You need someone to hold you. You don't care that he's lying to her in order to be with you. That's his responsibility, not yours. You don't care that he's a cheat, and a sneak; you never planned to keep him anyway. You don't care that, in order to cover his tracks, when you were at that hotel together in Marco Island, he apparently said something disparaging about you to some clients he met there so they wouldn't suspect he was with you. With you, as in knowing you, as in the biblical sense. He actually convinced them, you think. They were such uptight assholes, you didn't particularly care about that either.
Bullshit.
You care. You do. A lot? You don't know. What's a lot? It grates on you but you're determined to be pragmatic. You remind yourself that this is the only sex in your life right now, that no one else you've met around here even remotely inspires lust in you. You've got Goldilocks syndrome: this one's too old, that one's too young, the other one is too out of shape, the one over there is in shape but when he starts spouting
 that more-enlightened-than-thou New Age crap, you want to punch him, not fuck him.
The funny thing is, the man you have chosen to fuck, the cheating, lying sneak, didn't inspire lust in you either at first. But the raw physicality of his come-on turned you on, even if he didn't. He would not take no for an answer and you belatedly realized that "no" was not the answer your body was giving.
It's not purely sexual though. You're trading sex for something else you want — to be touched, to feel something similar to affection emanating from and to you, even if it's momentary, troubling and only partially satisfying; even if he's not a considerate man, or a good conversationalist, or a real friend.
You want the sensations of love but you panic at the idea of paying the usual price for them (although what that price is, you're not quite clear about). So instead, you exchange fake passion for fake affection; you keep one eye out for the real thing, hoping you'll recognize it if you see it and not be too cowardly to act on it.
In the meantime though, somehow, despite yourself, you've started caring about him, this man you fuck yet feel superior to, whose intellect, grammar and character you disdain. Somehow.
You suppose you do know how. Sex is like a slow-setting cement. You can do it once, twice, a few times and feel little other than the sensations. You either get bored and don't do it again or, if you keep doing it, eventually, without even noticing, you're going to feel some emotion, at least if you're a woman. For a man, somehow, it is different. His cock can stay separate enough from his affections.
But you, you are being penetrated. It's not just your pussy he is in. He is injecting you with himself: his hands, his face, his voice, his expressions. He is marking you with his scent, sensitizing you to it. These parts of him become a whole and become dear to you, accidentally. It isn't because of anything unique he is or has done. It has to do with you, with your nature. Some chemical that nature planted in your brain reacts and your heart grows tentacles that reach out to his heart, although you know that his isn't engaged in this activity, isn't growing tentacles of its own, at least not toward you. For him, it's all cock. But in you, something gets released and interacts with some neurons. Before you are entirely alert to what's happening, you start looking forward to hearing his voice, jarring New York accent and all. You look forward to kissing him even though he's not a particularly sensual kisser. The traps you thought you'd avoid by fucking a man you don't care about have caught you and now when you try to walk away, you feel the tug, the adhesion. Shit! What is this?
Oxytocin, maybe? You read about that once, and it fascinated you. You remember that that brain chemical, the chemical of attachment, gets stirred up in the female during sex. Oxytocin — you wonder if this is why arranged marriages worked so well through so many cultures for thousands of years. Maybe, once your own brain undermines you with its love drug, you think you want to be here. Sex creates its own reasons for continuing.
Meanwhile, he's busy with another set of endorphins. Adrenaline maybe, or serotonin, or norepinephrine? Whatever.
 Once he comes, they stop flowing so he can jump out of bed and get on with his life which has nothing to do with you.
Not that you want it to. But still.
This chemical sabotage makes you want to call him to hear his voice, even though he has nothing to say that would interest you. You want to hear it anyway.
You see them together one day — him and his official woman — and your heart seizes up like the muscle in spasm that it is. You console yourself that you know all and she knows nothing. But that's not necessarily true. Below the level of awareness, she must know. She lives with him. She picks up thousands of little signals every day.
She knows who he is.
She chooses not to be conscious of it because she also knows he loves her and will love her through all the other women before and after you. She has made her compromises for the sake of what she wants just as you have made yours. It's a package deal, either way. You each take the package as offered.
You go home to your bed alone and take the dildo out of the fabric bag where it is hidden under your bed. You push the crotch of your black silk panties to one side; you slide it inside you. It doesn't feel like him or like anyone else, this unyielding beige plastic cylinder, this not-a-man thing. But after a moment, your brain and your cunt take over. You get into the fantasy. You see that dream-like expression he gets when he's turned on. The inanimate plastic becomes his swollen purplish prick, with that single blind eye in its mushroom-like head weeping a sticky white tear, weeping for you. You imagine his fingers (really your fingers now) pinching your nipples, not too hard or soft, just the right pressure. You fantasize his cock pulsing, demanding, finding just the right spot, keeping just the right rhythm, brushing that bundle of nerve endings, igniting it like a Fourth-of-July sparkler, releasing you within seconds to pleasure's convulsions. As you turn over to go to sleep, you recognize the irony: it is only when he is not with you that he has ever made you come.
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