Three years married, and the passion had been worn smooth by the grind of everyday life. It was my idea to come for a couples’ spa — it was our anniversary, and something had to feel different. The front desk led us into a couples’ room: two massage beds side by side, separated only by a half-drawn gauze curtain, warm amber light, the whole space heavy with the scent of frangipani.
“Ma’am, lie on the left; sir, on the right.” The two therapists, one man and one woman, spoke in the softest voices. I lay down on the bed, my face buried in the face cradle, and turned my head to the side — through the gap in the gauze curtain I could see him exactly. Shen Zhou, my husband, lying face down too, his whole back exposed. How long had it been since I had looked at his body like this, quietly, without a word?
When the oil came down, we both shivered lightly at almost the same moment. I watched a pair of hands spread across his back, watched that spine I knew so well loosen bit by bit, watched him let out a muffled groan — a sound I knew far too well, so well that my face flared hot all at once. He turned his head too, and through the gauze curtain, looked straight into my eyes. Neither of us said a word, yet in that moment, we both understood exactly what the other was thinking.
“Relax,” my therapist said. But how could I relax — my husband was barely an arm’s length away, being awakened by another pair of hands, and his gaze never left me. For forty minutes, with only a gauze curtain between us, we used nothing but our eyes to finish an entire round of foreplay in which neither of us ever touched the other.