Joe covers his three-year-old daughter with a duvet and kisses her on the forehead.
“Good night Nuri, sleep well. Who loves you?”
“It’s you daddy.” She responds calmly.
“Who loves you the most?”
“It’s you daddy.”
He goes back the sitting room to be with his wife Chero. They finish watching an episode of Power on TV, then Chero drinks that extra glass of wine, then Joe sips his scotch on ice, then they brush their teeth, relieve their bladders, and slide into the clean white, cotton sateen sheets Chero put on that very morning, Joe leans into Chero’s face and kisses her.
“Don’t kiss me.” She turns her head away.
‘‘Why?” Joe is bemused.
“You know why.”
“Seriously Chero. We need to do better. These frequent arguments are not helping us.”
“It’s not my fault.”
“Whose fault is it then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Remember when we used to have sex frequently? We never used to argue.”
“That’s true.”
“We need to go back to that.”
“I thought you no longer find me attractive.”
“I do.”
“Show it then.”
First he kisses her on the edge of her cheek, on the part of the cheek that is right next to her mouth. Then he moves in closer to her lips, touching the corner of her mouth with his mouth. She turns her face toward him now, in the dark, her eyes closed, and he leans his upper body over hers and turns his face so his nose won’t get in the way and he pushes his mouth against hers and, openmouthed, they kiss.
Their tongues reach out and taste, and damn, if it doesn’t taste good. Damn if it doesn’t taste like warmth, like booze, and like that familiar flavor that is each other.
This is not a night when Joe will fart obscenely in bed next to her, pretending not to, and Chero, despising him, will snap her magazine angrily into a perfect tent in front of her face. Nor is it a night, like so many nights just before this night, when Chero would be full of mood swings.
Those first three months are over. Those three months of hell, that first trimester of pregnancy when the only thing Joe could do to survive being in the house with her was to pretend she wasn’t there. Gone is that horrible time. Done with it. She’d be there, and he’d pretend, just like he did as a child when his father was yelling, or his mother was yelling, that the person in question was not there.
Tonight he can’t not see her. He couldn’t, if he wanted to, which he doesn’t, imagine her gone. Tonight he is mesmerized. Tonight he looked at her on the couch, lazing with him in front of the TV, and he saw a beautiful, young woman. The woman he fell in love with.
He saw her as she was six years ago, he saw her as no different than she was when she was barely twenty five. And now, in their marriage bed, in her blue nightgown that he lifts over her head, he sees her and loves what he sees. The bones in her face are strong but womanly, her mouth is wet and inviting, her eyes are smart but slightly troubled, definitely knowing. Often thinking of something dirty.
His wife is still the dirty-minded college girl he once knew. And this, in the dark now, now that she is over that first part of her second pregnancy, now that she no longer repulses him, no longer hates him, now that she is resigned to her body and the strange creature inhabiting her, the stranger that neither of them have any idea who it will be, this bud of a person that he planted in her womb, now that this baby isn’t torturing his wife anymore, now, now, she is so smashable.
Her skin seems oiled, it’s moist, dammit, and sparkling at him he swears, and her eyes are wet like a healthy cat’s, glowing at him in the dark, open now, looking at him while their tongues stroke the insides of their mouths like they’ve never tasted each other before.
How could kissing this woman be anything that ever happened again? After years of marriage, years of just routine smashing, not that anything’s wrong with that, but years really where they would never, ever have kissed, preferring to get straight to the part that matters, kissing having bored them, kissing having been something of the past. Kissing not being on their minds, but they still needed to get off.
His balls would fill. She was the nice lady next to him who empties them for him. He always felt gratitude, but he had stopped feeling wonder. Excitement. Urgency. Except during these precious months when she was pregnant with their first child. And now, again, this gift. This time, this fleeting moment in their lives.
Here he is, his hands on her boobies which are so swollen, so sensitive she moans and pulls away slightly and he just can’t believe these are his wife’s bréasts because these were not his wife’s bréasts a few months ago. His wife’s jugs a few months ago were dried out, tired nipplés that lay nearly flat against her ribcage. His wife’s bréasts, when she’s not pregnant, were never as fleshy as her thighs.
It would be fleshy thighs and flat bréasts. Now he can’t even rely on her thighs to turn him on. His wife has bréasts! Serious bréasts. Not yet full of milk, but swollen and ready for what’s to come.
He has one in his hand and another in his mouth and she’s shaking now, because all those hormones that are making her bréasts grow into these beautiful fruits are making them raw with nerves. He has to be gentle. He doesn’t want to be gentle, precisely because he must be in the face of her painful, swollen bréasts. He squeezes and sucks them and she can’t stay still. She’s just squirming. He can tell it’s uncomfortable, hears her breathe out the word ouch, and she puts her own hand on them to protect herself, but also to feel them herself.
Because these bréasts are a gift from God, the God who gave humans the ability to reproduce, and to feed their young. These glorious titties are blessed and she wants to hold them too.
Joe arches his entire body over her now, he’s up on his knees, not leaning his body on hers, no, he wants to see her, and he locks his mouth on hers again and goodness, he’s kissing his goddamn wife. He wants to lick out the inside of her throat. And then he puts his finger in her puss-puss just like that, and it’s as warm and wet as melted honey. He nearly comes right then. But he pulls away from her and takes a deep breath.
On his knees now he grabs his cockerel hard and pushes at it. Down boy. Go get em boy. Go at it boy.
Not yet. Breathe in, breathe out.
Oh, man. Her skinny legs are splayed out from the bowl of her small hips, and in the dark he can just make out her glistening pudénda.
Jesus. He can’t look at it. He looks away. If he puts his rod in there now, he’ll just come right away and that is not what he wants to do. But what else can he do now? He could eat her puss-puss, but he doesn’t really want to. It’s about his cock tonight, about the effect this lady that is his wife is having on his eager dickson.
He could get back on those titties, but he’ll probably come right away doing that, too.
So what he does is turn her over and there’s her boot, which he loves, he loves his wife’s boot. But it’s calming him a bit, he loves it but it’s familiar, not strange and new like those bréasts and it’s not her fucking wet puss-puss staring at him either, and he feels calm.
But oh God, she’s lifting it up at him and there’s no hiding from what’s underneath it. And so he leans over her to not look, and, anyway, his dickson has been safely calmed, it’s still hard as rock, but not as near to bursting, and he rubs it on her like a cat in heat and then she’s rubbing her boot back at him. Her boot is asking him to stick his dickson in her, which he does—sticks it into her like a fork into chips. He leans over her and takes each one of those bréasts in his hands.
And then he grabs both bréasts in one hand, smashing them together hard, and she lets out a short cry, and with his free hand he grabs her head and twists it around, back toward him, so that he can shove his tongue down her mouth again.
Damn. Damn.
Oh, if his wife were always pregnant! Oh, if his wife were always four months, five months, even six months pregnant! Not one or two or three! And not seven or eight or nine! But that middle time, this middle time, how he loves her, how he can’t believe it’s her, how ripe she is, how womanly, how soft and precious and giving and forgiving she is! Oh, if she could only stay this fleshy, this wet, this ready. If only she were always in a dimly lit room, if only her bréasts were always like this in a dark room. Then, then his life would be perfect.
His wife, locked away in a dimly lit room, a room which only he had the key to, permanently four months pregnant.
This whole putting things off is not working. Or, rather, it is working and Joe has changed his mind. He turns her over again, and his wife’s bréasts flop around in a good way, loose and real, and there are her hip bones, her splayed legs, and he gently thumbs her clitty but she pushes his hand off of her puss-puss and arches up to him, her own hands on her titties, moaning and he grips her hips and thrusts in there deep and he’s just gonna come. It’s just gonna happen.
Her head is twisted to the side and her own hands smash her bréasts together—they touch! They’re so big they touch each other!—and he thrusts again but he’s going to come and he can come inside her if he wants, she’s already pregnant, it’s not going to make her more pregnant, and he loves everything about this, the no condom, the no cervical cap which he used to bang up against, the no smelly spermicidal jelly, just the thick, tangy smell of his dickson in her puss-puss and he can come inside her if he wants.
But he wants to come on her face is what he wants and he hopes she’s up for it, and really he knows she is because that’s why he married her. Not because he needed someone to cook him dinner, not because he wanted her to raise his kids, mop his floors, and put his underwear in the dresser drawer. No, he married her because she’s the kind of woman who likes to pretend she’s a porn star. He wants to lift his dickspn out and hold it over those bréasts and that’s exactly what he does.
His knees up near her armpits now and one hand is on his pulsing cock, and the other is grasping her round, fleshy bréasts together, and he shoots out come all over her tussled, beautiful face, and her round, round bréasts, banging his cock against one nipplé, then her chin, tap, tap, tap, knocking out every last drop of himself onto her, his wife.
And Joe is, in no small way, the happiest manon earth.
“Baby…..” He turns to her.
“Yes husband?” She stares at him with soft eyes.
“Let’s make our marriage work okay?”
“Yes dear. Let’s make our marriage work.”
