Cameron Marinne | fiction | You Are Loved

  
  
  
You Are Loved
                                                                                                                                           [cw: explicit sex, kink]



Hailey is a sex addict. At least, that’s what she tells herself she is, instead of one of those other, less glamorous addicts. This is how you know Hailey isn’t really a sex addict. Anyone who’s ever been addicted to anything knows it’s not glamorous. She may, as it stands, be addicted to benzodiazepines, but who’s counting? Not Hailey, and not her pharmacist, who has his own demons to count (five of them, two sets of twins (5, and 6 months) and a singleton (3) doomed to being left out, always). Hailey’s pharmacist is not a sex addict, even though strangers looking at the family photos his wife puts on Instagram might think he were. Hailey’s pharmacist isn’t even sure he likes sex, anymore. It’s risky business. He fantasizes about telling his wife he has stress-inducted erectile dysfunction. Then again, he’s a pharmacist. Dick medicine samples once clogged their dryer’s lint screen. 

Hailey’s husband does like sex, but not the kind of sex Hailey likes, which is the kind of sex she imagines sex addicts like. Her husband, it turns out, likes the kind of sex women are supposed to like. He engages her, not infrequently, in the tender act of making love. They have a good marriage. They are well regarded. Hailey lies awake at night and wishes he would buy her a miniskirt and a butt plug and fuck the ennui out of her. She imagines sexually charged things she might say to him. She reads old cosmo sex tips and tries to imagine any of them working. They all seem to be some combination of sticky and dangerous. Microwave a glazed donut and slip it around his member, alternately nibbling the donut and the head of his sugar-glazed ding-dong. Just what their sex life needs, third degree donut glaze burns and a yeast infection. The sexy one liners come off sounding like punch lines. Take the stick out of your ass and ream me with it, growled during an argument as she presses herself, soap-opera style, into his chest. But they don’t have arguments, and he doesn’t have a stick up his ass, not even a bit. He’s just not starving, like she is. 

She wonders if they like each other too much to have really good sex. After all, all the best sex she’s ever had was with people she could never have loved. Outside the time of the literal sex, that is. She always tried to love whoever was inside her, or she was inside of. It gave her an earth mother feel, especially when they happened to be inside her, to sort of envelop whatever body parts she was enjoying with this passion, this comfort, this heat. She tried to, as she had learned from the tantric shaman she spent a weekend with, love with her hands. She imagined her palms exuding an aura: I love you I love you I love you or if this could not be summoned you are loved you are loved you are loved. She liked the feel of mothering, of being a port in the storm. The body as food. When it came down to it, she was the nurturing type. She wanted to nourish. Of course, she also wanted to parachute some molly and drink champagne while pegging a six-seven women’s volleyball coach named Kyle on his birthday with a strap-on that she did not own and therefore would not be responsible for cleaning up afterwards. She wanted to be gaped and throatfucked and puke up the Misfortunes of Virtue and then maybe have a bath and smoke long cigarettes while some lust-drunk cougar drowned herself licking her cunt to just the edge of an orgasm. She wanted to act like a man, wanted to thrust and sow and spit and breath putrid whiskey breath into ears at parties and use sexy lines that were not ridiculous, perhaps even the broadest of thoroughfares would still appear too narrow for my monstrous faculties or shut up I need to cum. She wanted to pillage, she wanted to -- no, not quite, there was a line, but the desire was there, this craving to act out sexual violence on the consensually non-consenting. Her pharmacist said, projecting, that she was feeling a loss of control over her life. But what would he know? He was only a pharmacist. 
  
  
  
  
Hailey had wanted to fuck her pharmacist before she met her husband, and now the idea of fucking her pharmacist repulsed her. That was part of the problem here. Everything that used to make her clit throb and her slit slick now repulsed her. Her tits ached. Her cervix had sealed itself tight and set up a glaring neon no-vacancy sign. The aura from her hands pulsed red fuck off fuck off fuck off or alternately don’t touch don’t touch don’t touch. She could no longer nourish. She would have to give up the benzodiazepines. And what would she do, now, even if her husband did buy her a miniskirt and a butt plug and have her parade around the house like that, shivering a little from cold or thrill before bending her over and teasing her before fucking a tsunami of orgasms out of her like an unpaid debt? Probably just get cramps and have to take a nap. They had tried out another one of her big fantasies, a simple, domestic fantasy in which he snuck up behind her in the kitchen and took her from behind- which, to be fair, is really excellent, sex-wise, but really bad, kitchen-wise, unless you happen to be doing something extremely low fuss and not time sensitive, like making cake from a box, and not, say, trying to shape scones in the summer time before they marry themselves to the counter, or anything involving raw chicken. Also, she liked to cook with the windows open, and her husband was not an exhibitionist. It hadn’t been a catastrophe. But it had required some ground rules, and that was before. And this was now, only two weeks after her OB/GYN interrupted her masturbating to phone and tell her she was going to experience a great deal of interruption to her masturbating, in the form of one or more mewling people who would need a very different kind of nourishment than her body was used to- or maybe even capable of - providing. Now in the kitchen all she thought about was germs, and carbs, and throwing up into the garbage disposal, which used to be a cool trick for dealing with hangovers and was now the hallmark move of her afternoons. 

Of course there was always after the baby was born, at least six weeks (six weeks? She had never gone six weeks without) after, though, as reddit threads informed her, for some women it took much longer, for some women it never came back - but how do you even have the time for kink with kids? It had always fascinated her, browsing BDSM forums, how many of the couples posting were older and hideous and flabby and really, if we’re being honest, kind of repulsive- but now it was clear. They saw not what the furiously frigging viewer of their grainy smut saw, but what they had seen when, originally, they had conceived of this sex, possibly before they had conceived their children. And it was sweet, in a way, to think that these old fogies whipping each other were seeing, say, the bodies of their honeymoon days. That was not, however, what she was seeing, so she moved on. 
  
  
  
  
Those same anonymous forums warned her about dead bedrooms, sexless relationships after children, husbands who were afraid to touch their pregnant wives and repulsed by their wives afterwards, Madonna/whore complex, men who got blowjobs from sex workers because their wives kissed their children with that mouth, women who became single mothers because their husbands kissed sex workers with that mouth, men who were utterly entranced by their pregnant wives and disgusted by their postpartum wives, men who were perfectly fine but had wives disgusted by their pregnant or postpartum bodies or disgusted by the men who heretofore had been considered perfectly fine. These forums had a suspicious lack of queer relationships. Maybe queer people were better at talking about sex, as a rule. In her experience they tended to be better at talking about sex. There were less likely to be accidental children involved.
  
  
  
  
Hailey and her husband were good at talking. They talked about Middle Eastern politics. They talked about the development of language. They talked about global economies and paint swatches and the right way to make an omelette and the texture of bedsheets and poems. They watched television shows and talked through them, something neither of them would have tolerated from anybody else. They talked about the football and real estate and the ethics of capitalism and whether Elon would make it to Mars in their lifetime or manage to upload his consciousness, but when her husband said that he would certainly upload his consciousness and maybe his consciousness would make it to Mars before their grandchildren were born, Hailey only said “maybe,” and did the math, quietly. They were not good at talking about sex. When one of them said “I want you,” it often sounded like a joke, though it was not. Mostly they fumbled about each other, and usually both came. She wasn’t sure why it was so hard to tell him about the baby, except that the baby had come from sex. She knew that he wanted a baby, even if it was only conceptually, the same way that she thought she wanted a baby, some future version of herself that was happily married and successful and exactly in life where she was, right now. She thought about doing a cute reveal. She could buy him a mug for Father’s Day. World’s Greatest Dad to Be. Lots of women did something with the pregnancy test, but she didn’t have the pregnancy test, she had thrown it in the dumpster at the pharmacy along with her most recent prescription of benzodiazepines. Reddit forums suggested t-shirts, stuffed animals, cake, onesies. Gift baskets with sleep masks and earplugs. Kitsch and tack and ephemera. A plastic trophy for successful fertilization. It was amazing the human race continued. 
  
  
  
  
In the end she didn’t tell him at all. He picked up a nasty strep infection and the pharmacist, bless him, filled a second prescription for Hailey, with the recommendation to check in with her OB in a week, and a “Congratulations, it’s a wild ride.” Hailey’s husband smiled blithely. He thanked the pharmacist, took the long way home, and picked up two London Fogs with extra honey from their favorite coffee shop, and two pain au chocolat. As an afterthought, he picked up a third, finding himself, suddenly, starving.