ROMANCE: Mars And Venus (Second Chance Romance) (New Adult Romance Short Stories) (Contemporary Romance, Out of Body Experience) by Piquette Fontaine

 
     
    Mars And Venus
    One
     
    They say that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
    Men are violent, brutish, warlike. They love women, but only for the purpose of shattering them. Cleaving them apart down the middle, screwing their lights out, and tearing them to bits like savage beasts. They're made from snips and snails and puppydog tails, and testosterone. And penises...
    Women, meanwhile, are supposedly more genteel in nature. Goddesses of beauty, peaceful, keepers of everything lovely and perfect in life. They're made of sugar and spice and everything nice, as well as breasts and vaginas.
    Understandably, being of very different persuasions as they often are can cause a considerable level of strife between the two sexes, for whom it is impossible to see eye to eye on most fundamental issues about anything.
    Perhaps the issue is overstated a bit. It's not as though men and women everywhere somehow see completely past one another. There is generally some overlap, and on occasion it's so substantial that the roles are reversed. The idea of gender is as fluid as any, and the poles can be reversed so that the female in a coupling is the dominant of the two, and the male more passive and submissive. There are endless possibilities, and this just in male-female partners alone.
    Take Mark and Vera, for instance. They'd just gotten done with a romantic evening- Vera in her little black dress, looking especially cute, and Mark in a suit and tie, looking particularly dashing, but with lust in his eyes as he watched his vixen of a girlfriend walk from behind, staring at her just-barely-concealed ass as it teased him from beneath the dress. They'd went to dinner and an art gallery that night, and while Vera had largely appreciated the aesthetic value of so many nude statues, photographs of vulvas, paintings of vulvas, and photographs of flowers that largely resembled vulvas, Mark in his horny manliness couldn't help but become just the slightest bit aroused.
    For Vera's part, she kept hoping that a date like this might harken the relationship back to a simpler time between the two of them. A time when they'd both been much happier, and when they simply enjoyed one another's company for what it was. There was no necessary expectation of a sexual reward for a night's good behavior, nor was a “good night out together” always and exclusively punctuated by sexual activity.
    They'd always been a very physical couple, it was true. But there'd been an era when there was more between them than just sex- when the two of them could simply be content being in one another's presence. Laughing, holding hands, going out to dinner. Maybe snuggling up on the couch to watch TV, or just cuddling, holding one another, without necessarily having to be going at it like rabbits- savoring the mutual company, how lucky they were to have one another, and how rare a thing it was in this life and in this world to come across a connection as special as what the two of them shared.
    But... Well... Since those glorious old days, Vera couldn't help but wonder whether those good old days were actually that special? If the present was any indicator, maybe it had all just been a great big falsehood...
    Anymore, sex wasn't really something that indicated their closeness as a couple- it was more like it was something they did to keep from collapsing apart from one another altogether. There was still plenty of passion beneath the sheets, but that was about the only place where the two of them really seemed to connect on anything. They seemed to live almost entirely separate lives outside the bedroom, and physical intimacy was about the only kind they really shared anymore.
    Mark, for his part, seemed to intuit about the precise opposite of what Vera diagnosed as the problem with their relationship. To him, the only thing that had changed was that the two of them had become comfortable around one another. Apparently, to him, displays of closeness and affection