Centaurs and Lovers.

*** Six: Philip's Education / The Long Middle

This is harder to tell in sequence because it didn't happen in sequence. It happened the way marriages happen - in weather patterns, in the accumulation of small decisions, in the moments you don't know are important until they're behind you.

She learned him the way she learned most things - by paying attention and not making it strange.

The first time she moved her hand somewhere new he went still in the way of someone who hadn't expected to want something and did. She noted it with the same interest she brought to a new dish on the menu - well, that's interesting - and filed it away for later.

Later was good. Later she took her time with it, worked out what he liked and in what order and at what pace, with the quiet pleasure of someone who enjoys getting things exactly right. He wasn't much of a talker during. He didn't need to be. He had a whole vocabulary of stillness and sound and the specific way he'd reach for her when she should keep going, and she learned it the way she learned everything, which was thoroughly.

The shop was his idea, which surprised her. He wanted to go, was almost certain about it right up until they were inside, at which point he became fascinated by the dildos and strapons and couldn't quite bring himself to pick anything up.

"See anything you like?" she asked.

"I'm just looking."

"You've been looking at the same shelf for ten minutes."

"It's a big shelf."

She picked one up, turned it over, read the box like she was choosing produce. "This one's popular, apparently."

"How do you know that?"

"It says so. Right here." She held up the box. "'Best Seller.'"

He didn't laugh, but something in his shoulders let go a little.

"You don't have to buy anything," she said. "We can just look."

"I know."

"You keep looking at that one."

"I'm not looking at anything."

"Philip."

He looked at the floor. He didn't answer. He put his hands in his pockets like a man trying not to reach for something.

She watched him for a moment. She knew what she was looking at.

That night she told him she had a pretty good idea what he had in mind. Would he like her to handle it.

Yes, he said. Please.

The please was new. She liked it.

She handled it with the same attention she brought to everything - unhurried, interested, willing to be surprised. She took him through using a set of butt plugs in three different sizes and finally the strapon.

Then finally the big day.

She wrapped a towel around a pillow and placed it under his hips.

He never looked away from her face. She realized after a moment that he wasn't watching what she was doing. He was watching to see whether she thought he was ridiculous. She smiled before she said anything, and only then did he relax.

He was on his back with his legs spread and watching her face.

She applied lots of lube, lifted his legs, and pressed the tip of strapon firmly against his 'you know what'.

He felt so exposed and vulnerable but completely trusting. He knew she was going to penetrate him and he was relaxed and compliant and wanting to capture the moment. He told her he loved her.

She found herself feeling oddly competent. Someone had to know where they were going, and for once it was her.

They locked eyes and she slowly slid inside him.

"Still okay?"

"I trust you."

She caught herself wanting to straighten the towel under him, the impulse so domestic that she almost laughed. He looked up, puzzled.

She leaned down and kissed him softly and deeply.

And she was surprised.

He had a powerful orgasm, and he released a normal amount of sperm, but it didn't squirt; it simply flowed in a steady stream.

Philip who preferred to know the terms of things. Here he was with his eyes closed, trusting her to invent them.

She found she liked that more than she would have predicted.

***

What she knew: she loved him. That was not in question and never was. She knew his silences and his shampoo and what he looked like asleep. She knew which floorboard creaked and which burner ran hot and his attention when he was listening versus when he was waiting to talk.

One evening, dinner done, something on television, his hand on her shoulder, she said, not really meaning to say it out loud: "What are you thinking about?"

"Nothing. This." He nodded at the TV.

"Okay."

"Why?"

"No reason."

He looked at her a second longer than the moment needed, then went back to the show, and she let it go, because there wasn't anything to point to, nothing wrong exactly, just her, sitting there, waiting for something to happen that wasn't going to happen tonight or probably any other night.

She had been in that apartment hundreds of times and she would have said, if asked, that it was one of the places she felt most at home.

What she didn't know, for a long time, was what was missing. She suspected the category before she could name the thing. She'd catch herself in the middle of an ordinary evening - dinner, something on television, his hand on her shoulder - waiting for something to happen. Not bored exactly. Just aware that she was not quite all the way there.

Philip was not a risk taker. This she understood about him.

He was good at adapting. This was a real thing about him, not a small thing - when he learned the fuller version of what she'd been at twenty, he didn't flinch, he incorporated it, he found a way to hold it that worked for him. There was generosity in this and also, she came to understand, a kind of control. Philip preferred to know the terms of things. Surprises were for other people.

She loved him for the generosity and lived alongside the control and told herself this was what grown people did, which was true and also a thing you could say to cover a great deal.

***

The year he was laid off was the hardest year.

The recession took most of what he knew - the crews gone, the projects frozen, the competence he'd built over twenty years suddenly with nowhere to go. He was not a man who knew how to be useless. He tried not to show her how bad it was and she saw exactly how bad it was and they both pretended she didn't, which was its own kind of loneliness.

She was doing well. This was the mixed blessing: they were financially stable, the medical was through her work, he had no practical reason to panic and every emotional reason to.

They were doing dishes one night, not talking, the radio on low. He set a plate down harder than he needed to.

"You know what's funny?"

"What."

"You being fine. That's the funny part."

She turned the water off and didn't say anything for a second. Then: "I'm not fine, Philip. I'm handling it. Those aren't the same thing, whatever it looks like from where you're standing."

He picked the plate back up and finished drying it and put it away, and that was the end of the conversation, except it wasn't, because neither of them brought it up again and it sat in the kitchen with them for months after.

The antidepressant helped and didn't cure it. The sexual side effects were real - she was matter-of-fact about this to herself, because being matter-of-fact was what she had - and what they had instead was other things, careful things, satisfactory in the way that careful things were satisfactory, which was not much more than that.

She masturbated frequently. They mostly did oral sex. It was satisfactory for her but not much more than that.

She was okay with it. She told him the truth: she saw it as temporary, they could make it through. She meant this.

He started bringing it up on a Sunday, out of nowhere, while she was reading.

"You should find someone."

She didn't look up.

"I'm serious."

"I know you're serious." She turned a page she hadn't finished reading. "That's the problem."

"We used to do that. With Charlotte and Cooper. You liked it."

She put the book down, finally, and looked at him. "That was different. You weren't asking me to fix you with it."

He didn't have an answer for that, not that night, but he kept after her, the way he did once he'd decided something, and they fought about it in the way of couples who are actually fighting about something else - the words getting louder while the real subject stayed quiet in the corner of the room.

He said: I know you want it. I know you want to be fucked.

She stopped. She could feel the truth of it and the wrongness of how he'd put it simultaneously.

"All right," she said. "I'd like to be fucked. That doesn't mean I want to be fucked."

He laughed.

She was furious. He'd just named true out loud in their kitchen and then laughed at it.

She went to the bathroom. She did her hair. She put on clothes that were not casual, found her good earrings, stood in the mirror for a moment.

She went downtown to a hotel bar she knew. She sat at the bar and ordered a drink and let the room arrange itself around her the way rooms did.

A man appeared beside her in the way men did when she wanted them to.

"Can I buy you that?"

"You can buy me the next one."

He asked what she was drinking. She told him a Panty Dropper, and watched his face do the thing she knew it would do.

"That's a real drink?"

"It is tonight."

He was good-looking in an uncomplicated way and interested without being aggressive, and she could see the shape of the evening clearly. She could also see, somewhere underneath the clarity, what she actually wanted, which was to go home to Philip, and the hotel bar was the price of that.

"You come here a lot?" he asked.

"Enough."

"Waiting for someone?"

"Not anymore."

He laughed like she'd made a joke. She let him think she had.

Upstairs she took over.

"No kissing," she said. "No foreplay. Just this."

He didn't argue. She told him to get himself hard, and he did, and she watched him do it with the same interest she brought to most things. She took the condom from her purse and knelt down and then thought: well, nice looking penis. She couldn't resist sucking on it.

"I thought you said - "

"I changed my mind."

She put the condom on him, flipped her dress up, dropped her panties, bent over. He finished and that was that.

"Can I get your number?"

"No."

It was good. She was not going to pretend it wasn't good. But the good wasn't quite the point.

She thanked him and left.

When she got home Philip was awake. He asked where she'd gone and she told him, and the telling was its own thing - she watched his face change as she talked, watched him come back to himself from wherever the depression had put him. He wanted details. She gave them. The more she gave the more present he became, and eventually he was fully present, and what followed was the first time in months that felt like them.

She lay there after and looked at the ceiling.

She was glad it had worked. She was glad he was back. She'd gone to that hotel bar alone. That she'd sat there and let the evening arrange itself without a curator. That for a few hours something in her had simply run without management, and she couldn't entirely account for that.

She didn't say this. She filed it in the place where she kept things she wasn't sure what to do with.

Philip fell asleep. She stayed awake for a while, looking at the ceiling.