He feels petrified, and his body is cold and unresponsive to her touch. After some light kissing, he gently pushes her away. It’s not that he doesn’t like the kiss; he’s deathly afraid of what it’ll turn into. “Is something wrong?” she asks, and he says that he’s exhausted. She’s satisfied with that answer, but when he gives the same answer on the third night, then the fourth and the fifth, a knot forms on her forehead. On the fifth night, she ignores what he says, and her hand roams his body as she attempts, unsuccessfully, a longer, deeper kiss with him, one with more feeling, the kind she clearly thinks a wife and a husband should be sharing. But he has an avoidance mechanism with the kiss, whereby after a few seconds he moves his lips and plants them on her forehead, as though he were kissing a sister. On the fifth night her hand rubs his crotch, and harder, with desperation, when she finds that there’s no movement down there at all. All this time he’s lying there stiff as a corpse, his heart pounding loudly like a gong inside him.
