Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 73013 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73013 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
He turned his attention to my husband. “Are you going to let her get away like that, Rick?” he asked. “Young couple like you, you should be all over each other. I’m pretty sure April has given you the wrong impression of us—and, I guess, of our town too, since we brought it up.”
I had the uncomfortable feeling that Scott had decided to evaluate us, for some reason I couldn’t fathom. I turned toward the sun, now halfway down, and hoped the ruddy light of its setting and the gathering twilight would hide the pink I could feel mounting in my fair-skinned cheeks.
Should we be all over each other? Unwittingly—or so I thought, then, before we got to know Scott and April better—this man had touched a sore spot in my mind and my heart. I chewed on my lower lip as I realized how that figurative soreness echoed the soreness between my thighs, which had vanished by this morning.
It had vanished, and I had felt fine down there this morning, and yet…
Yet I had lied to Rick… my husband… the one person in the world with whom I should be completely honest. I had told him, just as I had done the previous night, after dinner and the morning after our wedding night, that I didn’t feel ready, down there between my legs, to try again, just yet.
Sorer in my mind, I thought ruefully. It hurts more there, inside my head because it doesn’t really hurt on the outside.
Rick’s hand felt good on my shoulder. My legs had felt good, placed across his. I liked to cuddle. I had liked it from the very beginning, when my handsome boyfriend hugged and kissed me in his car, and sometimes in his bedroom in the apartment he had shared with two other guys while he saved up for a house.
I thought of that house, still only a dream although we could definitely afford to buy something small now, especially if we decided to move to one of the mega-corp–subsidized towns that had started to attract a lot of growth. In that house, Rick and I would sleep in the same bed. We had to, right? I chewed my lip a little harder, thinking about it. I should want to sleep in the same bed as my husband, shouldn’t I?
Really I wanted to cuddle with him all the time. I loved the way the warmth seemed to build in my body when he had his arms around me, and how I felt so safe inside them. Working his way up from junior lawnmower to run his own landscaping and snowplow business, Rick had developed serious muscles, and although it made me blush a little, I did enjoy having an older husband with such a powerful body. The dark hair and eyes that came with his Greek heritage complemented my Germanic blonde hair and blue eyes magnificently—as my mother had never seemed to tire of saying.
And Rick had proven himself so patient, too, waiting for ‘real’ physical intimacy, as the world understood it. Really I felt like, for me, real intimacy was what happened when we cuddled on a couch, rather than what had happened the few times Rick had convinced me to lie down with him in his bedroom.
Let alone what had happened on our wedding night and then—so far—not again on our honeymoon.
Me, under the covers, dutifully spreading my legs the way the little book my mom had given me had instructed. The strange feeling of not having panties on under my pretty white cotton nightgown, because the book said that a wife should leave them off on nights when she expected her husband to want ‘to be intimate with her.’
Rick, coming out of the bathroom naked, to my shock. My bridegroom, silhouetted against the light flooding from the doorway—and a moment, just a moment, when he turned a little and I saw something long and rigid jutting from his lap. Me, turning away, my cheeks burning hot, saying in as calm a voice as I could manage, “Could you turn the bathroom light off, babe?”
A pause, though Rick stood right there next to the light switch. I had bitten my lip, wondering suddenly whether he might say no—and wondering even more intensely what I would do, if he did refuse to turn off the light… if my husband told me that he wanted to see his bride naked… that far from turning off the bathroom light, he would turn on more lights in the hotel room… would take the covers away and make me raise my nightgown so he could see all the private places that belonged to him as of today, and henceforth forever.
To have. To hold.
My mind had whispered, my insides fluttering, To fuck.
One of the bad words. The words a good girl like me knows, but may never say.