Feels Like the First Time
I’ve been home for a week and a half when my STD test comes back clean. I breathe a small sigh of relief that none of the possible nightmare scenarios I concocted in my head are true. Aside from the obvious and almost impossible scenario in which I got AIDS or something, I did have a minor concern that I might have gotten herpes, in which case Alyna would definitely have made me fuck with a rubber for the rest of my life, or just never fucked me at all, or possibly even divorced me. But I’m clean.
After work I show her the test results and she says, “That’s good news, I guess.”
I say, “What do you mean, you guess?”
She says, “Nothing. I mean it’s good news.”
That night, I decide to try to initiate our first fuck with me back in the house. I help her bathe the kids and put them to bed, and then, based on the level of comfort she’s developed with me when we cuddle at night in bed, I assume she’ll be receptive to an impromptu back rub. At first she’s clearly hesitant to relax with my hands on her, but then she gives in a little bit and says, “Fuck, I needed this.”
I keep rubbing for ten or fifteen minutes, and then I decide to make my move by kissing the back of her neck. She immediately moves away from me and says, “What the fuck are you doing?”
I say, “Kissing my wife’s neck.”
She says, “Whoa. Back rub is one thing, but this is another thing.”
I say, “I’m not trying to push anything. I just thought maybe tonight would be the night, you know?”
She says, “I know we’re eventually going to have to do this—”
I want to dive through a window. That phrase, “have to do this,” makes it clear to me that she has even less interest in me sexually than she did before I cheated on her, which was almost zero. Where before she might have found sex with me to be a boring chore she needed to do every once in a while, clearly she now finds it a deplorable event she’s going to have to endure against her will. I think about scrapping the whole idea. I think about just telling Alyna that it was all a mistake trying to make this work, and then walking out.
I ask myself why it was so important to make this work, to salvage my relationship with a woman who will very likely never want to fuck me like she used to. My kids are certainly one of the main reasons, but there’s something beyond the obvious reason. From somewhere deep down, another feeling emerges—that I actually miss my old life, my married life. I miss sitting in a chair watching football with my daughter asleep on my chest. I miss having full cable and a backyard. I miss sleeping in a bed that’s not in a hotel or a dorm room. I miss being an adult.
I say, “We don’t have to do anything. I want you to be comfortable with this. I want you to be happy that I’m back.”
She says, “I am happy you’re back. You know that. I want our kids to have their father back.”
I say, “What about you?”
She says, “What about me?”
I say, “Do you want your husband back?”
She says, “Do you want me to be honest?”
There is no way whatever she says next will be anything I actually want to hear. I say, “Of course.”
She says, “You’re still the same dad Jane and Andy’s always had. They don’t know what you did. They don’t know anything except that you had to ‘work late’ for a little while. And I want it that way. Believe me, I don’t want them to ever know what happened. I want you to be their dad forever and not the shitbag dad who cheated on their mom.”
I say, “Thanks.”
She says, “But to me, you’re not the same husband. The husband I married is gone. I honestly don’t think I can ever think of you as that same person again.”
This is what I imagine it feels like to hear that you’ve been diagnosed with lung or brain cancer. There is no hope for something better. Each successive moment you live will be slightly worse than the last, until you die.
I say, “So what do we do, then?”
She says, “I don’t know.”
We brush our teeth next to each other in silence. We get in bed next to each other in silence. She doesn’t snuggle up next to me like she’s been doing. Eventually she says, “There aren’t any condoms anyway.”
This is my opening. I say, “I got a vasectomy. Remember?”
She says, “Really?”
I say, “Yeah. You were the one who wanted me to do it. It was scheduled and everything, so I decided I should still do it.”
She says, “Why?”
And I feel like da Vinci painting the final brushstroke on the Mona Lisa as I say, “Because it was a decision we made together and I always had hope that we’d be in the same bed again, in the same house. That this would work out.”
She moves toward me and kisses me. She’s nervous. I try to go down on her but she says, “No, let’s just do this.” She only touches my dick once, when she climbs on top of me and positions it so it’s angled toward the opening of her pussy, which is not wet at all. She sits back on my dick a few times, inching the head in little by little as it sticks to the sides of her dry vagina.
I say, “Just let me go down on you.”
She says, “No. Just . . . it’s almost in.”
She sits down on my dick a few more times with more force. I’m starting to lose my boner as I think about how devoid of any sexual enthusiasm this whole thing is. Then she finally gets my dick in her and nature takes over.
I thrust upward from the bottom into her pussy as she sits motionless on top of me. She looks down at me with what looks like contempt on her face. The last memory I have of fucking her is similar. I only have to replace the look of contempt with boredom. I say, “We really don’t have to do this if you’re not ready.”
She says, “I’m never going to be ready. This will get better, but I just need to do this again with you or this might never feel right again.”
I say, “Do you want me to do something different or another position or something?”
She says, “Just cum.”
I say, “As fast as I can? Do you just want it over with?”
She starts crying and she says, “No. I need to know that you still want me like this, after you’ve been with that girl who’s so much prettier than I am and so much younger and I’m sure so much better at sex.”
I’m horrified. This is easily the worst sexual experience of my life. I can feel my dick shrinking. Eventually Alyna clinches her vagina and my limp dick pops out. She slumps down next to me and says, “I’m sorry.”
I say, “No. There’s nothing to be sorry for. I’m sorry. I’m the one who fucked this all up.”
I hold my wife as she cries and I know that Roland was the tip of the fucking iceberg. I’m going to be in couples therapy for the rest of my life. As she sobs in my arms, I go through the possible scenarios in which I could turn this night around and still fuck her. They all involve some worldwide-destruction-type disaster that would give us only minutes to live. And even then I assume she’d probably rather spend her last minutes on Earth with the kids.
The sobbing eventually stops as she falls asleep and breathes heavily through her nose on my forearm, which is wet from her tears and snot. I can’t sleep after having my dick in a pussy without blowing a load, so I sneak into my office and jerk off to some Brooke Lee Adams porn while my wife sleeps in a puddle of her own tears that I caused by fucking a twenty-one-year-old girl.