Shannon had worked a full shift at the hospital, visited easily with his parents as they’d eaten dinner, showered and fallen apart from three intense orgasms that he’d drawn out of her with the patience of a saint over an eternally long two hours. His hands, his thighs, even his boxers were coated with her scent and her smell. He’d licked his fingers clean while she’d convulsed the first time, her eyes glazing over as she watched him. During and just after the second, he’d slid his fingers between her lips one by one while she obediently suckled them. This time, he let her sweet juices stay where they were. She was exhausted and slumped against him, naked, her heated skin warming his, and he needed desperately to keep her right there at his side.
But most importantly, her defenses were down.
Harry had a question for her, and he knew he was being a bastard to ask her now, but he wanted an answer while the walls that guarded her heart were still crumbled in little piles of rubble at her feet. He didn’t want her thinking about it, he didn’t want to have to argue and cajole. He just wanted an answer, even more than he wanted his own release. Even more than he wanted to watch her sleep.
“Why did you imagine that I was having an affair?” he said softly against her ear.
To his surprise, she noticeably stiffened. He’d thought she was too far gone for that level of consciousness, but it was a sensitive question. Just in case she got any silly ideas about sitting up, he tightened his grip on her and held her closer.
Her hand trailed over his chest and her palm rubbed his abdomen, until her index finger found his navel and thoughtfully circled it.
“It wasn’t one thing,” she finally said. “We weren’t having sex, not even like this, and we hadn’t had for … weeks, I think. It’s never been like that before, even when the boys were small.”
Harry felt his heart – no, his soul, his heart was working just fine now, thank you – lurch. Shame washed over him and he struggled not to get defensively angry and indignant. He knew Shannon understood what had been happening in his body better than he had. He knew how he’d felt the last months, how he’d held back, afraid of disappointing her, afraid of not being able to finish, embarrassed about the unpredictability of his body, blaming aging and stress instead of looking for a real reason.
“What else?” he finally growled, still struggling not to fling himself out of the bed.

“You really want to talk about this now?” she eventually whispered. She pressed her face against the palm of her hand and rubbed it a bit, subconsciously offering him comfort even as his muscles stiffened and his erection, seemingly permanent over the last hour, half-deflated to a low ache in his balls and gut. He let it go without a qualm, knowing that Shannon would be horrified if he came all over his hands anyway. He’d been forbidden by the surgeon from intercourse and Shannon clearly interpreted that to mean any sort of ejaculation. When she’d been kneeling on the bed, facing away from him, and he’d had three fingers pushing in and out of her quim while his other hand wrapped around her hair, she’d unintentionally swiped one desperate hand across it as she found a better position with her hand between his legs, pressing into the mattress. I’m sorry, she’d gasped. I don’t mean to make it worse, I know what the doctor said.
He’d grunted and tickled her clit with his thumb so that the words had died away and she’d moaned, squirming and holding herself in place all in one desperate moment. Harry would be having a very specific talk with that doctor, soon enough, and specific enough that Shannon would want to bury her head and pretend otherwise, especially when she saw him later professionally. Still, Harry had every intention of making his interest and attachment to her plain. He had no problem with her colleagues knowing they had an active sex life; in fact, he’d much prefer it if they did know. Of course, he didn’t want anyone gossiping about them, but a little bit of it would keep the indiscriminate dicks in their places more easily.
His drifting thoughts must have confused her, because her hand stopped roaming. “Harry?” she asked.
“Yes, I want to talk about it now,” he returned, his mind focusing again.
“In the evenings,” she eventually said quietly, “You’d go into the study and shut the door, instead of working in the living room the way you always have.”
Why hadn’t he considered how difficult this would be to hear? There had been good reasons for that, things he would have to explain, things that would remain with him for the rest of his life. Things he hadn’t talked to her about – professional things – that he’d determinedly marked down to lawyer-client confidentiality, and then for Shannon’s worldly peace of mind. But instead of protecting that peace of mind by closing her out of the world’s atrocities, he’d been slowly chipping it away himself. Self-loathing threatened but he pushed it back and smothered it with a chilly inward look. He really was a bastard and it was definitely time to lighten the mood.
“Supporting evidence,” he returned, “But only applicable if there’s something concrete. Tell me the rest of it, plaintiff.”
“Building your defense?” she teased.
“Plotting an allocution that will reveal me as an idiot of the first degree,” he returned half-seriously.
“We weren’t having sex,” she repeated, “But…” Her voice died for a moment and Harry felt his insides stiffen in expectation and dread. “But you were,” she whispered then. “In the middle of the night. Alone. With your hand.”
Harry felt the blood drain from his head and he closed his eyes against the pain in her voice. He really was a bastard for starting this tonight, when she could have fallen asleep, spared from the emotional pain. But he wouldn’t have slept.
This one he would have to deal with now, or she’d toss and turn all night and it would follow her into her dreams.
“You know I couldn’t stay awake in the evenings,” he said after a minute and felt her nod against him. “But I’d wake up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep. You’d be there, right beside me, warm and silky and soundly sleeping. I could touch you a bit and then… well, sometimes I would need to come, like it was goddamned morning woody when I was twenty. Why I couldn’t do it in the evenings when you were there looking at me with your soul in your eyes I couldn’t have explained, but there was no way for me to go back to sleep without doing something, and waking you from well-earned and needed rest seemed selfish. So I did a few times.”
“Not every night?” she mumbled after a long minute of silence.
“More like three times in three months but I can’t say for sure how often. Probably because we weren’t having sex, so after I’d slept for awhile, my body would be rested and my dick would get enough blood in it to start thinking again.”
Harry felt her lips move, a bit too cautiously for his taste, into a smile. He wished she could be free with him again – confident enough to be free in her reactions and her words, not to mention her body.
“We’ll talk about the rest tomorrow,” he said, stroking her cheek and kissing the top of her head. ”Go to sleep now.”
She sighed, half-obedient already simply from exhaustion. Demanding control of her orgasms might have a pleasant effects on her in other contexts as well. Harry didn’t want to manage every second of the day, but he suddenly found the notion of her looking to him for guidance and reinforcement oddly appealing. It was, he thought, something to ponder in the dark stretches of the night. It was preferable to sinking into a morass of guilt and self-recrimination, at least.
“Don’t you need to wash up?” she mumbled, the words slurring as she slipped away.
He smiled into the room, reaching out with his free hand to flip off the light. “No, love. You smell and taste delicious – why do I need to wash it off?”
“Okay,” she sighed.
“Tell me goodnight, sweetheart,” he murmured, his fingers at her ear.
“Goodnight, sweetheart,” she returned, but he was sure she was already asleep, because the slur had turned to a husky moan.
Yes, he’d think about her, confiding in him, telling him things, talking about the inane parts of life like recipes and laundry and chores and coffee. She’d be on her knees between his legs, her head on his naked thigh below his shorts and her arms locked about his knees. She used to sit like that, twenty years ago during law school, when he’d had a single comfortable chair in the room he rented and a pile of books to read. She’d sat like that for hours as he’d read case histories. They’d positioned the chair so she could watch television, turned down to essentially silence, and he’d scrawled notes in the margins on the tiny end table that they’d ended up breaking when he’d sat her on it one day and fucked her against the wall so hard that one of the legs had cracked.
But Shannon on her knees at his feet? He’d like to try that again. Only this time, she’d be wearing nothing but her wedding ring, her remaining curls tied back tightly in a white ribbon and that sparkly pink polish she liked on her toes and fingers.
That day would be a good day.










What was she to do, anyway?

The Answering Machine