind my upturned bottom, he slid into me slowly, teasingly, giving me only the softest and shortest strokes possible for endless minutes while I begged for more.  Finally even he couldn’t hold back.  He drove into me with such power that my knees slipped off the bed; he caught my feet and held me in place wheelbarrow-like as we demonstrated the exact degree of our missing each other.

Finally we rested, curled in the dark with bodies wound around each other.  I couldn’t stop stroking his hair and breathing in his scent, strongest on his chest and beneath his raised arm.  And later that night when I went to bed to sleep, I found the scent on my pillow and there was no question of its reality.