realization

He went to kiss her and she said, “I don’t like to kiss, so much,” and all he could think of was how he’d heard that prostitutes didn’t like to kiss, either, because it was too intimate. Fucking for money was one thing; kissing was quite another. But this was his wife. This was their wedding night. They’d kissed, before, sure, but he’d always noticed her holding back, not so much getting into it. They’d had sex, too, before they were wed. It was sometimes semi-passionate, sometimes even more perfunctory. All this flickered through his mind as she said, “Let’s just have sex,” and so, he did, they did, but he would remember the moment as a moment when he finally began to understand who she really was, because he thought the prostitutes were right, and he wondered, “What have I gotten myself into?” He would spend parts of the next 28 years trying to fix whatever was holding her back. He didn’t know until it was over that there was no fixing it, that, her.