‘No, it isn’t,’ she replied, unsure, trying to remember. They’d argued about their sex life so much recently. She couldn’t bear to go over it again, what Seb wanted versus what she felt she could give. She’d told him so many times to watch porn, to satisfy himself however he wanted, just not to put any pressure on her.
Gently, he started, ‘It was just before Eddy’s birthday last year; the kids were staying at Mum’s.’ She remembered the night. Greer had only recently – at long, long last – started sleeping through the night. Rosie’s body felt like it was finally coming back to her after so many years of the kids needing it. For years, she’d been an incubator, a feeding machine, a comfort blanket, a punch bag and a carrier. Her body jangled with their fears, their joys, their anxieties along with her own and now, at last, she’d thought that night, she could return to herself. She wanted to get reacquainted with her body when she was ready, privately, on her own. But Seb had stroked her, just like he’d stroked her the other night and as he’d become more alive in his body she’d felt a deadening, a closing down. She’d been wrong. Her body was not her own. It never would be.
A year ago, she couldn’t face letting him know that she didn’t want sex. She couldn’t deal with his disappointment, didn’t want to have to reassure him again and again that it wasn’t him, that it really was her. She couldn’t face how sweet she knew he’d be about it. So instead, she’d let him have sex with her. She’d ignored the deadening feeling and forced herself to put on a show for him, sighing like she couldn’t hold her pleasure in, rubbing her weary breasts, telling him she was about to orgasm when really she felt hollow. She told herself it was just a little white lie, a necessary one, because that was what they both wanted, wasn’t it? He’d had his orgasm believing she’d had hers, and they’d cuddled and then her body was her own again. At least for a few hours until the kids woke up.
The next time, a couple of weeks later, when Seb had started stroking her again, something had happened. The deadening feeling wouldn’t be buried. Her body refused. Her body felt like a great iron door, locks fully engaged. She simply could not comply any more. She could not satisfy Seb’s needs to the detriment of her own, no matter how much she loved him. She tried, she really did, to lie there, but it felt like she was abusing herself. There was no way. She leapt away from Seb’s touch. He’d known that something wasn’t right.
‘It’s OK,’ he said after listening to her, ‘let’s just hold each other.’
They did just that, the first and second time, and then what could she do? She started lying. She’d heard Greer call out, she’d tell him, she had her period, a headache, the prolapse from the three births had returned, she simply didn’t want to. That’s when the rowing started. Quiet, bitter words, knifing each other from both sides of the bed. Continuing until one would leave to curl up on the spare mattress in Sylvie’s room. The next morning Rosie would always regret the things she’d said, but at the time there was a kind of heady joy, a release, in telling Seb he was a self-centred narcissist, a pathetic, fucking typical man. It almost felt good to hear Seb shout back that she was messed up and needed help. It made them more real somehow. Seb would always apologize first thing the next morning with a coffee, a quick kiss, and they’d promise to talk about it properly, to get help, counselling if necessary. But sex never felt so important in the daylight hours and Rosie never liked the look of the counsellors Seb contacted, so the issue slipped again and again.
It wasn’t, Rosie told herself, such a big deal, was it? Lots of couples were the same, weren’t they? She couldn’t imagine buttoned-up Vita and Patrick having sex. Anna had made Rosie think she and Eddy were always doing it but maybe that was just what Anna wanted people to think.
And besides, didn’t Rosie show Seb intimacy in other ways? She liked a cuddle on the sofa, enjoyed feeling his feet curl against hers under the duvet, but the problem was that the cuddle would always lead to his hand down her top, his foot would start stroking her leg. What she offered, what she felt she could give physically was never enough. She’d never been abused or suffered any childhood trauma but felt like her whole life her body had existed for other people, never for herself. She’d begged Seb for the time to figure out her new relationship with her body. She’d told him she was in some kind of transition that she herself didn’t fully understand yet. It was true, but it was also true that Rosie had no energy or time to try to figure out what kind of metamorphosis her body was going through and what to do about it. And all the while there was Seb pushing and whining.
Last week Seb had said, ‘I don’t want to be in a sexless marriage, Ro.’