Happily Ever After: A Novel (3 page)

Chapter 5

I
should be clear up front that Jason is not my boyfriend. I hate to call him a friend with benefits because that brings to mind hot twenty-somethings grinding their fit, toned bodies together in nightclub bathroom stalls. It does not conjure up lonely, flabby, middle-aged people getting together for the occasional necessary, if not altogether satisfying, lay.

I met Jason through a personal ad I can still barely admit to placing. I mean, how degrading is it to tell the world, albeit anonymously, that you can’t find anybody to fuck you? It’s the adult version of being picked last for the kickball team in gym class. But it had been almost five years. I lived in constant fear of waking up, looking in the mirror, and seeing a shriveled-up prune looking back at me. I was desperate.

“SDF, 46, mother, 5'4", curvy. Looking for an uncomplicated relationship. Friday late morning best. Disease free. Nonsmoker. Fetishists need not apply.”

I put the last bit in to be funny, but on some level I was being honest. The possibility of ending up with a man who wanted to talk dirty to my toes was even more depressing than being a prune. I needed to hedge my bets if I was going to survive this.

A man named Jason Blair responded to my ad. If his e-mail personality didn’t exactly leap off the page, at least he didn’t appear to be an ax murderer. We met for lunch two towns over, where I was happy to discover a somewhat attractive man attached to the name. Jason was forty-four, divorced, and worked as an intellectual property attorney in the city. He was passionate about model trains and DIY home projects, although he was currently living in a condo that did not require him to do more than change the occasional lightbulb.

He had brown hair peppered with gray, hazel eyes behind frameless glasses, and a small goatee that I hoped, if we ended up naked together, I could eventually talk him out of. His off-the-rack suit bunched up at the shoulders, and the lower buttons of his pale blue oxford strained against a burgeoning belly. The thought of that belly banging into mine left a bitter taste in my mouth. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just date like a normal divorced, fat single mother?

I’ll tell you why. Because it’s a desert out there, populated only by the damaged and desperate, of which I am one. After making this discovery, I bought a vibrator, but the way I went through batteries, I was becoming a one-woman ecological disaster. I needed the human version. Enter Jason. This was, after all, about fulfilling basic needs, not about launching a love affair for the ages. I was not looking for the man of my dreams. He did not exist. I was looking for sex. And that was something I would make perfectly clear to this nice man before any clothes were removed.

Jason reported he was here because his long marriage, which came to an abrupt end when he caught his wife in bed with the tile contractor, had left him with no confidence. He didn’t know how to date or how to talk to women or how to have sex with anyone but his now ex-wife. He wanted to dip a toe back in the pool. I was the pool. After lunch was done, we had an awkward conversation that went something like this.

“So, um, well, what do you think about some sort of, ah, arrangement?” I asked. I was pretty sure Jason met my requirements. I could overlook the goatee for now.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think maybe it could probably sort of . . . work. Right?” There was that confidence he’d mentioned.

“Yes.”

“So we’re agreed?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But it has to be Friday mornings around eleven thirty because that’s when my housekeeper is out shopping for groceries and my daughter is at school.”

“What did you say you did for a living?”

“I’m a writer. Novels. An author.”

He didn’t ask for titles.

“Okay. So next week, your place?” he asked.

“Great,” I said.

“Oh and here,” he said, handing me an envelope. “I’m disease free.” Inside was a note from a doctor whose name I recognized, stating that Jason Blair was not harboring any sexually transmitted diseases and was not HIV positive. My new friend came with his own warranty. How nice.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do the same for you.” I already dreaded the conversation I was going to be forced to have with my internist.

We stood up and gave each other air kisses. It seemed a strange way to part from a man I’d just penciled in to fuck in a week’s time.

Seven days later, as scheduled, Jason showed up at my house. I was nervous. I’d waxed and scrubbed and buffed and considered liposuction in the interim week, not that any of it made much of a difference. I reminded myself this was real life, and in real life, sex was much more ridiculous than in novels or in the movies. You could count on bad lighting and fat and sweat and awkwardness. But still, a part of me hoped it would be a transcendent experience. Or at the very least, distracting.

It wasn’t transcendent. Just so you know. Jason brought me a limp bouquet of flowers from the Trader Joe’s a mile away. It was nice but unnecessary. As Julia Roberts said in
Pretty Woman,
I was a sure thing.

“Come in,” I said, stepping aside. Jason entered the large foyer, and immediately I began to question my own intelligence. Who was this stranger I’d just invited into my house? Perkins wandered up, sniffed Jason’s shoe, and wagged her tiny tail. So the dog liked him. That was something.

“I’m nervous,” Jason said with a twitchy smile. “Isn’t that crazy?”

I exhaled. “No, not at all. Me too.”

“But I gotta get back on the horse,” he said. My eyebrows shot up.

“No, no, no,” he said, turning red. “I didn’t mean to imply you were a horse . . . you’re . . . very . . . pretty. Jesus. I’m sorry.”

I laughed. This was absurd, all of it, but the only way through it was through it.

“It’s okay,” I said. I reached out and took his hand. It was damp and warm. I reminded myself not to be judgmental. After all, I had several spare tires around my middle, plus razor burn. The worst Jason had done so far was to compare me to a farm animal.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said, suddenly bold. Was it the homemade granola Greta had forced on me that morning or the manifestation of pure desperation? As I lead Jason toward my bedroom, I decided not to question it.

“Your house is great,” he said as we climbed the stairs. “What did you say you do for a living?”

“I write books.”

“Right.” Again, he did not ask for titles. If, by some strange twist of fate, Jason turned out to be Superman in bed, our relationship was still doomed. A man who reads is profoundly sexy. A man who does not is just some guy.

I’d made my bed that morning, afraid Jason would judge me a slob if I left it undone as usual. But pulling back the covers to reveal the clean pale pink sheets underneath was oddly intimate, like I was giving the guy a Sharon Stone–style glimpse between my legs. My face grew hot, and my heart, relatively calm until this moment, began to pound.

“Here, let me help,” Jason said, yanking a blanket down to the foot of the bed.

“Thanks.” Now what?

“Can I kiss you?” Jason asked. He wiped his palms on his pants. He was in worse shape than I was.

“Please,” I said, stepping toward him. He smelled good, like breakfast. Coffee, pancakes, warm syrup. I reminded myself I was not here to eat him.

His lips were fine, not too dry, and fortunately he didn’t slobber all over my face. I pulled back after a moment.

“Do we need to, like, set parameters?” I asked. Damn. I’d meant to do this downstairs. “Is there anything you really like or hate?” My face was beet red now, and there was no way to hide it. What an all-around bad idea this was. What sort of idiot thinks she can just dial up some guy and have inconsequential sex with him? I wanted off the bus.

“Well,” he said. “I’m fond of blow jobs, but what man isn’t? I don’t generally do anal unless it’s something you really enjoy. Having the lady on top is nice.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m afraid I’m not exactly sexually cutting edge. I was married to the same person for twenty years. How about you?”

I stopped myself before I blurted out something along the lines of “Oh my god I just want to be touched by someone other than my daughter. I don’t care how! I don’t care where!”

“I’m with you,” I said. “Nothing too kinky sounds fine. So how do we . . . um . . . do this? I mean the clothes part?”

“Well,” Jason said, clearing his throat. “I’d love to take your clothes off, if that’s okay?”

“Sure.”

He did a nice job removing my garments. I’d made an effort to wear clean underwear with intact elastic, and even though my bras now resembled body armor as opposed to sexy lingerie, I’d chosen one with a little flower embossed between the cups. As he unclasped my bra and my breasts hung loose, I was again amazed at how big they’d become. I never envisioned myself as the proud owner of such a saggy pair of knockers.

But Jason liked them, burying his head in the folds of flesh and making weird sounds. Some men cared not so much about perky as about large. I tried not to think about the noise and just enjoy his soft hands lingering along my ample waistline.

When he was done removing my clothes, I asked politely if I could return the favor. The hair covering his chest was darker than what was on his head and flecked with gray. Was it discouraging as a man to see your chest hair go gray? If our relationship lasted longer than this morning, I thought I might ask him. Overall, I didn’t mind hairy men as long as I was not required to rub sunscreen all over them.

Jason didn’t have muscles, but his soft flesh was cool to the touch and a nice olive color that spoke of a Mediterranean ancestor somewhere in the mix. I undid his belt buckle and dropped his pants in a heap at his feet. Slowly, I reached my hands into the waistband of his boxer shorts and gave those a tug.

The word
penis
is a no-no in erotic fiction. Choose some other word:
manhood, member, hardness, cock,
whatever, but do not say
penis
. It’s a buzzkill. But in the real world, I say call a penis a penis, and Jason’s penis was just right for my purposes. Not too big, not too small. It didn’t veer off to one side in an inelegant fashion or droop when it should be ready for action. Silently, I applauded my still intact ability to make a man hard.

“Well,” Jason said, gesturing toward the bed. “Shall we?”

I’d never been in this bed with anyone but Allison. Following my divorce, I put all my bedroom furniture out on the curb with a sign reading
FREE
. I wanted a clean slate. The old stuff was gone within the hour, and I replaced it promptly with new stuff. Different stuff.
My
stuff. And now I was about to lie down on my stuff and allow a total stranger to cover me with his hairy body.

His weight made me groan. Men were heavy. This was something I’d forgotten.

“I like to be on top,” I whispered. “But maybe this first time we should, you know, just stick to the basics?”

Jason nodded. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead. Although I knew he was not going to give me chlamydia or something worse, I had no idea about his cardiovascular health. I tried to relax, but I was dry as a bone. As Jason kissed my breasts and my flabby tummy, I imagined being naked with George Clooney, which was not as much help as it usually is. But Jason was going for it anyway. He wiggled his hips into position.

“Now?” he asked politely. We’d been in bed for all of three minutes. Oh well. Maybe I’d get the ice-cream-sundae version next week.

“Sure,” I said. “But hold on.”

I licked my fingers and ran them over the desert down below. Lubrication by any means necessary.

“Okay,” I said. “Now.”

Jason entered me like a thirsty man finally handed a glass of cold water. He groaned and shuddered and yelped out some
oh, oh, oh
s, and after about ninety seconds he collapsed on top of me with a single great heave.

“Wow, Sadie,” he said when he caught his breath. “That was great.”

I could think of a lot of words for it.
Great
was not among them.

When I didn’t say anything, he slithered off me, propped himself up on his elbow, and studied my face.

“You didn’t come.”

In the four and a half minutes of sexual relations we’d just had? No. Not exactly.

“Well, no,” I said. The upside of this relationship was there was no need to lie. This was not about feelings or emotions, so I did not have to be mindful of protecting either.

“Can I go down on you?” Jason asked with such sincerity I giggled.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I appreciate the offer. Maybe next time?”

We had to wrap this up before Greta came home and caught me naked in bed with a stranger before lunch. Jason’s face showed relief. For a second I thought it was because he didn’t have to dive down into unfamiliar territory. But it wasn’t that. It was relief that I wasn’t dismissing him for having the sexual control of a fifteen-year-old. He’d won another chance.

“I’d be honored,” he said. And I giggled again. I couldn’t help it. The giggling rapidly turned to laughter, and soon Jason and I were completely hysterical on my bed. Hysterical, naked, and sticky. I was still wiping the tears from my eyes as I got dressed. We parted at my front door with a brief kiss on the lips and a hug.