Broken

He traced my body with his lips and tongue. I tensed when he nuzzled the curve of my belly, then my thighs. He parted my curls with a fingertip and kissed my clit. When he licked it, I arched into ecstasy at once, giving myself up to his touch. Adam made love to me with his mouth, slowly, until I couldn’t do anything but ride the waves of pleasure and try to remember to breathe.

Adam didn’t fumble with the condom or struggle to figure out how to enter me. He used a hand to guide himself inside, dipping the head of his penis first to smooth the way for the rest. I was so wet he was able to fill me with one thrust.

We both cried out. He bent over me, his face buried in the curve of my shoulder. His teeth grazed me, and I answered with the scrape of my nails on his back. We didn’t move at first. Pleasure had immobilized us. The immensity of what we were doing became real. Only for a moment, and then he eased out with a smooth shift of his hips. Back in, all the way, and I lifted my hips to meet him.

Inexperience should have made me clumsy, but arousal choreographed us. In and out, bodies shifting. Give and take.

It didn’t last long enough for me to come again, a feat of which I didn’t know myself capable at the time. Adam cried my name when he came. His last thrust hurt me more than the first had and I cried out, too.

After, I lay curled in the circle of his arms and slept until it was time for me to get up and leave for home. It took my body three days to recover, until I could no longer feel the effects of him inside me, and by that time Adam had called me twice a day and made arrangements to come see me at my parents’ house. I never asked him what he told Rachael. I didn’t really care.

We were inseparable after that. We got married the June after I earned my masters in psychology. A year later, while I was working on my post-doctoral experience so I could sit for the licensing exam, the binding on Adam’s left ski broke as a result of a manufacturer’s defect. He skied headfirst into a tree, suffered a C5-level spinal cord injury that put him in a coma for three weeks and left him without sensation or voluntary movement from the shoulders down. He was only thirty-six.

Losing my virginity hadn’t made me a woman, but almost losing my husband had. He could have died. There are days I weep with gratitude that he didn’t.

And then, there are days I wish he had.

At home that night, I let myself in the front door with my key. I smelled something good, savory. Probably soup. Mrs. Lapp likes to make soup in the winter.

“Mrs. D?”

She always asks, though who else would be coming in at dinner time? “It’s me.”

She bustled out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. Her tidy gray bun had gone a little askew and wisps of hair had come down around her flushed face. Dolly Lapp cooks and cleans like a dream come true, but she’s more than a housekeeper. She’s a mother, nurse, friend and my life would be impossible without her.

I hung my coat on the hook and set my briefcase in its accustomed spot by the front door. Everything had to stay in its place in my house. There could be no room for clutter, nothing to snag or catch on wheels and block the way.

“I made soup. Come in and have a seat. I was getting worried. You’re so much later than usual.”

“Traffic was bad.” I lied with nary a flinch. Traffic had been fine. The fight with Joe had so unsettled me I’d gone driving, around and around, unable to face the idea of coming home. “But you’re right, it’s late. I should go check on Adam.”

Mrs. Lapp nodded her apple-doll head. “He’s in bed already, I helped him in about an hour ago. Soup’s in the Crock-Pot, Mrs. D, and I’ll just get going. Samuel’s been here since half past five. I set him up in the kitchen with a mug of coffee and the newspaper, but you know how he gets rutchy, setting too long.”

Guilt at my selfishness pricked me. “You go on ahead. I’m sorry you had to wait.”

She fluttered her hands. “Pshaw. Not to worry. Just remember to turn it to low when you’re done, so’s it don’t boil down, and I’ll put it away in the morning. Oh, and your sister called. I wrote down her message by the phone.”

She really took excellent care of us. I smiled. “Thanks, Mrs. Lapp.”

She nodded and headed back the hall toward the kitchen and her impatient husband. Belly empty and growling, I postponed my dinner for another few minutes. I climbed the narrow stairs, a hand on the carved and polished railing Mrs. Lapp kept so clean.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped to listen. To my right was the short part of the hall, with the bathroom, the guest room, the elevator and the stairs to the third floor. To my left, the long part of the hall, with two more rooms, the entrance to the back stairs and the master bedroom and bath. From upstairs I heard the faint sound of the television and then the creak of footfalls. Dennis. A moment later he peered over the railing.

I liked Dennis. At six-foot-two-inches and 230 pounds, he looked like a linebacker, but he was equally sensitive as he was strong. Though he’d only been with us for two years, I could no more do without him than I could with Mrs. Lapp.

“Hi, Sadie. You’re home late.”

“Traffic,” I told him, too.

“I’ll be going out in about twenty minutes. I’ll check on him before I go,” he told me and disappeared into his room again. I heard him talking, then making some calls.

Everything has its price, and the cost of having Dennis and Mrs. Lapp was my privacy. No matter how often I wistfully remembered being able to walk around in my underwear and eat peanut butter straight from the jar, that life was a part of the past. My mother-in-law euphemistically called them “help.” I called them necessity. The three of us worked together like synchronized machinery to keep this household functioning. Without them, I’d have been lost.

I paused in Adam’s doorway to put on the right face. A pleased half-smile with just the right touch of weariness to indicate the battles of the highway. A fond gaze.

Adam was already in bed, but he turned his head to look at me when I came through the doorway. He’d been reading something on his laptop. “Close program,” he ordered the computer. He could operate most everything in his room via the voice-operated command system. “You’re late tonight.”

“I feel so loved. You’re the third person tonight to tell me so.” I kept the reply light, joking, slipping so easily into the role of wife.

I pushed the computer table out of the way and bent to brush his lips with my evening kiss. His mouth felt cold beneath mine, and I closed my eyes, willing it to warm.

“Long day?” Adam asked when I’d pulled away. “You look bushed.”

Even before I could answer, my stomach gurgled, and I put my hand overtop to quiet it. “Mrs. Lapp made soup. I’ll go have some. I wanted to say hi, first.”

He smiled again, still looking so much like the man I’d fallen in love with it made my guts hurt. “Hi.”

“Hi.” I reached to push his hair off his forehead. His mouth had been cold but his forehead and cheeks were flushed. “You feel warm.”

“Ah, you caught me reading.” He wiggled his eyebrows. For a man without the use of anything below his shoulders, Adam never had a problem making his expressions clear.

I looked at his laptop. “You’re reading smut again?”

“Please.” He affected a haughty tone. “It’s literature.”

“For class or for fun?” I stroked my hand across his forehead again, pretending a caress but really checking for fever.

“Class.”

Adam’s poetry had once won national awards. Now he taught online English courses for Penn State University. As far as I knew, he no longer wrote poems.

“Prison Poets?” I straightened a hand that had fallen askew, legs that had bent a bit during the course of the day. I tucked blankets in all around him with swift, practiced movements, making him a mummy.

“The Marquis de Sade versus Oscar Wilde.” Adam’s eyes followed my course around the bed.

“Sounds positively kinky.”

I leaned across him to tuck the blankets on his other side. He breathed in deep and his lips grazed my throat. Heat and memories flooded me.

“You smell so good.” Adam’s voice was hoarser than usual.

I froze. He tilted his head to brush his lips against my skin, and breathed in again. He nuzzled me. My nipples tightened and knees got weak as instant arousal, eager as a puppy, bounded through me at that one, simple caress.

His tongue flickered out. “You taste good, too.”

I turned my face to his and kissed him, our mouths parting. His tongue stroked mine and another bolt of pure liquid pleasure washed over me. I put a hand on his shoulder to steady myself. The flannel of his pajama shirt was soft, the bones beneath padded enough by the fabric not to hurt my palm.

I wanted to kiss him forever, to melt into him. The kiss broke and left both of us breathing hard. I leaned in again, my mouth seeking his and finding it closed to me. Shut out, I pulled away.