IN THE ORDINARY course of growing up and making my way to adulthood, I made plenty of mistakes. My mom would say I made more than my share of them. I always thought the important thing was to learn from my mistakes so I’d never repeat them.
But now, even as we’re traveling back to the house in the back of the cab, I already know I’m going to regret what I’m about to do. That’s why I’m trying to talk myself out of it, because when you know you’re going to regret something deeply, you should just not do it, right?
But I want to.
Okay. I’ll make a mental list of all the reasons why I shouldn’t sleep with Paul.
1. He let me walk away without so much as a fight.
2. Maybe he’s not in a relationship, but we never went more than a few days without sex, so him waiting for ten months as a single man? Not a chance. Does that matter? It shouldn’t, but I feel like it does.
3. See point 1, and remember that mediation? He couldn’t be bothered fighting for me, but he had plenty of energy to fight for his stupid house. Seriously. I hate him so much.
4. See point 2. I hate that (those? Oh God) other woman so much.
5. I really want to.
6. He’s looking seriously good at the moment.
7. I haven’t run my hands over those muscles on his shoulders and arms yet, and to do so, I need to get him naked, and if I do that, we’re going to sleep together anyway, so why fight the inevitable?
9. Wait, wasn’t this a list of reasons not to sleep with Paul? And what happened to point 8?
I’m not drunk—not drunk on wine, anyway. I threw the bottle in the bin as we left the waterfront and was surprised to see how little we’d consumed. Instead, I’m caught in some bizarre dreamlike state that makes it very difficult to think clearly. It’s the surreal nature of this moment, I think.
I’m not at all equipped to deal with the confusing reality that it feels good to be here with him right now, like relief and happiness and coming home and a reprieve all at once. It’s his scent and the warmth of his hand in mine and the fact that I forgot about this. I forgot how easy it was before it wasn’t easy anymore, and how good it was before it stopped being good, and I have a feeling in an hour’s time I’m going to be thinking and I forgot how great the sex was, although right now, I’m rather enjoying my own efforts to remember that even before he reminds me.
We leave the cab and cross the front lawn toward the house...toward privacy, and I know what’s going to happen once we close that front door behind us. That’s why, with every step I take, I’m more and more aroused.
I try to remind myself that nothing has changed. Sex was never the problem for us, it was everything else, and everything else matters. The thought of that is like ice water on my long-neglected libido and I have a moment of startling clarity among the raging hormones just as we step up onto the front porch.
“Paul,” I say urgently, and even in the darkness, I see his face fall at my tone.
“So close.” He sighs, and he releases my hand.
“We can’t do this,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. He turns to face me and offers me a sad smile.
“I...” I reach a hand up to touch his cheek, because I’m wavering again already. He steps away from me, giving a frustrated groan as he goes. I miss him the second the contact is gone, and maybe that’s why I can admit the truth to myself for the first time in a long time.
I have missed this man. I’ve missed him for years—since even before I left him, because he was slipping away from me long before that. And maybe, just for tonight, I want to ease that missing and longing.
Nothing has changed and nothing is fixed, but what was always good was the sex, and I want to enjoy that again. Paul’s gaze is still dark with desire. He runs his gaze from my face to my hand—outstretched toward him again, and he shakes his head sharply.
“Don’t play games with me, Isabel. Do you want this or not? I promise you that either answer is completely fine. It’s just pretty messed up to give me both in the same breath.”
It’s two steps to catch up to him. When I do, I throw my arms around his neck.
“Fuck it,” I say, and then I reach up and I kiss him, deeply.
He breaks our mouths apart to whisper against my lips, “You’re sure? You have to be sure. If you’re not 100 percent sure, let’s just go inside and go to our own rooms. I promise you, I’m okay with that.”
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Are you going to talk me out of this now?”
“Fuck no.”
And then he’s cupping my head in his hands and kissing me back, and I can’t get close enough—I want to shred those stupid trendy clothes right off his stupid hot body and mount him here, exposed on the front porch. But common sense prevails. We’re still kissing, but Paul somehow has the key in his hand and he opens the door without letting me go.
“Nice,” I whisper, but then I squeal as he lifts me into his arms and kicks the door closed. It’s ten steps to the sofa, where Paul carefully sits me down.
“Here?” I squeak, and he nods and lifts his shirt over his head. I reach up to his shoulders, but he brushes my hands away impatiently and moves onto his jeans. He slides his wallet from his back pocket and dumps it onto the floor beside us, and then kicks his jeans away, stripping down smoothly and efficiently. I finally catch on—shrugging out of his jacket and then my sweater and then my tank, tossing my bra into the irrelevant space beyond us.
Paul is naked now, but before I can make the most of this opportunity to enjoy the sight of him, he comes back to me and goes for the zip on my jeans.
“Lift,” he commands and I comply, helping him to shrug my jeans and panties down over my legs and ankles. I gasp when my naked skin makes contact with the cold leather and Paul flashes me a wicked grin and takes me back into his arms. Finally, I get to run my hands over those supremely sculptured shoulders, identifying and appreciating each muscle as I go.
Deltoid. Teres major. Supraspinatus. Infraspinatus. Pectorialis.
For a moment or two, I ponder his body almost clinically. He feels so different in my arms from the endless memories I hold of earlier moments like this. He’s harder now, solid and strong and powerful, and I feel soft and sheltered in his arms.
Right now, his lips are working magic—magic on my mouth, magic against that amazing spot beneath my ear, magic when he shifts his attention lower. His palms line up against my breasts, and he groans softly, and then bends to plant a soft little kiss between them, a moment of surprisingly gentle affection tucked in among all of the raging lust.
“I’ve missed these so much.”
I let my head fall back and my eyes close as I focus on the sensation of his mouth as he roams from one nipple to the other. He nibbles, licks, sucks, and bites—gently, and then harder, and there’s pain; the kind that offers only shades of dark among the blinding light of the pleasure, and in doing so heightens everything else. When he stands, I fumble to reach for his erection, but Paul gasps and catches my wrists, dragging my hands back to set them firmly against the leather sofa.
“It’s been a while, I won’t last,” he mutters, and I’m triumphant even though I know that makes me a bitch. Maybe there hasn’t been anyone since I left. Maybe he was sincere when he said he couldn’t move on so fast.
Why do you even care, Izzy? You left him. You have no right to judge and even less of a right to care.
Then my mental lecturing vaporizes because he kneels on the leather, presses my knees apart and crawls along the sofa between them. Then he’s kissing his way up my inner thighs, and I whimper and collapse back to rest my head on the armrest.
Paul is not in the mood to tease me or draw this out. He remembers me—he knows the pressure and the variation I like, and he gets straight to work. His tongue flicks against my body, very gently at first, and then with increasing pressure and intensity until I’m spiraling and barreling headlong toward my climax. I’m vaguely conscious that I’m begging, and that I want him inside me. Now. It’s not pleasure I’ve missed—I can give that to myself. It’s Paul.
“Enough,” I gasp, and I tug harder at his hair, and he rises. He fumbles for his wallet from the floor beside us, and I’m momentarily confused until he withdraws a condom.
Why does Paul have a condom in his wallet?
Paul has a condom in his wallet because we aren’t together anymore, and even if he hasn’t slept with anyone else yet, inevitably, he will. I can’t believe I’d let myself forget the reality of our circumstance.
We are not the people we once were. We’re free agents, and who knows what he’s been up to while we’ve been apart? It makes perfect sense that we’d be safe and use protection. I actually admire that Paul has had the presence of mind to think logically like this.
But of course he has. Paul is all about logic.
Yet the fact that we need to use protection startles me. The very sight of that condom is like a momentary bucket of cold water splashed over me. And if he didn’t ever so gently slide his hand along my neck and cup my jaw and move to kiss me again with that tenderness I had completely forgotten he was capable of, I might have freaked out altogether. I think seriously about pushing him away, about fleeing to my room...but I realize I don’t want to stop. I want to feel Paul, at least one more time.
Paul stretches his body out over mine and leans over me, his elbows on either side of my face on the cushion of the sofa. He stares right into my eyes as he pushes into me and I’m startled to find that in the depths of his gaze I don’t see a man I dislike or a man I resent or even a man I hate. Instead, I see every little thing that I have lost. That’s why I break the eye contact. I stare at the ceiling beyond Paul, and I force myself to focus my thoughts on the sensations in my body instead of the conflicted emotions in my heart and mind.
This is casual fucking, Isabel. You’re not making love here, you don’t need to gaze longingly at him while you do it.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, stilling. Even this shocks me. Since when does Paul read me well enough to correctly interpret my body language?
“Nothing,” I lie, and I slide my arms around his neck and bring his face down to mine so I can distract him with a kiss. He’s trembling, and there’s sweat on his skin and sweat on mine and soon we’re moving against each other faster and harder, each desperately seeking release. Paul’s stubble is short and soft, but it’s scratching my cheek a little, leaving my face feeling raw, and that’s somehow fitting. Everything feels raw right now—and I know it will feel even worse later. If the wound of our separation had even started to heal for me, then right now, I am tearing it back open with a callous disregard for my own feelings.
“Isabel,” Paul whispers.
“Hmm?” I’m too out of breath to reply properly.
“I’m so sorry, honey, I’m sorry—I can’t hold on...”
His face contorts, and when I understand that Mr. Stamina himself is so caught up in this that he’s already about to lose control, that discovery is just enough to tip me over the edge. The delicious pressure builds deep in my belly, and then it bursts, and I cry out as my orgasm breaks over me. For a beautiful moment in time, I’m not conflicted or sad or confused. It’s a singular moment of pure pleasure and joy.
As soon as I come back to earth, I’m conscious of the cold leather of the sofa beneath me, and the way that Paul is sprawled over me but still somehow half kneeling on the floor, too, and the angle is all wrong and he’s still shaking and now I realize it’s because he must be uncomfortable in such an awkward position. He’s panting as if he’s run a marathon, and so I close my eyes and I focus on the good sensations that linger—the feeling of him still inside me, the aftershocks that catch us both by surprise, eliciting fresh gasps from each of us when they hit, the pleasant heaviness of his body against mine and the scent that I want to wrap around me like a blanket that I could keep forever.
This was such a stupid idea.
And the worst thing is, I had plenty of opportunities to back out. I kept actively talking myself back into it. I was determined to make this mistake.
When Paul catches his breath, he slides gently from my body with a groan. I stay prone on the sofa as he deals with the condom, but then he rushes back to me and if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that he couldn’t bear to be apart. He lifts me high into his arms, and I wrap my hands around his neck and let him carry me. As he walks, I sigh deeply, satisfied, riding the wave of bliss high enough still that I don’t even open my eyes to see where he’s taking me. He rests me on a mattress, and then climbs in beside me and lifts me so that I’m resting across his chest.
Maybe I’m lying over him on the bed and it’s a damn sight more comfortable than the sofa, but mentally, I hit the ground with a thud and a tremor of tension runs from my head to my toes as I recognize that I’m back in the master bedroom.
With Paul.
Naked.
Sated.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
“Don’t,” Paul whispers into my hair. “Don’t think about it. Not yet.”
He should be asleep now. That’s what he always did—came, rolled away from me, dropped into a deep sleep. We didn’t talk at all after sex the last few years...and my God, did I need to. I’m a woman who needs a cuddle and some pillow talk, but the intimate conversations and cuddles Paul and I had shared in our bed across the early years gradually faded away to nothing. By the end, he barely stayed awake long enough to embrace me at all.
I tried to fix that dynamic between us. I tried to shake him awake to hold him, especially toward the end, when he seemed so determined to retreat from me. Sometimes he’d turn the light out after we made love and I’d get right back up and turn it on again, but he’d still roll over and go to sleep.
Nothing worked—and eventually, even as I longed for the way he made me feel while he was inside me, I’d dread the way he made me feel afterward when he rolled away from me to sleep. I was lonely. Coupled, married, partnered—but always alone. By the time I left him, I was avoiding intimacy with him altogether. Meaningless sex was fine and fun when I was single. From my husband? It was fucking insulting.
Sex did not come easily to us at first. I’d never been the kind of woman who climaxed easily, and it took us weeks to find our rhythm when we first started sleeping together. But Paul mastered sex with me like he masters any task he commits to—with an intense, singular focus. Every time we tumbled into bed together, Paul was on a mission to learn my body and how to pleasure me.
I remember the struggle we had to work through once we stumbled upon the discovery that I reached orgasm much easier if he stared into my eyes when he was inside me. That level of intimacy was difficult for him, but sex with Paul was never just sex to me. I needed the added closeness of eye contact when we made love, even though I didn’t want to need it, because I could see it was difficult for him.
Looking back, those moments of tension almost sum up our entire relationship. I desperately craved an emotional connection, but Paul only tolerated it because I needed him to. I tend to think of him as a man who never compromises, but I’m struck by a sudden realization that when it came to sex, he did more than meet me halfway. It was a challenge for him to let me see him when he was losing himself to pleasure. But he did it. For me.
Why didn’t I stop to appreciate that at the time?
“Isabel,” he says, and he shifts me a little, then tilts my chin until I’m looking into his eyes again. “Stay with me here. Don’t freak out.”
Stay with me here. He’s wide awake. He’s staring at me with visible concern.
Concern.
I’m not alone right now. I’m not even lonely.
And not feeling lonely right now is about the most confusing thing I’ve felt in my entire life. I’m so bewildered by this, the urge to lash out almost swamps me.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” I say. My throat is tight and my voice uneven.
“I know.”
“That was so fucking stupid,” I say.
Paul brushes my hair out of my eyes, and that’s when his wedding ring flashes in the moonlight. I squeeze my eyelids closed. I’d actually forgotten all about that in the tension and confusion this afternoon, but what the hell does it even mean? Is he hoping we’ll reconcile? If that’s the case, why hasn’t he tried to reach out to me this year?
Oh my God... am I leading him on right now?
To do so would be unforgivably cruel. And I hurt him tonight at the waterfront. It was shocking, and it was shameful, and I simply cannot bear the thought of seeing that kind of pain on his face again. Maybe, just maybe, I don’t hate Paul Winton as much as I like to tell myself I do. Or it’s just way too hard to hate him when I’m actually looking right at him.
Perhaps it’s just easier to hate someone you don’t actually have to face, because you can forget about their humanity when you don’t have to see the consequences of your actions.
“Yeah, it was probably stupid,” Paul murmurs.
“Why are you so calm about this?” I ask, pulling away from him and fixing my now-customary scowl back in place on my face.
He hesitates, then shrugs. “I just figured something out.”
He’s always two steps ahead of me. That was part of the problem. Light-years behind me emotionally, intellectually my superior in every way.
“What’s that?” I ask stiffly.
He pauses before he answers me, but we’re still cuddled close, and as I wait for him to speak I listen to the steady rhythm of his breath—he’s genuinely at peace, so his inhalations and exhalations are easy and relaxed. Meanwhile, I’m now so tense that I’m positively vibrating in his arms and I’m actually terrified of what he’s going to say. Because he’s going to say something cold and dismissive, and it’s going to shatter me. He always did that—I’d try to open up, to make myself vulnerable to invite him to do the same, and he’d either walk away or dismiss me and shut me down.
“Worrying about this tonight is redundant. We can’t undo what we just did, and honestly, I don’t even want to. Maybe we have some unfinished business between us. Maybe we were never meant to part on such bad terms. I’ve changed this year, and I’m sure you have, too. We both came here this weekend because we felt we needed to do something before next Wednesday so we could move on. Maybe tonight is just our way of saying goodbye to each other.”
Huh.
That is the least Paul-like diatribe in the history of the world. I expected something spawned from cruel logic, like it was just sex and it didn’t mean anything, or something rational, like don’t be hysterical, Isabel, if you make a big deal out of this, you’ll make it worse.
I’m so confused. None of this feels like our pattern.
“Come on, Bel,” he whispers softly. “At least enjoy the afterglow before you implode your brain overthinking it.”
...and, there it is.
I stiffen in his arms, but he tucks me up closer against his body, and his arms contract around me, as if he can counter the tension just by hugging me with more determination. And I desperately want to start an argument with him because I’m angry with myself—but I’m the one getting sleepy, and if anything, I want to retreat more than I want to battle. The urge to lick my wounds and find some space becomes overwhelming—it’s certainly more urgent than the urge to fight with him right now.
I tell myself I’ll just lie there until he falls asleep, and then I’ll make a nondramatic, easy escape.
Right up until sleep takes me, I’m still telling myself that I’ll just enjoy the warmth of his arms for one more minute.