by Jade London
Umber on my hipbones. Cerulean on his wrists. Amber streaked with black down the valley between my tits. Orange becoming purple on his belly below his navel, low, where our bodies meet, where I can’t help but begin to move, to roll my hips, to slide my ass against his thighs, slathering a dozen shades together in those few points of contact.
Our hands meet, palm to palm, fingers twining, and I crush his hands with mine, cling to him until my knuckles whiten beneath the paint. He moves with me, and our bodies find the rhythm, the roll and crush. We writhe together and our eyes are locked, and then my core muscles tighten and shift and everything inside me crashes into an explosive orgasm and I’m grinding on him hard and fast and using our joined hands for balance until the climax becomes too much and I have to fall against his chest and cling to his neck. Coming apart with sobbing whimpers of ecstasy, I smell the paint and him and us.
He leans over to the side, gently depositing me on my back. He pulls out and sits with his knees astride me.
His hands are at his sides, waiting.
His cock is stark clean white against the whorls of paint covering the rest of his body. From head to toe, we are both creatures of paint and sex and desire, except for where our bodies were joined, and there we are both clean, his cock and my cunt.
I take him in my hands, smear paint on him there too, now. Stroking him slowly from root to tip, I pause to add more paint, smearing and streaking the pigment on his erection until it, too, is covered in paint. He rumbles in pleasure as I glide my touch along his shaft, cupping his balls and massaging them, stroking him until he’s thrusting into my hands.
His breathing goes harsh and ragged and his hips flex and his cock grinds through my fist. Pink at the tip, green-blue around the glans mingling into yellow and gray and a touch of white further down. I slide my fist and the colors merge and mix, shades eddying.
He doesn’t warn me, doesn’t say a word, but I know when it’s coming, though. I watch him, and I know his body and I know when he’s about to explode. His lip curls into a snarl and his jaw tightens and he growls low in his throat. He lifts up on his knees and reaches down to tweak my nipples, one last greedy touch, and then his eyelids flutter and his abs tense and his cock throbs in my fist.
Cum gushes out of him in a thick white stream. It splashes onto my paint-slathered tits, flowing in a line down to my belly. I stroke him and squeeze at the base and he grunts and spurts again, and this time I aim it to splash onto my face. I open my mouth and taste his cum on my lips and feel it on my chin and in my hair and I keep sliding my fist on his cock and take another load of his cum on my chin and down my throat and on my extended tongue. I swallow his salty musky viscous cum and drag my fist down his cock until he’s finished coming, and then he collapses off of me and rolls me into his arms. The paint is sticky on his shoulder. Drying, going tacky.
We laze in the drying paint, content in each other’s arms.
“Take a shower with me,” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer, but we stand up and I lock the door to my paint room. The art we made on the floor there is sacred to me and I won’t change it, won’t clean it up, won’t let Charlie even see it. It’s mine, that whorl of body painted sex art, fuck art, love art. It’s ours.
He lifts me in his arms, carries me to the bathroom and starts the shower, getting it hot.
By the time we’re both clean, and all the paint scraped and scrubbed away, he’s hard again. I sink to my knees in the tub and the water beats down on my head and neck and back, and I suck his cock until he comes down my throat, and then he trades places with me, kneeling in front of me and hooking one my legs over his shoulder and burying his face between my thighs and licking my cunt until I come with a shuddering sigh. I come so hard I barely keep my balance.
Clean and wrapped in towels, we avoid the fact that he needs to leave. It’s getting late and who knows when, or if, Charlie will come home. I still haven’t faced him, can’t face him, because I don’t know what to say, not after all my raging and accusing, not now that I’ve taken Conrad in every room in this house a dozen times on every surface, in the kitchen, the bathroom, my art room, on the couch, on the back porch, on the dock, in the grass, up against the siding. I’ve fucked Conrad a hundred times in this house, in every room except my bedroom. Never in there, never in that bed.
He refuses to do that, and so do I.
I can’t face Charlie. I can’t tell him I’ve been fucking another man, and that I feel more for Conrad than I’ve ever felt for Charlie in the ten years we’ve spent together. That fucking Conrad is utter heaven, every single time, and that he can make me orgasm a dozen times and I’ll still need more, that I could fuck Conrad all day every day, all night every night, and never ever tire of the feel of his body, never need rest, never get enough.
I don’t know how to tell Charlie that our inability to share intimacy is part of the reason I’m fucking another man. Not the whole reason, but part of it. Charlie’s infidelity drove me to it, gave me the excuses I needed to justify what I’m doing. But at the heart of it, it’s Charlie and me. It’s that he doesn’t excite me, doesn’t make me come, can’t make my heart race, can’t push me into desperation. He never did, and he never will, and then I met Conrad, and he does. Conrad gives me all that.
And now it’s gone on for too long for me to know how to tell Charlie about Conrad.
The lie is too easy, because there is no lie. Charlie and I are two people living two separate lives, only occasionally meeting here and there, but yet I am still Charlie’s wife by law, and I do care about him, in some way. It’s just that I’m terrified, petrified, absolutely fucking horrified at the prospect of leaving Charlie for Conrad and discovering that
love isn’t real,
mystery doesn’t mean romance,
sex isn’t love,
there is no us outside of our fucking.
If these things are true, I’ll have no one and nothing and Conrad is
just
fucking
everything to me.
And I wish we could just fuck and ignore love, and pretend this is normal, and just occupy this totally fucked up thing we’ve created that we’re calling life.
“Hannah. You’re brooding.” Conrad wraps me up in a hug. “I can feel you thinking.”
“I don’t know if I can do this any longer, but I don’t know how to not do this.”
“Just come with me,” he murmurs, for the thousandth time.
I dissolve into a sudden paroxysm of sobs, and his arms tighten around me. He doesn’t try to shush me or tell me it’s okay, he just tilts my face up after I’ve cried myself out and touches his lips to mine and kisses me as if kissing me is the only balm that can soothe my pain.
And he’s right.
He kisses me and I just want to sink into the kiss, live in, bathe in it, and soak up the memory of it into my soul—
**
“I don’t know where we go from here.” Charlie sat on the closed lid of the toilet, elbows on his knees, leaning forward, fingertips pressed together, right toes tapping a nonstop staccato rhythm.
“Me either.” I’m in the tub.
The bubbles are up to my throat, the water steaming—almost too hot to stand—and every so often I nudge the hot water knob open with my big toe, slide the drain lever aside to let out some of the lukewarm water and let the hot water fill the tub again.
Charlie lets out a sigh. “Who is he?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“First, answer me this, who is she?”
“I met her at a coffee shop on the way into work.”
“And did you fuck her that day? Or was it the next?”
“It wasn’t like that.” He shifts, leaning back, crossing his ankles out in front of him. “It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then, Charlie? Because that’s how it seems to me.” I slide lower in the water, close my eyes so I don’t have to look at him. “I�
�ve seen you with her.”
“And I know you’re seeing someone.”
“So? You’re the only one who gets to cheat?”
“That’s not—”
“Bullshit, Charlie!” I shoot upright, stabbing a finger at him. Suds slip down my chest, and I sink back down under the water once more. “Don’t even try to act like you’re not jealous.”
“So there is someone?”
My heart hammers in my chest, and my stomach twists and lurches. “Yes. There is someone.”
“Who? How’d you find him? Where—where do you—?”
“Uh-uh. Nope. You don’t get to ask me jack shit, Charlie.” I hear him huff in anger. “That’s not how this works. You cheated first. I would never have cheated if you hadn’t.”
“And what—that makes it okay?”
I laugh bitterly. “No, it doesn’t make it okay. Nothing makes it okay. Cheating is cheating, and I hate myself every single fucking day, and I blame you for that.”
A long silence, and then when he speaks his voice is low and almost venomous. “You know why I cheated, Hannah?”
“I’d love to know, Charlie.”
“The sex was awful between us. It was always awful. For years I kept hoping it’d get better but it never did. You were always just…cold, a dead fish. Like it was chore for you. You’d just lay there and wait for it to be done.” He pauses. I glance at him, but he’s not looking at me. “You didn’t want me. You didn’t enjoy what we had. How long was I supposed to just…hope it got better? Ten years, Hannah, and it never got better.”
“So you found someone better?”
“It didn’t happen like that, but, yeah.”
Laughter bursts from me, a harsh bark of pained disbelief. “Wow, Charlie. Just…wow.”
I sit up again, this time not caring that the soap bubbles slide down and bare my breasts; we don’t have that kind of intimacy anymore, but it does feel like I’m cheating on Conrad by letting Charlie see me naked now. Weird but true.
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe you were at least partially at fault for the awful sex?” It hurts to say all this, but these are things I’ve been harboring for years.
“I was a virgin when we met, Charlie. That means for our entire relationship, I never knew sex with anyone except you. How was I supposed to know better? And let’s get down to the real dirty stuff, shall we? You didn’t make me come. How am I supposed to enjoy sex when I never reach orgasm? You always got yours, but I never got mine. I could get there by myself, so it’s not like it’s impossible to make me come—and yeah, now I’m realizing how much it is your fault, because now I’m with someone who can make me come.
“I’m not trying to rub this in your face, really I’m not. It’s just the truth. So, yeah, I agree the sex between us was awful. So why didn’t you—oh, I don’t know—talk to me about it? Divorce would have been better than this. That’s where we’re at anyway, but now we’ve got all this bullshit between us. We’ve both put ourselves and each other through all this bullshit we didn’t need. You should have been up front about things instead of sneaking around behind my back and acting like everything was normal.”
“Now hold on one damn second—”
“How long were you fucking both of us, Charlie? Because the moment I met…him…I realized I wouldn’t be able to stop what was going to happen. And that was the last time I touched you, or let you touch me.”
“It wasn’t like that!”
“You keep saying that, but I fail to see how it wasn’t exactly like that.”
“It was…complicated.”
“Un-complicate it, then.”
“It was just harmless flirting at first. We’d be waiting for our coffees at the same time, and we’d talk—”
“If you’re married, there’s no such thing as harmlessly flirting with another woman. But continue.”
“Why do you want to hear this, anyway?”
“Because I’m curious, I guess.” I lay back down in the tub and close my eyes. “Honestly, I’m not even really hurt anymore. Now I’m just…vaguely angry and a lot apathetic.”
“Apathetic?”
I shrug, sending a series of ripples through the bathwater. “Yeah. I just…don’t really care all that much about our relationship anymore. I’m angry with you for being a cheat and a coward, and I’m sad that our marriage is ending like this, but I’ve found someone who makes me happy and I just want all this bullshit to be done with. I’m tired of feeling guilty, tired of acting like the way we’ve been living is normal or okay, or anything but completely fucked up.” I wave my hand. “So…continue.”
He sighs, long and frustrated. “Like I said, it started out as just talking. Then one of my meetings got canceled so I went down to the coffee shop for a refill, and she was there. We sat down and had coffee together. Then we ended up, by coincidence, in line together at Qdoba for lunch. So we ate lunch together, and that turned into a regular thing, coffee in the morning and lunch in the afternoon.”
He leans forward again, this time scrubbing his face with his hands. “And for two months that’s all it was, just…talking. She’s fun to be around, easy to talk to, we get each other’s sense of humor, and it—it was just…easy.
“Then…I was leaving work late one night, legit—I got roped into finishing an account and didn’t get done till like nine or ten or something. Anyway, she was there. She works in the same building as me, two floors up. I was signing out and so was she, and we went out for drinks. Drinks at the bar led to drinks at her apartment, and…then we slept together. After that—” a shrug, a sigh, hands lifting up in a what are you gonna do gesture, “—we just couldn’t stop.”
“Sounds like how you start dating someone…only you were married at the time.”
“I know, I know.” He passes his hand through his hair. “I didn’t know how to stop it.”
I glare at him. “Really? Oh, I don’t know, how about something like ‘I’m sorry, but I’m married so I can’t see you anymore’?”
“It wasn’t that simple, Hannah.”
I think about Conrad, and I sigh. “I know. I get it, I do. When you fall in love with someone, you can’t really help it, can you?” I shake my head. “But you were married to me. You owed it to me—to us—to end things with me before you started anything with her. That’s just common decency. And that part is that simple. You may not be able to help how you feel, but you can help what you do about it, Charlie. And that’s what I’m mad about.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
The question still hangs in the air, unanswered—
Now what?
I mean, it’s fairly obvious. I’m already thinking of Charlie and I in the past tense. Were married, not are married. But who files first? How is either of us going to pay for lawyers? There are so many things to consider, and all of them are painful.
I lied to Charlie: it does hurt. I’m in pain. But it’s deep, dark, drowning pain, the kind that wakes me up in the middle of the night, the kind that hits hardest in the most unexpected moments. Shaving my legs, and I remember being eighteen and a brand-new wife to Charles Markham, and him watching me shave my legs and it felt so grown up, living with him, being his wife, having a house together, a life together.
Or remembering Charlie watching me put my bra on. He thought it was so weird that I’d hook the clasps together in front of me so the bra was backwards, the cups at my back, and then when the clasps were fastened I’d spin it around and slide my arms through the straps and then stuff my tits into the cups. He thought the process was fascinating.
The memories hurt. It all hurts.
In the bath, facing him, the reality of our crumbling marriage set out in stark and unavoidable relief, I lift my hand out of the water and stare at my ring finger. There is a thin strip of slightly whiter flesh where my rings sat for eight years. Those rings are on the vanity counter. The engagement ring is a small diamond solitaire, white gold. The wedding band is plain, a
narrow circle of thin white gold, unadorned. It sits on an angle, resting on the engagement ring.
“Hand me a towel, would you?” I ask.
Charlie gets a towel from under the sink and hands it to me. I stand up and wrap the towel around my torso. I step out of the tub, dripping on the tile and on Charlie. I grab the two rings from the counter, hold them up, and stare at them.
I hand them to him, placing them gently in his open palm. “I’m leaving.”
He stands up, watching me leave the bathroom. “Hannah, wait.”
I stop, turn around, and meet his eyes.
“I—I’m sorry.” There’s genuine sorrow in his eyes, along with pain.
“Me too.”
He reaches for me and tugs me into a warm embrace.
We’re both exhausted, but relieved. We know things are at an end for us, but we’ve acknowledged what we had. We slip into bed together, uncomfortable and awkward. Charlie falls asleep right away. As he sleeps, I think about the family I lost, and I’m reminded about why I was adamant about not taking Charlie’s name when we married.
***
“My name is all I have left of my family, Charlie.”
He cradles me closer; we’re naked, in the afterglow. I stare at the small diamond and thin silver band on my ring finger, placed there by Charlie a week ago in a courthouse wedding the day I turned eighteen.
Rain hammers on the roof and beats against the window. “I know, but—I just…it’s important to me.”
I stifle a sigh of irritation. “What about what’s important to me? I’m an orphan, Charlie. I’ve got no one except you. Literally no family at all.”
“I know, Hannah, I know. But you’re my wife now. You’re supposed to take my name.”
“Lots of women keep their name. Celebrities do it all the time. It doesn’t mean they’re less married or anything, they’re just keeping their name.”
“But you’re not a celebrity. They do it because their name is part of their brand. Angelina Jolie didn’t suddenly become Angelina Pitt.”