365 Nights Read Online Free

twenty or thirty years from now? I was committed to the idea of staying married, but as trite as it sounds, there are simply no guarantees, despite wedding vows to the contrary. In some ways this put me on notice—it nudged me out of marital complacency and into this experience, I guess. But what if I jumped out of the complacency pot into the “Oh no! What in tarnation have I done?” fire? Of course, we’ll grow closer, I thought, how could we not ?
    I was getting a little jittery, and it occurred to me more than once, as we approached Brad’s birthday, that perhaps these were issues I should have considered earlier. Ah, hindsight.

JULY
    Fireworks
    â€œHoney, what if we don’t like it?” I asked.
    He looked up from the paper, distracted: “Don’t like what?”
    â€œLike having sex every day . . .”
    He smiled. “I don’t know about you, but in my case . . . I think it’s pretty close to genetically impossible for me not to like having sex every day.” He looked a little more intensely at me, trying to read me: “Are you changing your mind?”
    â€œAbsolutely not! I’m just . . .” I hesitated, and then continued, “thinking through some things.”
    â€œI don’t know, sweetie, it sounds like you’re backpedaling. Just say the word, and we go out to a lovely birthday dinner for two and call it a day.”
    It was an inauspicious start to Brad’s birthday. We were on our annual vacation in the mountains at my parents’ house. Dreamy, huh? Wait, it gets better . . . In addition to my parents and my children, my brother, his wife, their toddler, and their new baby were there, too—a family affair, to say the least. Très romantique, non? So this was not exactly a secluded, lovey-dovey place to kick off having sex with your husband daily for a year, but hey, a birthday gift is a birthday gift, right? It was a standing tradition that we spend the week of July Fourth up in the glorious mountain town of Asheville. Not even my offer was going to push this trip aside. Perhaps it was sleeping in my old bedroom on July second, the night before Brad’s birthday, that made me worry whether I could pull off this endeavor. It had been redecorated since I’d moved out, but my flute was still in the closet, along with my high school yearbooks and my wedding dress, professionally cleaned and packed away for who knows what.
    Surrounded by the stuff of old dreams and tossed-aside possessions, I had some lingering doubts as I surveyed the site of what was to be our first attempt at intimacy every day. I mean, if I could throw away my daily commitment to that flute so easily (and I did . . . snap, just like that), couldn’t I just as easily dismiss this whole 365-nights-o’-pleasure thing? I didn’t want Brad to think that I was reneging on my offer, because I wasn’t, but I did want to be honest with him. What if we didn’t make it? What if, instead of this being the great year that I had envisioned . . . it turned into the year where Brad chuckled and said, “Char, remember when you made me that great offer and then retired twelve days later?”
    Arg.
    Brad’s suggestion of tossing aside my birthday offer and enjoying a gourmet dinner sounded nice, but it would be only marginally adequate, and we both knew it. I took some nice deep breaths, centered myself, and got back in the Sex Every Day Zone. I could do this. I had promised some serious once-in -a-lifetime action to my husband and I could not be an Indian giver on this one.
    This reminded me of a time during our engagement when I was backpedaling for a different reason. Brad was engaged before we met, and I was a little unnerved by that, not because I had concerns about the former fiancée, but rather, what if he changed his mind about getting married, again?
    â€œI won’t change my mind,” he told me over and over again with