Page 3 of Dirty Diana
You just smile, and in between kissing me, you ask, “Can I fuck you?”
My body is yours. You can do whatever you like with it. I nod and lie back into the warm sleeping bag, spreading my legs for you, my thighs still quivering. You enter me quickly and your thickness is even more pronounced. I tighten around you, as if begging you to stay.Never leave.
You grip my hands and we intertwine our fingers, digging into the hard ground.
“God, you feel good,” you whisper.
I roll on top of you so that my legs are wrapped around your waist. You sit up, too, your hands on the small of my back. You take my breast in your mouth, biting my nipple and then sucking on it, as if to apologize. I raise and lower my hips as you push more deeply inside me. We move together, faster and faster.
I lean back and feel a strange tickle at my neck. It’s warm. Too warm. I swipe at the sensation with my hand.
I sit up straighter and focus on you. I focus on our bodies, your skin against mine, the feeling of fucking you.
Now there is a tickle at my cheek. More like a cloying wind. I brush it away. I move against you, but the pressure of our bodies against each other has gone. I can feel the hard earth beneath me—butI’m on top of you, I should feel you, not the ground. The strange, annoying breeze returns to my cheek, distracting me from you.
I look down, but you turn away. I can’t see your face.
I press my eyes shut and will myself back into my body, into its rolling waves of pleasure. I desperately want to get back to the heat between us.
But I’m somewhere else now.
My eyes fly open. I’m staring directly into the face of my husband, sleeping beside me. I’m not in a tent or beneath the stars. I’m in my bedroom, between crisp pin-striped sheets.
The heat I feel is not my own desire but my husband’s breath, warm and stale, against my face. Each time he exhales, he makes a noise like a tiny bicycle pump working hard to inflate an enormous liferaft.
I sink my face into the pillow, willing myself back into the dream, to the tent, to the cold, starry night.
It’s no use. I’m awake now.
Dallas,
Texas
—
Now
Chapter 1
—
There’s a room in our house that we rarely set foot in. It’s the third of three bedrooms, small and perfectly square, the room no one sleeps in. It’s also the only room that still has carpet—thick, creamy white pile laid down by the previous owners.
Oliver and I have come here searching for wrapping paper, just enough to wrap the small plastic mermaid he and our daughter, Emmy, bought for her best friend’s birthday. “They would have wrapped it for you at the store,” I say. I can’t help it. “For free.”
He glances toward the overstuffed closet. “We had to hightail it out of there, before Emmy swiped anything.”
“Oliver.” I laugh. “That wasonetime. Almost a year ago.” When she was five, our daughter stole a pack of Juicy Fruit from the grocerystore checkout line, then feigned innocence in the car while trying to blow a bubble.
“She’s a thief, Diana. A stone-cold klepto.” Oliver smiles and backs out of the room, leaving me to hunt for the paper.
In the beginning, Oliver and I dreamed this room could be a work space for us both. It’s too tight for him to set up a proper workshop, but it gets great afternoon light and could fit the kind of drafting table he’s always wanted. And I’d have room for an easel and paints.
—
When we first met, I was twenty-six and living in Dallas with seven roommates in a run-down house we all tried to pretend was an artist commune. We called it “The Co-op” but it was more like a party house that no one ever cleaned. I once determinedly taped up a chore chart with a sign-up column, thinking this would fix things. Instead of marking down their own initials, my roommates penciled inMatthew McConaugheyfor toilets andThe Ghost of Sir Alec Guinnessfor kitchen duty.
In the hottest part of summer, someone left raw meat in the broken garbage disposal and we got maggots, so I started stashing my food in my room. Some afternoons, I amused myself by sketching the house and my roommates, embellished and a little grotesque. I sent a handful of the drawings to my friend Barry, back in Santa Fe, and others to my best friend, Alicia, away at film school in New York. I signed them “Dirty Diana” because exaggerated stories of my filthy Co-op adventures horrified Barry and made Alicia laugh. They both sent back long, sweet letters, and once Alicia just sent a note that read, “Blink twice if I should send help,” glued to a clean kitchen sponge.
