They smoked a joint in bed. They drank white wine that Bill’s wife got for them from the kitchen. They lay together by candlelight and held each other.
“That was really nice,” she said. “I like when you please yourself.”
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too,” she said.
Bill’s wife nuzzled against him and purred. It was a simple, quiet life-is-good type of feeling she was putting out, or Bill was feeling from her. He felt the same way.
He was happy. For a moment he forgot about the others, all the others who except for Mother Mary didn’t mean anything when all was said and done. Even Arlene whose mother had been struggling with cancer escaped his state of mind. That was what had made Arlene different, that he felt for her, not love, or maybe a different kind of love, but empathy. He and Arlene were right there.
Even Lorraine, who he liked and liked being intimate with, left him for the moment. Lorraine and Mother Mary had that in common. They were older, more settled in their lives, knew what they wanted physically and otherwise.
Their bodies were different too. Their bodies were fuller, softer, curvier, more friendly he’d always thought. He found that appealing. They’d been married and that made the sex different.
His wife, she was skinny, agile, always stretching one way or another, always moving something, fingers, toes, ankles, something, this because she was a dancer and had to stay limber. She had fewer needs than some of the others. She was from a family that was pretty much normal, whatever that was. Bill was from a broken family. She was from a family whose patriarch had not been damaged by the Nazis, whose patriarch had, in fact, enjoyed the benefits of being a veteran without any of the real difficulties of being a warrior. He was from a family that ended up a single-parent family in a time when that was relatively rare, whose parent was all screwed up through no fault of his own.
We get what we get. And so it goes.
His wife had gotten encouragement and guidance and support. Those things had allowed her to be able to articulate what she wanted and to go for it. Those things had allowed her to be able to be creative, to choose an artistic career that offered little if any chance of her supporting herself.
Bill.
There was a song about Bill.
He had gotten taught to stay out of sight, to please everyone around you so you didn’t get killed, to not get noticed, ever. He had gotten taught that you could rarely get what you wanted in life and the way to get anything was to be co-dependent. (Of course that was not the word used. Bill wouldn’t know that word for a very long time.)
Bill sipped his wine, fondled his wife’s breasts. One thing about her was that she had small, pert, beautiful breasts and she enjoyed having him touch them. She enjoyed having him suckle on them. She enjoyed him paying them attention, paying her attention even though because of their schedules they were mostly not together, even though she was often not accessible when he was. He came home and she was asleep. She went off early in the morning.
He slid down some. She slid up some. They kissed. He asked if she wanted more weed. She said no. They kissed some more. He leaned up on his elbow and kissed downward, down across those lovely breasts and down further. She moaned once, softly. He could feel her breathing shift, increase slightly. He could feel her yielding to his touch, reacting to his kisses and nibbles and then to the feel of his tongue as it slid across her flat tummy and down the insides of her thighs, first one, then the other.
She cupped his head to help him in what he was doing. He saw her close her eyes and slip into her own mind.
