Her Room

Her ex-husband painted the room a dark eggplant color before he left for good. Holly moved the bed to the corner of the bedroom as soon she heard the front door click behind him. Something she had always wanted to do, but was never allowed. She then bought gold pillow cases to match her wine colored bedspread. Now gold curtains hang from the windows, and a deep purple floor rug takes up most of the cement floor. There is only one small lamp next to her bed to give off just enough light to cast shadows. The walls are lined with paintings of her choice: flowers and landscapes and snap-shots of her youth. Gone are the paintings of bowls of fruit, and bellicose portraits of people she never knew. The room is her womb, a place to find comfort. She lies in bed propped on her newly purchased gold colored throw pillows believing she is a moth in a cocoon ready to metamorphose.
Her mother had a comfort room. It was the bathroom where she used to luxuriate in the bath for hours reading her romance novels and smoking her reefer. Her grandmother had one as well. It was her kitchen where she made her red sauce and listened to Frank Sinatra as she sipped sherry while she sung along to the tunes of her youth.
After a lackluster marriage, and a back slinger attempt at finding romance, Holly realizes that the only thing that will give her constant pleasure will be a room of her own that hadn’t been shared with either her husband or her lover. There she will be the mistress of her own desires; her heart can’t be broken by her own hand. If you ask her ex-husband, he will say that he didn’t leave, but was asked to. And if you ask Holly’s lover, he will say the same. But they had left her because both had become forgetful, and in Holly’s mind that is a leaving, a shutting of a door that can never be reopened.
Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto plays from the living room. The sweet melody makes her think of her lover and his smooth olive skin. His head is between her legs, her right hand stroking up and down his back moving slowly, tenderly to his tongue which is honed in, calculating, knowing when to feel her shudder from within. He had the most impeccable timing to slow his rhythm to her body while her fingertips moved up and down the curve of his back as her warmth spilled out upon his lips. She never wanted his exploration to stop, but it had, and now she is left only with a sense of betrayal. He owed her nothing, she knows, but she believes he should have been different from the rest of them. He should have adored her ache that she had for him. She never wanted to feel so much, or want so much, the feel of his lips and fingertips upon her body. Aloofness was more her nature but his lips broke through her hard shell.
And now, she is left with a wanting. The same feeling she was left with when she thinks about the man she lost her virginity to. He used to say she tasted of strawberries while he licked and stroked at her innocence. She was his forbidden fruit; he liked to say as he entered her from behind. “Your skin,” he whispered in her ear as he nibbled at her ear lobe, “is so soft, so ripe, and so perfect for my touch.” She did not care as he pumped and thrusted inside that those words were never mentioned the next morning as he dressed quickly, giving her a benevolent kiss on the forehead, saying he’d call.
He too became forgetful when he got what he wanted, a pleasurable pastime, but then after the deed was done, he lost interest. What did she really have to offer him after the quest of her body had been won? What did she really want from him after she had given him her innocence?
The same holds true for her lover. She too is the forbidden to him. When they met, the still married woman, whom he dreamt about capturing, and when his dream came true, and his exploration complete, what else is there to be taken? Her body will grow old, her face will wrinkle, and what will be left of her once youthful shell that he really desires?
Her legs are still strong and her stomach still flat. Her breasts still firm, yet neglected by the hands of her husband, and recently from her lover. But, now as she works the lotion into her supple breasts she imagines the hands of a new lover. He will not neglect them as he works his want down her slender body to her core: stopping first to lick and kiss her stomach. Her lover used to do this in the first stages of their love making, but then he grew cold and hollow and oblivious to the little kisses that she so needed.
Holly takes her time as she rubs softly at the folds of her opening, breathing in her scent, her warmth, her desire to be wanted, to be explored. Her husband never understood this in his love making that a woman needs to be explored before she is taken. Holly’s lover had known in the beginning, but then grew bored after he found her flower, his endearing metaphor for her womanhood. She thought it resembled more of an oyster—but he had disagreed, saying hers was tender and soft and ever so pink, like a delicate wild flower. He loved to lap at it, and suck at it, and then enter it. But, after awhile Holly became annoyed with his disregard to the other parts, like her breasts, her neck, her elbows, and her calves, the instep of her foot. These areas were all left alone-forgotten in the night shadows cast by her lover’s selfishness, and her husband’s ignorance.
Left alone to her own devices in her newly painted room scented by fragrances which evoke memories she had long thought were mute. She may admire her own body, touching it the way she imagines her new lover will. The one she sees in her mind, the perfect phantom to her hearts desire that will warm her body with his own. He will not be inattentive. He will know by instinct or maybe the schooling of an older woman that a woman has more places to be touched, to be explored other than the obvious. She yearns to feel those fingertips and lips which will administer the apology to her arched body. But for now, she has her room, a room that she designed for such a purpose, a room that will comfort her from her woes and her heartache. No tears will be shed in this room, no regrets will be felt. It is her cocoon; Holly believes as she pulls the wine colored blanket tighter around her spent body, thinking of those tender kisses she so desperately craves.