Bodies can speak to each other, making us feel things we don’t choose, even things we try not to feel. 

Desire can come out of nowhere — unexpectedly to turn calm waters foamy, to plant an ache where before there was none, to leave you parched with a craving that no food can satisfy. 

It had been 9 months since she had seen him, since she had met him in a hotel halfway between their worlds and spent a morning of passion in his arms. She had been wet before he had even touched her, so strong was her craving of him. Between them was an invisible thread, a connection that pulled them together with an intensity she couldn’t understand. 

“I missed you,” he had said, an admission she hadn’t expected. 

“I missed you, too,” she replied before they kissed, long and deep.

But then, it was time to drop the bomb she had carried with her to that place. “My husband wants to meet you.” Her eyes watched his face as the words left her lips. She had been hopeful that this request wouldn’t be off putting to him, but the way his shoulders sank from the weight of it, told her it wasn’t so simple. 

Her marriage was open, a thing her lover was unaccustomed to. He had never dated a married woman, and on more than one occasion, he had shook his head as if to say this is crazy. 

This arrangement was new to her and her husband as well. The opening of their union was still fresh, a delicate bud unfolding its petals to a vast new world. Her lover was the first new man she’d been with in 8 years. Although her husband wanted to be comfortable with this new dynamic, on the evenings she was gone, his mind wandered, and his heart felt things he didn’t want to feel.  After talking it through, her husband had decided that he’d feel more comfortable knowing her lovers, so he wasn’t left to the wiles of his imagination. 

So her husband needed to meet her lover, or it had to end. It was a reasonable request, and she wanted her husband to feel comfortable with her illicit adventures. She had been nervous to ask but hopeful that her lover wouldn’t have a problem with it.  

“I’ve got to think about it,” her lover had said after they had finished and he sat on the edge of the hotel bed. He was tired from working double shifts at the fire station. His large form was hunched over from exhaustion and the weight of her request. 

A week passed, a week of her emotions swinging between hopeful and despondent.  He would agree to it; she thought, but he was taking so long to decide. No, he wouldn’t, she thought. 

In the end, meeting her husband would be “too heavy” her lover had said, and what had barely started, ended. Her husband held her in their kitchen as she cried, barefoot on their gray tile floor. The tears slid from her cheeks on waves of all she had still wanted to explore, and they dropped to the floor on the wings of the too soon end of their unexpectedly strong connection she had yet to understand. 

Then, she choked down the tears, stuffed them deep down and resolved to accept what had to be accepted. Her lover was younger. He wanted to find a life partner. He wanted kids. Their paths were so different. Of course he didn’t want to invest emotion into the relationship she had to offer. Not accepting his choice would be selfish, so she tried. She tried not to think about him, tried not to hope that he would reach out. She dutifully resisted the recurring temptation to contact him. 

She took other lovers, as the new freedom of an open marriage afforded her. She explored — she had hotel sex, group sex, threesomes, foresomes, and moresomes. But in moments of longing, her mind would drift back to him, leaving her wanting to understand the sudden connection she had felt for him. Was it his physique, his confident air, his unmatched ability to express himself, the passion that burned inside her for him, or perhaps a combination of all of them. 

A month after the goodbyes had been said, and their conversation ended, her lover had liked a picture she had sent him before. Was it an accident or him saying I still think of you? A few months later, she was at a sex party and a bit too high and feeling cold and unexcited by all the sex happening in the house. She was snuggled up with one of her husband’s lovers under a blanket in a room with mood lights dancing on the ceiling. For a moment, her control slipped, and she liked one of his messages — an invitation that received no response. 

9 months later after so many things had become more comfortable in her open marriage, such as not having to meet each other’s partners, she found herself alone in a hotel room at a work conference. She was in a restless mood. Thoughts of him entered her mind, and in that moment her desire for him broke free from the tenuous hold she had attempted to place on it. She wrote a message and sent it before she could stop herself. 

“Hey, this is my moment of weakness, so feel free to ignore it. I hope life is going great for you and you’re making progress in finding your own pair of baby-making hips,” she said, leaving him an out, a way to not respond if that’s what he wanted, if that was what was best for him. 

But she had done it, wrapped all of her feelings up in a light, playful message that carried with it all of her desire to hear from him again, and she had tossed the line into the vast void between them. 

She told herself to not hope for a response, to not have expectations, but as she sat in bed working on her laptop with her knee elevated and iced from a fresh cycling accident, a not insignificant part of her attention was consumed by the small black portal between her world and his that stared at her from where she had placed it on the night table. 

He responded sooner than she had expected. His words gave her hope that she hadn’t been the only one who had thought of the other in the months of silence since she had said goodbye to him.

“Awww I’m sooooo happy to hear from you. I was reading some of our old messages not too long ago. You definitely left an impression on me. I hope life is treating you well too! I haven’t found that yet. This text made my night.” 

And just like that, as their conversation unfolded, her fire for him ignited from hopeless embers to a burning desire, an endless craving to feel his body encircle hers once again.

One evening as her son played in the bath, she read his message, “Can I ask you a question?” 

“Of course,” she responded. 

“Is there any way I can be with you again, any way I can feel and hold you again?” 

“I think so,” she had said before explaining the shifts in her marriage that had made more space, that had removed the initial requirement that had led to their paths parting. She and her husband now both had lovers the other had never met. Time had changed things, had opened more doors, and she felt that perhaps those desires that had been cut so short by circumstance could now be explored. 

“But I’ll need to talk to him about it — because of the history,” she had told him, and it was the truth. 

Her husband had disliked her lover ever since the latter had chosen to opt out rather than to meet. When her husband had held her and watched her tears fall, he had realized that her feelings ran deeper than a casual fling. He disliked her lover for having caused pain in the woman he loved so much, and he also felt a pain of his own at knowing the strength of the attraction she felt for this man he had never met. 

That night, she asked her husband, relaying her lover’s question to him —- could she and her lover open that door again, despite the history and the feelings, both of hers and of her husband’s?

They had talked through it. It hadn’t been an easy conversation or a short one. It was tense with a lot of thoughts shared, but the ultimate outcome had been her husband and her lover talking on the phone one Friday afternoon.

She had asked for the conversation between them, not her husband. Her lover had agreed, but her husband had initially refused. “Go for it, but I don’t see a point in talking to him,” her husband had said. But she negotiated, balancing a line between love and desire. She wanted them to talk because she knew her husband. She knew that if he could have an impression of her lover instead of a question mark filled in by all his assumptions and fears, that her husband would be able to move past the negative feelings he had toward her lover. 

Just after she boarded a cruise ship for a bachelorette weekend, her husband called to tell her of the conversation. He said they had had a good talk. She could tell that her husband had finally been able to see beyond his intimidation of her lover and see him as a real person. He wasn’t a bad man; he was just a man who didn’t know the complexities of dating a married woman. Before they hung up, her husband mentioned in reference to her lover, “he said he’s thinking on if he should move forward with it or not.” As his words registered in her mind, her excitement wavered and weakened. 

Her husband now felt comfortable and ready to accept the relationship, but her lover, perhaps not? 

She hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days, and although long silences were an occasional occurrence in their conversation due to his work schedule, this time, it felt like he was doubting. Once again though, she couldn’t blame him if he was. How could she? Perhaps she had been selfish in sending him that message. Perhaps she never should have. 

As her cruise ship was setting sail, she messaged her lover. She had wanted to say that she was craving him, that she couldn’t wait to feel him pressing into her, couldn’t wait to satisfy the desire she had felt for months. 

Instead, she thanked him for talking to her husband, and she told him that she would never judge him or think bad of him if this wasn’t right for him. She told him if he needed time to think, she could wait, and then she apologized for having let her craving for him start something that perhaps he wasn’t ready for. 

Every word she wrote to him was true and from her heart. That night while the cruise sailed and the girls partied to celebrate her friend’s upcoming union into a strictly monogamous marriage, she played her role of the faithful wife. Internally, however, she hoped for the chance to start another passionate union with him. She wanted to let him feel how her desire for him drenched her loins at mere thoughts of his hands on her. 

The line between them remained silent. She knew she would hear from him, but the longer the silence lingered, the more certain she felt that when it came, another goodbye would be required, another restraining of her feelings, another accepting of that which she didn’t want to accept, and so she braced herself once again for the need to corral and cage her irrational, wild want of him.

But she imagined it, imagined what it would look and feel like to be able to have him again — what lingerie she would wear and the way she would look up into his eyes when he opened the door. She felt it, the way their bodies would ache at the nearness and the craving almost fulfilled. She could see it, the way he would possess her, the way he would push her onto the bed with his immense strength and press himself between her thighs, needing to feel her, just as she needed to feel him. Her body ached deep inside her belly at the mere thought of that moment should reality turn out differently than she suspected it would. 

~

One evening, the emotions of wanting and of doubting overwhelmed her, and the words started filling her mind. The words that would help her release some of the unbearable tension within. 

So in the wee hours of the morning, she found herself an elegant silver bench with a high back and enclosed sides near the promenade of the ship. She tucked herself into the space with her small strawberry covered notebook, and she wrote. She took on the voice of a narrator telling of someone else, and the feelings flowed from her mind into words shaped loosely on the thin paper. 

She had tried throughout the months before this moment to write the story of him, the story of how someone she hadn’t spent much time with had left such an imprint on her memory, of the night they met at a club in the city, and of the way they had devoured each other when they met again. But each time she had sat with intention to write, the words had dried up in her mind and blown away in the breeze of her endless thoughts. 

But this time, the story flowed, and she wrote it out, letting it free from where it had been wedged inside of her. When the last word had dropped from her mind and onto the paper, she felt that it was a beautiful story of desire and wanting, and she was happy to have her feelings, for once, articulated even if the true ending of their story was yet to be decided.