by Amy Hatvany
I pictured my father putting his penis into my mother and cringed. Suddenly, I didn’t want to talk about this subject anymore.
“Do you have any more questions?” my dad asked, and I shook my head, feeling uncomfortable.
I had that same feeling that afternoon in the kitchen, when I wanted to ask my mom if what I’d done the night before—the feeling I’d had—was normal. I was afraid that she might tell me to ask my father about it, the way she had when I got my period in sixth grade. If I had problems with math or science, she was more than happy to help—in fact, she often foisted her help upon me when I didn’t ask for it—but when it came to my body, she let my father, the doctor, handle my inquiries. And since there was no way I was going to tell my dad about the story I’d read, I decided to not tell my mom, either. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, at all.
Now, almost twenty-five years later, the one thing the experience at the club with Will had done for my relationship with Jake was make it easier to talk about sex, and our feelings about it. It felt as though we’d stepped into a different world together, where the colors were brighter, the sensations more intense. The volume on our sex life had been turned up, high, and our bodies—and our minds—were overwhelmed by the pleasure of it. We started telling each other more about what really turned us on.
“I love it when you whisper dirty things in my ear,” I told him one night, when we were naked in bed—somehow, over the last ten days, we had stopped bothering with pajamas—both of us lying on our sides in the dark, facing each other.
He kissed me, deeply, then moved his mouth and set his lips against my earlobe. “Dirty things,” he whispered. “Dusty, muddy, filth.”
I laughed and gave his chest a little push. “Idiot,” I said, with deep affection.
He smiled and then put his mouth close to my ear again. “I can’t wait to see you fuck Will,” he said. His breath was hot. “I want to see you ride him.”
I released a short, staccato breath of my own, feeling myself get immediately wet.
Jake pulled back so he could look at my face. “Better?”
“Yes,” I hissed, and then began to move my lips down his neck.
“Use your teeth,” he murmured, something he had never requested before. I complied, grazing his skin, feeling him shudder as he twitched against my leg. He groaned and rolled on top of me, pinning my arms above my head. He moved his hips until they forced my legs apart. The tip of his cock slid back and forth over my slickened clit.
“Put your hand over my mouth,” I said. “Like you did against the car.”
“Not yet,” he said. He shifted the tiniest bit, and then thrust inside me, causing me to cry out. Only then did he clamp his hand over my lips. Still, I moaned, feeling my lips vibrate against his palm. I wanted him to know how much I loved that feeling. How much I wanted to be taken.
“I want the lights on,” he said, gruffly. “I need to see your face when you come.”
I nodded, and he took his hand off of my mouth to reach over to hit the button on the base of the bedside lamp, illuminating the room with a soft glow. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at me with the dark blue eyes I could never resist.
“I need to rub my clit,” I said, even though he was still inside me. He gave me a small, wicked smile, then lifted his body off of me just enough for me to slip my arm between us. When my fingers hit the right spot and began to rub in small circles, he pushed his hips forward gently, using only the tip to fuck me, slowly. Teasingly.
“Holy shit,” I said, in a ragged breath. “Yes, like that. Fuck me like that.” My fingers moved faster, feeling his eyes on my face as my entire body clenched, then spasmed, and went over the edge. “Oh god, I’m coming!” I said, and as though intuiting what I needed, Jake shoved inside me, hard, and to his hilt, over and over again, causing my one orgasm to roll over into another, and then one more before he finished, too, finally collapsing on top of me.
“Mmm,” I said, wrapping my arms around him. The weight of his body on mine was perfect—warm and reassuring. “You feel so good.”
He rolled off of me onto his back, keeping one hand splayed on my stomach. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too,” I said, lacing my fingers through his, feeling closer to him than I ever had. We lay in companionable silence for a few minutes, basking in the pleasurable afterglow, until I finally spoke.
“When did you start masturbating?” I asked.
He released a short laugh. “Where’d that come from?”
“I’m just curious.” I quickly told him the story of my first orgasm, after reading the hot stories in my brother’s magazines.
“Honestly,” he said when I was finished, “my mom told me I discovered my dick when I was eight months old and treated it like a magic joystick from that moment on.”
“Ha. Tucker did that, too. I think he was closer to a year, though.”
“Well, he’s twelve, now, and I have no doubt he’s figured out how to get off.”
“Ew.” I gave him a playful jab in the stomach with my elbow.
“You asked. I was eleven when I remember having my first real orgasm. Within a couple of years, I was jacking off maybe six or eight times a day.”
“What?” I exclaimed, shift my body so I could look at him. “You can’t be serious.”
“Teenage boys have remarkable recovery time. And are perpetually horny.”
“Wow.” I turned and snuggled back into our spooning position. “Maybe you should talk to Tuck about it. So he doesn’t think anything is wrong with him. Or Peter can.”
“You’ve already told the kids that masturbation is normal. They were like, eight or nine?”
“Yeah, because my parents never talked to me about it so I thought I was a total pervert.”
Jake moved his hand so he could gently squeeze one of my breasts and then put his lips on my ear. “My gorgeous, pervy wife.”
I moaned a little. “Oh god,” I said. “We’re not doing this again, are we? I’ve got four showings tomorrow and two listing appointments! We haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in almost two weeks!”
He bit my earlobe, softly. “I don’t care,” he whispered.
I rolled over to face him, letting his long arms encircle me, and put my hands flat upon his chest. I didn’t care, either. In fact, I was thrilled he wanted me again. That he couldn’t help himself. “What am I going to do with you?” I said, letting my fingers wander downward.
“Let me show you,” Jake replied, and then reached over to turn on another light.
Five
“Tuck!” I hollered my son’s name from the kitchen, where I was throwing together his lunch and before-practice snack. “Get your butt down here or we’re going to be late!” It was a daily battle, getting my twelve-year-old out of bed and off to school by seven-thirty. Jake had already left with Ella, who popped out of bed like a jack-in-the-box at six a.m., even on the weekends.
“Just a minute!” Tucker yelled, in a tone I’d need to have a chat with him about on the drive to school.
“Don’t forget your uniform in the dryer!” I replied. Our laundry room was upstairs, one of the features that had sold me, especially, on buying this particular house when Jake and I got married. When we met, I’d been renting a small, two-bedroom bungalow on the outer edges of Queens Ridge. Even with child support from Peter, it was the only thing I could afford on a single-parent, one income budget. Working in the tech industry as a recruiter for companies like Microsoft and Amazon, Jake made substantially more money than I did at the time, and after he proposed, he was more than happy to sell his one bedroom condo in downtown Bellevue and use the proceeds to put toward a down payment on a house for all four of us to live in together as a family. I’d struggled with this gesture, at first—my pride as a woman who could take care of herself and the kids on her own took a definite hit—but I decided that my discomfort would fuel me to work even harder at becoming one of the top realtors
on the Eastside. Two years later, I was awarded highest-selling real estate professional in the area. We had split the bills fifty-fifty ever since, something that when I was a teenager, my mother had told me was essential for a relationship to be successful.
“Never become so reliant on a man that you don’t have the ability to take care of yourself,” she often said. “Get an education. Make your own money.”
Her expectations, and my father’s, were that I would do as my brother—who was three years older than me—had done, and enter a four-year university. But unlike Scott, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life, so much to my parents’ disappointment, I enrolled in community college, meeting Peter not long before we both graduated with AAs in business. Six weeks later, he and I took an impromptu trip to Vegas and got married on a whim.
“What are you going to do with your life, now?” my mother demanded when I came home with a thin, gold band on my finger, announcing my plans to move to Seattle with Peter. My father was at the hospital, as usual, leaving my mom to deal with what I had done on her own. Part of me wished that he were there, too, yelling. At least that would have meant that he cared. “What kind of job do you think you’ll be able to get?” Her usually pale skin was bright red, and her gray eyes flashed with anger.
“We’ll be fine,” I said, bolstered by a specific brand of youthful, invincible, self-righteousness. “We’ll figure it out.”
“‘We?’” my mother said, with a shrill edge. “What about you? Your education and your life? You have no idea who you even are, Jessica! You can’t be making these kinds of enormous decisions! You’re ruining your life!”
“You were only twenty-three when you met dad,” I countered. My mother had been in graduate school, and my father, about to start his residency, when they met. They got married two years later, after my mother had graduated with her master’s, and then decided to proceed with her PhD.
My mother gave me another furious look. “It’s not the same thing. I’d already spent five years on my own, working and paying for tuition and rent. I didn’t have parents to help me.” My mother had been a later-in-life, surprise baby, born to her parents when they both were in their mid-forties. Since they were already accustomed to a childless life, my mom said she often felt like a nuisance to her parents—just another one of the animals they took care of on the potato farm she was raised on outside of Idaho Falls. She was sixteen when her father died of a sudden heart attack out in the fields, leaving my grandmother a heavily mortgaged house on 50 acres of land. Bankrupt, my mom and grandmother had to move to Boise in order to live with her mother’s sister, where my mom ended up attending the university where eventually, she would become a professor. My grandmother passed away before my mom had Scott and me, so I knew little about her.
“I have Peter, now,” I said, fighting off the tight feeling in my throat. “I don’t need your help!”
I finished packing my bags after she left my room, and a few hours later, Peter and I had filled the back of his beat up Ford truck with as many of our belongings as we could manage. We began our trek west, him in his truck, and me in my ancient Honda Accord, with barely enough money for first and last month’s rent on an apartment when we got to the other side of the Cascade Mountains.
We settled in the far outskirts of Redmond where rents were cheaper—me with a job waiting tables in downtown Kirkland and Peter doing scut work for a construction company—going several months without talking to either of my parents. (Peter’s mother had died in a car accident when he was a baby, and his father didn’t seem to care what Peter did with his life, as long as it didn’t interfere with his.) But then I got pregnant, and though I was excited, I was also overwhelmed, and the only thing I could think to do was call my mom.
“Oh, Jessica,” she sighed, when I told her I was already four months along. But then her voice brightened. “Are you going to find out if it’s a boy or a girl?” Something about the idea of becoming a grandparent changed her—softening some of the harsh edges I’d spent my own childhood butting up against. She sent gifts and came to visit, even staying with us for a week after I gave birth to Ella. “You’re the sweetest baby girl ever, aren’t you?” she cooed as she held my newborn infant, and while it made me happy to see her be affectionate with my daughter, I wondered why she hadn’t been the same way with me; at least, when I’d been old enough to remember it. My father, however, remained as detached with Ella and Tucker as he had been with Scott and me. I tried not to let it bother me, but there were times I couldn’t stop myself from shedding a few tears, wishing my dad was a different kind of man. Wishing I knew for sure that he loved me.
When I was ten years old, my class was assigned a short “The Person I Admire Most” essay, and I’d decided to write about my dad. I’d always been a little in awe of the work he did at the hospital, how he’d hurry out of the house, even in the middle of the night, if one of his patients needed him. I’d hear him get up, and I’d rush to my bedroom window to watch him go down the front steps toward his car, the tails of his black trench coat flapping behind him like a superhero’s cape. I’d written about that in my essay, and when he walked through the front door that night after work, I rushed to greet him, the paper in my hand.
“Can you read this for me?” I asked, waving my essay like a white flag as he loosened his tie with one hand and set his briefcase down on the entryway table with the other. He looked groggy, as he always tended to when he got home from a shift, as though he’d been rudely awoken from a long afternoon nap.
“Not now, Jess,” he said.
“But it’s about you,” I said, unwilling to be deterred. I didn’t tell him the reason I’d written about him—I wanted that part to be a surprise.
“I’ve had a long day,” he sighed. He walked past me, toward the kitchen, where I knew he would pour himself a glass of red wine—“good for the heart”—from one of the bottles on top of the refrigerator. I followed him, hoping that after he’d had his drink, he would relax and be more open to reading my essay. Scott was upstairs in his room, and my mother was in her office, which was in the basement. She hadn’t come upstairs to greet my dad, which wasn’t unusual. Oftentimes, I’d have to pound on her door to get her to emerge and eat the dinner she’d prepared before disappearing.
I sat at the kitchen table, legs swinging, as I watched my dad pour the ruby-red liquid into a glass. He took a small sip, and then a longer one. He stared out the long, rectangular window over the kitchen sink at the blossoming pink cherry tree in our side yard, not seeming to register that I was in the same room.
“Dad,” I said, a little impatiently. “I really need you to read this. I want to be sure it’s good.”
“Ask your mother,” he said, tiredly.
“She’s working,” I said, feeling a small spot in my throat start to tingle. I didn’t ask much of my father—I knew what he did was important. My mother liked to remind me and Scott of that fact, often. But I wanted him to know that I knew it. I wanted him to read my essay, pull me into his arms and tell me that it was the best thing he’d ever read.
“Carol died this afternoon,” he said. He turned around and rested his hips against the edge of the countertop, crossing his arms over his narrow chest. He was a tall man, but slight. My mom was always trying to convince him that he needed to gain ten pounds.
“One of your patients?” I asked, quietly. He rarely discussed the people he took care of by name—something about patient privacy laws—so I sensed this woman must have been pretty important to him.
“She was only nineteen,” he said, and somehow, he looked even more bedraggled. He stared at me, but it seemed like he was looking right through me. “She had bone cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt helpless, and like I might actually start to cry. I had the crazy thought that maybe I should get cancer. Then I could stay at the hospital and he would spend time in my room, playing Scrabble or Uno with me, feeding me green Jell-O and
popsicles while I slowly got better, the way I knew some of his other patients had.
“I did everything I could,” he said, and I nodded, pretending to understand the magnitude of what that entailed. I looked down at the paper I held, and the words upon it began to blur.
My dad sighed, picked up his wine, and walked past me again, out of the room. Before I realized what I was doing, I took my essay and ripped it into shreds, then stood up and threw the mess into the garbage can, shoving it down as hard as I could. I stormed out of the kitchen and walked past the living room, where my dad had settled into his recliner, glass in hand. I paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked at him.
“I love you, Dad,” I said, but my words seemed to fall on deaf ears, because he didn’t respond. He didn’t move. He didn’t say that he loved me, too.
Later, after I became a single mother and experienced days where I was so exhausted I could barely remember my own name, let alone cater to every one of my children’s demands, I understood that my dad was grieving that night, unable to be present in the way I needed him. But that wouldn’t be the last time I wondered if he loved me, nor was it the first that he’d been too distracted to pay attention to me. Even when Ella and Tucker were born, he made little effort to be a part of their lives, something that grieved me, because I’d hoped he might soften as he got older. I hoped we might connect in a way we never had before.
The most fatherly thing he’d done after I became an adult was to offer to let me, Ella, and Tucker come live with them when Peter and I divorced. And despite my refusal of that offer—at the time, I was still resentful of his lack of involvement in my childhood—and the challenging few years of single parenthood that followed, I never forgot that fight with my mother the day Peter and I left, when she told me I was ruining my life. Even as I built my real estate business, I knew she had wanted more for me, a fancier degree and a more academic career, like hers. I never stopped feeling like I had failed her. I never stopped wishing that my father had shown up that day to beg me not to go.