Free Cleaving by Julie Powell

Saturday afternoon in early October, I decide that something
     has to be done. D and I haven't been sleeping together for several months, not really. He keeps citing a busy schedule, and,
     to be fair, my being married and also driving upstate all the time for the butchering isn't making things easy either. Since
     he's returned from his most recent business trip more than a month ago, we've met in parks and bars, we've kissed and giggled,
     cooed sweet words and cuddled like bear cubs, but have managed sex exactly once, and that was because I lured him with a wildly
     expensive hotel room directly across the street from where he works. What's next? Is he going to start asking for a monetary
     exchange? Enough is enough. So I text him, just tell him straight up,
I'm coming over tomorrow. What's your apartment number?
    (He's just been forced out of his old apartment and has made the peculiar choice to move to a new one right down the street,
     staying in the Murray Hill neighborhood I find so dreadfully dull. I guess it's funny what you can get attached to. Anyway,
     I haven't seen it yet, which is my trumped-up excuse for inviting myself over.)
    I'm in a good mood as I ride the elevator up to his apartment. Here I am, making a stand, going for what I want. No meek,
     whimpering adulteress, I! When he opens the door, I'm grinning, and I neatly ignore the distinct ambivalence of the smile
     he gives in return. I grab hold of his hand as he gives me the tour of his tiny, rather sad, new apartment. Once he's closed
     the door to his sunny, small room, still scattered with packing boxes, we collapse onto his bed--it's the same bed, but stuffed
     into this much smaller room, pushed up against a wall, it seems depleted, a double instead of a vast expanse of California
     king--and commence some serious making out. After two years, kissing him still leaves me breathless; it seems worth both the
     harrowing guilt over Eric and the nasty little holes of self-contempt that my neediness for D opens up in me over and over
     again.
    But something's not right, even willfully clueless I must eventually admit. I keep going for the buttons of his shirt, his
     belt buckle, but he handily evades my gropings. He cops the occasional halfhearted feel but doesn't even attempt to get a
     hand under my shirt. (
Highly
unusual, that. D is what I believe is referred to as a "breast man.") After a while, the kissing trails off, and though I
     keep trying to make inroads, conversation takes hold. Increasingly frustrating conversation, about not all the deliciously
     dirty things we'd like to do to each other, but movies. Animated movies. D is simply shocked that I've never seen
Team America
. The laptop comes out.
    I go along for a bit, fuming. He laughs loudly. It's the same laugh he bestows upon himself when he's feeling clever, which,
     I think meanly, is more often than is warranted. I don't think it's all that funny. I last perhaps twenty minutes before slumping
     onto my side with an irritable sigh. He presses the space bar to pause.
    "What's the matter?"
    "Nothing."
    "Well, that's clearly not true." He's smiling at me. D never gets mad, not really. Occasionally condescendingly exasperated.
     He's always smiling, no matter how angry I get, and, in truth, I have often gotten too angry, demanded too much. I've wanted
     certainty, resolution--have needed it. He has been, all along, the wrong person to ask it from. We were both happier, I think,
     before I told him I loved him, when that was a hidden thing.
    I flop onto my back, unable to stop a small answering smile to his despite my annoyance. "What the hell is going on here?
     What's the point of this anyway?"
    "What's the point of what?"
    "
This!
What's the point of a torrid love affair without any sex, goddammit?!"
    And so, still in each other's arms, we talk.
    "Look, I'm a total fucking mess, I'm miserable at the thought of losing you--"
    "
Losing
me? You're not going to lose me."
    "But I'm