Lying In Bed by MJ Rose Read Free Book Online

of the tangle of arms and legs and lips.
    More
.
    Please
.
    Your lips
.
    You’re crazy
.
    Feel me
.
    Oh
.
    No, that was my imagination. I was already superimposing my story on their actions. I didn’t know what they were saying or hearing. What they were feeling. Except for their own kind of passion.
    Locked in their embrace, they remained on that corner for a few more seconds until the woman started backing them away from the street, toward the side of the building where they disappeared into a small alcove.
    To anyone walking by, they would be veiled in shadows, but they were still visible to me.
    And as if to prove it, a car drove past, its light illuminating the rest of the sidewalk, but not catching them in its beam. I was glad for them, for finding a place to be hidden in plain view.
    His back was up against the bricks, she was leaning into him, her arms were around his neck, his around her back, his hands were burrowing into the waistband of her short jean skirt.
    Oblivious to any possible danger or intrusion, urgently now, the woman hiked up her skirt, exposing more of her thighs. She thrust forward. The man maneuvered. I couldn’t be sure but from the way his shoulders moved, I thought he might be unzipping his fly and entering her.
    Their slow thrusts were the movements of a sexual dance. With heads bowed and hands gripping arms, their hips gyrated in circles, moving faster and faster until they slowed down for one long aching sequence of kisses and lunges.
    I held my breath, squeezed my arms with my own fingers, pressed my pelvis hard up against the window ledge while I kept watching them, staring, living out their whole pleasure in my head.
    I’d had sex with a few men since Joshua had died. I’d even enjoyed it in my own way with two of them, but I hadn’t come close to longing for anyone, hadn’t been pulled toward anyone with such a force that I would have made love to him on a street corner in the middle of the night. Even with Joshua I’d never been sexually adventurous like that.
    Passion - hungry, yearning, overwhelming - want found its place in the stories I wrote for clients. But those were fantasies. I couldn’t imagine living that kind of desire.
    To feel it required living it. It required exhibitionism, of the body and of the mind, a baring of more than your flesh. You have to open up to someone and show him what is inside of you to feel passion. And that was something that I’d learned to be afraid of a long time before I’d met Joshua.
    Except for my first real relationship with a man, I’d never managed to merge my fantasy life with my reality. Back then, with my first lover, I’d lived out my eroticism easily. Given and taken freely. But since I’d broken that off at 19, for the past eight years, there had been a deep gulf between what I imagined and what I lived. My daydreams and nighttime dreams were thick with lust and wet with pleasure. But when I was with a flesh and blood man, I became tight and dry. Withholding. Selfish. Preoccupied.
    The letters and stories I wrote, the artwork I did, fulfilled me. And I was all right with that. Not everyone could manage to merge their wishes with their deeds, their imaginings with their actions.
    I stepped away from the window, leaving the couple to zip up and pat their clothes back into place. And as I turned back to the living room, I realized exactly what my problem was with the cover of the novel I’d been working on.
    I didn’t think of Joshua – or miss him – too often anymore. Weeks could go by without me consciously focusing on him. I didn’t cry anymore or wonder what might have become of us. But the cover design for the novel that took place in Venice had brought him and his awful, surprising death back to me. And there, in the nighttime, alone and powerless to fight the memories off the way I could during the day, I had become melancholy.
    The cover had made me think of what I’d lost with Joshua.
    At least that was what I