What She Needs Read Online Free PDF Page B

depended on it. A smile too masculine to be smug flashes across his face. He bends over, braces his hands on the bed and drops a quick kiss on my lips.
    “I’ll call you,” he says. The door opens, then closes behind him.
     

    Ten minutes later I’ve recovered enough to think about a shower when the door opens to admit Jack, an overnight case in one hand, the key in the other. As he tosses the key on the dresser he offers me a sweet smile, the one that makes his ordinary face magical in my eyes. I prop myself up on one elbow and smile back.
    “Your mother texted. The kids are in bed. She’ll take them to early services tomorrow and we can pick them up after brunch.”
    With the trip to his car my dark, demanding lover has disappeared and my husband is back. I don’t mind. The rasp of the cotton against my tender nipples is a delicious, sufficient reminder of my night with a stranger.
    “Mmmmm…I can sleep in,” I purr as he sets the case down on the luggage stand.
    “Not too late,” he replies, his voice gone hard again despite the smile. The incongruence makes me giggle.
    When Jack first took our children to spend the night at my mother’s and called me from the Embassy Suites bar, I was so sure someone had the wrong number I had to double check the caller ID on my cell phone. Eleven years into our marriage, the demands of his job coupled with the day-to-day tedium of stay-at-home motherhood had left me fractured and irritable. I wasn’t working in my studio, but I was picking fights. Frequently.
    One night, after a particularly bitter argument over something I can’t remember but which was probably stupid, like dirty socks on the floor, he asked me in a weary tone what I wanted. Equally weary, I told him that I wanted to stop thinking for a while. I wanted to forget the laundry, doctor’s appointments, meals, where his badge or keys or glasses were, whether I’d bought enough fish crackers for snack at Katie’s preschool, the dog’s incomprehensible urge to vomit only on the new living room carpet, all of it. I wanted to stop being responsible for just a couple of hours, and I really, really wanted to fuck more frequently than every few weeks.
    He sits on the bed and strokes my damp hair. “Thinking already?”
    I smile up at him. “No.”
    Trial attorneys are often very good actors, and Jack reads unspoken, barely acknowledged cues with experience honed in improv theater and the courtroom. He read what was underneath my impossible demands, because we both knew his eighty-hour-a-week schedule left no room for laundry or snack duties. I didn’t want help around the house. I wanted to be transported to another dimension, if only for a few hours. He couldn’t buy Goldfish crackers, but he could restore brilliance to hues and shut off my mind. I have no idea what it was about the unique, incessant demands of motherhood that made me crave surrendering to him in bed, and I have no idea how he knew what I barely knew myself, but when he gets this hotel room and strips me of the last shred of my control, I light up like a summer thunderstorm. The lashing, explosive releases give me what I need to go back to the routine, and back into the studio. For days after we meet, images flow through my mind and into the glass. My work is subtly changing. That artistic growth brings me almost as much pleasure as those moments when I become nothing but white light and his cock inside me.
    “Want to shower together?” he asks.
    I nod.
    “Go start the water. I’ll call room service.”
    Still unusually pliant, I nod but lay my left hand on his jeans-clad thigh, my bare ring finger a gentle reminder. His cheeks crease into a smile as he winks at me, then he digs in his front pocket and extends his palm. Gold and diamonds flash as the rings tumble and tink against each other. I select his wedding band and slide it onto his left ring finger. The remaining three rings are mine. My wedding band goes on first, the one Jack