The Venus Fix

Wednesday Two days remaining
Sixty-Nine

I woke up to the sound of music playing-bluesy jazz that somehow fit a cold winter morning. First I thought it was a CD, but then realized it was Noah, playing on the small upright piano that had been my grandmother’s and then my mother’s and was now mine, stuck in a corner of the den- not a worthy instrument, but a sentimental one.

He played for ten minutes and I stayed under the warm comforter, thinking about him, about how he’d slept on the couch, thinking mostly about the fact that he’d stayed.

“Good morning,” he said when he came in a few minutes later with a mug of steaming coffee that smelled stronger than what I made. Even though coffee was my finest hour in the kitchen, compared to Noah’s mine was only passable.

While I drank the coffee, Noah ran my bath, and when it was full and steaming, he helped me into the bathroom.

“I can take my nightgown off.”

“Okay, just holler if you need any help.”

I pulled the nightgown over my head, eased it over my right arm and then carefully got in the tub, resting my right arm on the ledge, hoping it would stay dry. I’d just sunk down under the hot water when I heard the knock.

“Yeah?”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

“If you sit up, I’ll wash your hair. I know how tough it is to do this stuff with only one hand.”

Grateful, I sat up, leaned forward and shut my eyes.

Noah massaged my scalp with shampoo. It was an utter indulgence to lie there in the fragrant water and have this strong man minister to me. I’d never be able to go to work after this, I thought. After he rinsed my hair, he took the washcloth, squirted my fragrant lime and verbena body gel on it, and then he washed me. It was gentle, helpful, and not erotic at all. And then he was done.

“I’ll leave your towel here,” he said, putting it on the hook near the bath. “Or do you need help getting out?”

I wasn’t sure. “Maybe. I feel a little off balance.”

He picked up the towel, threw it over his shoulder, then held out his hand. As soon as I was out of the water, he wrapped me up in the big terry-cloth sheet.

Standing behind me, he patted me dry. I’d never felt so indulged in my life. Then, taking a fresh towel off the rack, he used it on my hair, gently squeezing out the excess water.

It was warm and humid and smelled so good in the bathroom, and Noah’s hands were so large and sure of what they were doing. I couldn’t remember anyone ever having done these things for me before. My mother certainly had dried me off after bathing me when I was a very young child, but that memory wasn’t accessible. Besides, she was my mother, and as avuncular as Noah was being, he was still a man. A man who had once been my lover. He was standing in my bathroom without his shirt on, and under my bath towel I was naked.

Over at the sink, Noah turned on the dryer and worked the hot air through my hair, using his fingers instead of a comb.

“That’s dry enough. We have to get you dressed now and make you breakfast,” he said, leading me out of my own bathroom as if I were the guest and didn’t know where to go next.

We stood in my walk-in closet and Noah unwrapped the towel. Now, finally, his eyes moved over my flesh. I felt the look as if it was a touch, but he didn’t acknowledge either his appraisal or my reaction. Instead, he let me stand there naked as he went hunting through the drawers, finding first a black bra and then a pair of black lace underpants.

Then he started to dress me.

Noah pulled the bra up over my right and then my left arm, lifted the straps into place, snugged the cups around my breasts, and then pulled the two ends around my back and hooked it. I let out a long breath. My flesh goose bumped. My nipples hardened. I wondered what he was thinking. If he had any idea how he was making me feel.

He bent over, lifted my right foot, and put it through the leg opening of the panties, then did the same with my left foot. Using both hands, he pulled them up over my calves, my knees, my thighs, my hips, and then smoothed them into place.

I shifted, rotating my hips involuntarily.

Noah was looking through my clothes again. I willed him to turn around and touch me more. Nothing happened until he grabbed a dark gray cashmere sweater off the shelf, turned back to me and manipulated the sleeve over my cast and then up the rest of my arm, adjusting it with his hands, smoothing it with his fingers so that I wasn’t sure what created the sensation-his fingers or the soft wool. Then the other arm. Done, he buttoned the sweater from the bottom up and tugged at it so that it lay smoothly around my waist and over my hips.

Once more, Noah went looking through my clothes, now finding a pair of gray flannel slacks. I put my hand on his shoulder and he pulled them slowly up to my waist. He zipped up the fly and snapped it closed.

Except for his shirt, we were both dressed then, standing in my closet, face-to-face. My hair was still damp. His hands were still on my waist, and then there was no space between us anymore. We were wrapped up in each other, Noah’s lips smashed against mine. My good hand was on the back on his neck, pulling him even closer to me.

His hands moved to all the places they had just been, no longer innocent and helpful; now they probed. Over my sweater, cupping my breasts, running up and down my spine, slipping between my thighs, tickling me though the flannel.

There is a kind of want that takes over your consciousness, that blocks out time and logic. Your body responds to it involuntarily. You stop thinking. You don’t care about anything but the touching and the feeling. Wings flutter inside your rib cage. You are lifted up.

My hips ground into him, his arms went around my back, his hands grabbed me and pulled me closer, until there was no closer that I could get.

Slowly, in the same order he put my clothes on me, he now took them off. He unbuttoned my pants, unzipped the fly, pulled them down around my ankles and helped me step out of them. Then he got down on his knees, I thought to help me take off my underwear, but he buried his head between my legs, blowing hot breath through the lace, making me squirm and thrust forward.

I gasped. I couldn’t get a deep-enough breath. I couldn’t get what I wanted fast enough. I wanted it to take forever.

Noah unbuttoned my sweater and pulled it off of me, going very carefully when it was time to manipulate it over the cast.

While he unhooked my bra, I went to work on his jeans with my left hand, fumbling with his fly but managing.

Finally, all of our clothes out of the way, his glorious bare skin was pressed against mine.

“You need to understand…” Noah said in between kissing me on the neck and behind my ear “…that it’s not wrong to want to feel something other than pain.”

Did I answer? Nod? Say yes, you are right?

I don’t think so.

It was all in the movements. All in the sensations. There was nothing I needed to put into words. There were other ways to tell him that he was right-with my lips, with my fingers, the way I opened my legs to him.

We were on the floor and Noah was hard against my stomach and his fingers teased me, making me finally ask him for what I wanted, still not with words but with my legs wrapping around his waist as I pulled him to me and thrust up against him until he slipped inside of me.

I bit into the soft skin of his earlobe and my tongue licked inside his ear. He kissed my lips. Then pulled back.

“This, what we’re doing now, it belongs to you.”

And it did. Noah making love to me, with all of his body, with all of my body responding, with the smell of him, rosemary and mint flooding my senses, with the softness of his hair on my chest and the heat of his breath on my neck. There was just the two of us in that small space. In a normal room, where there would have been space, the ghosts of my patients and their issues and problems would have come along for the ride. But this journey was closed and tight, and there was no room for anyone but us. The two of us. Our bodies intertwined, my cries mixing with his one deep sigh that reached out and stroked me as softly as the fingers that were fluttering across my back.

And then, there, with only the two of us in a space that could barely contain us, I forgot that it was morning and that it was cold and that there were people who would be waiting for me, or that I was scared to let someone inside. Noah was already inside. It was out of my hands. And then there were no more thoughts.