With relief she sees the thing he’s fetched is a rubber. Miss Dolly’s girls had told her the most difficult part about rubbers was getting anyone to wear them. The girls preferred pessaries, which they said were not always easy to come by. Barclay crawls onto the bed, nudges her legs apart with his knee. He pauses briefly, meeting her eyes, giving her a last chance to change her mind. The first sensation is one of adjustment: her groin muscles absorbing the strain of his weight, much greater than Caleb’s, her internal architecture shifting. The feeling of him is obscure and distant, some message from a subterranean city, yet as he moves she begins to feel a gathering, a quickening, as though what they are doing is urgent and necessary, as though something important hangs in the balance.
Maybe she had known this would be the consequence of turning the plane upside down.
“Are you all right?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Does it hurt?”
“A bit.”
“You haven’t done this before, have you?”
“No.”
He stares at her. She can’t tell if he believes her. Brusquely, he pulls out, turns her over so her face is engulfed in pillows and pushes into her unceremoniously from behind. After a moment he rolls over, pulling her on top of him. Then he is pressing her onto her back again, pushing her knees up against her shoulders.
As he arranges her limbs first one way and then another, he radiates itchy dissatisfaction, and she surrenders to the role of startled, silent bystander. What does he want from her? He doesn’t quite seem to know. She wonders if all his encounters are like this, if all his girls feel like dolls in the hands of an impatient, tyrannical little boy.
He turns her over restlessly, puzzling at her body as though it contains the key to something he wants but is not itself that thing. To her surprise, she finds his impersonal manipulations exciting, but he, fussing over the position of her arms, is beginning to have difficulty maintaining an erection, a possibility she hadn’t ever considered. Placing her arms above her head and pushing them firmly into the mattress as though telling them to stay put, he takes his softening member in hand and attempts to stuff it into her.
“Shit,” he says, rolling off. He hunches on the edge of the bed, trying to chafe himself back into hardness.
“Did I do something wrong?” she says.
The movement of his arm ceases. “I don’t know how to trust you,” he says.
“What should I do?”
“Promise not to be with anyone else.”
“I have. But what should I do now?”
He turns and looks at her until he seems to reach a decision. Drawing a long breath through his nose, he swivels to lie beside her. Holding her gaze, he fits his hand carefully around her throat. He does not squeeze, but her pulse flutters like a trapped butterfly.
What follows is not entirely different from what had come before, but he is more decided. He holds her by the head, the hips, the wrists. He puts his penis in her mouth, something Caleb had never done. She is lost in a state of perpetual transition: exhilarated then nauseated, fearful then reckless, debased then venerated. He seems to want so profoundly. She thinks he might destroy her, break her like some small animal and not even notice because what he wants is not actually in her but beyond her, somewhere else, or perhaps doesn’t exist.
When he comes, it is with a terrible grimace.
At some unnoticed point it had begun to rain. He gets up to open the window, letting in the dusty smell of a summer storm.
“Are you all right?” he says, returning to bed.
“Yes.”
“I meant to be gentle. I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t know whether or not he wants her to say it was fine.
“There’s no blood anyway,” he says, uneasy.
“I spent a lot of time on horseback,” she says.
He seems to accept this. He asks, “Do you know what a rubber does?”
“It’s so I don’t get pregnant.” She pauses. “You thought to bring one along.”
“I’ve been carrying it around, just in case. How did you know about rubbers?”
“From Dolly’s girls. Lucky that didn’t fall out of your pocket and land on someone’s head.”
He is on his side, close to her. He rests his fingertips on her clavicle. “Someday, of course, we’ll want a baby.”
Marian is taken aback. “I’ve never thought about it.” This is the unadorned truth—never once has she imagined herself cradling an infant.
“All girls want babies.”