An Intimate Life Read Online Free Page B

said.
    Mark gave a little half-smile, seeming to overcome his embarrassment. “I like your nipples. Do you like to have them sucked?”
    The truth was that I loved it, but for a second I flirted with claiming the opposite. What scared me was that Mark would stop breathing while he sucked my breast. The tabloid headline, “Suffocated by Breast,” flitted through my mind. I looked over at the respirator and the breathing tube that lay inches from his lips. I could do this. I would do this. “I love it,” I said. I straddled Mark’s narrow frame and pressed the palms of my hands down on either side of his head. I would have to do a push-up-like motion to lower each of my breasts into his mouth. I placed all of my weight on my left hand and then lifted my right to make sure I could balance on one hand if I had to quickly grab the breathing tube.
    “I could think of worse things to choke on,” Mark said.
    Slowly, I bent my arms and shifted my hip to the left so that I could lower my right nipple into his mouth. Mark tightened his moistened lips around it and pulled in.
    “That feels really good.”
    After a few seconds I lifted my breast out of his mouth to ask if he needed air.
    “No, I need nipple.”
    This time I lowered my left breast into his mouth and he took it in more intently than I had ever seen him draw in oxygen.
    When I lifted my breast out of his mouth, Mark asked if I would scratch the area behind his testicles. I reached my hand down and told him to tell me exactly where he wanted me to touch. When I put my finger on his perineum, the strip between the scrotum and the anus, he said “there.” I scratched lightly and Mark said “harder.” I applied a little more pressure and he moaned with delight.
    I buried my head in the crevice between Mark’s left jaw and shoulder for a few seconds, and then he asked if we could have intercourse.
    I asked him to check his breathing for a few moments. I reached for the condom in my purse and quickly put it on him. I straddled Mark and lowered my pelvis down to brush his penis against my mons. Before I could get him in me, Mark came again.
    “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said preemptively.
    Mark closed his eyes and squeezed his lips. His cheeks turned pink.
    “It’s okay,” I repeated.
    I stroked his hair and he opened his eyes and smiled.
    Then his eyelids started to drop and he became dreamy, a look I would come to see always followed his orgasms.
    I do my best to stay in the moment with my client, but lying next to Mark that day, I noticed myself worrying about our next session too much to be entirely present. That’s because the third session is typically when I do the mirror exercise. It is one of the most telling exercises in surrogacy work and it involves the client standing before a full-length mirror describing how he feels about his body. As we lay quietly together, I started mulling over just how I would adapt this for Mark. I worried about how he would react. Was he ready to do this? I was just about to broach the topic when he asked if I had ever read Shakespeare’s “Eighteenth Sonnet.”
    “Many years ago, in school.”
    “Well, I memorized it for you.”
    “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” he began.
    “Some air,” Mark said as he finished the first line. I brought the breathing tube to his mouth and he let the oxygen fill his lungs. He parted his lips and I took away the tube.
    “Thou art more lovely and more temperate/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May/And summer’s lease hath all too short a date . . . ”
    Clients had expressed appreciation before, but never with a love poem that has endured centuries. I snuggled against him and I realized how much I hoped that Mark would find a partner and that one day he might lie next to her reciting this very poem.
    Boundaries can get fuzzy in surrogacy work. Having sex, even in a therapeutic context, invariably creates attachment between people. Early in my career I