Everything Changes

being yanked back into her reality is disorienting. She goes down on her knees to take off my pants, her tongue on my lower belly as she pulls them down. Her fingers encircle me, coaxing me to stiffness, but even as she stands back up to kiss me, I can already feel myself softening. I may have only kissed Tamara once, but the damage has been done, because now, as I stand naked in Hope’s writhing embrace, I feel like I’m cheating on both of them simultaneously. Nothing like a guilty conscience to hamstring the anatomy.
    She pushes me down onto her four-poster bed and climbs on top of me, kissing me with liquid urgency, her fingers kneading and stroking me all the while, trying to resuscitate me below. “I want your cock in me,” she moans into my ear. Hope has a number of sexual personas, and this one likes to talk dirty, which, I’ll admit, was a turn-on when we first started dating, but now never fails to make me feel self-conscious, like we’re filming an amateur porno film. “Put your cock in me,” she whispers, grinding her wetness against me to no avail.
    “What’s wrong?” she says, momentarily breaking from character.
    “Nothing,” I say, trying to hide behind another kiss.
    “Are you still sore down there?”
    “No. I just need a little time.”
    But Hope will not be so easily dissuaded. Sex, to her, is another arena in which to excel, and she has worked energetically to cultivate this particular skill set, so failure is not an option. She tears into me, bringing to bear the full weight of her work ethic, sucking, licking, stroking, and pulling, and after a while she stumbles upon the right combination and the stalemate is broken. She pulls me into her, her nails digging sharply into my ass, throwing her head back to cry out as our pelvises meet. We couple fiercely, with great concentration, and it’s like an athletic event, complete with grunts, sweat, and the very real risk of a groin injury. When she finally comes, her pleasured cries are tinged with the relish of sweet victory. Afterward, she lies on her back, reveling in the satisfaction of a job well done, while I lie in the jumble of my own contradictions, having compounded my crimes, a feckless spectator to the growing farce of my own life. So much for the afterglow.
    Hope talks to me, about London and our engagement, about wedding halls, bridesmaids’ gifts, and guest lists, and this is my Hope, beautiful, animated, and ever so slightly anal, unabashed in the unrelenting pursuit of her agenda. I listen with an impending sense of dread, peering out from behind the veil of my secret thoughts while she rambles on, oblivious to the growing distance between us. I’m terrified that despite everything, I’ll still go through with it, and yet I’m equally afraid of losing her, a middleman through and through, waiting for nothing less than an act of God to move me one way or another, to unseat the incumbent inertia.
    She turns over and grabs my hand, and I wince involuntarily at the pain. “Oh my God!” she says, studying the colorful damage. “What happened to you?”
    “I got into a fight,” I say as if it happens all the time.
    “What do you mean, you got into a fight?”
    And so I tell her about Pete’s Mustang and our encounter with Satch, as well as our subsequent arrest and release. I get so absorbed in the telling that I almost start to include today’s excitement, but then catch myself, remembering that she knows nothing of the biopsy. “You know,” she says when I’m done, “I thought it was a good thing that you were spending time with your father. Now I’m not so sure.”
    “What are you talking about?” I say. “Norm didn’t start the fight.”
    “I just don’t think he’s a good influence.”
    “I haven’t been influenced by him in twenty years. Why would I start now?”
    “Oh, please. Here or not, he’s been influencing you your whole life.” She sits up in the bed, pulling a sheet up in the name of modesty, a funny switch for the woman passionately demanding cock just a few minutes ago. “And you can’t deny that you’ve been acting very strange since he got here.”
    “Define strange.”
    “Did you go to work today?”
    “No.”
    “Okay, so that’s what, three days you’ve skipped work for no apparent reason. And with all that free time, you couldn’t be bothered to call me in London. No, wait, you did call me once, and you were stoned at the time. And now you’re getting into