Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [59]
“As a matter of fact.”
She turned toward him, nudged him with her shoulder.
This was what passed for flirting between them these days.
He put his hand up the back of her T-shirt, and she leaned against him. It was the first time since the accident that she’d shown any interest in him at all.
She sank back farther, the full weight of her body on his, and he felt himself beginning to stir. He moved his hand around to her warm stomach and then higher, the stretchy fabric of her shirt tight against his knuckles as he spanned his fingers between her small breasts, then cupped each one. She arched her back, her neck against his cheek, and he kissed her jawbone, her chin, the corner of her mouth before she turned her head to his and kissed him full on the lips, her tongue already in his mouth.
The lights were on, two bedside lamps and one overhead, and the bed was still made. It was only nine o’clock. It had probably been years, Charlie thought, since they’d had sex like this, at this hour, with the lights on. The door wasn’t even fully shut. Alison’s parents were downstairs puttering around; Alison hadn’t folded out the couch in the TV room for them yet, as she normally did each night. Annie was in bed, but probably not asleep.
These were the thoughts running through Charlie’s mind as Alison slid her finger under the waistband of his shorts, slipped them down, pushed him back against the pillows. Straddling him, she took his nipple between her teeth, running her tongue back and forth over it as it stiffened, and he shut his eyes and tried not to think of anything at all.
Concentrate. Pure physical sensation.
Slowly she moved down his body, her breath hot on his stomach, and then, finally, took him in her mouth. He was hard now, and she ran her tongue up and down his length, brushed her lips across the head, put her whole mouth around him. Light-headed, he opened his eyes, winced at the brightness, saw his wife’s silky dark hair spread out across his abdomen—her own eyes shut, her tongue curling around him—and closed them again. Now it was Claire’s tongue encircling him, her hand moving up his flank, her wavy hair against his skin. …
Charlie reached down and held Alison under the arm, urging her up. “Let’s fuck,” he whispered.
“No,” she said.
“I want to. I want to be inside you.”
“No.” She wouldn’t look up.
“Alison—”
“I want you to come in my mouth.”
Charlie was startled—though of course she’d gone down on him plenty of times over the years, as far as he could remember she’d never said those words before. It was vaguely unsettling: Was this some kind of self-flagellating impulse? Did she want to feel degraded? Did she feel him pulling away; was this a calculated gesture, a competitive move? Was she trying to control him? It might have been any of these things, or it might have been none. At that point, lying on the down comforter in a T-shirt and nothing else, Charlie decided he didn’t much care.
He closed his eyes and consciously tried to relax, pushing away the images in his mind, concentrating only on the opaque orange light through his eyelids, a thick, glowing sea of light, warm as summer. As she sucked steadily he felt a gathering wave of pleasure, and then the stronger pull of an undertow, blood orange, bleeding into the orange of the wave. His body shuddered and stiffened; he stifled a groan, and then felt a sudden, dissipating release.
After a moment he looked down. Alison was wiping her mouth on a corner of her T-shirt. She laid her head against his thigh. Then she moved back up the bed toward him.
“That was amazing,” he said, turning onto his side to make room.
“Umhh,” she said.
He got up and shut the bedroom door, turned off the lights, then went to the bathroom. When he came back to bed she was curved away from him, her hair half covering her face, with her eyes closed.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her—it seemed like the right thing to say. I love you isn’t much, he thought; it’s just what a husband says to his wife in bed in the dark, an automatic reflex, an acknowledgment