Friday Afternoon. Sylvia Ryan

      I slip out of bed quietly and enter the large walk-through closet and dressing anteroom to the master bathroom space, locking the door behind me. An anguished huff of air rushes out as I sit on the tiny stool in front of my vanity and twirl a half circle, facing myself in the mirror. The overhead lighting is stark and unforgiving. I’m not the young woman I was a year, or five, ago. I’ve tried as hard as I can to forget I’m closer to forty than I am to thirty.

      When I linger long enough to take inventory of myself, like now, I discern more of the slight lines making their home on my skin. I never notice them when I float through mornings, functioning on nothing but my first sips of caffeine. But now, at this moment, I see them as clear as day. I’m older, not sexy anymore, I suppose.

      I swallow down the hurt. Levi used to look at me with hungry eyes, even when I was pregnant with twins and fat as a cow. Now the sight of me naked, whether it be coming out of the shower or spreading my legs beneath him, no longer draws interest from his cock. Tonight brought any speculation, any hope he’s still attracted to me, to an end.

      I’m angry first and then sad as I realize I’ll never experience the twirl of excitement and shiver of anticipation from the expression of hunger on my husband’s face. That hasn’t happened for quite a while, and now I know for sure nobody will look at me with similar hunger again. I’m stunned, aware those intense desires go hand in hand with youth, new possibilities and new passions, and I’m faced with a blatant fact. That part of my relationship with Levi is long past.

      Yet to my mind, there’s a lot of middle ground between being hungry with young love and being so indifferent you don’t get off anymore. It’s taken us exactly fifteen years to span from one end of the you-turn-me-on spectrum to the other. During the last decade, the progression of our sex life from brilliant to bland has been so infinitesimally small, it went mostly unnoticed until now.

      I’m shaken. The sudden realization I’m not sexually exciting to my husband anymore and probably never will be again knocks me off my rails. I feel ill and wrap my arms around my waist and duck my head between my knees. I breathe deep and swallow repeatedly trying to allay the bile creeping up my esophagus. The repeated gulps also push the hurt away, staying the tears, leaving me whole enough to wonder how–when–this happened.

      In the beginning, when we were newly married, the passion between us burned at the speed of light, carrying us headlong into the deliciously forbidden.

      From the first, Levi owned me. The raw masculinity and power he possessed weakened my knees to the point I wanted to bow before him. He was larger than life, and he took my breath away.

      There was an intrinsic element of deviance that defined the moments he chose to sate our sexual needs. To him, it didn’t matter where we were or what we were supposed to be doing instead. I think those scandalous acts of passion were the reason I fell so madly in love with him in the first place.

      God, just thinking back on them makes me catch my breath.

      My gaze shifts from my mind’s eye back to the mirror. I find myself smiling ear to ear.

      He was fun.

      We were fun.

      Levi perfected the art of ambush early in our marriage. I’d be washing dishes or folding clothes and he would stalk me. He was good at it, and I rarely caught him before he descended upon me from behind. He’d pounce with a raging hard-on, reaching around to cup my mound and press me more firmly against him. It usually took less than a minute for him to rip my clothes off and sink inside me. It was so damn hot.

      I sigh, sadly surveying the woman with the wistful smile looking back at me before turning away from the mirror.

      It’s quiet on the other side of the door. He’s probably fallen asleep. I turn off the room’s overhead light and feel comforted by the familiar yellow glow of the night light.

      How can he be so oblivious to the fact I’m sitting in this locked room devastated because I’m no longer able to get him off? That this slightly used body can’t excite him to orgasm anymore? I’m left reeling at the confirmation of my faded youth and angry at him for being so insensitive that he doesn’t even realize how affected I am.

      But I don’t want to fight, and I don’t want to cry, so I stay locked in here, hiding. I lie down on the fluffy, round rug in the middle of the floor in the dressing area to gain the thin cushion of it under my back as I stare up at the ceiling. I slide my hands between the hard tile floor and my head.

      I smile again as I close my eyes and comfort myself by shuffling through my memories. God, it used to be so good between us, spontaneous, almost primitive. How did we end up here with everything so changed I barely recognize us anymore?

      I’ve never even been tempted by morning fucking, probably because I have way too many concerns about what my breath smells like and if I’m “fresh” enough downstairs to even want to use the equipment.

      And at night, well, with twins in the bedroom next door, it’s a near heroic feat to even think about sex, let alone actually manage to get any.

      We’ve always primarily been during-the-day fuckers. Since we turned into grown-ups with a family, it’s been pretty hard to get any during-the-day fucking in. On the rare occasions when we get a window of time, it’s a race. For as long as I can remember, fucking in our house is an extremely quiet race to our orgasms. When it’s over, it’s followed by a mad rush to put our clothes back on and pretend in front of our children that nothing happened.

      After doing this for over a decade, sex has become more trouble than it’s worth, I guess. I can’t lay a finger on any exact day or moment when our marriage turned into something worn and comfortable, but the process more than likely started with the birth of the twins, Ella and Luna.

      For me, their birth marks the threshold that took a deliriously happy, newly married me to a violent end, to a cessation of everything. My career, my marriage, who I’d always been as a person. It was like falling down while water-skiing, bone-jarring and suffocating. Despite the sheer joy of my new baby girls, their birth created the tiniest gap in what has subsequently grown into a rift between Levi and me.

      After that, the inevitable cascade of thousands of days, filled to the brim with the mundane matters of life, followed. Mostly, paying the mortgage and taking care of my girls have monopolized the years of our marriage. Every day is so similar to the last. It all blurs together now.

      Here I am fifteen years into this life I’ve built, lying on my bathroom floor, hiding and wondering what happened to this love of a lifetime I’d been blessed enough to find.

      I try to force myself to accept those days of my life were good ones, but they’re over now. I’m thirty-something, and I assure myself this is the normal progression of things,