Wandering Hands
I have a question:
If my boyfriend is that disinterested in sex that we’re not having any of it [again], how come I keep waking up in the middle of the night with his hands down my pants?
Last night, for example. This morning, actually. 4:38 am, according to the clock. I found myself risen from my slumber, still in the dark, roused by something that was nice and annoying all at once. It took me a few moments to work out what it was: Bear’s hands. Bear’s hands rubbing and grabbing at me. And judging by just how hot and sticky I felt between the legs, he’d been doing it for some time.
I stayed exactly where I was, deathly still, afraid of moving in case I scared him off/woke him up/woke myself up (if I was actually dreaming), and he kept going. Rubbing his hands over the front of my pants, kneading my flesh, occasionally letting his fingers stab and probe beneath the cotton. It felt GREAT to have his hands on my body again. Better than great; I was ecstatic. Still sleepy and not even sure it was actually happening, I nudged myself towards him, making it easier for him to gain access. I moved gently, edging backwards a little bit at a time, barely daring to move at all just in case I broke the spell.
At around the same time as his fingers slid right underneath my underwear and a little gasp escaped my throat, he woke up.
“Huh? Oh, sorry,” he mumbled, before grunting, rolling over, and going back to sleep.
That was that, then.
For about five minutes I stayed still, glaring at the back of his head, willing him to wake up and continue doing that thing with his hands that I’d started to enjoy a lot, but there was little point. It wouldn’t lead anywhere. It wasn’t the first time I’d been woken up by a sleeping Bear’s wandering hands, and he does the same thing every time: he briefly wakes up, apologises, and then goes straight back to sleep.
Meanwhile, there’s a party in my pants and I can’t do anything about it.
Sometimes, once his deeper, sleeping-breathing starts, I’ll crawl out of bed as delicately as I can, rush into the bathroom and sneakily finish myself off. At other times, I stay exactly where I am, silently fuming about how he’d gotten me started and then didn’t complete the job. But it’s not his fault, is it? He’s asleep. It’s not like he consciously knows what he’s doing. And he’s been doing the wandering-hands thing since we first started dating, but up until about a year ago, it would’ve led to barely-awake sex. It even became one of our little inside jokes for a while.
But not now.
“Hey, do you remember getting all handsy with me last night? You can do it again tonight if ya like … ?”
I try to cheekily bring it up in conversation the next day when we’re both in good spirits and definitely awake. His responses have gotten shorter and more abrupt each time. He’d laugh about it at first. Then he started getting apologetic. It wasn’t his fault, but he’s sorry for it anyway. I’d tell him that I didn’t want him to be sorry; that I actually quite like being groped by my lover in the middle of the night and surprised with sex, but still he’d apologise over and over again. And then he started to get defensive, as though I was accusing him of something by bringing up his wandering hands.
The apologies soon stopped, along with the defensiveness, and he would get really angry and annoyed whenever I’d bring up anything to do with sex. He’d accuse me of giving him a hard time, or not being patient enough. Or he’d tell me that he understood how patient I was being but he couldn’t do anything about it, therefore talking about it was just rubbing salt into the wound. And now we’re in that place where he gropes me a bit in his sleep and I try my very hardest not to remind him of when he almost got the party started in the middle of the night with his wandering hands.
But I want to shout and scream at him:
If you’re getting hands-on with me when you’re asleep, why won’t you just do it when you’re awake?!
It doesn’t even need to be full sex. I don’t care what sexual morsel he offers me. I just need him to throw me a crumb here and there. This has been going on for such a long time, I’m starting to wonder if it’s me. Maybe my appearance has changed? Have I put on weight? I mean, I know I have put on a bit over Christmas, but have I put on so much weight that he no longer finds me attractive? Is it my hair? Have my boobs sagged? Does my butt look bad? What about my stretch marks? Are they more obvious than usual? Do I smell funny? What the fuck is wrong with me?!?!
These are all things I shouldn’t give a shit about. I don’t usually give a shit about them. But him not wanting to fuck me is starting to affect my self-confidence in ways I don’t even know how to explain. I know that nothing has changed, really. Putting on a few pounds over Christmas is probably not going to change what my boyfriend thinks of me – and it likely hasn’t. But if that’s not the reason, what is? How have we gone from having sex multiple times a day, as much as we physically could, to having full sex ONCE in the last year and a half? I can probably count the number of times we were intimate with each other on both hands. In fact, I could probably count them on one hand.
I’m getting hella tired of sounding like a broken fucking record.
Do you want to read something that actually contains some sex? How about these:
it seems like some kind of strange is happening to him
It’s weird when we all know that consent is key, then he does something without it. Now you give him the said consent and doesn’t do anything? I hope things are better these days.