Guilt?
Shame?
Bill was born with guilt and shame. Maybe. Not really. Maybe it came upon him or he acquired it. He didn’t know exactly how or why, but he knew he did. And then it was beaten into him, both literally and figuratively. Or maybe his image of it, his view, was simply skewed. Maybe it was first skewed by the lazy eye he’d been born with and the host of distorted images built upon it and then built deeper by a year’s worth of eye operations and having one eye covered by a patch.
Nevertheless…
After he’d washed her back and backside and kissed her there all over, she leaned against the wall much like Edelgarde had done in the bathroom not even two hours ago.
“Darling, have your way with me,” she said.
He felt like a dog. But then, as he thought about it, he always felt like a dog so the feeling wasn’t new. He felt guilty, but then he always felt guilty so that feeling wasn’t new either.
His first instinct was to ask her what she wanted. That was a gut reaction from years and years of training by his father. His father didn’t mean to train him that way. It was all part of a load of unintended consequences, things that maybe shouldn’t happen to anyone yet happen to most everyone in one way or another.
If his father-in-law, a college graduate Air Force officer, was stateside in the war, his own father, Nathan, was a high school dropout who dropped out to help support his family during the depression, and then he was a combat infantryman, Big Red 1, captured in North Africa, a POW in Nazi Germany for three and a half years.
We get what we get.
So if Bill’s first instinct was to please his wife instead of to satisfy himself, which is what she had told him to do, he couldn’t help it. He was what he was.
“What would you like?” he asked.
“I want you to have your way with me,” she said.
She was standing there in the shower, her legs spread, leaning against her arms against the wall of the bathroom above the tub.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Anything,” she said.
In effect, this was the hardest thing anyone could ask of Bill. Asking him what he really wanted and telling him to go for it was so contrary to all that had been in his life to this point that it made him cringe. And cringe he did. He hesitated, had to swallow that knot in the pit of his stomach and finally decide what it was he really wanted.
He knew what he wanted. He knew what he really wanted. He just wasn’t sure if he could go for it.
It had to become an existential decision, an f-it decision. It had to be something that didn’t really matter altogether in the scheme of things. Once it was that, he could proceed.
Proceed he did.
He did know exactly what he wanted and he did know how to do it and he did know how to please her at the same time because he knew, and this was from their experience being together, what pleased her as it pleased him.
He took his time. He let the water run over them and kept it so it was hot but not too hot. He stepped back a moment and looked at this wonderful woman who had chosen to be his wife—he couldn’t understand that or understand why—and then he did the things he wanted to do. He only did things he wanted to do. He did some things he’d done before but he did them a bit differently. He used her and she let him use her.
“That was great,” she said when they were finished and were drying off.
“Sure was,” he said.
She dried him, and he dried her, and then they kissed some more.
