Pulling My Hand Away

The first time it happened by accident. My mother-in-law had texted about the lake house and I pulled my hand back a second earlier than I meant to. He made a sound like I had hit him. I saw what was starting and left the phone where it was. That is how we ended up with what I call pulling my hand away.

A ruined orgasm is release without pleasure. The body lets go but gets nothing back: no spasms, no wave, no warm fog afterward. It just leaks, slow and thin, while he lies there watching it with a look I never see at any other time. Something between no and thank you.

How it looks. He kneels on the bed, hands behind his back, fingers locked. The cage is off. I take it off myself, and that alone is already something because I rarely do. I sit in front of him and bring him close with my hand. Slowly. I know the edge by heart now, by the way his stomach tightens and how he starts staring at the ceiling to hold on.

One second before, I take my hand off. Put both hands on my knees.

For the first two seconds nothing happens and he thinks I am just starting another round. Then his body does it on its own. He feels it before he sees it, and his face says no, wait, not like this. It leaks anyway. He groans, low and disappointed, and the sound stays with me sometimes when I am standing in the checkout line at Target.

He stays hungry. That is the difference. After a real one he drifts for an hour, everything feels distant. After this he has given something up but his head never caught up, so he looks at me like I still owe him. I do not. That is the point.

Afterward the cage goes back on while he is still shaking. I do not drag it out. The click, the key on its chain.

“Thank you, Ma’am,” he says. His voice is rough.

I asked once what he was thanking me for. He thought a long time. “For not letting me,” he said. I had to go into the kitchen so he would not see me smiling.

What I get out of it is honest: the face. Those two seconds when he still thinks it will be good and the third when he knows it will not. I am not cruel. In ordinary life I cry at the shelter ads on TV. But those three seconds are mine and I take them once a month, sometimes less.

And then there is the week after. After I pull my hand away he is quieter, quicker with the small things, more careful with how he looks at the key on my neck. I end up wanting to do it to him again.

I answered my mother-in-law about the lake house the next morning. She was annoyed. Well.