Enchanted Again (25 page)

Peter approached her with relish, running his hands along the insides of her legs and then placing them beneath her lower thighs, just above her knees, to hold them steady. As he entered her, he bent her legs a little more and guided them down from his shoulders so they rested one in each hand. He spread them even wider apart as he pushed himself into her slick opening. Joyce cried out loudly as he moved slowly in and out of her. He held her legs in his hands, high up and apart as he kept slowly driving in and out of her. She wrapped her arms around his neck. She could still taste her body on his lips when he kissed her.

Peter increased the speed of his thrusts as his excitement increased, and he jutted his hips forward and up with each thrust, stabbing her savagely while forcing her legs up even higher with his hands. Joyce clung tightly to his neck, crying out with equal measures of pleasure and discomfort.

“God, you feel so good,” Peter murmured. His anger was almost forgotten as he became more and more immersed in her softness. All he could believe for the moment was the pleasure she brought him. He was struggling to maintain control and forced himself to slow his pace to painstakingly protracted and unhurried strokes. She was clinging to him with her face buried in the warmth of his chest. Very carefully he let her legs fall, and she slipped them around his hips and locked her ankles together at the base of his back. He lifted her face tenderly in his hands and looked down into her eyes. He continued to slide his lower body into hers with long, even strides as they silently stared at each other. In the depths of his expression, lingering behind his desire, Joyce thought she glimpsed sorrow. Her heart stopped for an instant, and she was torn between her own fears and resentments and her love for Peter. How could she bear to hurt him?

But it was only fleeting, and in the next instant she even wondered if she had imagined it. Peter suddenly picked her up off the bathroom counter and, holding her with one hand on each buttock while her legs still clung to him, he carried her, still fully joined to him, into their bedroom. She wrapped herself around him like a vine and luxuriated in the way it felt to simply have him inside her. These short moments of shared intimacy in between the intense passion that brought them together were her favorite moments with Peter. It was what she lived for, from one sexual encounter to the next. If she had been a prostitute, this would have been the price she would have demanded for her body. But it was impossible to say what these moments were made up of or how they could be brought about. She only recognized them once they came to be, when the intensely soothing blanket of contentedness washed over her, leaving her feeling satiated and slightly stunned.

With the same measured carefulness that Peter employed to carry Joyce with him into the bedroom he brought them both, still joined together, onto the bed. Once settled there, he immediately resumed his long, easy strokes in and out of her. Joyce moved her hands over his shoulders and chest, admiring the feel and appearance of him. In the next instant a switch seemed to flip inside her and she felt an enormous upsurge of all encompassing passion rise up within her and rush toward her center with a warm flood of pleasure. She stared blankly up at Peter as it seemed to explode inside her, releasing the pressure in a balmy gush that dispersed into titillating little waves of contentment all throughout her. She lay motionless, trying to keep the feeling with her, but it was very quickly passing.

Yet, Peter was still inside her, strong and hard and hungry, and her climax seemed to ignite an explosive fire within him. Suddenly he gave himself over to all the yearning that had been building up throughout the night, along with everything else he had been feeling, including his frustration and fear. Joyce was soft and pliant beneath him, still wallowing in her earlier pleasure, and he plundered her softness with a passion-driven brutality. Joyce reveled in his loss of control, spurring him on even more with all the little touches and sounds she knew he liked best. She watched him, too, mesmerized by his strength and beauty as he struggled over her. She felt strangely detached now, making the rest of the act seem more intimate somehow, as if she was observing something very private that she had no right to see. Still, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him, and so she gently clung and encouraged and stroked him to satisfaction while she trespassed into his most vulnerable moment in an effort to see inside. Peter stiffened all of a sudden and threw himself into her with a loud yell. Watching the intense pleasure cross over his features gave Joyce an overwhelming sense of power. She was delighted to have pleased him so. She realized he probably felt the same. This realization brought sadness with it.

Joyce rested sedately in Peter’s arms. Normally he would be sleeping by now, but tonight she knew he was lying fully awake, wondering.

Her mind wandered back to the first time they were intimate together. She was still married to Bob, and he, too, had a wife at home. She had asked him afterward, perhaps unfairly, “Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know,” he had replied. “I guess I’m not happy.”

“You don’t know if you’re happy or not?”

“I don’t think about it much,” he admitted. “Maybe I’m just bored.”

She had thought about his words many times since then. She could not accept the idea of such an incredible breach being made out of simple boredom. She herself had been excruciatingly unhappy in her marriage with Bob. Resentment and frustration had built up over the years to the point where she little cared anymore whether she hurt him or not. His lethargic attitude regarding her and their marriage had created an antipathy in her that grew and grew until it bordered on violence. She wanted to hurt him in fact. That was why she began the affair with Peter, really. And throughout their affair, Peter had admonished her to take more precautions so that Bob would not find out, but the truth was that she could not wait for Bob to find out. Her cautionary measures were all especially designed so that when Bob did finally find out, he would have many memories to recall with horror and dread, adding insult to injury once the cat was out of the proverbial bag.

Unlike the overwhelming majority of unfaithful husbands—for Joyce had researched the subject at length—Peter did leave his wife. Perhaps it was because Joyce was married, too, that it occurred to him to do so. Peter did not like having to share her with another man. It was decided that they had both made a terrible mistake with their first marriages, but that now that they’d found the “right” person for them, they could rectify the problem at once. And it was like a dream come true. Joyce had genuinely fallen in love with Peter, and she could not believe that something so wonderful could come out of her hatred for Bob.

But all too soon after she married Peter, it became apparent that he, too, could be terribly lethargic in matters of the relationship; and this is when Joyce began to call back to her mind his earlier statement that he was “bored.” Only now
she
was the object of his apathy. She had fought the urge to give up and wallow in resentment, as she had with Bob. Yet in spite of her best intentions to make the best of it, she felt herself teetering back on the edge of hostility, and it simmered around and within her like a slow burn. It appeared to her that this was simply the way it was for men, that upon conquering an object of their desire, their interest in it would automatically be depleted.

Things progressed along these lines in the relationship between Peter and Joyce until one day Joyce happened upon, quite accidentally, a solution to the problem.

It came to her while they were out Christmas shopping together. Joyce was agitated and anxious, having won the war in getting Peter to go shopping with her, but having lost the battle—and all pleasure in being with him—for being obliged to fight for the opportunity. Just like the princess who was expected to spin gold from straw, Joyce floundered with the task of trying to make their outing cheerful and fun while being painfully aware that he had practically been forced to join her. She silently seethed at the injustice of it. She had focused all her attentions on Peter’s gift-giving list, and now wondered how she could get him enthused about hers. He had thus far been sullen and distant. She was standing with him while he finished eating a fresh-baked pretzel at the food court contemplating this when a handsome, slightly younger man approached her.

“Hey…Joyce is it?” the man asked. She looked at him in surprise. She only vaguely remembered his face, but could not immediately recall where she knew him from. He laughed at her confusion. “It’s Brian. I met you over at the perfume counter a few weeks ago. Remember?” He acknowledged Peter’s presence while she was trying to remember the incident, explaining, “I think I frightened her a little. I was quite taken by her scent.”

Joyce remembered the man when he said this. He had approached her slowly, grasping her arm suddenly and bringing it to his nose in a disconcertingly intimate gesture. She had been offended until he spoke to her, when she realized immediately from his explanation and his demeanor that he was quite harmlessly looking for a perfume for another woman. She had provided the necessary information and he had purchased the perfume and that had been the end of it. Until now.

“Oh, yes,” she laughed now. “How did your friend like the perfume?”

“We’ll find out Christmas morning,” he said.

Peter moved closer to Joyce unexpectedly and grasped her hand firmly in his own. She stared down at his hand holding hers. Under the present circumstances it felt something like a foreign object clinging morbidly to her flesh.

“Well…” Brian faltered a little, becoming suddenly aware of the tension. “Merry Christmas, Joyce.” She couldn’t have said exactly why, but Joyce was suddenly so grateful to Brian that she could have kissed him.

“Merry Christmas to you, too, Brian,” she said warmly, meaning it. He looked at her a moment before he walked away.

Peter and Joyce stood there a few moments longer before they resumed walking together, still hand in hand. Joyce was deep in thought. Peter mistook her thoughts and asked, “Who was that?”

Joyce looked up at him in surprise. “Why, he just explained our one and only encounter!” she said. She was still wondering over the sudden change in him. This was the most interest he had shown in her during their entire outing.

“He was clearly interested in something other than perfume,” he said cynically. Joyce nearly laughed out loud, but something made her stop herself from doing so. She resisted the urge to immediately rush to the defensive and explain the situation more emphatically. It was slowly dawning on her that something of import had just happened, and she wanted to decipher what it was and, even more importantly, what it meant.

Peter, who had before the incident been like a sullen child forced on an unwanted excursion with his mother, was suddenly now the attentive and charming husband. It was Joyce who seemed to be only half present as she watched him with a detached inner eye. Here was the Peter she had originally fallen in love with. Here was the Peter she believed she was losing.

Yet he was back again, and all it had taken was a single word from another man! She marveled over how different Peter was from her. The same kind of encounter from another woman would have caused her to become distant and sullen. She suddenly realized that the constant reassurances she gave him were actually what
she
needed, not him. For her, those reassurances would have created trust and enhanced intimacy. But for Peter, they provided the cushion upon which he could rest his head in apathy.

All of this Joyce realized in a mere instant. But she watched Peter thoughtfully for days after the encounter, carefully gauging how long his interest remained piqued. It seemed that he needed a
reason
to be attentive, and for Peter, that reason was to keep what was his.

Joyce never uttered a single word about these realizations to Peter. It would do her no good to do so, and he would have adamantly denied them anyway. She merely adjusted her behavior so that it was not quite as straightforward as it had been before, adding a hint of mystery where before there had been none, and doing things that were improbable and inexplicable to keep Peter on his toes. She struck up conversations with strange men everywhere she went now, for those men became an excellent resource at the most unexpected moments. All of these little alterations in her lifestyle were relatively insignificant but had a powerful effect on the way Peter perceived her. She became, for him, a fascinating woman of mystery that both tortured and allured him. And when the effectiveness of any given behavior waned or failed, she would quickly find another. It seemed to her that the stakes were getting higher and higher in this game of theirs, but she could not stop. Even when it escalated to the point that she felt she had to resort to outright deception to get Peter’s attention, well, so be it. She simply must continue to create the illusion that
she
was losing interest in
him.
And it was not, she reasoned, quite as much of an illusion as one might imagine. She had watched Bob lose interest in her for years, allowing herself to be treated as if she was no more important than an old piece of furniture. She knew she would never be able to just idly sit by and watch the same thing happen with Peter. Now that she knew firsthand how easily another man could be found, she could do it again if she had to. And, in fact, hadn’t her outgoing behavior of late provided her ample opportunity to do just that? Her newfound appeal to the opposite sex not only piqued Peter’s interest; it also caused her to realize how desirable and lovable she was.

As Joyce snuggled up to Peter, she secretly hoped she would never have to leave him. She loved him and being with him when he was attentive to her gave her everything she needed. A nursery rhyme from her childhood came to mind and a wicked little smile crept over her features as she mentally recited it, slightly altering the words as she went:
Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there
she
kept
him
very well.