Cabin Rage

“WHAT DOES IT MATTER IF WE SAVE A FEW HUNDRED OR MAYBE A THOUSAND MORE PEOPLE IF WE BLOW THE ECONOMY UP AND PUT THE WORLD INTO THE WORST DEPRESSION SINCE THE 1930S?!?!”

“ARE YOU PUTTING PROFIT BEFORE PEOPLE?! YOU ANIMAL!”

13 days confined to a small stateroom could and likely would be challenging for most people, whether individuals, families, or as with Leigh Down and Clark Barr, couples. Some might claim that the prior day’s New Moon further contributed. Illness, though no worse and seemingly still getting better, likely contributed as well. Stress related to ongoing world events and the sudden explosion of COVID-19 cases across major cities in the U.S. absolutely contributed.

Whatever the precise cause or combination of causes, the raging discord exploded suddenly Wednesday morning 25 March, escalating from nothing to total blowout in less than a minute.

“TWO TRILLION DOLLARS IN NEW DEBT! THE DEBT’S ALREADY KILLING US, MAKING AMERICA SHITTIER THAN EVER!” Clark ranted at full yelling volume. “FUTURE GENERATIONS HAVE NO HOPE!”

“WHAT DO YOU CARE ABOUT FUTURE GENERATIONS, YOU CHILDLESS SCHOOL-KILLING CREEP?!”

The only good news about this altercation was that it remained a verbal argument, not in any way a physical fight. Plenty of stomping around and posturing to be sure, but no contact, and no throwing things other than occasionally a bed pillow tossed hard down onto the top of the bed neither of them were currently on.

Actually there was a second piece of good news: their lungs were working great. So well in fact that riled occupants of adjacent staterooms occasionally banged against the wall to try and get the ragers to shut up.

So furious were the argument combatants, they either couldn’t hear the demands to quiet down, or, more likely, were ignoring them.

“PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE PROPAGANDA CAMPS FOR GENERATING MORE SHEEPLE!”

“YOU’RE A PRODUCT OF THEM, YOU HYPOCRITE!”

“SO ARE YOU, AND LOOK WHAT YOU STAND FOR!”

“COMPASSIONATE HUMANITY IS WHAT I STAND FOR, NOT DOLLAR SIGNS!”

“THE STOCK MARKET IS CRASHED! WE’VE HAD THREE BLACK DAYS IN THE PAST SEVERAL WEEKS!—NOT ONE A GENERATION!”

“PEOPLE NEED TO LIVE!”

“PEOPLE NEED PAYING JOBS! THIS ISN’T PLAY MONEY! WE’RE GOING WEIMAR, I JUST KNOW IT!”

“OH RIGHT, LIKE YOU JUST KNEW THAT SARS-CoV-2 WAS A HUMAN-MADE RUSSIAN PLOT, UNTIL YOU SUDDENLY DISAVOWED IT!” She barely avoided jabbing him in the chest at the last moment.

“I ADMIT MY MISTAKES, UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE.”

“THOSE OF US WHO AREN’T UNHINGED AND GO WITH SCIENCE AND RELIABLE SOURCES TEND TO MAKE FAR FEWER MISTAKES!”

“PROPERLY DONE SCIENCE IS WHAT I’M ALL ABOUT! CORRUPTED SCIENTISTS WORKING UNDER THE JACK BOOTS OF BIG PHARMA OR GOVERNMENT OR OTHER THUGS AREN’T DOING LEGIT SCIENCE!”

“BIG PHARMA SAVED YOUR LIFE!”

“BIG PHARMA PERMANENTLY DAMAGED ME!”

“WHAT?! THEY MADE YOU THINK ALL CRAZY LIKE THIS?!”

“YOU WELL KNOW WHAT THEY DID TO ME!” he loudly hissed. “AND WHAT ABOUT THE GATES INTERVIEW WITH TED CURATOR CHRIS ANDERSON YESTERDAY?! ARE YOU READY FOR YOUR BODY-EMBEDDED DIGITAL DATA STORE AND SERIAL NUMBER, REQUIRED SO YOU CAN WORK OR TRAVEL OR HAVE ANY TEENY TINY SHARD OF FEIGNED WATERED-DOWN FREEDOM WHATSOEVER?!?! IT’S ALL PART OF HIS FORCED VACCINATION AGENDA!”

“YOU AND I DIDN’T DIE FROM SMALLPOX BECAUSE WE HAD VACCINES AS CHILDREN! VACCINES WOOORRRRK!”

“NOT ALL VACCINES ARE THE SAME! THE SHIT THEY USE NOW ISN’T WHAT WE GOT! BIG PHARMA DOESN’T EVEN HAVE ANY LIABILITY FOR KILLING PEOPLE WITH THEIR SHITTY UNDER-TESTED NEWER VACCINES THEY’RE FORCING PEOPLE TO TAKE!”

“BULLSHIT!”

“LOOK IT UP! UNLESS YOU’RE TOO MUCH OF A LACKEY TO THE CULT OF THE OMNIPOTENT STATE!”

“PEOPLE COME TOGETHER IN SOCIETIES AND FORM GOVERNMENTS TO HELP EACH OTHER, IF YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS!”

“GOVERNMENTS USURP POWER, BECOME CORRUPT, AND NEED TO BE REPLACED!”

“SO YOU’RE CALLING FOR THE OVERTHROW OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT?!”

“I’M CALLING FOR PEOPLE TO WAKE THE HELL UP, SMELL THE SHIT, AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE BROKEN ONE WE HAVE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! WHICH IT ALMOST IS, OR MAY ALREADY BEEEEE!”

Seeing his eyes look more than momentarily at her wobbly fat hips sent Leigh’s rage into a whole other direction: exercise. She commenced stretching, marching (twice as fast as she and Clark had been doing to Honks The Goose), running in place, and otherwise furiously burning off calories. Had she been allowed out of her stateroom, she’d likely already be fully dressed, in her running shoes, and heading for the Sports deck to run laps.

At first Clark ignored her, even as she broke into running around in circles. Soon, a better idea came to him.

“Put that down!” hhhh, hhhh she panted, out of breath.

“Why?”

hhhh “YOU can’t make videos of me without my permission!” hhhh, hhhh

“Who’s going to stop me?”

“DAAAAGGGGHHH!” she screamed, “I’m gonna run your memory out!”

{I look forward to that} he thought, making no effort to suppress his grin.

Having been spending the vast majority of their time together in their stateroom with no clothes on, such was the situation all morning so far today. Leigh remained in too much of a rage to get into any clothing. More than that, she knew her body needed all possible freedom of movement to exercise as deeply and thoroughly as she intended. She satisfied herself with cursing him, flipping him off, and otherwise being as nasty to him as possible as she went about her burst of athleticism.

Credible exercise though Leigh managed, her stamina ran out well before Clark’s iPhone memory did. She established a force field of rage around herself atop the bed. He was left to take refuge on the couch. Given that he’d been sitting on it for much of his videography of her snarling nude exercise routine, he didn’t mind.

Tension between them remained thick enough to cut with a chain saw. At least at this point they became and remained quiet, to the great relief of those locked down adjacent to them.

The silent independent staying-apart rage continued well into the early afternoon. A new wave of anger crashed on his emotional shoreline, once he realized that she’d ordered her own lunch without including him at all, making more work for the overburdened room service delivery staff.

Half an hour later, she first felt hurt then anger once he took delivery of his lunch: the fragrance of his bacon cheese sandwich was making her hungry again already. As much or more than that, part of her wanted to share that she could again smell things far closer to normal, with the rest of her remaining furious that she’d let herself bond deeply in love with such an antisocial cretin. Worst of all, he’d ordered a vanilla cupcake with sapphire blue frosting, which not merely called out to her, but yelled for her to savor, enjoy, and ingest it—seemingly nearly as loud as Clark had been yelling at her earlier… and her at him.

The many wordless and near-silent (apart from breathing) hours apart gave Clark plenty of time to take stock of his life. The more often he replayed their blowout argument in his mind, gradually over time the more he felt that he’d let emotions suppress his reason. He wasn’t feeling a need to apologize to her to get something from her or even necessarily for them to make peace and get along, nice as these things would be. The deeper motivation was the principle of owning his mistake or mistakes—he still wasn’t sure if it was singular or plural—whether or not things between them would be, or could be, patched up.

Knowing how important it was to communicate correctly the first time, he spent the first half of the next hour clarifying in his mind what it truly was that he wished to convey, then another quarter hour optimizing his wording.

After several deep, slow, near-silent calming breaths, he stood up and approached the bed.

“I’m sorry, Leigh–”

“–Oh no!: You can’t apologize your way through life! I’ve seen your true colors, and they’re not pretty!”

He resisted the momentarily strong urge to light into her anew, instead taking a breath, relaxing the muscle tension he could feel throughout his body, and calmly walking back over to the couch.

As afternoon became evening, Leigh needed a bathroom visit. She’d had her own several hours since blocking his apology attempt to more calmly reflect on what all had happened this morning, and life in general. Their eyes briefly directly met as she passed: one of those timeless moments etched into memory, clear in the memory mind as the moment it happened, many years after the fact. She continued on her way and undertook her business, making use of the full bidet seat washing and drying cycle.

She averted her gaze on her return trip, leading him to figure nothing had changed between them.

A minute later she was back. Carrying one of several of the stateroom’s soft microfiber blankets, she headed directly towards him, draping it over him with care as he sat on the couch, as though she cared. “It’s getting cold.”

“Mmm hmm. Climate control’s working well in here though, thankfully.”

It surprised him when she reached over and placed the back of her hand against his forehead. “Your temperature feels normal. How do you feel overall?”

“Still feeling run down, otherwise closer to normal healthy. What about you?”

“I’m feeling basically recovered, other than worn down. But that might not be the illness.”

“May I please share with you the grand, gigantic, biggest mistake I made today?”

She scanned his face, whether looking for tells or truth or what, she was not sure. Almost immediately she regretted doing so, feeling her romantic self pulled back into his spell. “Alright.”

“I epically failed one of the primary rules on Wikipedia, and in life in general: Assume Good Faith. I attacked you this morning from an irrational mind place fueled by my greatest fears, treating you like an evil enemy bent on the destruction of all I believe in, rather than the inherently good, fair, kind, rational, reasonable person I know you to be. Driven by fear and anger at scary things beyond my control, I attacked you and your belief system, rather than entering into a calm discussion which might have allowed me to better understand why you believe the things you do about people, society, government, and so on which differ from my beliefs. I lost the opportunity to learn and grow in my desperate attempt to bludgeon my views into you rather than calmly offering them in an understandable, measured fashion for your consideration, or at least information. Personal attacks don’t do anyone any good—no, wrong: they don’t do me any good. I can’t speak for anyone else. I regret having launched so many this morning.”

“May we please order dinner together as usual? My biggest regret of the day at the moment is engaging in discussion of any form of belief system, which we know politics and economics are, before we had breakfast. One of my biggest fears, mostly irrational, is terror of having no food to eat. That’s behind why I remembered to pack the energy bars, and why there’s currently a month’s worth of dry and canned and aseptic and related goods at my home, so I’ll hopefully survive the Big One until societal infrastructure can recover.”

“Seems to me we’re having a dress rehearsal for that right now, with the lockdown.”

She gently doodled on his chest, the microfiber blanket between her fingertip and his skin. “I want to talk about that and many other things, but not until dinner’s in me and digesting, please.”

It felt really good to have her join him on the couch under the blanket as they surveyed the evening’s offerings, then agreed upon and placed their order.

“What shall we do until dinner arrives?”

“I dunno” she softly sighed, clunking sideways against him. “We could sing an apropos Tom Petty song.”

“The Waiting is the hardest part?”

“That’s the one.”

“I think I’ve already hurt the ears of everyone within 2 rooms of us in any direction this morning, which my singing would only exacerbate. Hungry?”

“Usually.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“If you don’t mind starting with dessert, I have something for you.”

“I don’t want to get into sex now, please. Else we likely won’t make it to our discussion after dinner.”

“I’m flattered, but I meant what nearly everyone considers edible food… at least in our nation. Will starting with dessert spoil your dinner?”

“Not unless it’s on the order of magnitude of a sheet cake.”

“Sheet no, cake yes” he grinned, retrieving a small pink paper box from under the couch, then opening it up in front of her.

“Hhhhhhh! It’s a sapphire-colored frosting vanilla cupcake, like the one you had for lunch!”

“Sapphire Prince Cupcake they call it, but yes: same as I enjoyed at lunch. I ordered two of them, knowing I was going to apologize to you at some point, and wanted you to have one.”

“Ooohhh!” she purr-sighed, nearly drooling from both sets of lips.

Clark had a great time watching Leigh and the cupcake make foodie love, in a manner so all-out food porny it belonged on the Food Network in that network’s heyday.

“Normally I’d lick the frosting off your lips” he commented once she was finished, “but given your reasonable request to postpone anything amorous, here: look into the digital mirror and lick yourself.”

She carefully licked her lips over and over, futilely hoping not to miss an atom of remaining cupcake frosting.

Dinner delighted Leigh, in large part from being the first meal she’d been able to fully taste in over 2 weeks. Clark’s sense of taste and smell was returning, though not yet all the way back. They ate slowly and peacefully, taking an additional half hour after the conclusion of the meal to be well into digestion before entering into any possibly intense discussion.

Equipped with mugs of soothing tea, they again sat on the couch, in slight hip-to-hip contact more socially friendly than intimate.

“Would you like to go first?” he offered.

“I don’t know how this is supposed to work.”

“Hopefully we can make our own rules, and adjust as necessary. My idea was calmly asking each other how we’ve come to believe what we believe, taking turns either back and forth, or maybe one of us going through all our questions and concerns relative to the other, then the other having our turn.”

“If your offer for me to go first still stands, I’m ready.”

“It does. Please proceed as you choose.”

“I don’t understand why during an unfolding pandemic from a new, poorly-understood disease with an accelerating death toll, your primary concerns seem to lie with the economy and financial matters rather than human lives. Why is that?”

“Lost lives are tragic, most especially to those losing them and those close to them. Both you and I are accomplices to murder, on account of having bovine cattle, sheep, pigs, et cetera slaughtered for our consumption. Personally I’m OK with that, because I have communed spiritually with plants, so going vegan or vegetarian shifts the murder but does not resolve it, in my world view. Sure, it’s different murdering a fellow mammal, with whom we have more in common and can more readily relate. Yet as has been proven over and over again as science continues its pursuit of the truth, mammals and other so-called “higher” animals we humans used to regard as lacking feelings or logic or other assumed-human attributes often have forms of these very much like our own. Who’s to say that plants don’t have equivalents, even if profoundly different than anything we humans currently understand? What I’m getting at is anything I eat is murdering something or someone. As Laurie Anderson once made into a song—at least a song title, I was born, never asked to be born. I have to eat something to survive. I’ve read that indigenous people of what we call North America express gratitude for the entities that give them sustenance as their food, whether plant, fish, meat, or any other category I may be forgetting.”

“Interesting, but how does this address my question?”

“It’s essential background information, especially so I won’t hopefully come across as so heartless and uncaring. I don’t like having things killed on my behalf so I can eat and survive and hopefully thrive, but that’s how this world into which we were born works. Even synthetic foods have living predecessors in the cases with which I’m familiar, but you’re correct that this is getting too far off on a tangent. Point is: I don’t like things—plants, creatures, animals, people—dying, whether murdered or otherwise. It’s part of life, and unless things change radically and very quickly, our destiny.

“Last statistic I saw, 684 U.S. citizens have died from COVID-19, and the experts expect those numbers are just the beginning of something much larger. For the world death count I last saw over 18 thousand. I have read that preventable medical mistakes ending in death may total 440 thousand people in the U.S. alone each year. Now I’ve not fact-checked that number and it might be bullshit, but let’s assume it’s legit, or even divide it by four and round way down and call it 100 thousand Americans a year dying from medical malpractice—dying. Where is the outrage on that? Why aren’t the authorities locking us all down and making the world stop for that?”

“That number seems way high to me.”

“It may be. I’d love for it to be. Here’s the thing: I don’t have time to fact-check every bit of information that comes along. Even if I did that for a living as a journalist, it’s too much: I’d be paralyzed, unable to live my life. So, like every human I’ve ever met, I take shortcuts, such as trusting others. We’re living through an especially awful time in terms of being able to trust sources many of us have formerly trusted, or those sources even remaining viable journalistic entities, for that matter. The same technologies that empower us to more easily communicate to a worldwide audience and help us reconnect with long-lost friends and family members and so on amplify the easy ability to generate mountains of noise: truth, deception, outright lies, and otherwise. So far everyone I’ve seen is making the logical fallacy error of Appeal To Authority: choosing their preferred information sources and trusting those, usually disregarding others that for each person’s reasons we choose not to trust. Sorry world, but the New York Times and Washington Post hold no special truck with me. I don’t care how long they’ve been around, how many journalists they employ, nor what pretty noises they make about trust and honesty and why anyone should believe them. Similarly, I have no use for Brietbart, nor other usually-online sources that tend to get lumped together as ‘conservative’ or ‘far right’. I disregard the entire category of what we still seem to be calling cable news outlets of all persuasions.”

“This is interesting, but if you don’t mind my pointing it out, you seem to be way off on a tangent again. Can you give me a one-line summary of what news and information sources you do trust, and why?”

“I don’t trust any of the major tech firms to be my news aggregator, and I do prefer an aggregator using many sources. Least-worst I’ve found for news is the Wikipedia: Current Events portal. It at least lets me know what people think are major issues going on, whether I use the links to sources provided on that page, or do my own lookups. That’s 3 sentences, so I’m already thrice over my one-line limit. I do similar things for tech news, other things for local news. Good enough?”

“Yes. I’m willing to go with your 440 thousand or 100 thousand number—your choice—so you can get back to making your main point about financial matters over human lives.”

“OK. My point is that other things kill people by far larger numbers than most estimates of what I’ve seen for COVID-19. I don’t have the numbers for suicides, but looking back to the Great Depression, we have those stories of people jumping out of windows killing themselves on account of sudden unexpected financial ruin. Hopefully our suicide prevention measures have improved since then, yet even without shutting down most of the planet’s social activities and economies, suicide rates remain high and problematic. Socially isolating people from real in-person human contact as you and I are enjoying right this moment then making them suddenly unemployed because the company for which they work or maybe even their entire industry has been forced closed and might not be able to survive to reopen are major stressors that will push a number of people over the threshold. How many? I don’t know that number.… OK, there’s this I just looked up: suicides in the U.S. for 2018 were 48,344. Then there’s auto crashes. My point is that none of these other things are being used as excuses to put people into lockdown, despite these other death numbers being much higher. This makes no sense to me, and makes me extremely suspicious.”

“To me they’re very different. Suicides, car crashes, and medical malpractice aren’t wildly contagious nor spreading rapidly in not-entirely-understood ways. Seems to me that draconian measures are being taken because we don’t know enough yet about what this is, and lack more nuanced tools with which to deal with it.”

“Fair enough. But is it therefore OK to have so much collateral damage? Millions of people have filed for unemployment in the past several weeks. Millions. I don’t want anyone to suffer, but what is the point of destroying entire careers and families to save lives of those with ‘underlying health issues’, which depending how one defines that phrase, can be anyone? That is what scares me, and that fear is what drove me towards being so loudly argumentative this morning. I fear unemployment, then poverty. In general, and personally.”

“OK. That’s foreign to me, because over here in my world view, we have a sufficiently-functioning government—stumbling and messing up, yes—able to see to the basic needs of its citizenry during the shutdown. The whole testing and medical supply situation is screwed up, beyond question. At least they’re keeping people out of poverty with the various recovery and economic stimulus packages.”

“That’s where I have a whole slew of other issues which deeply upset me. I am no master of economics—I struggled through Adam Smith’s Wealth Of Nations and didn’t finish, in large part because I had a helluva time wrapping my mind around and relating to the real-world examples he used, from an agrarian economy that no longer exists in the so-called western world. My understanding is that what the U.S. federal government is doing is going to dramatically increase our nation’s already far-too-high national debt, and may lead to inflation. There’s nothing magical about printing money: far as I know, the backing value has to come from somewhere. If we don’t pay it, future generations must. The can cannot be kicked down the road forever. It may not affect us all that much or it might, but assuredly it will affect younger generations during their lifetimes. Or even if they figure out a way to kick the can further down the road, the eventual reckoning will be all that much more fatal to those who come after them. Easily could cause the collapse of the U.S.A. That’s a huge, huge price to pay for saving some thousands of people.”

“My sources indicate that if we did nothing, there would be millions of deaths in the U.S., not thousands. Wholly apart from the human compassion aspects, how would that not be a huge blow to the U.S. economy?”

“It likely would be a huge blow. Again, I don’t want anyone to suffer, but suffering happens, and dying happens. Were we truly compassionate, rather than focusing so much time and so many resources onto saving every possible human life, we’d be developing or already have developed vastly better, more humane ways to make the transition from life to death tranquil and less painful, resulting in far less suffering for deaths we can’t prevent. I believe there are too many people in the world, for humanity’s own good as well as that of the world. Limiting new births is a whole other tangent, for which so far humans have dramatically failed, at the same time keeping millions more alive via what we call ‘modern medicine’. While I’d prefer to continue living an acceptably pain-free, passably healthy life, especially with you in it if we can work through our differences, I’m willing to be in line to be humanely and comfortably put down to die the next time I have some dire illness or physical failure that would require heroic efforts and gee-gobs of money to try and resolve.”

“I understand not wanting to suffer, and if death was truly inevitable and was heading towards slow, agonizing, and painful, I’d want viable hospice for myself or whomever, and I thought we already had it. But if we don’t that’s another tangent, so let’s not go there right now. I’m not thrilled with how crowded our cities are, but at the same time I’m not convinced that population reduction via allowing more deaths will meaningfully change that. That’s another tangent. I think people’s lives have worth, and should be preserved. I don’t understand why the price tag is so important to you.”

“Because we live in a world of limits. I can’t go out and buy a gigantic mansion or very high-end car without taking out a mortgage or other financial instrument, to pick two random high-ticket examples. Each of us and every individual we know has a budget. We stick to that budget, or we go into debt. We can’t legally print more money the way governments do, so we have to pay back our debts, else our credit rating goes to shit, we can’t borrow money, and creditors will likely come after us to get what is owed.

“These limits do not magically disappear when government is involved, despite so many governments pretending that they can. Everything has costs. Social support has costs. Bailing out industries and/or individuals due to shutting them down as a blunt instrument to try and stop a novel infectious disease has huge costs—at least the way the U.S. is doing it. The national debt is nothing new, and that scares me even more. Like a cancer, it’s kept growing and growing, and now with these latest COVID-19 bailouts it’s shot up in size, like a faster-growing cancer. Like a biological cancer in a human body, left unchecked it will kill us as a viable nation. The price tag for having to use exotic, wildly expensive means to save some lives is important to me because I believe it is a greater threat to our survival than SARS-CoV-2. May I please ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“How do you think economies and money and all that work? How is it that you don’t seem particularly disturbed by the economic aspects of the current emergency, yet seem highly disturbed by COVID-19 itself?”

“We don’t even have to go outside this ship for me to explain that. You and I seem to have been amongst the fortunate who are surviving this disease—the vast majority of those infected, I admit. Think about how brutal it’s been. Think about all the panic we had when we were wheezing, possibly at the fork in the road where either or both of us might have gone down the path that might now have us on a ventilator, or dead. Think about the ambulances… the medivac helicopters… and most devastating of all at least to me, the coroner’s station wagon, which might as well be a hearse. I don’t know the current death count for this ship, but conservatively it’s at least 10, from what I’ve personally witnessed and counted. After I got all upset learning that cruise ships have morgues because people routinely die on them from our earlier discussion where you made that point, I looked into how many they can hold. The number I saw was 4, indicating that they never expected more than 4 people at a time to die of any/all causes between port stops. All these personal experiences inform me that COVID-19 is more impactful than most other communicable diseases within our lifetime—especially in terms of how widely and rapidly it spreads. That is what makes it so uniquely disturbing to me, and to my mind justifies draconian measures until enough can be figured out for society to gradually loosen the restraints and ease into whatever our new normal will be. I get the points about budgeting, and agree that the U.S. national debt is a huge problem, and not a new one. Much as I hate to agree with the current U.S. Presidential administration, this does seem to me like a war. As far as I know we didn’t spend a lot of time totaling up costs during World War II, postponing that reckoning until after the the war ended. I believe we have to do the same thing here.”

This long interaction was only the beginning of several hours of calm discussion, where both Clark and Leigh strove to truly listen to the other, and open their minds as much as they could to understanding the other’s viewpoint. It was challenging, and at points each remained unconvinced. At least this way they could understand that the wise mind they loved which seemed to think and believe so differently from their own on these matters of belief did so from a well-reasoned, informed, integrated, plausible, compassionate perspective.

Every step of the way, as Clark and Leigh each better understood the other’s perspective and came to accept it (whether or not they embraced it), tensions and residual anger further dissipated. The vacuum left by these dissipations was filled by the swelling of their deep love for one another as quickly as it was created. By far the strongest love each was feeling was carnal, obvious to themselves, and to the other via their well-understood behavior in this familiar realm. Having been attenuated by weeks of illness and put off nearly an entire day on account of the argument it refused to be put off any longer.

“Are we done working things out yet?” he asked at what he felt was past the end point of the discussion. “Or is there more?”

“You’re forgetting the most important part of finishing working through an argument.”

“What’s that?”

“The make-up sex!”

Like a fierce lioness, she attacked him with dominant, ferocious sex-laden kisses and wanton lusty gropes. No shrinking violet, he was similarly all over her in seconds after she started. Heavy breathing, panting, and occasional gasping and moaning filled the stateroom, in the most intensely aggressive lovemaking they as a couple had ever undertaken. Indeed, they were going at it more ferociously than either had ever done in the past with any lover.

His full-mouth-and-tongue breast attack without her having had to in any way hint at such an activity poured passion gasoline on her lusty fire, moistening her innards faster than she knew possible.

Groping her fat, wobbly hips with reckless abandon had him breathtakingly banana-upped. Their activity briefly slowed both so she could more thoroughly enjoy the sensations of sliding his fully-grown neener into her, and so she could do so carefully without inadvertently hurting him and his scintillating sex stick. Once he was all the way in, each of them contributed to the wildest, most physically rambunctious intercourse they’d yet undertaken. In truth, they were likely both dissipating the last vestiges of stored anger energy together, in the most pleasurable manner possible.

This was greedy sex: not the agreeable, communicative sort they normally shared. They humped and humped to their (personal) heart’s content, right there where they’d been on the couch. She was too sexy and the stimulation too intense for him to hold back for long: his neat and clean dry retrograde ejaculation had him blowing up backwards into himself (his own bladder), remaining most of the way hard far longer after the fact than had ever been his experience pre-surgery.

Nice as that was for Leigh, she needed more—and she got it. Wordlessly near-dragging him over to their bed, her lying down on her back with her legs spread wide along with the context of their past sexual experiences together told him all he needed to know: go down on her.

After some preliminary licks with his tongue, he took her to the bridge… of his nose. Nose sex! His bridge and tip tantalizing her clit did her exceedingly well, in all senses of the phrase. Greedy for this sort of pleasure, she had him keep going on and on for over an hour down there: mostly nosing, sometimes licking or kissing or otherwise doing her right.

For their next sex act, they caressed their way together into the bathroom and into the shower. This wasn’t their first shower sex by any means. Like everything else so far on this night, it was their all-out near-porn-like lustiest.

“How are we ever going to get clean if we keep getting dirty?” she said with a giggle over the noise of the stimulating shower spray.

“What aspect of anything we’ve been doing since starting make-up sex is in any way dirty?”

“Nothing” she giggled some more, sliding him back into her.

It had been an utterly exhausting day for Leigh Down and Clark Barr in multiple ways. Once dried off from shower sex, they were ready to lay down together in bed for a restful night’s sleep. Spoon cuddling and relaxed, that is exactly what they wound up getting.