Something Real
I’ve been fucking the married woman for six months now, and I think we’ve found our sweet spot. Yesterday, when we woke up, I was already spooned to her backside, and when she noticed I was awake, she parted her legs so my fingers would find her. There’s something different about our morning sex. She’s softer, gentler, slower, stilling while I trace over the outline of her breasts, skim my nails over her stomach, massage the dimpling spots between her legs.
“You make me feel so good,” she whispers when I kiss her neck, and I think – this feels like something real. I know how to make her cum in less than fifteen minutes. I know what to say to rev her up: Baby, you feel so good. Baby, you’re so wet. Baby, I love your sweet, little pussy. I can predict the way she’ll arch and buck when I play with the dimple just above her ass, how she’ll grab my fingers and bring them to her lips.
When she leaves, the sheets linger on her smell – a tang mixed with soft floral scent – the only softness I can find most days. I rise and face the brutal heat of the summer morning, put on a socially acceptable amount of makeup, and fight traffic into work. I spend my mornings engrossed in reports and statistics, drink my afternoon tea with gluten-free creme cookies, listen to my coworkers chat mindlessly in the kitchen. They’re all focused on sucking up to the CEO or maneuvering themselves into the open Director position. They talk about KPMs and retention, quoting their favorite motivational speakers: “Start before you’re ready!” I’ve stopped reminding them that we all must move in our own time, that speed is not the only way to the finish line. No one says things like this anymore, or at least that’s what my coworkers have told me.
Every day, I wake up; I wander. The whole world feels like a movie people are performing in, and I’m a background character who just took the gig to cover their car payment. “It’s not real!” I want to scream at them. “You’re all just following a script!” I want them to be more like me – to take the money and leave the performance, to sink further into themselves, to question things, to find sweetness in real things like fucking and Palisade peaches and the swell of the loping river – but they don’t even know they’re performing.
With the married woman, I don’t have to perform. I’m present. Rooted. When I’m thrusting the eight-inch dildo inside of her or working my fingers around her perfect pink clit, I never think about work or the watercooler rumors. When she’s running her fingertips over my lips and chin, her mouth open and her breath on the air, I don’t obsess about the wildfires twenty miles south of us, or how this summer is the hottest on record, the smoke blocking the sunlight, forcing us to live eclipsed for days on end. Occasionally, she likes to lay me back on the pillows and slide two fingers inside of me, moaning when my body shakes for her. Just me and her and our bodies. That’s real. Isn’t it?
“Why do you like me?” I ask in the middle of the night, tucked into her backside, the fine strands of her hair smelling of shampoo and used sheets. The fan rocks above us.
“Because you’re kind,” she murmurs, full of sleep. “Because you’re sensitive and funny and hot.”
Because you’re kind. I think about this long after her breaths have evened out, and the tension in her belly goes slack as she presses into dreams. I fall asleep telling myself that this matters. That this, right here, primal and uninhibited, is more real than any promotion, or workplace gossip, realer than social media and its sucking, angry comments, the fancy galas we go to on weekends to prove we’re part of our communities, to let people know we’re still here. This is honest, this is soft, this is all that humanity has lost.
“Kind?” I ask her in the morning, the sun casting the room golden through the blinds.
She considers. “You don’t demand.”
When she kisses the corner of my mouth, her lips smelling of morning, I think this is the realest thing of all: her sneaking out early to make pancakes and bacon for her kids and husband, a life I have never wanted – not even with her. Real. The job that pays my bills constantly reminding me of all in this world that’s painful and wrong. Real. The tiniest amount of makeup allowing me to escape social judgement, while simultaneously making me feel like I’ve failed to be my true self. Real. Me alone in the bed in the peacefulness of the morning, the birds cooing outside, half sad to be alone, half relieved to finally be able to bask in my own energy again. Real. A life split between desire and solitude, softness and bleakness, performance and sincerity.
Real.
Chelsea Catherine began writing poetry at eight years old and eventually expanded into fiction and nonfiction. They live in the high desert of Colorado where they like walking dogs at the local animal shelter, painting, and reading books about the art of living. Find them at chelseacatherinewriter.com.