That's Us

Journal

This motherfucker is killing me. Fresh out of the shower. He’s so close I can smell the Irish Spring on his skin. His hair’s all damp and sexy, and his beard scruff is at thatperfect length just long enough to be soft to the touch, but not so long that it hides his perfect chiseled features. And the way his undershirt clings to his biceps

and stretches across the hard planes of his chest…I could look at him all night. I have been through the corner of my eye. But that’s not enough.

I want to touch him. In the half-hour since he plopped down next to me and flipped on the Braves game I’ve thought of a thousand and one ways to reach over and

caress this man. I could lace my fingers through his, or run my knuckles along his rough, square jaw. Maybe I could be playful and walk my mint￾green nails up his sculpted abs, then, once I have his attention, I could

straddle his damp, clean, hard body and thrust those same fingertips into his wet hair. But I don’t do s**t, because I know all it will get me is a sideways glance

and a shift in the opposite direction.

My husband is a rock. Not as in, He’s so strong and supportive. I don’t know what I’d do without him. But more like, He’s so f*****g cold I wonder if he still has a pulse. Braden has never even held my hand. Not on

purpose, anyway. He has had his handheld by me, while unconscious, but whenever I’ve tried that move during waking hours, Braden has politely endured the discomfort of human contact for…oh, say, five and a half seconds before smoothly removing his soft, limp flesh from my grasp.

Sex is pretty much the same story. Ever the gentleman, Braden will lie on his back and allow me to have my way with him while he quietly engages in minimal and obligatory petting. (Even when I tried to be fun and reenact the ice cream scene from Fifty Shades Darker. In his defense, I do have to play the part of Christian because Braden doesn’t know his lines. And I admit the white noise of a baby monitor isn’t exactly Al Green. And for some reason we never seem to have vanilla ice cream, like in the book. We only have Cherry Garcia, which is pretty awkward to lick off, what with all the chewing required. But still. A little participation would be appreciated. Regardless of the level of theatrics involved, afterward, I always kiss and cuddle Braden's lean, beautiful, body, trying to squeeze a single degree of

warmth from the man-shaped boulder that is my husband. All the while, I can almost hear him counting to himself one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand before he taps me on the ass. My cue to get the f**k off of him.

At least, that’s how it seems. Braden’s problem isn’t his coldness, his complete lack of need, want or capacity for intimacy. Those attributes keep our marriage quite stable

and drama-free. That, and the fact that the man never does anything wrong.

Braden is a lawn-mowing, bill-paying, law-abiding, defensive￾driving, trash-toting husband—a cyborg built specifically to withstand seventy to eighty years of gale-force matrimony. I’ve never caught him looking, at

another woman. Hell, I’ve never even caught him in a lie. No, the problem is that he’s married to me.

Before meeting Braden, I’d been contorted into at least seventy-three percent of the positions in the Kama Sutra. I’d shaved most of my head and had all my lady bits pierced before I was old enough to see an R-rated movie.

I spent my free time being handcuffed to things by boys with more combined tattoos than a Guns N’ Roses reunion concert. Braden simply can’t compete.

So, why, you might be wondering, did a slutty little punk as I go and marry someone so straight-laced?

It was because of them. Because of the way my adrenaline spikes and my pupils dilate in a fight-or-flight-or-f**k response every time I smell the sickly sweet musk of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men. Because of the way a pierced bottom lip makes me want to take up smoking again. Because of theway, a full sleeve of tattoos makes me want to hitch a ride on a tour bus andleave everything I worked so hard to achieve in a gutter at the side of the road. Because my nerves were f*****g shot by the time I met Ken, my heart was riding in on fumes, and the stability and security and sanity he offered was a soothing balm to my spent scorched soul.

That inked-up men-children from my past might have been ferocious lovers, but they couldn’t keep their d***s in their pants, their asses out of jail, or a positive balance in their bank accounts to save their lives. Braden, on the

another hand, was just so…safe and responsible, so easy. He wore Nikes and Gap T-shirts. He owned his own home. He jogged. His criminal record wasas ink-free as his freckled skin. And, to top it all off, he had a degree in…waitfor it…accounting. I might have overcorrected a bit.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the s**t out of Braden Dikes. He is my bestfriend, the father of my children, and we are ridiculously happytogether. Or, at least, I’m happy. I am. Really. You can be bored to tears andhappy at the same time, right? They call those happy tears. Happy, bored, oh￾so bored, tears. Braden is pretty anhedonic and deadpan, so it’s hard to tell howhe’s feeling. I choose to think of him as happy, too. But let’s be honest. Braden.

may not have feelings.What he does have is a Captain America–style square jaw with a subtle cleft and a permanent five o’clock shadow. And enviably high cheekbones. And aqua eyes hooded with espresso-colored lashes and sandy-brown hair that is just long enough on top to do this cute little flip thing in front. His physique is lean and muscular. His sense of humor is dry. He is brilliant, self-deprecating, and tolerant of my bullshit. The man is at least ninety percent perfect for me, but lately, all I can think about is the less-than-or-equal-to ten percent that’s missing: passion and body art. Two things I need to mourn and move on from to protect my Lovely, monotonous marriage.

But I can’t.

Tattooed bad boys are like a drug I can’t quit. I devour antihero romance novels like they’re an essential food group. My iPhone runneth over with the songs of a thousand breathy, angsty, tattooed alt-rockers, ready to fill my head at the press of a button whenever I need to escape. My DVR is brimming with mysterious vampires, renegade bikers, hedonistic rock stars, and zombie apocalypse survivors—alpha males into whose ink-covered arms I can run whenever things around here get a little too…domestic. And do you know what I realized during my escapes to these imaginary

dystopian societies and fictional underground fight rings? I know these men. I dated these men—the super intense skinhead turned US Marine turned motorcycle club outlaw, the ex-convict/underground hot-rod racer with the devil-may-care attitude, the sensitive guy liner–sporting heavy metal bassist… I had them all. How did I not see the parallels between my fantasy men and my ex-boyfriends before? And I call myself an Actress!

Knight, my high school boyfriend, is probably the reason I became an actress in the first place. f*****g psycho. I’ll tell you about him tomorrow. Braden’s going to bed, which means I only have about a five-minute window to get in there and pounce on him before The History Channel lulls him to sleep.

Wish me the lucky night, Knight, Knight. Where do I even begin? Being Kenzie’s girlfriend was a lot like being a kidnapping victim with Stockholm syndrome. I had no say in the matter Kenzie decided I was his, and nobody said no to Kenzie. But over time, my fear of him morphed into friendship, and I actually grew to love my captor, psychopathic tendencies and all. Kenzie was a skinhead. Correction: Kenzie was the skinhead the only one in our sprawling suburban Boston tri-county area, to be exact. He was so incredibly angry that none of the other angry-white-male subculture groups at Peach State High School would do. The jocks were a little too gregarious.

The punks, although sufficiently violent and vandalous, had a bit too much fun. The goth kids were just p*****s. No, Kenzie’s rage was so consuming that he had to choose the one subgroup whose image screamed, I will f*****g curb-stomp you and then rip off your arm and beat you with it if you so much as breathe the same air as me. Kenzie was so successful in his mission to

intimidate that he remained a subgroup of one throughout high school. I think his fury originated at birth when his dumbass disappointment of a mother named him Donald McKenzie. It was 1971, so knowing Cindy, she was probably trying to impress the married stockbroker who had knocked her up by naming their lovechild after the most famous Republican she could

think of. I guess—after years of being treated like a punching bag by Cindy’s the revolving door of abusive, alcoholic, probably married boyfriends; being treated as a burden by a woman who preferred the company of douchebags to her son; and having to endure Lucas McKenzie jokes every time he finally did get away—somewhere along the way, Lucas became Kenzie, and

Knight became a holy f*****g terror. Kenzie had the boyish good looks and perma-scowl of Eminem—fair skin, a quarter-inch of buzzed platinum-blond hair, and practically clear eyebrows and eyelashes. Kenzie’s ghostly colorless appearance was violently punctuated, however, by two piercing arctic-blue eyes. Knight’s physique was scrawny but cut. Like a street fighter. He took weight-training classes religiously (Seriously? f*****g public schools can’t find anything better to teach kids?), and once hustled three hundred dollars out of the football team by bench-pressing three hundred pounds—over twicehis body weight at the time.

Whenever Kenzie told the story, he would always muse, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.” And let me tell you, there was a whole lotta fight in Lucas McKenzie, or as everyone at Peach State High called him (never, ever to his face), Skeletor.

What was even more interesting than Kenzie being the only skinhead in town was that he wasn’t a racist. I never once heard him tout any Aryan pride bullshit or saw him sport any of the typical Nazi regalia.Swastikas and iron crosses were suspiciously absent from his personal

effects. Ever the psychologist, even then, I became so fascinated by his lack offascist iconography that I got up the nerve to ask him about it once.Instead of thrusting his right arm into the air and launching into a Sieg

Heil, Kenzie quickly glanced up and down the hallway to make sure no one was listening. Then, he leaned in so close that I could feel his serpentine breath on my neck and whispered, “I’m not a racist. I just hate everybody.”

And I believed him. That motherfucker hated everybody or so I thought.