Hope stared at him.
“It was a nice time, actually. I ran into Frank—you remember him? We went to high school together, and he was on the team. Midfield. Had a hell of a left foot. I didn’t know that Rizzo’s is his family’s place, on his mom’s side. He’s managing, now. He’s got four kids!”
Anthony’s presence began to extinguish the fear burning inside Hope’s body, and by the time he handed her three slices of green-olive pizza—her favorite, not his—peace descended upon her once again, a peace so complete that it felt like it was brewed by a god.
After they ate, they lay on their backs, rain hammering outside. “Turn over,” he said.
“Why?”
“I want to give you a massage. Payback for worrying you earlier.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
She beamed, sat up, kissed him. He pulled her shirt over her head, running his hands over her skin. “Turn over,” he whispered. She obeyed, and he massaged her bare back for a long time, his hands calloused and strong. Eventually, she turned over again, her entire spirit kindled. In the motel lamplight, Anthony looked like a painting. There was something sinister about lapping up his beauty like this—something Twitter and the Church would condemn—but Hope stopped rationing her pleasure years ago, when she realized she might not have much of it to feel before she died. She looked and looked at her husband. His dark hair ruffled, his strong jawline and the architecture of his body, and that one vein on his neck casting its mysterious spell on her brain, shutting off the parts that operated language and logic and breathing. His boxers were from high school, torn and covered in cartoon fish. She touched them, felt jealous of them, jealous of how close they got to be to him all day long, even while he was at work. She gulped. Gradually, she realized that Anthony was studying her with concern, his eyes shining, his eyebrows furrowed. “Are you all right?” he asked. He was so luminous she felt he might burn her.
“I want . . .”
“Yes?”
“I want . . .”
And then he understood. A quiet smile. “Show me what you want,” he said.
All the Catholicism left in her body made Hope blush, made her shy, made her feel fantastically evil. For years, she’d been hauling religion out of herself one box at a time, reluctant to look too hard at anything. It was the same way she sorted through her father’s house after he died. Now, instead of speaking, she leaned forward and pulled down Anthony’s waistband, took him in her mouth, and began showing him what she wanted by giving it to him first. He ran his hands through her new haircut, tugging on it gently as she arched her back. He said her name like a prayer, and she felt him get even harder in her mouth. “Fuck,” he whispered. She loved how inarticulate he became when they were about to have sex. “You look so good,” he mumbled, running his hands over her skin. Tugging a lock of her hair again. “I love this fucking haircut.” After a couple minutes, he pushed her shoulders away from him, his face pink, guiding her into the bedding. “Lie down.”
She did, her whole body now coursing with liquid light. He kissed her mouth, her neck, her breasts, her nerves neon beneath his touch. He kissed her hips, her thighs. His mouth was warm, his stubble rough as sandpaper. “You are a work of art.” When he said things like this, it always sounded like he meant it, somehow. Her skin shimmered, and soon her whole body was glowing like that bioluminescent plankton she saw online. The deific shock of his tongue on her clit, two fingers inside her. “You taste so good,” he said, “I could taste you forever.” The work of his hands and his mouth hovered her body from the sheets as some tide possessed her, overtook her, and soon she was begging him to fuck her, nearly speechless, and finally he obliged, and as he entered her, she thought the pleasure would crack her in half. “Slow,” she breathed. “Or I’ll come right now.” He maneuvered her on top of him. “Show me how you want it,” he said. Yes, she heard herself repeating. She was a personified Yes by then. Lamplight rippled across his muscled torso, and held her ass as she fucked him, his eyes on her jumping breasts like they were saving his life. She heard herself incanting words she’d be too embarrassed to repeat, felt an uprising inside her body, inside his body, in the whole room, in the whole world, lifting them both into each other and out of themselves, and as she writhed and tightened around him, a flash of sweat bloomed from his skin. For a moment, everything was indigo. His eyes rolled back, his mouth opened, and he jerked forward to music that only they could hear, filling her with himself as they inhabited each other. Together, briefly, they became the objects and forces around them, too: the furniture, the power lines, the forest, the factories, the river, the storm.
Someone once told Hope that in the Beginning everything came from one thing. Lying side by side in the dark, his come dripping down her thigh, her nipples hardened, her pussy hot and wet and beating like a heart, breathless and drugged with worship, tearing up from the fantastic chemical tempest twirling inside her, she knew it would End that way, too—that everything would return to one thing.
His dark eyes searched hers as they breathed together. They knew that there was nothing sensational or innovative or dangerous about their lovemaking, nothing that would be replicated in a film, and yet it was the familiarity of conjugal sex that moved Hope. To her, it proved that the ordinary could transform you, too. In the motel, she and her husband studied each other in awe, like a pair of detectives who had cracked the uncrackable case.
After trying to conceive for thirteen months, Hope and Anthony had stopped buying pregnancy tests, stopped vigilantly tracking her cycle. They couldn’t afford fertility treatments, and so they avoided the doctor, afraid they would receive bad news that they could do nothing to reverse. They were young, they assured themselves. But that was also the source of Hope’s alarm: if she was having trouble at the age of twenty-four, what were the odds she would get pregnant later in life? She wanted a baby with a clarity she had only experienced once before, when she met Anthony at a bonfire on Kara’s friend’s uncle’s farm and knew, within ten minutes of conversation, that she would marry him. He was twenty-six now, and he wanted a baby, too. For a while, sex had become depressingly utilitarian, divested of spontaneity or invention, but after they stopped trying to conceive, it restored itself to life. No longer a means to an end, the sex was better than ever.