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From: Selena Jardine <selenajardine@yahoo.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} Home Safe
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 01:10:03 -0500
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Home Safe
by Selena Jardine


Traffic had slowed to a halt on the Beltway.  I was tired. 
I wanted a shower; Sarah would probably make me shave; I
needed a drink.  As far as I could see in front of me, the
jeweled highway was blinking:  diamonds of headlights and
rubies of taillights reflected in the cars' own August
heat.  No one was honking.  These were all professional
two-hour-a-day commuters, like me, NPR-listeners,
hands-free cellphone freaks, feverish book-on-tape
consumers, and they knew it was pointless.  

There had probably been an accident, some fenderbender that
had snarled into hundreds of microwaved dinners and frantic
reschedulings.  Or maybe there was some construction up
ahead.  A pretty woman I knew at work told me that she
called the Department of Transportation every week so she
could avoid the scheduled construction that seemed to dog
commuters year-round.  I remembered thinking at the time
how smart that was, how I should do that and shave a few
minutes off my drive home.  I remembered looking at her
full breasts, then down, away, at the high, rounded curve
of her belly.  She'd be taking leave soon, she said, for
the baby.

Tonight I was in no hurry to shave minutes off my commute,
to get home to Sarah and our quiet house.  Tonight I was
content to sit on the Beltway and postpone the dread for
half an hour, forty-five minutes more.  Tonight was sex
night again.

+++++

It had started two years ago, with a flush and a bad pun: 
Sarah and I had watched together as she'd sent her birth
control pills down the toilet.  When she was done, she'd
looked up at me with those laughing brown eyes and said,
"Oh, baby."  If I hadn't been standing so close to her in
the tiny bathroom, I might not have noticed that she was
breathing as though she'd been running.  

I bent down to her, my own pulse so loud in my ears that I
wondered if she could hear it, and lifted her, her legs
wrapped awkwardly around my waist, and carried her to the
bed.  Sex that day was an impossible surprise, an urgency,
a responsibility that pushed us off into unknown waters. 
We hadn't even bothered to pull back the covers, and
Sarah'd had the marks of the chenille bedspread on her fair
skin for hours afterwards.  I'd suckled the nipples that
might one day feed my children, and when my body stiffened
in impending orgasm, pouring like quicksilver into her, it
was Sarah who cried out, "Yes!  Yes!"  and laughed aloud.

That month, though, she had her period, regular as
clockwork.  She was philosophical about it.  "Nobody gets
pregnant on the first try, Adam," she said.  

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, my shirt off, one
shoe in my hand.  I knew that as well as she did, and she
knew that I knew.  It was the first in a series of tiny
false notes, the first sign that she was going to pretend
she didn't need reassuring, not Sarah Wilson.  Though that
first barrier was easy enough to step past:  I stood up,
awkward in one shoe, and took her in my arms.  It only took
a moment's hesitation for her to relax, unhappy, into them.

"It's okay," I said, hoping it was true, holding her body
close.

"I know," she answered.  "I just hate the feeling that when
my body does exactly what it's supposed to do, it's
betraying me."  Her voice was muffled against my bare
chest, and the feeling of her warm lips moving against my
skin was giving me a hard-on.  I ignored it -- not coming
on to your wife when you're supposed to be comforting her
is an important relationship nugget -- but Sarah looked up
at me.  Her lashes were wet, but her dimples were showing. 
"Well, hello there," she said, and laced her fingers
through my belt-loops.  She began rolling her hips slowly
against mine, point to point, feeling my hardness, making
me harder.  My hands came up to cup her breasts, and I
kissed her, forcefully enough to hurt a little.  Maybe I
was relieved that the crisis seemed to be past.  When we
surfaced for air, it looked like she was fighting giggles,
or maybe more tears.  "Enjoy the freelance while you can,"
she said, and pulled me by my belt-loops onto the bed,
where relief came in a different form.

The next month, the poetry and booklight on Sarah's bedside
table made way for a thermometer and a temperature chart. 
She'd been to websites, she'd talked to friends.  "We have
to be scientific about this," she kept saying.

"Okay," I said, and meant it.

Her chin went up.  "You don't have to keep track," she
said, calmly enough.  She was sitting too far away for me
to hear her breathing.

"Sarah, dammit," I said.  Started over, keeping my voice
even.  "Sarah.  I want to be part of this.  I *have* to be
part of this, but I also want to."  I waited for a
response.  Nothing.  I felt helpless.  I wanted to ask her
not to leave, but that was ridiculous.  "Just -- keep me
with you, okay?"  Ridiculous.  She lowered her brown eyes,
as if considering, then nodded noncommittally.  She didn't
say a word.  

Three days later, I was reading in bed.  Sarah rolled
toward me, put a tentative hand on my thigh, and said,
"It's time, Adam."

Startled, I said, "What?"

"I'm supposed to be -- it's time."

"Oh," I said, catching on,  "oh, good!  Great," and,
putting my book on the floor with one hand, I put my hand
on her waist with the other and pulled her toward me.  Her
color was high on the fair skin, and she came hard and
long, clenching her fists on the sheet beneath her.

Two weeks later, she had her period.

After eight months of trying with no success -- all shake
and no bake, as Sarah memorably put it -- we went to the
doctor together.  The doctor, a blonde woman of about
thirty-eight, asked questions we had both anticipated, and
we gave smooth, practiced answers.  Yes, Sarah's
temperature charts indicated she was ovulating.  Yes, we
practiced intercourse on the recommended days.  No (I
answered with a large, insincere smile), I was not wearing
"tighty whiteys."

The doctor drew blood from Sarah's arm, the two female
heads together, one dark, one light.  I got a sterile jar
and an antiseptic room to beat off in.  I thought of Kathy
Dieter from college, her sweet tanned haunches in front of
me, the way I went without textbooks and would cheerfully
have gone without food to afford condoms for our noisy,
sweaty, carefree fucking.

All the tests came back normal, we were told on our second
visit.  The pathways seemed to be clear; my sperm was
within normal limits; Sarah had all the right hormones.  

"There isn't much we can do," said the doctor, raising her
hands, apparently to show the futility of modern medicine
in these mysterious affairs.  Sarah sat beside me in a blue
dress and sneakers.  Her hands lay in her lap, soccer
Madonna.  "Sometimes it just takes some time and no one
knows why."

Afterwards, in the car, we sat for a moment in silence. 
Then, unexpectedly enough that I started in my seat, Sarah
hit the door with the side of her clenched fist.  "No one
knows why?  Jesus Christ, some expert she is.  I bet she
didn't even send off that blood for testing."  She hit the
door again, harder this time.  "She probably just eyeballed
it and decided nothing was wrong."

"My sperm, too," I said helpfully.  "Probably has a little
collection in her freezer.  For the *special* cocktail
parties."  Sarah snorted, and her shoulders relaxed a tiny
bit, but she didn't really think it was very funny.

That night, after I finished a long run, I went into the
bathroom and started running myself a bath.  I was achy and
tired, looking forward to the water, as hot as I could bear
it, on my sore muscles.  

"What are you doing?" said Sarah from the doorway.  Her
voice was sharp.

"Running a bath," I said, looking at her.

"What do you mean, running a bath?  A hot bath?"

"Of course, a hot bath."  The mirror was starting to steam
up.  What was she talking about?

"Don't you even *want* a baby?"  I was starting to feel
angry and punch-drunk, my calves trembling with exhaustion.
 Then I understood.  

"Sarah.  There's nothing wrong with me.  With my sperm. 
The tests --"

"Well, there goddamn well will be if you boil it," she
said.  "And are you saying that there *is* something wrong
with *me*?"

"No!  Jesus!"  But she was gone.  We made it up, of course,
and she cried and I held her.  But I quit taking baths. 
One more thing under suspicion.  Or two, if you meant my
balls.

Every month after that, Sarah spun a little faster, and her
focus became a little narrower, and her loathing for the
Kotex pads under the sink became a little blacker.  She
wasn't crazy.  She wasn't even obsessed, not really.  But
some of the light went out of those brown eyes, and she
walked too fast, past playgrounds full of shouting kids and
past certain topics of conversation.  Once, we were at a
party for someone at Sarah's office, and a woman we were
talking to started a smiling question, "So, when are you
two --" She never got the chance to finish.  Sarah tripped
on an invisible line in the carpet and spilled her drink
everywhere.  We left shortly after that, Sarah needing to
change into something clean.

I didn't bring it up, after the party.  It wasn't easy for
me to be part of Sarah's spin, wondering whether I was
expected at any given moment to be intuitive, clairvoyant
or tougher than a fifteen-cent steak.  Easier, much easier,
not to have noticed her narrowed mouth, the breathing that
was almost panting, before the incident got lost in the
apologies.

Our sex life got narrower, too:  the important part became
the carefully-timed coupling three or four times mid-month,
followed each time by an hour in bed to let my sperm make
its way through Sarah's womb.  I would lie beside her,
looking at her cool, remote profile, her chin pointing at
the ceiling.  Sometimes I would close my eyes and imagine
the child we hoped for.  Usually it was a girl who looked
exactly as I imagined Sarah had when she was a baby, with
coffee-brown eyes and hair.  Just once, half-dreaming, I
saw a tiny boy with my own blue eyes looking back at me. 
He opened his mouth.  *It hurts,* he said, and I suddenly
woke to find Sarah looking at me in the twilight, an
unreadable expression on her face.


It had to break sometime.  One day I was lazily
masturbating in the bedroom, thinking I was alone for an
hour at least, and she walked in on me.  She stood in the
doorway, her eyes round with disbelief and something else,
and the something else grew as my dick wilted.  She waited
as I zipped my pants and then turned and went into the
living room.  Good, I thought.  Take it out of the bedroom
for a change.  But it didn't turn out that way.

"Adam, I just don't even know what to say to you."

"Because I was jacking off?  Oh, come off it, Sarah."

"It's sex night *tomorrow night*."

"And I'm supposed to be a monk or something?  Sarah, it's
been almost ten days since we had sex.  You can't just ask
me to abstain except for three days a month."

"Why not?  I don't exactly ask you to do very much on those
three days, do I?"

"No, that's exactly it," I said.  I wasn't shouting, but I
was standing very close to her, and I could feel the
tendons standing out in my neck.  "Exactly it.  All I am
any more is a boner.  A boner and a donor.  Night deposit. 
Not a husband, not a partner.  And all because I can't be a
father."  Or because you can't be a mother.  It hung in the
air, unsaid.

"Be a father?"  She almost spat the words.  "You don't even
make me come any more."

I was so angry I could hardly see.  I'd fought her on that,
showed her studies that said female orgasm could help
conception, that it might even be the purpose of the whole
delicate business.  She'd refused, been immovable, said
she'd read it could force sperm out of the body.

I didn't raise my hand to her.  But I didn't sleep with her
that night, either, or the next, or the next.  We nursed
our bruises and our distrust under the same roof, slowly
recovering from what had been said, and what had not.  One
night I found that the nest of blankets I'd made on the
couch was gone; I took it as an invitation.  Things were
fragile, friable around the edges, but the center seemed
all right still, to me.  I didn't know how it seemed to
Sarah.

+++++ 

It was dark by the time I finally made it through the
traffic jams on the Beltway and pulled into the driveway. 
I switched the car off and sat for a moment, listening to
the tick of the engine, rubbing at the delicate skin under
my eyes.  Two years.  I was starting to feel all but
superfluous.  This seemed to be Sarah's argument with
herself, something I was less and less a part of.  I
thought again of my coworker, her breasts and belly, the
way she'd abruptly admitted to me one day over coffee that
the baby had been an accident.  She was happy now, she
hastened to assure me, smiling, but at first!... An
accident.

These thoughts were too familiar.  I pushed them away and
went inside.  I noticed on my way through the garage that
Sarah's car wasn't there, and the house was dark and still.
 I tried to remember:  was this her night for ballet class?
 I found a note stuck to the microwave:  "Out.  Eat.  Love.
 S.", and I took a sandwich into the den with me.

But I wasn't really hungry.  And I couldn't concentrate on
the ball game.  Where was Sarah?  She was always home when
I got home.  I got up and walked around restlessly.  Maybe
she'd waited for me to get home and decided I was being
late on purpose.  No, she knew traffic around here.  And as
if giving in to something that had been there all along, I
wondered, with a sudden desperate unhappiness, if she was
with someone else.  Someone who could give her what she
wanted so badly.  I stood for a moment, my head lowered, my
thoughts full of this idea:  some other man's prick in my
wife's cunt, some other man's child in my wife's belly,
some hunger satisfied.  Then I shook myself, as if coming
out of a dream or a fever.  Sarah was shopping, or she was
out with a friend, or she was at a movie, or she was
watching the goddamn Chippendales, for all I knew.  She
would tell me when she got home.  I was going to sit on the
couch and eat my sandwich and watch my baseball game and be
sensible.  So I waited.


I must have fallen asleep in front of the television.  I
awoke with its blue light flickering over me in the dark
room, aware that it had suddenly fallen silent.  "Shhhh,"
breathed a warm voice in my ear.  What? I thought.  I felt
half-stunned.  And then a warm, wet mouth enveloped my
earlobe.  I drew breath sharply and tried to turn my head,
but felt a fierce little nip.  "Shhhh," said the voice
again, and warm lips began to trail open kisses down the
tendon in my neck toward the hollow of my throat.  I had an
erection already.  I couldn't remember the last time she...
the last time we had been like this.

I closed my eyes and raised one hand toward the weight
beside me on the couch.  Terrycloth; a warm scent of skin
and soap; finally, one warm breast falling sweetly into my
hand like a ripe apple, with a nipple almost painfully
hard.  I could hear her breathing, fast and light, as I
moved my thumb over the nipple, flicking it with the nail. 
Her hand rested at the inside of my knee for a moment, then
moved up over the fabric of my pants, over and over, light
strokes up my inner thighs that just grazed my balls.  My
cock was throbbing, pushing at my zipper.

I fumbled for the tie of her robe and opened it to find her
other breast, but she stopped me when I tried to slide it
off her shoulders.  "Ah ah," she whispered warm in my ear. 
"I need that."  Then her fingers were at my waistband,
freeing the button and letting her knuckles slowly drag the
length of my cock as she slid the zipper down.  One
heartbeat, and then the wet heat of her mouth was hungry on
the head of my cock.  I groaned aloud.  It had been more
than a year since Sarah had tasted me; not a useful
position for conception.  My buttocks clenched as she
began:  Sarah was very good at this.  Her tongue swirled
around the head, vibrated for a moment on the underside of
the swollen glans, tenderly stroked the length of my cock. 
Jesus.  Suction now, with tiny dancing movements of the tip
of her tongue that sent pulses of pleasure through me.  I
couldn't stop gasping.  My hips were beginning to thrust
involuntarily. 

Sarah's suction stopped.  I froze, and her mouth left my
cock.  Right, I thought, trying to control my breathing, my
mind almost clear for a moment.  It's sex night, can't come
like this.

Then I heard a crinkle.

I opened my eyes.  By the flickering light of the
television, I could see my wife's serious, lovely, focused
face, concentrating on something in her hands.  A condom. 
I shut my eyes again before she could catch me looking at
her, my thoughts whirling.  What the hell was she doing? 
Why-- but then I felt one of Sarah's hands gently cup my
balls, stroking, and then slide up to caress my throbbing
penis, and all questions fled.  

She didn't say a word of explanation.  Her touch was not
tentative.  For each millimeter she rolled the condom down,
she stroked back up the length of my cock, apparently
checking the fit and ensuring quality control.  Down a
little, back up again.  Down a little more.  I was gritting
my teeth, sensitive almost beyond bearing, the pressure in
my balls growing each moment.  When the ring of latex
finally reached the base of my cock, I made a sound in my
throat somewhere between a sob and a growl, and pulled her
to me, onto my lap, straddling my thighs.  I reached
between her legs, my warm fingers finding her center, and
separated her pussy lips, releasing a flood of her slick
wetness.  That was what I needed to know.  This was not
just about me. 

But Sarah wasn't waiting.  She had her hand on my sheathed
cock, and she was wriggling hips and thighs, and she was
pulling her robe out of the way, and -- now -- my cock was
at her entrance.  I met her eyes.  Her face was flushed. 
With one thrust I was inside her, inside Sarah, deep
inside, one of her nipples in my mouth, my first two
fingers on either side of her clit, a marble drowning in
oil.  Her hands were in my hair, pulling just hard enough
to hurt a little but not enough -- no, never enough to
distract me from this.

"You," she was saying in my ear, "you, you, Jesus keep
doing that, yes, you, I want you, I don't care, I just want
you, oh fuck yes, you matter, Adam Adam Adam I want you
just you just you Adam Adam Adam yes yes! yes!"  I was
thrusting hard, feeling it in the muscles in the small of
my back, cupping her ass with one hand and rubbing her clit
over and over with the other, and she was riding me, her
thighs working.  I could feel my orgasm like a copper
spring, wound tighter and tighter, then ah God sudden sharp
release, and her voice was a husky laughing shriek and mine
was a shuddering ohhhhhh, and then I was holding her tight
to me and it was over, but something had changed.

Sarah kissed me on each eyelid.  Her face was serious, but
there was a hint of a smile as she carefully disengaged
from my deflated penis.  

Semen trickled down her left thigh.  

We looked at each other, aghast for one unthinking moment. 
In the dim light, my appalled wife looked about sixteen. 
"Jesus, Adam," she said.  "The fucking condom broke."

Then the dam burst.  A snicker turned into a giggle turned
into a roar.  Sarah's helpless, dissolved, high-pitched
gasps sent her reeling, rubber-legged, for the couch next
to me; I sat, ridiculous with my pants around my ankles,
and simply brayed with laughter.  I laughed and laughed, my
head tilted back, powerless to stop, until my stomach hurt
and all the little muscles in my abdomen felt rubbery and
weak.  Just as I was beginning to wind down, slowly gaining
control with hitching gasps, I could hear Sarah start in
again next to me, and that sent me off again, whooping. 
Sarah leaned against me, shaking, and I dimly perceived
that she was crying as well as laughing, her face streaming
with tears.  I pulled her close, unable to stop even then;
the sight of the crumpled condom on the floor sent us both
into another fit of hysterical giggles.  Two years.  What
in fuck's sake were we doing?  

I wiped at my eyes, a lump in my throat, still hooting a
little with laughter, and looked at Sarah.  Her eyes were
red-rimmed, but she was more or less under control, only
the occasional hiccup escaping her.  "Sarah," I said.  My
voice sounded oddly strained, shaky.  "Come on, give.  What
was that all about?"  I didn't dare say the word "condom"
for fear it would set us off again.

She looked at me for a moment without saying anything, then
shrugged a little.  "I wanted a break," she said.  "I
wanted to fuck you, just you, not your -- not your sperm,
if you know what I mean.  I wanted it to be just the two of
us, not the two of us plus all the shit in the way."  She
looked at the condom on the floor, and this time we were in
no danger of laughing.  "It didn't work, though, did it?"

I shook my head, but not in negation.  "You didn't have to
do that," I said.  I pulled her to me, started kissing her
face gently, the corners of her eyelids, the angle of her
jaw, her cheekbones, the tip of her nose.  She was crying
again, but quietly now, no trace of hysteria.  "You didn't
have to do that," I repeated.  Soft kisses.  I was
thinking:  now what?

++++++

Now what?  As always, the short questions have the long
answers.  For us, here, now, it has turned out to be a
daughter, Alice Namikim Wilson.  Alice is the name we
decided on for a girl when we began; Namikim is the name
her mother gave her back in Korea.  It was a small death
for Sarah, I think, giving up a little on the idea of
having a child of our own, but it was a birth, too, in a
way.  Alice has Sarah's coffee-brown eyes, even if she
didn't get them from Sarah.

And when she laughs, hooting and pointing, she sounds just
like me.




__________________________________________________
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reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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