“No, you don’t.”
Henry works his hand between our bodies, pushes the pillow into me. “I want you to keep rubbing your clit on me. I want to be inside you when you come.”
He sounds so earnest, looking up at me with his sweet serial-killer face. I squeeze him between my thighs and I fuck and I fuck and I fuck.
“You get so tight,” Henry says. “Like you don’t want to let me go.” He does this, he tells me beautiful stories about us that wouldotherwise turn my stomach. Like some kind of exposure therapy for true love. I come for a long time, shaking my headnoas Henry insists it’s true, it’s true. We love each other.
Henry rolls me onto my back. I’m exhausted, malleable, slick behind my knees and at the nape of my neck. He braces himself on his knuckles above me, his hair flopping at his forehead as he pushes in and out of me. I brush it out of his face, tenderly, because maybe it’s all a little bit true. Henry’s lips part and his eyes turn to sleepy, twilight slits.
“Let me love you, Faye.” He manages to make it sound like a kingly order. He holds my chin in his hand, he forces me to look at him, and I promise him I will try. Then he comes with his mouth on mine, kissing me softly like I am a normal girl, someone who says things likesoulmatesandmaking love. It is as repugnant as it ever was, but I take it. For Henry, I take it.
Chapter 22
I shove open a window and breathe in the pristine morning. Henry’s golden head bobs in the lake, his hands working suds through his hair. I make coffee for us like a dutiful little wife, head out barefoot into the thick, noisy morning, alternating the length of my stride to spare the worms and critters stranded after the storm. The crickets are chirping at a frenetic pace, and I remember Henry telling me that there is a way to calculate the temperature outside by counting their chirps in fourteen- or fifteen-second increments, then adding some number I can longer remember.
I pause in the skimpy shade at the base of the dock and try not to squint. The trees are flowering with small white and purple flowers, beautiful but ineffectual when it comes to my concerns—aging and melanoma, in that order. Henry hauls himself up the ladder, biceps corded and dazzled with wet. He steps naked onto the dock, a hulking, streaming sea creature. He reaches for a towel and dries his hair as he strides over to me at an unhurried, unselfconscious pace, his cock swinging mightily between his legs.
“Why are you cowering back here?”
I hand him a mug. “Shade.”
He considers me with an up-and-down swoop of his eyes as he sips the coffee. “How do you manage living in California?”
“Hats, mineral sunscreen, depression.”
“Depression?”
“It makes it hard to leave the house during the day. I actually think it’s my best-kept beauty secret.”
Henry removes my mug from my hands and sets it on the floorboards of the dock. I know what he’s going to do before he does it, and I turn to get a head start. He gets me by my bouncy cheerleader ponytail, picks me up in a bear hug, and marches us to the end of the dock while I kick and protest.
Henry lays me down on the degraded gray floorboards and pins me in place with his knees. From the shower caddy next to the ladder, he produces a slimy bottle of Hawaiian Tropic dark tanning oil with an SPF of two. It is possibly the same bottle Henry used when we were in our twenties. Despite all his preciousness when it comes to his diet and his teeth and his hair, Henry has always been reckless about the sun. I watch from beneath him, appalled, as he lubes his coconut-sized shoulders, somehow nut brown though it is not even May yet.
“How are you not dead of melanoma?” I ask.
“The sun is not bad for you here,” Henry replies, completely serious.
I laugh. Here. Like the Adirondacks have a special kind of sun, one that doesn’t spot and wrinkle and metastasize to your brain.
Henry drags an oiled finger down the bridge of my nose. “Do you still get freckles?”
“They’re called sunspots in your thirties.”
Henry looks crestfallen a moment. “How did you celebrate it?”
“Thirty?”
“No,” Henry retorts, “your first sunspot.”
I squirm beneath him as he knots my T-shirt under my breasts. “You really want to know?”
“You’re not the only masochist on this dock.” Henry drizzles my middle with more oil. I am trying not to think of everything I will have to do to undo this—probably more of those tiny little needles with the electric microcurrent that makes my limbs involuntarily flail. The thing they do with my own blood: extracting it, spinning it, injecting it right back into my face.
“We did a dinner,” I say as Henry bastes my thighs next, “at this old-school steakhouse in Hollywood that’s been around since the 1920s. You know, iceberg salad with creamy dressing and tiny martinis that go down in three sips.”
“What did you wear?”
I smile. I like that Henry cares about what I wear. “Black leather pants and a black tank top. No bra.”