Free The White Rose by Jean Hanff Korelitz

past each other.
    “Don’t you hate these horrible things?” Oliver complains.
    “Yes,” Marian says. “I do. All women do.”
    “Then why not get rid of them?”
    “Why not?” She is putting her hands under his sweater. Her sweater. “Get rid of them. Take them off.”
    “Take them off for me,” he teases.
    He gets up on his knees and looks down at her in open challenge. Marian slides one hand up under the skirt, experimentally. Then, self-consciously, removes it.
    “Chicken,” Oliver says and grins.
    “I can’t. It’s too weird.”
    He kisses her again. The evening crashes down around them. The couch, which is covered with expensive Scalamandré silk, gives a disquieting ping somewhere in the region of her bottom. She puts her hands under Oliver’s skirt and, avoiding his crotch, fishes for the waistband. It fights her as she pulls it down.
    “Dr. Kahn!” Oliver gasps, theatrically. “What do you think you’re doing?”
    “Just relax,” Marian says, laughing. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
    He whispers something she doesn’t quite hear, and rocks his hips against her, pressing his advantage, and after that, she finds herself both borne away from and then back to the whisper, which was unintelligible but is somehow charged with deeper meaning, so that the farther they travel from it, the more she also returns to it, first idly curious, then aroused, then inescapably anxious, until finally he slips inside her and Marian feels her chest contract in panic.
    “What did you say?” she hisses.
    “Mmm?” Oliver does not open his eyes. He is deeply inside her, one hand on the small of her back, the other caught in her hair.
    “What did you say?” Marian cries. “Before. What did you say when you whispered?”
    “What?” He opens his eyes, so reluctant, so knowing what this means, not only to the sex, which is about to wither, but to the evening, which has had too many wrenches already to easily withstand another. “Shh,” he tries, optimistically closing his eyes again. He presses his face against hers. “I love you.”
    “No,” Marian insists. “No, you need to tell me. What did you say ?”
    So he stops where he is, which is nowhere she can place, the physical sensations having fled the scene, taking everything of value with them. Even the light, she thinks dully, has gone plain and flat, the Aubergine Time so far in the past it might be embedded in childhood. It is good, Marian thinks, that she can’t see Oliver’s face very clearly. This is all too pitiful to see clearly. Besides, doesn’t she know exactly what there is to see? Isn’t she a middle-aged woman on an expensive couch with pants bunched at her ankles under a beautiful boy in a wig?
    “It was dumb,” says Oliver, her beautiful boy.
    “Tell me.” She is going to cry. Any second, she is going to cry. She is pathetic.
    He pulls the rest of the way back out of her. “I said you can hurt me.”
    Marian sits up. Her knees snap together. “What?” She is choking back tears now.
    Oliver shrugs. “You said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ And I said, ‘You can hurt me.’ It’s meaningless. We were playing, Marian!”
    She knows, she knows, but that’s all gone, now, and she is sobbing into her hands, because out of the mouth of a babe it has come, this ultimate truth, and she wonders if she actually heard him in the first place and only tried, tried not to give it meaning. You can hurt me. She doesn’t want that, she doesn’t want to hurt him! That is exactly what she has wanted to avoid, from the start. But how can they avoid it?
    “Marian,” Oliver says softly. He sits back on his heels at the end of the couch. His skirt has come down and covered him. His wig is askew. He gazes at her, helpless and wounded. “Please, why are you crying?”
    But she won’t say. She is only crying still, and now it feels as if her life is not punctuated by these fits of tears but that her life itself has turned into a long fit