My Turn: The Conversation That Changed Our Nights

She was thirty-four, she knew her own mind, and she was tired of almost. The man she had been seeing for two months was kind, funny, and generous in every department except the one that mattered at midnight, and the night he rolled over satisfied while she lay awake staring at the ceiling, something in her quietly made a decision.

❦

The morning after

She did not slam doors. She made coffee, sat across from him at her kitchen table, and said the thing she had rehearsed in the shower with considerably more diplomacy than the shower version had contained.

"Daniel. Last night was lovely, right up until it was only lovely for you. I am not angry. But I need you to know that I am not a warm-up act. If we are doing this, we are both doing this."

He stared into his mug like it contained weather. "I thought you were fine," he said, and then, hearing himself, winced. "That sounds bad out loud, does it not."

"It sounds like an assumption," she said. "You never asked. So I am telling you now, because I like you, and because women who do not tell end up resenting men who were never given the chance to do better. Consider yourself given the chance."

❦

A drawer, opened

To his credit, and it is considerable credit, Daniel did not get defensive. He asked questions. Real ones. What did she like? What had he been rushing past? What did she wish he would do more of, and slower, and first?

And because he asked like he meant it, she showed him the drawer.

"This," she said, taking out her rabbit vibrator, "is the most reliable man in my life, and he is not even a man. He has never once assumed I was fine. I would rather retire him to special occasions, Daniel, but that part is up to you."

He turned it over in his hands with the solemnity of a student handed an instrument. "Teach me," he said. "I am serious. Apparently I have been improvising, and apparently the reviews are in."

She laughed so hard she had to put her coffee down. It is very difficult to stay disappointed with a man who can take direction and make you laugh in the same breath.

Good lovers are made, out of honest women and men who listen, and it starts with four small words that are somehow the most romantic sentence in the language: it is my turn.

❦

Her turn

That evening he cooked, badly and endearingly, and afterwards he did the thing that changed everything: he paid attention, out loud. He asked. He listened. He treated her pleasure as a subject worth studying rather than a coincidence worth hoping for, and when he reached for the rabbit vibrator, it was with her hand guiding his and her voice entirely unembarrassed.

What happened next belongs to them, behind her door. What can be reported is the review, delivered the following morning by a woman who had slept extremely well.

"Promotion," she told him, stealing his toast. "You are officially on probation no longer."

She had spent years believing that good lovers were found, like shells on a beach. She knows better now. Good lovers are made, out of honest women and men who listen, and it starts with four small words that are somehow the most romantic sentence in the language: it is my turn.

The End

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