I’m not sure why I drive straight there. I mean, before all the sex, it would have been natural to come over after work, or after a bad date. We’d pull off our shoes and put our feet up on her coffee table and watch a movie or have a couple of beers and play cards. I didn’t need more than that from her; it was perfect.
But now it feels like there’s something else to be had, which makes me not only want it, but feel like I’m starting to need it.
I wonder whether, after the first time we had sex, if one of us had said, “I’d really like to try having a relationship,” that would have changed everything and I wouldn’t be weighing the balance of her sexual availability against her emotional intimacy so much. What is it about talking to women online and evaluating interactions that makes a checklist appear in my head, giving equal weight to all these things, forgetting that we all have strengths and weaknesses, and that no one comes into a relationship fully grounded?
I don’t have a plan in mind. I park, I walk up her steps, I knock. I think maybe I’ll turn tonight’s Daisy Disaster into a comedy show or ask Millie to mull over these existential dating questions with me, but there’s something about her face when she opens the door that throws me. It takes a couple of seconds to register that she’s relieved that I’m here on her porch—that I didn’t go home with Daisy.
Her cheeks go pink—I can tell she’s a little tipsy—and she touches her ear and then tucks her hair there, and I scramble back in time, trying to remember when I first noticed all these little things about her, like the tiny dimple she has at the corner of her mouth, and that her left eye is a few shades darker than her right, and that she breathes through her mouth when she’s nervous.
We’re just standing there, staring at each other, and then she cracks and her smile breaks like the sun coming out, and it makes me laugh, too.
“So it was terrible?” she says. She’s giddy.
“Awful.”
Her hand comes up to my chest and curls, making a fist around my shirt, and it’s like being in an old movie, being pulled in by the scruff, door slammed behind me.
“Seriously?”
I smile against her lips. “Does it make sense if I say that I felt like I looked at her and saw all of her, in a single glance?”
She pulls me down again, more eager now. The first time, we were sweet, tender, talking. The second time was heat and passion and that sense that we were working something out of our systems. But tonight, it’s urgent and immediate: Her mouth comes over mine the same moment she starts to lift my shirt up. I probably have her shirt unbuttoned and her jeans on the floor before my car engine has even cooled outside.
We’re naked, stumbling down the hall before giving up and leaning into the wall, where I lift her up, holding her, taking her in a breathless flurry of movement. I keep moving until she comes, until she’s a boneless, soft weight in my shaking arms.
Carefully, I set her down, kissing the crescent-shaped scar on her shoulder.
“Did you come over here for that?” she asks with a sleepy drawl. Her fingers trace the side of my face and I can’t seem to help myself, I lean into the touch.
“I came over here for you.”
There’s so much truth embedded in my words that I’m surprised when she laughs, a single, breathy chuckle. It’s either disbelief or relief.
“What are we doing, Mills?”
She laughs again, pressing a kiss to my neck, sucking in the exact way that I like. That she’s learned that I like. We’ve done this three times now, it’s no longer just an accident. “Having sex, Reid.”
And it’s that—the condescending words, yes, but also the tone, so lighthearted—that hits a dissonant gong in my head. Her response is the verbal equivalent of a marshmallow, a Peep, something with shape but no volume. I wanted her to say something better, maybe even “I don’t know”—that at least would invite conversation, at least show that she’s as confused and affected by all of this as I am.
I step back, surveying her flushed chest, her weak legs and sated smile. Turning, I head to the living room, gathering my clothes as I go.
“You can stay,” she says behind me. Relief flushes warm through my bloodstream, until she adds, “I have to run to my office to grab a couple things, but you’re totally welcome to hang.”
At this, I actually laugh. “I mean, don’t get all needy on me, Mills.”
“Oh, no fear of that,” she says, and it doesn’t feel like a joke, it feels sincere. It’s as if she really doesn’t know why it would be weird for her to take off right after we have sex, without any emotional understanding, and expect me to just hang out here and wait for her to come home. In the past I would have gone with her, to keep her company in her office or do something at work myself, but she doesn’t want that or even expect it.
I feel half-oblivious and half-chauvinistic for assuming that recurrent sex with Millie would eventually mean more than sex to her, but I’m not sure it ever will.
“It’s cool, Mills. I’m gonna head home.”
My car door closes heavily and I let my head fall back against the headrest. Postsex, I feel like a well-used glove, a warm blanket, a body pillow. Soft and warm and sated. But inside, somewhere deeper, I’m a knot of angst.
I want Millie. I think I’m falling in love with her. And she just does not see me that way at all.
I text Chris.
You home?
Yeah.
Can I come over?
Sure.
His front room is lit warmly, and from the street I can see him standing behind his couch, facing his television, fiddling with something. He looks up when he hears my footsteps on the stairs, moving to open the door.
I don’t even let him get a word out: “I’m going to tell you some shit, and you cannot freak out on me.”
He glances at me, dropping the remote on the couch. “Oh, boy.”
“It’s about Millie.” I pause, and his eyes narrow. “And me,” I say.
“Millie,” he says, “and you. As in . . .” His brows go up. “Oh. As in, you’ve been banging her?”
“Three times.” I stop, wiping a hand over my face. “No, like seven times. But three separate occasions—”
“Wait, wait. You’re telling me there was a night where you had sex more than two times with Millie Morris?”
“The fact that I had sex with Millie at all is what I expected to be shocking.”
“What’s shocking is you’re fucking virile, son.”
I groan. “Chris.”
“I’m saying,” he says under his breath. “We’re not in our twenties anymore.”
I push my hands into my hair, wishing I could reach into my head just as easily and shift everything around until it made sense. “But she doesn’t like me that way.”
“She . . .” He scrunches his nose and looks at me with suspicion. “What?”
“I mean, no, no, she liked the sex—that was both of us—but she doesn’t want more.”
“You know this?”