Jake & Mimi by Frank Baldwin Read Free Book Online

assures me that his buddies are the same. Worse. If
     it weren’t for professional sports, he says, they’d talk about nothing else, and he promises that if I ever heard a tape of
     poker night, I wouldn’t let any of them into the apartment again.
    I don’t understand it, this obsession with sex. Will she or won’t she, on their end, and should I or shouldn’t I, on ours.
     Isn’t there more to life? It’s in the air, I know — the whole culture is mad with it. The movies. The music. The scandals.
     The billboards. There is no escaping it, and I guess it seeps into everyone. Really, though, I don’t ever think about it.
     Or didn’t ever.
    If there was a problem between Mark and me, any problem, I could understand it, but no, there is no problem.
    Well.
    It’s not a problem, I would never call it that. It’s not even a complaint, really. But since I’m trying to understand… there
     is one thing.
    We… only ever go at it the one way. The usual way. It’s wonderful. Safe and easy and natural, and he makes sure I’m… cared
     for… and three weeks ago I would have said I’m happy. I
am
happy. I’m a flower to Mark, and I love it. I can do everything with him that I dreamed I’d do with a partner. Suggest a
     museum on Saturday and he won’t blanch. Talk to him about books and about ideas, even.
    It’s just… there is fire in me, I know it. And there are times I’d like to… give in to that side of me. And there are times
     I almost do. Mark and I have made love when I’ve gone after him and he’s come back at me hard and it’s been wonderful. But
     still safe. Always safe. And always, essentially, the same way. Even our way into sex is the same.
    He’ll touch me, then look into my eyes, and if I return his look, we’ll walk to the bed, where I’ll take off his clothes and
     he’ll take off mine, and then either he will start down from my neck or reach down for me as we kiss. I swear it is this way
     almost every time. If I start it differently, he steers me back to this… routine. Gently, but he steers me back. If we are
     on the floor, reading the Sunday paper, and I kiss him and smile back at his look and try to pull him down to me, he will
     smile but he will tense, and to save the moment I’ll stand and we’ll go to the bed. Or, and this happened just once, two weeks
     ago, we were in bed, and ready, and I started to, to sit up, but I saw his eyes tense and I stopped myself almost before I
     started, brought him down to me, and we did it as always.
    I should speak to him, maybe. We’ve never talked about sex. Not once. There are couples, I know, that discuss everything,
     that get videos and, can I even say it, devices. We could never. Even asking him to take me… another way — impossible. Imagine,
     the man I marry. But I couldn’t. And I wouldn’t, either, because he’d think I’ve been unhappy all this time, and I haven’t
     been at all. There has been, from the start, such comfort and safety in our sex. And I’ve prized it. I grew up a good Greenwich
     girl, eighteen years in the same beautiful stone house, loving parents, private school, and happy, happy with all of it. And
     when as a girl I thought of love, I thought first of a soul mate, and yes, a protector, and I have that in Mark, absolutely,
     beyond question.
    So why do I see men now and… it’s less than imagining it, not quite imagining it, because I stop myself, turn my thoughts
     away because… what was it Daddy used to say… no good could ever come of it.
    But just once, to feel — what?
    Dominated.
    Mimi. See where the mind will go, when you let it loose? When you start it down a way of thinking? It’s not true. It is nerves,
     as I said before. Nerves and nothing else, and it will pass. Oh, I wish the wedding were tomorrow. I want to stand at that
     altar and hear the priest say his words. The traditional words. The magic ones. “Do you, Mimi…” and so forth, right through
     to the end. He will