Naked: How to Dress the Truth Ch. 02

Alison had been so intent on experiencing Tom's orgasm that she wasn't sure what she had felt herself. Laying there now, in the quiet of the room, she felt both sated and yet still with a warm buzz of arousal, as if her nerve endings were still charged and firing.

She lay there, looked over their bodies in a late afternoon light. Tom had dozed off. This would make a good photo, she observed from a distance. What should we call this one, Greg? Aftermath? She almost choked in her struggle to suppress a nervous laugh. Alison, where do these thoughts come from? She drifted, alone with her thoughts, her right hand absently caressed his shoulder and held his head, her fingers in his hair. Her stomach knotted, an uneasy reaction to a simple gesture that felt inexplicably too familiar. How can that be possible, she wondered? It was almost 6pm, she hadn't realized how much time had passed. We've been having sex for .. how long? .. she asked herself, and now I'm worried about too much familiarity? She pulled back her hand, too conscious of the skin of her forearm touching Tom's back. Yes, I am, she admitted, brow furrowed in puzzlement.

She again felt a disconnect. She was not on the bed, no longer in the room. Instead, she stumbled back into that maze of confusion, a labyrinth of twisting corridors of her own thoughts and feelings. She followed each in turn to see which corridor gave her stomach a twist. If I was now with Greg, she thought, I'd turn to him and put my other arm around him. He would hold me. We would hold each other. We would face each other and whisper to each other. She held that image and found herself transported, with crystal clarity, to a place in her mind that soothed the tension and bathed her in a restful glow.

It was easy. She was amazed that it was so easy to find her way out.

Alison remained in bed a while longer, long enough for her sexual heat to dissipate and to be replaced by another need, signaled by a grumbling stomach. She eased herself out from under Tom's arm. He drifted into half-consciousness, raised his head.

"I'm going to take a shower," she said.

"Sure," he replied. "Towels are somewhere." He rolled onto his back, an arm over his eyes.

Alison entered the shower stall and adjusted the water up to temperature. One part of her wanted to linger under the soothing hot water flowing over her skin, while another part of her was concerned that Tom might join her. She could guess where he'd want that to lead, and her own lingering sexual arousal tempted her in the same direction.

Alison turned and gasped in surprise to see Tom sliding open the door to the shower.

"Sorry to frighten you," he said with an apologetic wince.

"The running water. I didn't hear you come in," Alison replied, flustered. She saw Tom's expression change to one of amusement, and she realized that she was standing in front of him in a classic pose of trying to cover herself with crossed arms and spread palms. "Oh," she muttered, giving him a self-conscious glance as she stepped past him.

She dried herself, gathered up her clothes still in a pile on the floor, and returned to the bed. She slipped on her panties and her bra. She put on her skirt and blouse, found her hair band by the side of the bed and fastened her hair back into a pony tail. She retrieved her sandals and shoulder bag from the vestibule and returned to the living room. She sat on the couch and put on her sandals, then turned her back to the bathroom and studied the titles of the books on the shelves. Tom finished his own shower and was now following the same routine of retrieving his clothes and dressing. She was in the same room, but felt she was in a different mental space, from which she viewed the shared physical intimacy with a sense of awkwardness. She remembered she had felt comfortable there, in that space, but the memory was almost of watching a different person. Now, she didn't know what to do. She felt uneasy. She couldn't just leave. Something else ought to be said.

Alison glanced in Tom's direction and when he was completely dressed she faced him and pressed her lips together in a forced smile. "I didn't realize how late it is. I'm famished. If you don't mind me running off ..."

"There's a pretty good Thai restaurant not far from here. We could go have something to eat there, if you don't have anything else planned."

"Sure." Alison stood and removed a loose knit open front cardigan from her shoulder bag. Just being practical, she thought to herself. It can get chilly in the evening, and you never know how long you might be out.

Within 15 minutes they were sitting at a table, studying the menu. Alison asked for a recommendation, and Tom suggested the beef massaman curry. He ordered shrimp in a red curry sauce for himself. While eating their meal, Alison was content to let Tom entertain her with stories of a trip he had taken to Thailand. She let him do most of the talking, listened with interest, asked the occasional question. Her own thoughts were elsewhere, engaged in a silent debate as to what to do next.

The simple thing to do would be to finish eating and then go home. Alison thought she understood enough to be able to let the matter drop without being further plagued by unanswered questions. But a more inquisitive side of her had little patience with easy exits. However much she thought she now understood, they had still not said anything about what had happened and why. In fact, they had hardly talked at all. The ambiguity bothered her. They both could have been acting for entirely different reasons and she wanted those reasons out in the open so that she could avoid .. avoid what?

While she smiled and laughed at the appropriate points in Tom's stories, and nodded, and paid her half of the bill, and stood to leave, she was irritated by the lack of simplicity in the situation. The deed done didn't end things as much as it implied a start for something new, how the threesome had led to .. this private thing .. and how this could spiral off in an unanticipated direction. She felt claustrophobic, sensed the labyrinth of her thoughts starting to collapse around her.

They retraced the route they'd taken to the restaurant, and Alison could continue past Tom's apartment to where she could catch a bus back home. She again felt torn by a surreal sense of disconnect. How do you say good-bye, she wondered. Shake his hand? They had spent more time in bed during their time together than out of it. The absurdity of it made her laugh.

"Pardon?" Tom asked.

"Oh! Sorry, nothing. Just some strange thoughts running through my head," she shrugged. It was something to sort out, both of them now paused on the sidewalk. Another junction.

"Would you like to come up for a while and talk about it?"

Alison had already decided, but hesitated, felt perplexed, her brow furrowed. "OK," she replied.

A sense of déjà vu hit Alison when she stepped into the apartment, which told her how far removed she felt from everything that had happened earlier that afternoon. She half expected Tom to step up behind her and place his hands on her shoulders. The thought gave her a brief flash of anxiety, unsure of the situation, and she almost sighed with relief when he instead asked her if she'd like something to drink.

"A cup of tea, if you have some."

"Only tea bags."

"That's fine," she said, and walked over to the couch, removed her cardigan, slipped off her sandals and sat down. The apartment was lit by a ceiling light in the kitchen area. An amber tint of street lighting warmed the other end of the apartment. Alison removed her hair band and combed out her hair with her fingers, then reached up and turned on a lamp behind the couch.

Tom set a tray on the low table before them and sat on the couch beside her. Alison poured herself a cup of tea, stirred in some sugar, then sat back, cup in hand, and folded her legs under her. They both sat in silence, a silence that began to feel increasingly brittle. She looked over to Tom, thought a moment. "Did you get your closure?" she asked, softening the words with a smile in her eyes.

"Closure," Tom chuckled, and pulled a face. "What was I supposed to say?"

Alison shrugged. "The simple truth would work."

"I didn't know how you'd react. I didn't even know what you were thinking."

"I'm only kidding. I was having the same problem. What would you have done if I said no?"

"I didn't see it that way, as a direct question. I figured it would come up, or not, and that would settle the matter. And it came up. We both moved in the direction we wanted. Right?"

"Yes." Alison paused again, thinking. "So what about your closure .. or whatever we want to call it? What was it that you felt you lacked in the first place."

"Believe it or not, there was one moment when I sensed it. If I can interrupt your question with one of my own, I'm wondering what it was that bothered you."

Alison put her cup onto the tray and took a deep breath to calm herself. "I had a very specific idea of what would happen in our threesome. I know it can be a serial one-on-one, as Greg calls it, but I just hadn't thought about it in that way. So when you, you know," she paused again, feeling unsettled.

"It's difficult to say, even when you've done it, isn't it? I suppose .. when I sort of took over."

Alison winced. "Yes, you literally pulled me out of my fantasy image. I found myself somewhere else, out of my depth."

"But .."

"But then I got tuned into how you were feeling and, I'm not sure, I was drawn into it. You were very .. intense." Alison said the words and felt her insides begin to dissolve. She grasped her cup of tea to give herself something to do, to keep herself from shaking.

"I think we're talking about the same thing. At one moment you were involved, and suddenly you withdrew. And that's .."

"Your lack of closure," Alison concluded for him. A hot euphoria made her head spin. I was right, I was right, she repeated to herself. It all makes sense. "That's what was bothering me. I felt very confused at the time and withdrew. It frightened me, and later it bothered me. I wanted to see what it would be like if I had let it continue."

"Yes, so did I," Tom said. They both sat half turned towards each other, Tom's arm along the back of the couch. In the hesitant admissions they had begun talking in whispers to each other.

Alison could feel the subtle tension in their exchange, the thoughtful pauses, as they edged closer. I'm back, Alison decided. I'm back in that other place. She looked at Tom, conscious of being so close to him, yet not touching, her mind hot with memories of what they had done that afternoon. She looked down at her folded legs. She could feel herself getting wet. "Considering everything," she said. "Considering this afternoon, would it have worked for you, even in a threesome one-on-one interlude?"

"I'm not sure, to be honest. You mentioned us guys getting in each others' way. I think you were right."

She smiled. "It had to do with being able to let yourself go?"

"Maybe. I think it had more to do with not wanting to be interrupted. Could you have? Let yourself go?"

"I don't know. I thought I could. That's what I thought I was doing, letting myself go. It frightened me. That's why I had my panic attack." Alison frowned, felt sad. "I guess I was the one doing the interrupting."

"That's what I thought at the time, that you stopped something."

"You were very intense," Alison looked back up to Tom, heart pounding. "Even today. You were coming at me like there was no tomorrow."

"Like there's no tomorrow," he repeated. "That's one way of looking at it." Silence fell over them like a thick blanket. "I .. umm .. didn't hurt you or anything?" Tom continued.

Alison smiled in reassurance. "No, not at all," she answered, a hot flush warming her face and spread down through her body, making her muscles tighten on an emptiness inside that she wanted filled. "More on the rough side than I'm used to, but," She bit her lower lip nervously and again paused at the brink of something, attempted to control her breathing. "But, that's what I was responding to, your intensity."

The silence was palpable, it was something physical, a vacuum drawing them together. Tom glanced along his arm, to his hand resting on the back of the couch behind Alison's head. They exchanged a glance, held it, looked away.

"Excuse me," Alison interrupted. She went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet to relieve a pressure in her bladder. She shivered with sexual tension. She closed her eyes, searched for calm and couldn't find it.

Tom was still sitting on the couch. She went to join him then stopped, and turned towards the window. She now realized that what she thought had been a window was in fact a ceiling to floor sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony. She stepped over to it and looked out through the curtains. She unbuttoned and removed her blouse. She looked over her bare shoulder to Tom, then continued to undress herself.

Completely naked, her clothes in a neat pile on the floor, Alison turned and faced Tom. Before she could kneel down onto the bed he was close to her, his hands on her bare hips, the small of her back, the curve of her waist. It felt endless, the way he reacquainted himself with the shape and feel of her body. His hands covered her breasts, motionless, held her. Alison shivered, lips parted, her hands on his shoulders, waited, then held him closer, their bodies pressed together in a long caress, the length of his erection against her abdomen. She had to giggle, it was unbearable.

"You realize the effect you have on me?" Tom whispered.

Alison ran her tongue over her dry lips, and grinned. "Yes." She looked at him, saw him staring hungrily at her. She felt it in his fingertips, pressed into her. She moved closer, caressing his body with hers. "You don't have to hurry," she whispered in his ear. And yet, when their embrace tightened, when he brushed aside her hair and held her cheek, when she felt immersed in him, in his wet mouth and probing tongue, when her mind spiraled into chaos, and as they fell to the bed, Alison doubted that she could follow her own advice.

By the time Alison was on her back Tom was already buried inside her.

* * * * *

The pillow didn't have the familiar odour of herself, or of Greg. Alison couldn't recognize where she was in the sounds that grew out of the night, the irregular rhythm of night traffic, distant sounds that echoed through the unfamiliar building, a flushed toilet, footsteps, a closed door far away. The refrigerator shuddered at the other end of the apartment. She opened her eyes. She was on her left side, her right arm wrapped around a pillow. Her left arm extended away from her, palm up, hanging over the edge of the mattress. Her left leg bent at the knee and her right leg crossed the left ankle and also hung over the edge of the mattress. She felt the texture of a sheet on her naked skin. She rarely slept completely naked, and the awareness of her own naked body frightened her. Her first impulse was to get dressed and to get back home. She felt vulnerable, cold. She could just as easily have been outside in a dark alleyway, for all the difference it made to how exposed she now felt.

Alison raised her left arm and held onto her own shoulder, hugged herself. An emotional longing welled up inside her. She wished she was with Greg and to cuddle, sheltered, in his embrace. She drew her fingernails along her upper arm, watched her own hand as though it belonged to someone else, to Greg. She closed her eyes and imagined that her arm was his, and gave herself a gentle squeeze of encouragement as he would have done.

She sensed Tom nearby, could hear his quiet breathing. How did she end up here anyway, at this time of night? She hadn't anticipated this, spending the night here. Earlier, when they finished, when the fire of sexual arousal began to dim, exposing both the physical and also the psychological fatigue, it had been easy to follow that slow fading of desire down into sleep.

But that was then. Now, she was awake and in a state of mind that did not fit the room she was in or the person she was in bed with. She held onto herself and stared unfocused into the room's shadows. She remembered things .. images of naked bodies, intimate acts, even a less charged and less desperate moment together. Yet the memories felt sterile. No longer inside of that intense shared bubble of physical intimacy, she again felt disconnected from what she had experienced. She had an urge to slide towards Tom, to warm herself next to him, and it felt .. inappropriate.

The emotional emptiness had everything to do with her sense of isolation, alone and vulnerable in an unfamiliar place. The sexual arousal, once satisfied, had departed and had left a void within her, and she wanted to fill the void with Greg. That thought, that admission, helped her understand where she was. Not with the crystal clarity she had experienced earlier, but enough for her to find her way back to a place of calm.

She pulled her legs up in a foetal position, pulled the sheet around her exposed shoulder, hugged herself, rested her cheek on the back of her right hand. She lay in the dark, alone, listened to water bubbling through pipes somewhere in the building.

* * * * *

Alison woke with a sense of suffocating, as if she had forgotten to breathe. She inhaled deeply, then again, and relaxed. She lay on her stomach, could feel her breasts pressed into the mattress, her legs spread, her arms wrapped around a pillow. She felt something under the sheet, crawling over her back that gave her skin a tingle, just under the threshold of a tickle. It was as if someone was shining a flashlight over her body, and revealed it to her in a small moving circle of illumination. It sparkled and glowed down her side, into the hollow of her back, up the shallow valley her spine, circled the hill of a shoulder and down again, wandering slowly over her hips and her bum. It made her catch her breath, then sigh, and smile a drugged smile in half sleep. Tom was caressing her naked body.

She could already sense a small sphere of discord rising over the horizon of her waking mind. She knew what it was.

Alison let it go. "What time is it?" she mumbled through the haze of morning grogginess.

"A little after 7."

She groaned. "I wish I could spend more time waking up." She turned to face Tom. "But I hadn't planned on spending the night and I have to get home and get ready for my day."

"I understand. I hadn't planned on this either."

"Good," she smiled, relieved. "Can you do me a favor? Could you make me breakfast while I shower? To give me more time?"

"Sure. What would you like?"

"Coffee and toast .. if you have the ingredients." Tom nodded. Alison gathered up her clothes and scampered into the bathroom. She paused to look at herself in the mirror, tried to read the ambiguous expression on her own face. She hugged herself and stepped into the shower.

Cleaned and dressed, Alison sat down to the small breakfast that Tom had prepared. Now, with the rest of world expanding out around the apartment, with plans and private lives making their own demands, a cautious awkwardness separated them.

Alison smiled, hesitant. She didn't want to have a what-next conversation, not now. She wasn't even sure if she wanted to have that sort of conversation, not now, not ever. There's no reason for a what-next. This was supposed to finish something, not to start something. She felt uneasy, she couldn't just run off. She looked over to Tom, thought a moment.

"So," Tom said, noncommittally. The ambiguity weighed heavy on both of them.

"So," Alison replied with a sigh. "I'm glad you got your closure," and she started to laugh. "Sorry, it's nerves."