All The Unsaid Things (Patreon)

Hello my patreon peeps :) For February book club, we're reading "Three Women" by Lisa Taddeo & I'm so close to finishing it even though the month isn't over yet. It's so great I am just gobbling it up! Today, I read a chapter on one of the women (Sloane) & something about it really stood out to me... Enough to want to share it with all of you even if you're not participating in my book club this month! Taddeo focuses a lot of this book on desire & the parts of women that never see the light of day because we keep them in. In the part I read today, Sloane was describing her "real fantasy" after going into detail about her husband's (spoiler alert: his are sexual lol). I just find the juxtaposition wonderful & relatable & felt the need to share, so I'm going to leave it here:

In Sloane's fantasy, she's standing at her kitchen sink, wearing a butter-colored apron. Her hair is drawn back in a ponytail. The children are playing, quietly, at the table. The light is subdued and yellow. For dinner they have just eaten a roast chicken. The skin of the animal was crackling and underneath the flesh was moist. There were new potatoes and baby carrots from the farm down the road. The restaurant is making money. There is nothing to worry about, nothing to pay off. There is a mess in the kitchen, the kind a good dinner leaves behind. Her husband looks at her from across the room. The expression on his face is frank and wonderful. It's an expression with bones of its own. He rises and crosses the room, several dishes in hand. The insinuation of his body is enough to move her body out of the way of the sink. He looks her up and down, and he smiles. Then he turns the faucet on, and he begins to wash the dishes. Without having been told. 

The fantasy is he did the stuff she didn't even know she needed, like cleaning his amber drops off the rim of the toiler, getting the kids' clothes ready for the following morning, putting the scissors back where the scissors go, he did a bunch of things before the thought of them even entered Sloane's head. Invisible service, the kind she likes the waiters to practice in her restaurant. He cleared the room in her brain so that she might be able to get sexually excited in that now wide-open field up there where the to-dos aren't scrolling and the boxes next to each task are checked--but that overwhelming list didn't even get written up because he did it before she thought about it. He even walked the dog. Ha, she thinks. Come on. That's crazy. After all, we don't even have a fucking dog.