Affection Read Online Free PDF

his palm to be swallowed whole.
    This is a pattern that I recognize. There is always someone
who can charm me out of my brittle protection, always a friend for whom I have unconditional love.
    Just one friend at any one time, a kind of monogamous extramarital obsession. There is no language for me to explain the way I feel for Christopher as he wraps the book in a paper bag and passes it to the boy, solemn, respectful. I fall in love a little bit even though I said I wouldn’t do that anymore. I can’t help noticing his quiet dignity, his kindness. His subtle humor and, forced to stand so close in such a cramped workspace, there is the flesh as well, constantly brushing against mine. I try to love without lust but there is always lust. So, lust then, and a great heaped serving of love. Now there is this melancholy brew for me to drink down, slowly, on a day drawn out.
    I am certain that this is only a fleeting wave of lust and soon, in a matter of days or weeks or months, I will transfer this affection to someone new. I am reminded of my conversation with Paul the other night on the Internet, the sudden intimacy, the wave of familial love, and something else, some unnameable emotion.
    Sex addiction. Katherine was right. This is all about sex, because on top of the lust there is still the love I feel and will feel for him that will go on, even when this unwanted desire has moved off and onto someone new.
    â€œYou have to stop falling in love with your friends,” my husband tells me. He has been watching me hop from one obsession to another for the eighteen years of our relationship.

    â€œIf I am a tap, and you are a sink,” I tell him, “it is like I am locked on. A full-force gush of emotion and you are filled up with it, but there is too much. It is spilling out onto the floor. It is like I need to hold one bucket after another under the overflow. When the bucket is full I exchange it with another bucket.”
    I am pleased with my metaphor but he just shakes his head. “Well, you should stop falling in love with your friends. You’ll chase them away,” he tells me, voice of reason that he has always been.
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    â€œI am not monogamous and I am not heterosexual,” I told my husband on the night we met.
    I was sitting in a girl’s lap. I liked her well enough. I had slept with her before in that easy way I used to enjoy. I would have slept with her again that night if I hadn’t noticed Anthony. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall. His deep green sweater was the exact color of the ocean at dusk. I noticed how blue his eyes were. His long hair pulled back and tied in a ponytail, the chiseled perfection of his cheeks.
    I stopped kissing the girl. I switched from vodka to water. There was another drug present in the room and I felt myself turn toward it. I basked in the glow of potential sex. I hopped from one group to another, chatting briefly, moving ever closer to my target. Anthony was alone. He sat with a beer warming between his fists and smiled quietly, watching the crowd grow drunk and bleary-eyed.
He was beautiful. I had never before seen anyone quite as beautiful. I sat beside him quickly, before I could change my mind, and clicked my glass against his beer bottle as if we were old friends. I breathed through the erratic thudding of my heart, the exquisite tumble-turns low in my belly. I caught a whiff of his aftershave and a hint of soap. We talked about mutual friends, films, documentaries we had both enjoyed. We talked until we were amongst the last to leave. Maybe I would stay, sleep in a corner on the floor. Maybe he would stay, too, or maybe he would leave. Yes, I should leave. I said that I would walk home and so he offered me a lift.
    â€œI am not heterosexual or monogamous,” I told him, the sun climbing up over the silhouette of the city.
    â€œYou will be both of those things when you are with me.” His prediction. And up