Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [143]
“Can it wait?” she said.
“It can’t,” he said.
He took her other hand and helped her up and led her out of the room, wanting to put his arm around her (though she only let him take her elbow), leaving Jo and Chappie to their own decisions, guiding Marilyn through the stables, where he finally let her go, and to the fence that ran along the edge of the Chapmans’ property and overlooked the ocean. Then he told her what he’d realized: that the two of them had somehow fallen so far apart, and had been for so long now, that it seemed their resting state, that this was the source of their unhappiness and that this awareness of the growing gulf between them was not only what kept them from crossing it but also, oddly, from falling even further away.
“We only orbit each other now.”
“Be careful who you call ‘we.’”
“I want you,” Sheppard said. “I just want to feel your want too.”
Marilyn shook her head. She’d leaned her chin on the fence. “You make it sound like it’s me.”
“No,” he said, “it’s us. I’m not good at this, but I’ve thought about it. I think that if we can feel each other then it’s going to improve.”
He wasn’t sure if she understood, but he knew she was listening. If he could feel her want, he went on, if he could prove to her that he’d always be there to feel it, then they’d be complete. She’d be as close to everything to him as another person ever could be. At this point, he didn’t care how she took this or what she decided to do. So much had happened between them, he admitted, perhaps unforgivable things, but to apologize now would oversimplify the matter. They’d gone thousands of miles past things like fault. He just wanted her to know that he believed this to be the answer. It was, he said, their diagnosis.
“And it’s going to improve,” he said.
Marilyn said nothing. All she did was take his arm.
It began there, Sheppard thought, at that very moment, everything that had changed between them, and then it continued that night. He rose from a deep sleep, unsure of where he was, to discover Marilyn naked with her head between his legs (unsure initially, in fact, that it was even her), his cock in her mouth and his balls in her hand, squeezing them firmly, easing off, and pressing the heel of her hand into the bulb of his penis, spreading his scrotum taut, a generous pressure she exerted against his pelvic bone, her lips tracing out the heart shape of his glans, bottom up and top down, with a rhythm to the whole loving exercise she’d never imparted to it before, which she varied and changed and would herself decide when to finish—for when Sheppard sat up and tried to kiss her she pushed his chest down with her free hand, kneading and descending and rising on him again, as if his orgasm must be gathered from the bottom of his body’s well. He fell back and closed his eyes; it was pitch-dark in the room, but he could hear the sea and imagined lying on the sand, with Marilyn a goddess risen from the water to pleasure him as she was now, because the knowledge she demonstrated, her care and expertise, was so completely strange and divine. She stopped and then kissed her way from his stomach to neck, never letting him go until he was inside, pressing her hands to his shoulders as if he were a pinioned bird, and when he finally did come he felt the synchronous sea-wash inside her that then dissolved in a long, quiet dark between them like foam.
In their bedroom now, in Cleveland, as Sheppard remembered, the wind of the lake blowing through the trees whose limbs rattled the screens, Marilyn touched his back and said, “What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about Big Sur,” he said, and smiled.
She smiled back and took his hand.
“Feel,” she said, placing his palm on her stomach, and together they felt the small fillips.
“Boy,” he said.
“Girl.”
That was where it started, Sheppard believed; and that night he was sure was when this child had been conceived. He believed in science, not omens, yet the thought of this child’s conception occurring in such