The daybed’s too small for us to lie side by side afterward, so I turn my back to Leo to gather my thoughts. Where are my thoughts? Leo turns and wraps his arms around me, kisses the back of my neck. I’m feeling a little embarrassed. I have never in my life been this exposed.
“I’ve been thinking about that for a long time,” he says.
“You only met me two weeks ago.”
Leo laughs and kisses my shoulder. “You really aren’t very romantic, are you?”
“I might be an overthinker.”
“I’ll fix you,” he says, and I turn around to face him. He’s joking, but I love the idea of being on the other side of the fixing equation. I love the idea that he thinks I’m worth the trouble. I love that buried deep in that sentence is a hint of the future tense.
* * *
? ? ?
My kids know something’s up, but mercifully they don’t know what. They’re at an age where their first suspicion wouldn’t be sex, but they’re also at an age where they are exquisitely tuned in to subtle changes in their mother. I feel them watching me, and I don’t know if it’s the lightness in my body or the smile on my face while I wash potatoes. I know I’m glowing, and there’s nothing I can do to hide that or make it stop.
While everything’s changed, in that first week my routine isn’t so different. Sunrise, breakfast, kids to school, run, shower, tea house from ten to two. Except instead of writing, I lie in bed with a movie star. There’s a lot of sex, like a ridiculous amount of sex. In my previous life, I would have considered half this amount of sex to be a complete nightmare, but now a day spent in bed feels like a day well spent. It’s possible that I didn’t really understand what sex was before Leo.
I used to think about the plumber a lot when I had sex with Ben. Not because I was in any way attracted to the plumber, but more because I’d wonder if I’d called to have him check the seal on the outdoor water spigot. If I hadn’t, the pipes might freeze and burst, and that would be really pricey. A fix like that would bite into my already tight Christmas budget. And I really needed to convince Arthur that he doesn’t need a drum set. Forget the noise, but just the amount of space it would take up and how much it would irritate me to vacuum around it when he was sick of it by New Year’s. On New Year’s Day, I like making a curried chicken salad, but Arthur’s doctor has repeatedly told us that he might want to cut back on dairy. I’d have to break that tradition because of the mayonnaise. But, wait. Mayonnaise is just oil and eggs. There’s no dairy in mayonnaise! Arthur can have all he wants! I could even make macaroni salad and that vegetable dip he likes. Mayonnaise isn’t dairy, I’d smile to myself as Ben rolled off of me. Of course, Ben thought that smile, like everything else, was about him.
I guess the problem with Ben in bed was the same as the problem with Ben out of bed: Ben’s all about Ben. Ben is focused exclusively on what’s going to make Ben happy, what’s going to make Ben feel good, and what’s going to reflect well on Ben to the outside world. With Leo, it’s not about either of us. It’s like there’s this third thing we’ve created. We step into that space and the rest of the world is gone. There is no time, no news, no world outside that daybed until three o’clock.
Leo likes to run his finger from the bottom of my ear, down my neck, and along my collarbone, and sometimes the rhythm of it puts me to sleep. We get up for food deliveries. Sometimes we run errands. We are at once energized and lazy, supercharged and sleepy. I wonder if other people can feel that we are operating on a different energetic wave, like we hear a separate soundtrack and feel the air on our skin in a more exquisite way. Deep down, I’m fully aware that this is not a sustainable reality, but I cling to it like you do with a really good dream when you’re sure you could never replicate the feeling in real life.
Leo has never set foot in my bedroom. He doesn’t so much as brush his hand against mine when my kids are home. We don’t discuss this, but he seems to understand my instinct to protect them. In the darkest corner of my being, where a tiny piece of me still recognizes reality, I know Leo is temporary. I’m in for a horrible fall, but as long as I can keep that as my problem, not theirs, this is worth it.
He starts coming on my runs, which he says are boring. I like a loop because it forces me to finish. And, frankly, my whole life is a loop; every day I end up right where I began. He likes variety, so we start exploring the back country roads that wind around Laurel Ridge. Some stretches are paved and some are dirt, changing up that sound our feet make as we run. We pass an occasional house with a split-rail fence, but mostly the roads have meadows on both sides, lined with the last of the daffodils. Old cherry trees and dogwoods offer sporadic shade, and if the wind blows at just the right time, we run through a shower of white blossoms that feel like confetti.