Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [2]
“You’re spasming here,” he whispers just loudly enough so I can hear him over the Enya. I feel my muscle involuntarily clench up and resist the very relief that I’m trying to offer it. “This entire section of your back is in deep spasm,” he repeats. “We’re going to have to do a lot of work on this today.”
I grunt and rearrange my face in the donut cushion so that I, ideally, won’t look half-alien when Garland is done. Not that he hasn’t seen me at my worst before: Once, on my worst day, I devolved into sputtering sobs as his hands worked their way down my torso, releasing what he later told me was “disturbed energy” that came unjiggered through the power of massage. But still. It wasn’t a look to which I aspired. Not least because, as my friends from Pilates informed me, Garland, with his sinewy forearms and espresso-colored hair, would occasionally put his hands in places where, perhaps, management wouldn’t approve. But where my friends very much did.
But I’d been seeing him every other week for nearly four months, and as of yet, nothing inappropriate at all. Which, in some ways, was a relief. Henry and I had met at twenty-seven, and for the past seven years, there had been no one else. Nor had I truly wanted there to be. I was a wife. I was a good wife, and fantasizing about your masseuse, no, fantasizing about anyone was outside the bounds of what I characterized a “good” wife to be. I attended the requisite cocktail parties for Henry’s firm. I washed our ivory damask sheets every Saturday. I ironed Katie’s gingham dresses so that there wasn’t a literal thread out of place.
Of course, despite my best and most public efforts, my subconscious occasionally led me down paths that my current consciousness couldn’t control. So while Garland worked his delicious finger magic on me, I couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel if those fingers wound their way beyond the acceptable parameters of what they teach you in massage school.
I heard him slap some eucalyptus oil between his hands, and my nerves along my spine exploded as he ran his palms over them.
The truth of the matter was that Mrs. Kwon wasn’t entirely wrong. Henry and I were going stale, not because we wanted to, but because like a bag of cookies that had inadvertently been left open, the air in our marriage was slowly hardening our crusts.
When was the last time we had sex? I think, forgetting Garland’s hands entirely. I filter through my brain until I land on a wedding we’d attended in the Berkshires two months earlier.
“We have to do it,” I said to Henry, as we lay on the crisp sheets of the inn and both wished that we were asleep instead. “Seriously, Hen, I just read an article in Redbook that said that couples who have sex have a much deeper connection and are more likely to stay married.”
“What about couples who would rather sleep?” He looked over at me and grinned. “Are they doomed?”
“It didn’t say,” I said tersely, and rolled to my side.
“I’m kidding, Jill, I’m kidding.” I heard the sheets rustle below him as he moved to spoon me, and then, from behind, he slowly unbuttoned my shirt.
Okay, so that was two months, it’s not that bad, I tell myself, readjusting my face in the cushion. Especially because Henry is always away. That has to be taken into account when doing the math. He’s always away.
It didn’t used to be like this, of course. When we first met, we ravaged each other like wild beasts, albeit without the wildness and maybe not quite like beasts, as Henry had an aversion to performing oral sex and usually begged off when I had my period, but certainly with the passion that a new relationship brings. And even if the sex wasn’t as torrid as it had been in my previous relationship with Jackson, Henry and I clicked together in ways that were unexplainable but instinctual, as if by being with each other, Henry, the up-and-coming finance guru with a swimmer’s build and a mind like a steel trap, and me, advertising executive, who had coined the year’s biggest jingle, “It’s the zizz in the fizz that makes Coke