In Spite of Everything

He watches her undress. Quick, sure fingers undoing buttons and clips, her face stern, hyper-critical of the body incrementally revealed and watched by both of them in the wardrobe mirror. She turns to examine the cauliflowering on her left buttock, tutting softly. Eyes downcast, a crease of mild exasperation in their midst. The middle-aged thickness of her body depresses her. She talks of little else these days, constantly seeking out and discovering fresh flaws. There are impulsive bursts of dieting, perusals of leisure centre websites, but such occasions are fleeting. Her sensuality ever prevails.

She looks up at him without expression before returning to her bedtime routine. Now she sits, takes up her wipes. She is fanatical about her skin. Cleanse, tone, moisturize...He watches how intently she looks at herself, recognizes the same pleasure in her self-scrutiny that he feels while shaving. She elevates her chin to get at her neck, showing him the hollow between the blood vessels of her throat. A small diamond pendant sparkles beneath her collar-bone. Her bra is cream, sheer, grubby with fake tan. It had been visible through her blouse at the restaurant. Max, seated opposite her, staring at her tits. Her lip-marked wine glass raised to her mouth, her eyes looking at him above its rim...

Most of the time she doesn't even realize that she is flirting. It is an alpha female reflex, a sensitivity to male potential. His jealousy is tempered with a perverse satisfaction, as if her continued attractiveness to other men is somehow an advertisement for his own potency, the unique qualities that had made her choose him above all others. Yet they had argued in the car on the way home. She had called him delusional. He had called her a whore, a fucking disgrace. They haven't spoken since...

She drops the last wipe in the bin and goes to the bathroom. He reaches across to her bedside locker for her phone. A screen scored with nail marks, her wallpaper a snap of a beach at dusk from their summer in the South of France. His skin crawls with shame as he scrolls through her texts, her call history. Nothing. He replaces the phone as the toilet flushes and reassumes his previous position.

She shuts the bedroom door, eyeing him with suspicion. Her body language is awkward on her approach, her hips free of their usual ease. The mattress sighs as she sits down, finding an echo a moment later in the release of tension as she unhooks her bra. The weight of her freed breasts drags her shoulders forward, a slouch that mimics despondency. His fingers reach out but stop short of touching her.

He recoils as she stands up and throws back her side of the duvet. She mounts the bed, enters in a flurry of warmth and brute presence. A sigh, a drawing up of limbs...The posture is a barring order, a gesture of reproach. Though her back is to him, their intimacy is too well-established for him to be discouraged. Her arse is towards him, radiating heat and he can sense her blood much as he knows she cannot but be aware of the inflammation of his. She breathes slowly, a poor facsimile of a drifting off to sleep. He can feel her alertness, the cold logic of her conscious thought.

He lies down, inches slightly towards her. Her stomach growls with as yet effervescing Solpadeine as she moves an equivalent amount in the opposite direction. When he smiles at the gesture, she seems to relax. He doesn't need to see her face to perceive its softening, its tacit surrender. She is tired, reluctant to fight, willing, for now, to accept his intimations of remorse.

His erection slips out of the vent of his shorts as if in search of her. He can't recall an occasion on which he has not wanted her. Her craving for intimacy is infectious, ever-present, an addiction to a communal rather than an atomized bliss. She makes him believe in the soul. Nothing as good as what they share could ever originate in mere flesh. He sees the sweat of her breasts and stomach, an arm flung across her face, as he makes her come with his fingers in the bedroom of the villa in Arles. It's the physical closeness that makes her come so hard, the sense of being wanted by him, wanting to please him...She has no control over her desirability. He understands this now...

The bed is dressed in the same linen as it had been the last time they had made love. It's meaningless, but the coincidence pleases him. He squirms down further, deep enough to get a view of her body beneath the quilt. The warmth beneath smells of moisturizer, suppressed hormones. A chink of light illuminates the scar above her coccyx. He tries to remember the exact configuration of the effaced tramp stamp but is unable to see beyond a map of Roman Arles. When she knelt before him with her hips raised, it would expand in response to each thrust of his body. He would aim for it at the critical moment but he was a wayward bombardier and invariably overshot. Streaks of come along the damp marble of her lower back...

His glans brushes against the endsheet, twitching with muscle memory. He wets his fingers, touches himself...I'm sorry...The words are stillborn on his tongue. He knows better than to compound his offence...

She shifts her body, neither towards or away from him, and inhales sharply through her nose. He lies absolutely still, uncertain of how he should respond to the overture. His paranoia is justified. She is not above deploying lures, false flags. He moves closer, focusing on the down of her hairline, the ball of her vertebra prominens. The length of spine beneath is ominous, arrayed like a stinger awaiting fugitive wheels. A long back, characteristic of her mother's people, showing early signs of the curvature that had afflicted the old lady in her later years. The prospect terrifies her, as does ageing in general. He has seen her web history, the obsessive quality of her investigations into scoliosis, free radicals, HRT. That she believes she may hit upon the secret of eternal youth via the munificence of algorithms breaks his heart...

Forty-five. The despair in her voice when she states her age...To him, she has never been more beautiful. Where she sees only the corrugation and slackness of middle-age, he sees terminal coherence, the apogee of adult structure and form. She accuses him of blowing smoke up her ass. He has long since given up trying convince her of his sincerity. But there is no question of a choice between the callow girl he had married twenty years before and the woman who now lies next to him. Her mature body is a narrative, its nuance and subtext discernible to him alone. He reads of their shared heritage amongst its peaks and hollows, two strangers growing towards familiarity to the point where it becomes idle to speak of two separate minds and bodies. Love is too poor a word; too imprecise. He feels depth of his need for her by imagining her loss, but, as always, his mind stops short. There can be no question of their ever being parted. They will prevail, somehow. He has never doubted the fact...

A blood vessel moves on the side of her throat, less a pulse than a murmur. Her heart, her viscera, her poor womb...Which would prove treacherous? He lowers his eyes to the middle of her back, seeing through flesh and muscle to her kidneys, descendants of those that had done for both her parents. As the heart fails, the kidneys fail; as the fluids mount due to the latter, all the more struggles the former...The dwindling self of the run-up to death, the end of communication...He has seen it four times, both of his parents and both of hers. Her father had spoken of angels above his wife's death-bed but there had been nothing there, a void above a grey, hollowed face finally at peace in the midst of the effrontery of medical hardware. She had clung to him, screaming mucus into the crook of his neck...He knows she had felt his hardness, just as he knows she is aware of it now, drawn some small comfort from its mindless vitality. They had fucked away the week of the funeral, and every funeral since, in the same spirit of defiance and affirmation. They were alive. It was beautiful to be so. It wasn't a victory over death but it felt like one. Tumescence, the burgeoning of fluids, breathlessness...It was as if their bodies were mocking the symptoms of heart failure, reclaiming them on behalf of life. Death is big and ugly enough. If it can give it out, then it ought to be able to take it.

She has been so still up to that point that her turning to look at him over her shoulder seems cataclysmic. He touches a vertebra, encouraged by the impatience he can see in the visible corner of her mouth. It is one of the subtle ways in which she manifests arousal, a system of tells that only he knows. The tiny acceleration in the rise and fall of her breasts, a certain click in her swallowing, a particular diameter of pupil in relation to iris...He moves his hand further up her back, thrilled, as if for the first time, by its indulged sleekness, the perfect fit of the ball of her shoulder in his palm. The tip of his ring finger probes her innoculation scar...

She raises herself on an elbow and docks in the groove formed by his body. Her arse is everywhere, assertive and insistent as it seeks purchase in his lap. She likes to feel his hardness up against her, to measure its quality against that of the muscle and bone of her pelvis. The counterpressure he applies is that of a beaten arm-wrestler. There is no contest. She whips him every time.

He buries his face in her hair and eats a way through to her scalp, feeling her laughter as a vibration in his teeth via the bone of her skull. It is one of her ticklish spots, even more so than the soles of her feet. He had attempted to wash her hair for her once, a grand romantic gesture. Her ensuing hysteria had made her piss the bath. Now he feels her laughter modulate into contented breathing, mimicking the deep and regular character of his own. She moves her hips against his groin like a stripper. He stuffs an imaginary note inside the waistband of her knickers before touching the softness at their centre. Slick, balled cotton...Her bed pants are practical rather than flattering but he would rather see her in them than in her best lingerie. She likes her comfort. Living with him, who can blame her...?

He stretches the fabric, feeling the quickening of her vulva beneath. She gets wet so quickly, so thoroughly, just as she can dry up in an instant. Sometimes passion makes him careless, leaves her raw and stinging inside. He is duty-bound to make amends...

Her body is supple, surprisingly light as he guides her up on to all fours. He pauses a moment alongside her, traces the uncanny perfection of her definition with a fingertip. She lowers her face into the pillow and sighs. When he stares at her like this, she suspects a critique, the drawing up of a snag list. She would laugh if she knew the truth. His imagination is protozoan, a junkyard of second-hand impressions. Line of beauty, form and ideal, echoes of formative sexuality...He says nothing; leans forward to kiss the scar on her back. Her flesh responds, stopping his mouth, eager to shut it up. She believes in the body, in the eloquence of gesture and sensation. It is all that matters. The rest is flannel, the posturing of windy boys...

His lips continue southward, over the hem of her knickers, premature stubble on his cheeks catching in its stuff. She pushes back hard against his face, straight out of her corner, an instinctive brawler. Ilium versus cheekbone – a straight-up fight would be a massacre. The only option is guile...Though his fingers are a mere suggestion against the facing of her knickers, it is enough. He breathes in against her stilled flanks, smiling at the corresponding inrush of air through teeth that he hears at the far end of her. TKO...

The shadow they cast upon the wall above the headboard is gigantic. His upright form looms over her bulk as if bent upon mayhem. Looking down, he sees the tip of his glans crushed between her buttock and his pelvis, his meatus grimacing, a recusant pressed under stones, ecstatic in martyrdom. Her knickers are halfway down her thighs (when had he done that?), her labia thick and slippery, as protean to the touch as his own sex is on occasion. The length of his index finger, laid upon her from the rear, is a perfect fit to her cleft. She sees the symmetry in mystical terms, evidence that their being together is necessary, the reunion of two long since sundered hemispheres. Something she had read in one of her undergraduate paperbacks...He had laughed at the notion but, occasionally, when he takes down one of the old books, yellowed now, spinal glue brittle with age, and finds her underlinings and notes, touches the cigarette ash in the gutters and toast-butter fingerprints in the margins, he understands what she means. Studying these traces of her younger self, the brown-haired country girl with whom he had fallen first in lust and then in hopeless love, he becomes aware of the passage of time, centuries arrayed in arcs above them in a statement of their essential insignificance. The sense of hazard, of an infinity of alternative scenarios, none of which involved the two of them together, is cosmic; nauseating. But he had found her rather than anyone else and she had found him. Though his cynicism balks at her fond teleology, he knows, deep down, that she is right. They are meant to be together. Even death will not separate them...

She rolls on to her back and takes his face in her hands before guiding it down towards hers. Her fingertips are cold against his cheeks, victims, like her feet, of bad circulation; proof, according to her, of the warmth of her heart. His hands, meanwhile, are rank with bastard sweat...Their lips pause, millimetres apart. Foul with Listerine and vinegar, their mingled breath forms a weather system of intolerable humidity. Her eyes are restless, cocked with skepticism as they flit from one of his features to the next. He touches the satin of her temples by way of reassurance, watching the depth of her philtrum, an indicator of the readiness of her lips. The stain on the rim of her glass...Max and his full-bellied smugness; his truculent editorializing...She had been taking the piss out of him, not flirting. That subtlety, the exquisite balance she maintained between diversion and indifference was a coping mechanism, acquired as a means of dealing with an overbearing partner. He blanches with adoration and withering shame. A man can be so fucking contemptible...

Her smile, though slight, is unmistakably indulgent. It tells him that yes, he may be an insufferable prick but he is her insufferable prick. That she wouldn't have him any other way...His lips against hers throw shapes of contrition but her tongue intervenes, telling him to go way and shite. She's heard it all before.

The top half of the bed's divided base lurches to the right and his body slips into hers. She looks at him in apparent disbelief before laughing into his mouth, adjusting the lie of her hips to accommodate the intrusion. Her thighs ascend, clamping him into position, the bristle of her calves abrading either cheek of his arse. This will be at her tempo. He owes her that much...

Her eyes darken in a felon's adrenaline rush. Even the gentlest of souls can relish the indecency of a supplicant body, the dangerous potential in the malleability of abject flesh. His torso arches upwards, spine hyponastic, the only movement he is permitted by a counterforce intent upon compressing his entire bodily essence upon her loins. Here is the limit of her gentleness, a shading into the reality of physical desire. Her focus is obsessive, her need for him both edifying and baffling. In spite of everything he's done to her, twenty years of pig-ignorance and complacency, callousness and indifference...As she loosens her grip, allows his hips enough freedom to proceed, he is in awe of a sense of her greatness of character, a feminine generosity entirely free of the kind of endoparasite self-interest conditional upon his own. There is no implicit pay-off anticipated, no interest to accrue upon the principal...The openness that characterizes her giving of herself to him is an expression of the impulse to bring forth life. Deep inside her, he touches her cervical neck, imbibes a portion of its sadness for the two poor souls late of there and their failure to come to full term. The entire gynaecological profession could go fuck itself for all the use it had been. Hostile, they had said of her uterus...And what are they with their perverse instruments, their sick-fuck specializations, their essentialist misogyny? Again he thinks of Max, but only for a second. He doesn't matter anymore. Nobody does. Nobody but the two of them can vouch for the grief implicit in their carnality, not so much an actual presence as a desperate striving to keep it away.

She pushes him out slowly before drawing him back in again, settling into a rhythm, adding embellishments to each successive phrase. Her face is hard, not yet entirely free of hurt. But she believes him now; has willed herself to accept his sincerity. He tries to kiss her but she feints, offering up her thorax instead. The sweat between her breasts is funky, the oxygen grab of confined bodies laced with dogged cigarettes although he knows this latter is a phantom. He misses her smoking, the fetish she used to make of each cigarette. Yet he had bitched at her to quit even though she took little notice. Two pregnancies, two attempts, two relapses...

After the second, he kept his mouth shut, bumming drags off her as they drank themselves to sleep each night. The wine made her impassive, immune to his sloppy-mouthed commentary, the inanity passing for wit, the ignorant psychology...He buried his sadness and offered up the obscenity of his ensuing denial as male fortitude. A virtue...She said little but brevity couldn't mask the pain in her voice. Its honesty shamed him. He took refuge from his cowardice in resentment. One night, he had exploded and told her he couldn't bear her martyr act any longer. Screeds of self-pity, blurted out with neither logic nor design. She remained impassive throughout, even as he broke down at last and sank weeping to the floor by the window. When he looked up she was still in the same position, hunched primly upon the edge of the sofa. She poured two glasses of wine and lit a cigarette, waiting for him to come back to her. In spite of everything...A sense of the boundlessness of her love for him had fresh shame mustering but one look from her was enough to let him know not to go there. Once in one night was enough...He sat down next to her and took the glass she handed him. It was empty before he could bring himself to look at her. She was peeling the security tag from a cigarette box, pleased with the cleanliness of the sundering. He looked away quickly, anxious not to jinx it...

He feels her climax mustering in the heels that club his kidneys. Each time he thinks they have reached the limit of constriction, her thighs grasp him tighter again. His lower back is screaming but he sucks it up. Pain is what she feels. Her hands are aloft on either side of her, palms up against the pillows in a mockery of surrender; impatient fingers, erect with tension, willing his own into their midst. The knotting together is somehow more intimate than sex. She would, he suspects, forego intercourse for good so long as she was still allowed to kiss him and hold his hand, to have his arm about her waist and her hand in his back pocket when they are out together. The adolescent gestures that nonetheless single him out as her man and her as his woman, whose very innocence are more freighted with significance than the instinctual emesis of fucking could ever hope to be. Yet he isn't quite ready to renounce the flesh and neither is she...