Everything Changes

gone, swallowed up in the numbing blue-green glow of the fifty-two-inch plasma screen, his true home for the last two years.
    “
X-Files
,” he announces exuberantly. “Damn. I saw this one.” He’ll sit there until morning, watching reruns and infomercials, effectively doubling his odds of encountering Chuck Norris. At some point he’ll take a nap and a shower, order in some breakfast, and, thus replenished, resume his mindless vigil.

    Back in my room, I try to capitalize on our unscheduled wakefulness and extract Hope from her pajamas, but although she lets my hands roam blissfully under her shirt, she obstinately refuses to relinquish it. “I have to be at work early,” she says.
    I gently rub her left breast in what’s intended to be a seductive motion, running my hand across her nipple and down to where the softness disappears into her ribs and then back up again, her breast filling my palm, overflowing against my fingers like a rising cake when I press inward. Hope has the greatest body of anyone I’ve ever been allowed to touch. Her long, toned torso is crowned with two remarkably pert, grapefruit-size breasts whose tall, barrel-shaped nipples jump to attention at the slightest manipulation. Her legs are lean and toned from her thrice-weekly spinning workouts at the Reebok Club, and above them sits a Magritte apple of an ass, firm but deliciously yielding. “Come on,” I say, already popping out of my Felix the Cat fly. “Earthquake sex.”
    She looks at me skeptically. “Earthquake sex?”
    “Of course.”
    I am forever cataloging the vast cornucopia of the various kinds of sex there are to have. New Partner Sex (basic and always fun), Shower Sex (more technically difficult than it appears on Cinemax), Platonic Friends Dry Spell Sex (the sexual equivalent of emergency rations), Sloppy Drunk Sex (self-explanatory), Hotel Sex (make all the mess you want, since you won’t have to clean it up), and Wake-Up Sex (absolutely no tongue kissing), to name a few. When it comes to sex, my inner teenager pretty much has the run of the place.
    Hope remains unimpressed. “I’ve got a maritime auction tomorrow,” she says, firmly removing my hand from under her pajamas.
    “Do you realize what a rare opportunity this is?” I say. “What are the odds of another earthquake in Manhattan?”
    “Only slightly better than the odds of your getting any right now,” she says with a yawn, rolling over and closing her eyes.
    “Come on, I’ll be quick.”
    “Sorry. I need to sleep.”
    “But what about my needs?”
    Hope opens one eye and rolls it at me. “We had sex three hours ago,” she says.
    “And wasn’t it great?” I say.
    The other eye opens. “The earth moved,” she says, and smiles lovingly, a rare smile devoid of her habitual irony. I love that smile, and how it feels to be both its cause and effect.
    “There you have it, then,” I say.
    She leans over and gives me a quick peck on the lips. “Good night, Zack.” Her tone leaves me no wiggle room. Not that I’m keeping count, but I suspect I’ve been getting a lot less sex since this whole engagement business started. I roll over painfully onto my vestigial erection, and then turn to watch her drift off to sleep. I love the way she folds her hands under her cheek, like a child pantomiming sleep, the way she rolls her knees up, curling herself into a compact ball. Hope at rest is a rare thing, and it gives me time to contemplate her beauty, to wonder, as I often do, at the dumb luck that has brought this angel into my bed. “Why do you love me?” I’ve asked her repeatedly.
    “Because you have a big heart,” she’s told me. “Because you’ve spent your life taking care of your brothers, and you don’t even understand the strength and love that that must take. Because you think you have to earn everything, that nothing is coming to you, which means, among other things, that you’ll never take me for granted. Because,” she has said, “every boyfriend I ever had loved me for my potential, for what they expected me to become once we were married, an accessory to affluence. But you have no great plans for me. You love me for who I am right now, which means you’ll always love me, no matter what I become.”
    “Why do you love me?” I whisper to her now.
    “Because I knew you were going to ask me that right now,” she murmurs without opening her eyes.
    When I fall asleep, I dream of Tamara.

    Life, for the most part,