Chapter 1: Missionary Regret and Midnight Fantasies
The room was warm, thick with the smell of sleep and the faint, sweet trace of the Shiraz they’d shared on the couch. Paul’s weight shifted beside her, a solid, familiar warmth. He grunted, a soft, sleepy sound, and his hand slid over her hip.
“Hey,” he mumbled into her hair, his breath wine-tinged.
“Hey,” Lisa whispered back. The word felt small in the dark.
His movements were procedural. A kiss on her shoulder, fingers fumbling with the hem of her shirt. She arched her back to help him pull it off, the cotton catching briefly on her earring. The cool air raised goosebumps on her skin. He touched her breast, his thumb passing over her nipple with a practiced, almost absent-minded familiarity. It peaked, a physiological response that felt disconnected from the rest of her, like a light blinking on in an empty house.
He rolled on top of her, his body a comfortable, heaviness she knew by heart. She guided him inside. He was only half-hard, and for a moment she felt a clenching, not of pleasure, but of a profound, hollow sadness. He pushed in with a quiet sigh.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
His rhythm was a metronome, a shallow, steady pace that rocked the bedframe gently against the wall. She stared past his shoulder at the ceiling. The paint had a hairline crack she’d traced with her eyes a hundred times. She could map its entire journey from the light fixture to the crown molding.
His breathing hitched. He buried his face in the crook of her neck. “Lisa,” he breathed, the word damp against her skin.
A shudder ran through him, a brief, total tension that melted instantly into dead weight. He slipped out of her, soft and wet against her thigh.
A few minutes after it began, it was over. They both grabbed some tissues and cleaned up and put their pyjamas back on. They cuddled for a while before Paul drifted off to sleep soon after. Lisa still couldn't sleep though.
A deep, itchy restlessness crawled up from her core. It was a physical thing, a need that the brief, mechanical friction had only agitated. Carefully, she extracted herself from under Paul’s arm. He mumbled, smacked his lips, and rolled onto his side, clutching her pillow.
The sheets were cool where she moved. She lay on her back, one hand flat on her stomach, feeling the quiet pulse of her own dissatisfaction. Her other hand drifted down, over the plane of her abdomen, through the trimmed hair below.
She closed her eyes.
It wasn’t Paul she saw.
It was Marcus from work. Marcus, who’d leaned against her desk that afternoon, his tailored sleeve brushing her wrist. His scent was different—clean, sharp, like ginger and lime, not laundry detergent and mild sweat.
“Those reports are a nightmare,” he’d said, his voice a low, smooth baritone. “You make them look easy.”
“It’s just data,” she’d replied, feeling a flush creep up her neck.
“It’s the way you handle it.” His smile was a white, knowing slash. His eyes, a dark, impossible brown, held hers for a second too long. “Precise. But I bet there’s a lot you can do that isn’t.”
He’d straightened up, letting the implication hang in the air between them, before walking back to his glass-walled office. She’d watched him go, the confident swing of his stride, the way his shirt stretched across his shoulders.
Now, in the dark, she imagined those hands. Not Paul’s gentle, tentative touches, but hands that claimed. A mouth that didn’t ask, but took. She pictured Marcus turning her over in this same bed, his body covering hers, not with sleepy affection but with a hungry, focused intensity. She imagined his voice in her ear, telling her what he wanted, what he was going to do. The fantasy was vivid, shocking in its clarity. Her fingers moved in small, tight circles, pressure building in a swift, urgent wave. Her breath hitched, caught in her throat. She bit her lip, hard, to stay silent.
The climax, when it came, was sharp and lonely, a stolen moment of heat that left her shaking. It faded instantly, replaced by a guilt so cold it felt like a sheet of ice against her skin.
Paul was fast asleep.
Lisa stared at the crack in the ceiling until it blurred. The physical release had left her body humming, but her mind was a snarled knot. She carefully slid out of bed, the floorboards cool under her feet, and padded to the bathroom.
She didn’t turn on the light. The streetlamp glow through the window was enough. She looked at her reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror—a pale, shadowy figure with messy hair and eyes that looked older than twenty-five.
Was this it? Was the price of stability, of safety, a lifetime of quiet yearning? Of closing your eyes next to one man and desperately picturing another just to feel something? She loved Paul. She did. He was her best friend. He remembered her mother’s birthday, he made her tea when she was stressed, he wanted a house and kids and a golden retriever. It was a good life, a complete picture. But it felt like a suit she’d outgrown, seams straining across places she hadn’t known existed.
She had been sixteen when they got together. Paul was her first kiss, her first everything. She’d never known another touch, another body, another set of desires. What if she was missing something fundamental? What if the calm, tender love she had was only one color, and the whole spectrum was out there, waiting in shadows she was too afraid to step into?
Her mind flickered back to Marcus. To his hands, the contrast of his skin against the white desk, the rich, deep timbre of his laugh. A flush of heat, separate from the earlier arousal, spread through her—a heat of shame, and of terrifying curiosity.
It was a private, unspoken thing, a pull she’d felt in movie theaters and malls and now, acutely, in her own office. A purely physical magnetism toward Black men that had always been there, a silent, secret thread in the fabric of her desires. She’d never acted on it, never even voiced it, not even in the confessional darkness of a drunk night with girlfriends. It felt like a betrayal of something, though she couldn’t say if it was of Paul, or of some unspoken rule she’d internalized. Now, with Marcus, it was no longer an abstract attraction. It had a name, a face, a smell. It sat across from her in meeting rooms. It made the secret feel like a living thing, squirming in her gut.
She crept back to bed, the guilt a cold stone in her chest as she curled away from Paul’s sleeping form. She eventually falls asleep as well, chased into restless dreams by the scent of ginger and lime.