Like No One’s Watching

Ethel Rohan

Fall 2009

The day I birthed our son, my husband’s and my first and only child, my libido died. Eight years on, my husband’s sexual frustration is a thousand times bigger than our wiry, loping, green-eyed boy.

“I have needs,” he urges.

In recent months, he’s added: “I couldn’t be blamed for straying.”

It’s not that we don’t make love. We average twice a month, give or take. It’s that I don’t ever want to make love.

“A waste,” he says whenever he sees me naked, or dressed-up. “People would never imagine.”

At least I believed I didn’t care if I never made love again until I dreamt the other night about having panting, thrashing, sticky, wet sex with the dad of one of our son’s classmates.

The next morning, in the schoolyard, I saw the dad I’d dreamed about: tall, lean, and black-haired, regular and rugged, but striking. His large eyes and lips. I hurried past, pretending not to notice him.

Minutes later, as I drove home, I fantasized about him, imagining my meeting him at a party and admitting: “I dreamt about you.”

Somehow, at this party, there’s no one else around. He touches his thumb to my right cheekbone, and slides the digit down to the pulse at the side of my neck. I moan, too loud. He dips his head, touching his thick, cool lips to mine. We kiss hard. He smells of oranges, of happy ever after. Tastes of danger. We knit tongues: the deep, sweet, drowning lock of the damned.

I pulled my car over to the curb, my insides contracting, on the verge of another birth, and death.

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