The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [60]
What was the definition of a fetish, she wondered? An object—a something—that made sexual excitement or gratification possible. Something like that. She swallowed, anxious Max might be her something. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe she was fixed, now. Maybe she could go back home in another month and join the rest of the world in its glorious orgasmic pursuits. Or could this man be her elusive, singular something?
Lying before her could be the key that unlocked all that missing pleasure. Her own body tightened and warmed, remembering the visual—watching Max getting hotter, watching his face transform as he drove closer and closer toward release. She’d feasted on his strong body, those muscles clenched, voice a harsh rasp, uttering exotic words she didn’t understand but thrilled to hear.
Max tensed and then relaxed atop the bedclothes, adrift in some dream or other. She studied his shoulder and back, his tattoos. She wished she could stamp him with some permanent brand of ownership. She wished she could turn him over and find the diagrammatical outline of his heart etched across his chest, with her name in the center as its tiny caption.
She wished she’d stop thinking things like this.
“I’m going to knit you a scarf,” Fallon announced from her seat in the bay window the next morning as Max came downstairs, freshly bathed and dressed. She took him in again—hers, somehow.
“Are you?” He put the kettle on to boil.
“Yup. I just found an ad in the paper. There’s a woman in town who sells yarn and needles out of her home. It’ll be cold soon. And it’ll give me something to do all day aside from crosswords.”
He nodded. “I would very much like you to knit me a scarf. I will make sure the cat does not destroy it, like it did my old one. My mémère—my grandmother—made that one. I was very sad when it was ruined. You will make me one just as good, I’m sure.”
“Well, I don’t know if I can compete with anybody’s grandma. But what colors would you like? I can only do solid or stripes—no patterns.”
He thought for a moment, filling the French press. “Yellow and black. Like a bee. Une écharpe abeille. Very good.” He made a zuzzing noise with his lips and planted a kiss on her cheek as he passed by.
Fallon smiled, delighted and surprised by this playfulness. “You got it. I’ll start tomorrow.”
As the conversation died away, she noticed there was something different about Max this morning. He was smiling but there was a strange energy to him, an underlying baseline of strain and anxiety. Fallon worried it was because of the sex. She suddenly wished she hadn’t brought up the scarf, wondering for a moment if she was being too familiar, too much of an infatuated schoolgirl. She wondered for the first time what The Rules might make of her.
Max wheeled the marble to the center of the floor and gathered his tools. Then, as if reading her troublesome thoughts, he came over and sat beside her.
“I am having a very hard time concentrating,” he said, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“Oh?”
She felt him nod.
“Because of the sex?”
Another nod.
She bit her lip for a moment, nervous. “Was it a mistake, do you think?”
“How do you define ‘mistake’?”
“Do you wish we hadn’t done it?”
He laughed, sitting up straight. “That is the best thing I’ve done in years. But I think we need to establish some ground rules, yes? Otherwise, I won’t be able to think about anything else.”
Fallon glowed a little inside, released the fear and tension knotting her stomach. “What kind of ground rules?”
“We need rules so that I don’t forsake this commission in favor of attacking you every hour of every day.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” Fallon said.
“Here is what I think. I think that from the time we finish coffee in the morning until four o’clock each afternoon, we cannot touch. No