Peanut Butter Love

He paints my toes with peanut butter and I let him because the therapist said we needed to dig inside ourselves to find our secret passion, and I dug around and found peanut butter, which isn’t a secret but is quite a passion of mine and I looked at my feet for more inspiration and came up with toes and he flinched and said, Really? as if this was some kind of test, and I guess in some ways it is.

He’s naked apart from his spectacles, hunched on his knees with his tongue between his teeth, and I wish I’d bothered to pick up some ‘smooth’ because the crunchy nuts are getting stuck in my crevices.

He says the smell alone makes him sick and I remind him, That’s not an allergy, sweetie, that’s an aversion.

I’m draped in the rather beautiful-but-inexpensive Japanese-print dressing gown he bought me to assuage his guilt and I pull it a little higher up my shins because I would hate it to get peanut buttery and he is flaccid as a dead fish and soon he will have to put my calloused toes in his mouth and he goes about me like I’m just another job, like painting the porch or mulching the flowerbeds and I think 32 years is an awful long time to be married to one person.

I really don’t think it’s an allergy – sure there was the thing with the walnut salad, but I put that down to choking rather than anaphylaxis.

Our therapist said we need to rediscover our spark, keep things edgy, and as he approaches my foot with a dry mouth and trembling tongue, I wonder what he licked from her body, what gifts he gave her, and whether, on reflection, he thinks it was worth it.