Sensuous

21 March — Sunday

Couldn’t type this part yesterday. Don’t know why. Maybe just worn out from so much fast and furious typing; by the time I finished the day’s entry I felt as though I had run a race and couldn’t move another step.

What he told me: The reason he had been abrupt with me on Thursday.

“I have to be careful not to see you too often, Jennifer. You could far too easily turn out to be a preoccupation of mine and that wouldn’t do either of us any good. You’re a special sort of challenge. We excite and fulfill each other and yet I don’t touch you at all.”

More in this vein. I felt a rush of dejd vu. Then recognized it. He feared involvement with me for the same reason I feared it with him. He, too, saw that we could be good for one another, but only if we kept each other at the proper distance. We had to avoid making one another actors in a fundamentally unreal drama.

A reassuring rush for me. Confirmation of my own decision. And more — the realization that we were equal partners in this charade we have devised, that involvement is equally possible and equally frightening for him as for me. No need now to feel that my role in this is exploitative. He wants me (if for unhealthy reasons) just as I want him (if for similarly unhealthy reasons.)

A lazy Sunday again. Either today or tomorrow is the first day of spring. The weather is right for it, mild with showers that cannot make up their minds whether to pour in earnest or give up the whole thing.

I feel bittersweet. Glad that I went through all of it yesterday. That I let him go down on me, and that I let myself use the moment to come.

A breakthrough of sorts, I suppose, in that I had never come before through physical contact with another person. Yet I could only do so by willing him and Wanda out of existence and yielding entirely to fantasy. The fantasy I employed was so gripping I might as easily — or more easily — have come by myself, untouched by anything, my own hands included.