Ehud and Sarah: A scene

"You've grown afraid", he said.
"Does it matter?".
She took a drag on her cigarette. She could feel his thighs shifting beneath her knees.
"Have you been thinking about death again?"
"I always do."
"You think about death too much. That's your problem."
She took another drag. He could feel a slight tingling at the point where the backs of her knees touched his skin. She laughed.
"I'm waiting for you to tell me my lips taste like strawberries."
She wanted to kiss him, but she knew he hated her cigarette breath.
"I told you, I don't write poems anymore."
"Well you should".
She was not aware of her fingers crawling down his back. He laughed.
"How can I, when my muse is so far away?"
She took another drag.
"Do you fuck other women?"
He was silent. She got up, and walked towards the window. The sound of footsteps, and his body against her back. His arms reach for her breasts. She stands still, feeling the white curtains caress her cheeks, aiming her ashes out the window, towards the moonlight.
"I think you just killed a rose", he says, as they both look out over the garden. She laughs. He kisses her neck.

As their bodies weave in and out of each other, the word "love" never passes between them. But why does it hurt so much the next morning, when she leaves him behind - or is he the one leaving her? She holds her daughter's hand tighter as they turn the corner, knowing that she is the one thing that binds them together - or the one thing that tears them apart?

"Mommy, you're hurting me!"
"I'm sorry sweetheart. How would you like it if we stopped for donuts on the way home?"

Great, she thinks to herself, it's not even 7 am and I'm already breaking one of the rules in the parenting book. Ehud had bought it for her while she was pregnant, and they had mocked a different chapter everynight. "Great foreplay", she had teased him, when he triumphantly laid the book on her belly and proceeded to screw her on the couch. "So sexy. Next thing, you'll be bringing me Plato". "I'd rather bring you the Marquis de Sade", he said with a grin.

But of course, they had first bonded over their love of Rilke. He had been the starving grad student, she had been the waitress of the local cafe - like some sort of Hollywood movie. He came in while he was working on his thesis on poetry and peace. She was wandering aimlessly in her post-seminary years, having decided to stay in Israel, but not quite ready to move on to college. "You're too smart to be a waitress", he had said, and she had been too flattered to be offended. Growing up no one had ever expected her to be brilliant; as long as she got above the C-range, and was on home on Fridays in time to bake the challah, nobody really cared. She used to hang out with all the off-the-derech boys at night, smoking cigarettes and doing other things that tasted deliciously forbidden. But somehow, she could never get herself to have sex. It was the one halacha she just couldn't break, no matter how much the other girls teased her. By senior year, she had grown too resentful of their treating her like a baby because she was a virgin to stay friends with them, really, and then she had gone off to Israel and "straightened out".

He, on the other hand, had grown up in Efrat, the son of American parents, but Israeli in a way that she never could be, no matter what it said on her teudat zehut.