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Unlike most men, and itwasmostly by Áine’s regard, Fionn knew what a woman wanted. He’d perfected the simple task of actually asking.
Ask before pushing himself inside of her.
Does this feel good?He’d whispered on the cusp of her ear.
Do you want me to keep going?
Do you want it harder?
Do you enjoy it when I fuck you like this?
And if he wasn’t asking, he was looking at her, observing her interest; if she bit her lip with pleasure, if she moaned, if she pressed her bottom deeper into the bed, furled her fingers into the sheet while looking at him as if she wanted to devour him in aching mouthfuls.
Áine liked to think consent didn’t have to be a pre-engagement contract, and it didn’t have to be a dampener or remove anything from the equation. It just had to be given by both parties. The absence of no didn’t equate to yes, but Fionn still managed to make her scream that one-syllable word over and over until she came for him a second time.
With the sweats and pants and wetness of the aftermath persisting, Fionn took her under his arm, so that her damp curls pressed between her cheek and his slowly-rising chest.
He relaxed his fingers on the cusp of her bum with a sense of security she wasn’t all that familiar with. There was lightness in her whole body that made her press harder onto his chest in case she started to float away. The associated feeling, she thought, was that she was content, maybe for the first time in her life.
And to her stilling fright, she liked it.
In old relationships when people looked for more, emotionally, Áine voiced ‘content’ to be a stale place of being. She wondered now if she was misconstruing it as a dejected acceptance of life. A resignation of ambition.
She recalled voicing to her aunt Mags at a drunken Christening party that the only place anyone should feel content is in their coffin. Mags with the smoker’s lips and a clenched glass of vino resting on her bust, had argued that to be a silly view for such a young girl.
Áine, for her own copious consumption of wine, debated Mags by googling the definition of content on her phone screen, which was so cracked the glass had scratched her thumb.
Mags was edging away now, towards getting a hold of the baby in his white dress so he might be a little closer to contracting RSV from all his passing around.
But the definition, satisfactorily, gave Áine something to drive home her point. “Look,” Áine near shouted with her phone outstretched to Mags’ face. “It means to be in a state of peaceful happiness. Now you can’t tell me anyone actually feels that all the time!”
Even in recollection, Áine maintained her stance to be true-ish. But now that she’d realised her overdue acknowledgment of being too preoccupied with the future, did she think of content alternatively too; in the context of how people say,to theirheart’s content. That had a wholly different definition, which was to do something as long as you found pleasure in it. So maybe the sensation resting with a soft pulse on her bones was that what she had with Fionn just made her content, for the brief duration she knew it would have to be.
Content was knowing it can’t be forever and appreciating it for such.
“So, what’s the story with working here?” Fionn asked more to the ceiling than anything. More to the void of many questions probably rumbling around in his lovely brain than to her directly.
She took to looking at the ceiling ringed with browning watermark too, and wondered if he felt he’d some claim to her secrets now he’d been inside her. That if he could enter one way, he believed he had access to all routes of her being.
She laughed slightly, angry with herself. Only seconds before she’d been praising his bar of perfect consent, and now all the good in him had been washed out by her fearing the worst in others.
Christ I’m hard work, she thought with a harsh, unbridled tone that banged against her insides.
It was a simple question, but she didn’t answer, instead deflecting to something that might justseemlike an answer to those unfamiliar with the tactics of debate.
“Wasn’t it crazy how me and you were so sure of ourselves when we were younger? Career-wise, I mean. Nobody else I knew had much of an idea what they wanted beyond what that curly-headed-fuck of a Career Guidance Counsellor told them they might be suited to, but yeah, I thought it was cruel how it worked out for us.”
Maybe I’m not deflecting at all.
He shuffled beneath her. “Ahh, college isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway.” To most people’s surprise, if Áine was to everadmit it, given that was exactly where she wanted to be, she was inclined to agree with him.
She sat, out of his touch with no bearing or insecurity of how her breasts sat on the rolls of her stomach.
“Exactly!” she persisted over her wandering. “College is just a place crawling with teenagers absent of any vocational passion because of societal pressures to further their education. Ireland is fucking obsessed with tertiary education, more than the George Foreman Grill, which is saying something. Then these people skip to graduation with an ambitious mindset that quickly leads to the realisation they don’t even love the thing they’re qualified in. But again, because—society”, her eyes rolled, “they force themselves to stay in that career so that it appears to everyone else that they’ve achieved something,anything,before the apparently geriatric age of thirty. Although, that applies more to women. Didn’t ya’ hear our fannies shrivel at midnight when that happens?”
Fionn laughed gently at that last part in a way that bobbed her naked body against his.
Glad he enjoyed that, she continued happier, “In reality, they’re all miserable, albeit miserable in a nice home with fancy furnishings and I dunno, a fucking wine cellar with those cheese wheels they never seem to eat.”
