Skin Contact

by Elisa Faison

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Literary Fiction; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

A newly open marriage brings discovery, excitement, and upheaval to a young couple, and to the friends and lovers in their orbit

Thirty years old and reeling from her mother’s recent death, Frances feels as if she’s lost her sense of purpose, her joy; her husband, Ben, will do anything to help her. So when she suggests that they open their marriage, he’s willing—and maybe even a little intrigued. They invite a young woman into their bedroom, create a joint dating profile, and go on dates with other exploring couples, with mixed but often exciting results. Over the next five years, they explore their sexualities, navigating through jealousy, betrayal, desire, and obsession—and the friends and lovers in their circle find themselves asking new questions about their own lives and relationships. When Ben finds himself falling in love with another woman, just as Frances realizes she’s ready to settle down and have a baby, they’re forced to confront the consequences of their experiment.

With warmth, humor, and sharp insight, Elisa Faison explores marriage’s many forms and possibilities—and announces herself as an exciting new voice in fiction.

Release date: June 23, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

“I’M REALLY SORRY. NO one told me you were here.” That was the first thing Lily ever said to us, that she hadn’t seen us. But now she was looking me right in the eye, with a little pleading smile, and I softened—as I always did when I felt someone needed something from me.

Ben and I had been seated for fifteen minutes. For the first five minutes, we had luxuriated in the wait, reading to each other from the menus on our phones and sinking into each syllable. “Duck confit,” I said, letting myself lean a little Frenchy at the end.

“Heirloom carrot,” Ben said. “Yuzu. Turnip. Honey.” If you didn’t know whether it was an entrée or a grocery list, it would be either delicious or tiny but almost never both.

For the second five minutes, we discussed how unpretentious the décor was. “These chairs look like our chairs,” he said. “And I like our chairs.” I shared my opinion that tiki cocktails were too trendy—though I dreaded the day that I’d have to pretend to like bourbon and smoke again.

For the third five minutes, we tried not to notice the lingering silences that began to pepper our inanities. The big sad thing we were trying not to think about. “Maybe I should say something,” he said.

“Maybe.”

She came and saved us from the shame of requesting something.

“The hostess is new,” she explained as she set down two glasses and a carafe of water.

“Don’t worry about us!” I said, and wrinkled my eyebrows together in a show of sympathy. I repressed an urge to tell her that I had once worked in service. I liked to be an easy customer, liked to cultivate a rapport with waitstaff—authentic or not—and liked to leave 25 percent tips when I was sober and 30 percent tips when I was drunk. I sometimes imagined that my waiters thought of me after I’d left, remembering my easiness fondly and with relief.

“We really just sat down,” Ben lied.

She told us her name was Lily, which I thought was a beautiful name. Her face was smooth and shiny in the right places, like she hadn’t put on any face makeup or like she knew the best makeup to buy. Her eyebrows were thick and dark and straight, above brown eyes and a nose with a little bump in it. Her lips were full, with a big dip at the top, and painted not quite nude, a little burst of light pink next to the white of her skin, like a lily, which was my mother’s favorite flower.

A year or so ago, I would have thought of her vaguely as “our age,” but now I realized that she was younger than we were, maybe twenty-four. I was thirty, no longer the youngest kind of adult you could be. I had kinky gray hairs that broke up my wall of bangs. I had college-ruled lines of wrinkles across my forehead that I hated and covered up with the bangs. I had wide parentheses around my mouth that used to appear when I laughed, but now lingered like unwanted guests long after the dinner had ended. I had begun to fear that my eyes were shrinking, that the hood of flesh under my eyebrows was succumbing to gravity and slowly subsuming them, the way my mother’s had before she died last month. People used to comment on my big eyes, which were blue even though my hair was dark. But all the strangers had gone silent lately.

I supposed I should be grateful to be alive. My grandmother’s sister, Frances, for whom my mother named me, was dead by thirty. Dead before her hair went gray, and her forehead got lined, and her neck began to sag, and her eyes began to shrink, and her mom began to die. People noticed her for her whole life.

“Early Valentine’s Day?” Lily asked.

“No,” Ben said. “Yes,” I said. I wasn’t sure why, except that to say yes seemed light and festive, which I wanted to feel. In fact, I hadn’t even realized it was February. I’d celebrated the New Year in big stupid 2020 glasses, a glittery zero around each of my eyes, and two days later, I got the call and chronology stopped. Time had become one gray blob that I merely floated back and forth in, like an astronaut in space, unmoored, homeless.

“Sort of.” Ben laughed, and grabbed my hand across the table. “Just thought it’d be nice to get out for a date.” Nice to get dressed, nice to leave the house, nice to be a person in the world again, who loved and was loved. I had woken that morning wanting it out of nowhere, with a desperation that startled me.

We ordered cocktails. Cognac, ruby port, spiced Demerara syrup, allspice dram, lemon, orange. We ordered snacks. Nori, enoki, shoyu. Fried potato, kimchi dip. We started to get a little silly and a little horny.

“What about them?” I asked, tilting my head to the couple at the table next to us. He was an enormous blond with a squashy face, and she was a bony redhead with thin shoulders. He was drinking red, and she was drinking white.

Ben gave them an appraising look. “Never. Once a month at most.”

“And only when the kids are with their grandparents,” I said. “If they’re there, she can’t stop thinking about them. If she remembered to turn the night-light on. If they’re warm enough.”

“Which is a problem for him, because he has a fantasy of getting caught.”

“Gross! No.”

“He can’t help it. He caught his parents as a kid. Don’t kink-shame him.”

I shrugged, sucked on the edge of my cocktail glass, and popped a fried potato into my mouth. The kimchi dip was hot and tangy—almost sweaty, like Ben after his morning run. He nodded at something over my shoulder. “What about them? The glasses behind you, to the left.” I looked up into the mirror behind his head.

It reflected a man in glasses who had a turtleneck under his blazer and a clean-cut taper fade. His eyes were warm and open, and he laughed at something the man across from him said. I could only see the back of his head, but I liked the squareness of his hand cupping his glass. “All the time,” I said. “Look how they’re looking at each other.”

“Maybe. Unless they only get turned on when they’re out together. And when they go home, all they want to do is watch TV on the couch and wrap up in a blanket.”

I nodded. That was a thing. A thing that was sometimes our thing, and I felt the need to protect it. I said, “Glasses likes that, though. He likes the way his husband’s butt looks in sweatpants. He gets all hot and bothered when their hands brush against each other when they reach for the remote and he can’t help himself. They always have sex on the couch, never in the bed.”

We ordered a bottle of wine: orange muscat, Izydora Natural Amber, Cimişlia, Moldova, 2019. When Lily brought it over, she said, “This is a really good bottle. It eats really well.” She reached into the pocket at her waist and brought out a bottle opener and used it to slice the neck of the bottle. As she crushed the wrapping in one fist, she brought her other hand up to her forehead and smoothed back a swath of errant baby hairs. Her fingernails were short and perfunctory, but each was painted a different color of the rainbow. My mom and I had sometimes done my nails that way, when I was a kid. I must have been staring because Lily balled her hand into a fist as she brought it down from her face.

“It eats well,” I said to Ben after Lily had walked away, lifting my glass and tilting it slightly toward him. I had liked the way it sounded in her mouth, and I wanted to remember to say it about other wines. It was syrupy and rich, and I held it on my tongue for a few seconds before I swallowed it.

We ordered duck confit, mushroom, cippolini, cannelloni. The whole fish, allium mignonette, fresh greens. We started to get a little sad and a little lovey. Ben held my hand across the table and ran one finger up and down my palm, and I found myself talking about Lily’s fingernails, offering up flashes from my mind for him to make sense of: some slumber party, hot pink silken pajamas smooth on my skin, my mother’s pursed lips blowing a soft stream of air onto the tips of my fingers, my palm in hers.

Lily arrived to remove some of our empty dishes, the fish plate covered in the bones that we had licked clean. I wiped my face roughly with my palm, and I couldn’t tell if she saw or not.

Lily. There was no end to the proliferation of things that made my mother seem more dead.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to both of them.

I went to the bathroom and made a face in the mirror that I had a feeling I only ever made at myself in mirrors. I had seen the faces other women made in mirrors, and I never recognized them as existing in nature. I pulled the skin under my eyebrows up and thought how pretty I must have looked in my twenties. I went into the stall and luxuriously let three big tears fall out of my eyes, not sure if they were for my mom or for myself five years ago. I miss her miss her miss her miss her miss her miss her miss her miss her miss her miss her, I repeated to myself. Meaning both my mom and the me who still spoke to her mom every day, who still like a child thought that her mom might be her soulmate. What did you do when you found yourself, happily married at thirty, suddenly missing half of your soul even though your husband was right there, his hand on your back for hours and hours? I let two more tears fall and thought, I miss her miss her miss her miss her but this has to be the end of this, please.

Afterward, I thought about sending a picture of my tits to Ben to make myself feel better, but I chickened out.

As I walked back to the table, I passed the open kitchen. Lily’s hand was on another waitress’s shoulder, and she was whispering something to her with a smirk on her face. When I sat back down, I said to Ben, “What about Lily?” I put my cocktail face back on, a sly crimp at the corner of my mouth.

“Lily,” he said. “The waitress?”

“Server,” I said, though I realized I’d been calling her a waitress in my head.

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Ben said, shaking his head as though to knock the word out of it. “What about her?”

“I don’t know,” I said, risking more wine. “I bet she has a boyfriend waiting for her at home. And he’s always complaining about how she has to work on the weekends and gets home so late. But she’s full of energy when she gets back from seeing so many people and maybe finishing their nice leftover wine at the end of her shift. She wakes him up to have sex.”

“Yeah. He’s always pissed off at first, because he just fell asleep. But he gives in and then he’s glad he did.”

“She can’t help it.” I felt a hot flush come into my cheeks. It was the end of the story, per the expectations of the game, but I wanted to keep going. It surprised me, to feel pulled back into my body. I wanted to stay there. “She likes it when her customers flirt with her, even though she knows she’s supposed to be annoyed by it. She complains about it to the other waitresses when she’s drinking their wine, but she doesn’t mean it.”

“Servers, Frances,” Ben said, and I frowned at him and rolled my eyes. “Don’t be sexist. Which reminds me—Lily especially likes it when the women at her tables flirt with her.”

I let the sip of wine sit in my mouth. It was more like honey or sherry than wine. I thought about Lily saying that it had eaten well, and I felt a giggle in my chest. “I have sort of a crush on her,” I said after I swallowed, only realizing it as I said it.

“Really?” Ben’s eyes went wide, and he leaned in to look into the open kitchen. “She’s not really your type.” I always made a point of preferring women who were taller than me and fatter than me and had bigger boobs than me. I wanted to be smothered in womanness.

With men, I always became maternal in my expressions of lust. Even as a teenager, when I started to fall in love with a boy, I’d find myself cradling him in my arms, kissing the top of his head, smoothing the wrinkles down the back of his shirt. It could excite me, even five years ago, to picture myself doing these things with men. I thought that it set me apart from other women, whose attentions I pictured as more surface than mine, less encompassing. Now, at thirty, I had begun to feel ambivalent about this tendency, worried that it was another way I was aging myself. I wanted to be sexier, dumber, more bodily.

I said, “Mm. I don’t know why.”

“I do,” Ben said with a grin. “She looks sort of like you.”

I let out a laugh—an almost harsh ha!—which I hadn’t consented to. “No, she doesn’t! Does she?” The idea swelled up in me, a balloon. I thought of her pastel moon of a face, smooth and shining.

“She has brown hair, she’s sort of tall, thin…” He shrugged. “Like you!”

I couldn’t suppress my smile, but I didn’t want him to know how much he’d thrilled me. It seemed ridiculous. “Oh, no,” I said, and took an erratic drink of wine, savoring the taste of loss that lives somewhere between the first honeyed scent and the warm tartness at the back of the throat. “I don’t think so. Is that a thing?” Ben shrugged but kept smiling. I felt like he was seeing something hidden in me that I hadn’t known was there. I said, “What were we talking about before? Before I went to the bathroom, I mean.” After I asked, I realized that it had been Lily’s rainbow fingernails.

If he remembered, he picked up on my tone and pretended not to. “That was forever ago; I don’t know. Maybe how fucking good the duck is. You should have the last bite,” he offered.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m too full. You should have it.”

“You sure?” Ben asked, already reaching for it. When I nodded, he picked up the meat and melting fat with his hand and popped it into his mouth, licked his fingers. I smiled. Ben was always pretending he didn’t want something and getting it anyway. It felt good to me in a way that hit deep in my belly.

When Lily came back, she said, “I know you two are going to get dessert.” Her voice shimmered as she said this, and I wondered if she really would drink our leftover wine as she talked about us with the rest of the staff, her mouth where our mouths had been. I leaned toward her just in case she really did like it especially when the women flirted with her and asked what she recommended. We ordered Cognacs and the olive oil cake, lemon preserve, fior di latte ice cream.

“Thanks,” I said, breathy and drunk, when Lily came back with our order. Her fingers brushed against mine as she handed me the tiny, warm glass, and I seemed to feel them trill down my spine. Hi, they said, hi, hi, hi, you’re still here, in this body.

As we were paying the check, Ben said, “Should we leave her our number?”

“What?” A disconcerting ache shot through me. “Like, wait, for real?”

Ben leaned in and ran his hand down my shoulder. It felt like ten hands. I realized, looking into his eyes, that he was drunk and excited and happy again, too. He looked like himself, and I must have looked like myself, because he said, “Why not? I mean, we’ll leave before she sees it. The worst that will happen is she’ll have a fun story to tell her boyfriend later.”

“Oh my god,” I said. I felt giddy, like a girl. “Okay, let’s do it.”

Ben turned the receipt over and scrawled his number. He read to me out loud as he wrote above it, “‘We think you’re cute. Give us a call if you’d like to get together sometime.’”

“Perfect,” I said. But then: “No, wait, did you already write it?” He nodded. “Fuck. I feel like we should have said ‘text,’ not ‘call.’”

“Same difference,” Ben said, folding the note.

“That’s really old of us to say ‘call.’”

“You’re not, like, ancient. My question is: What are we going to tip? Like, we can’t give an enormous tip, which I know you want to, because then it will seem like we think she owes us a call.”

“A text,” I say. “Yeah.”

“But obviously we don’t want to under-tip her because we’re not, like, assholes.”

“No, yeah. Okay. What about just, like, twenty percent? That’s normal, right? Not bribery?”

“Yeah, yeah, good call.”

We threw on our jackets like we were shoplifting them and practically ran from the table. But once we were outside, Ben grabbed my shoulder and said, “Wait!” He turned me so that we were both looking through the big front window at Lily, who had the note lifted in front of her face, her hand pressed tightly to her mouth, her eyes smiling, unless I imagined it.

We were hungover Sunday morning, surrounded by our shoes and the piles of clothes we had clumsily ripped off each other when we got home. I had told Ben to use me like a thing, so he had pulled my hair, but I hated it and it turned tender and caring in the end. We’d drunk too much, and neither of us came.

I rolled into his body and pressed my throbbing forehead against his neck. He kissed me on my ear and said we had to start ordering coffees with our desserts.

I said, “It was fun, though.”

“When Lily saw the note. That was cute,” he said. Cute. It made me feel tender toward him, and I curled myself up tiny into his arm.

“I wonder if we should go back,” I said after a few minutes of silence. “We didn’t get to try the artichokes.”

He rolled to his side so that our noses were touching, and he studied my face. “You want to see her again? For real?”

“Yes,” I said. I thought of how it had felt, to imagine her life, to brush my fingers against hers. The rush of heat, the idea of something yet to come. I wanted to keep feeling it. “Don’t you? Or—”

He smiled. “I think she’s going to call.”

“She’ll text,” I said. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Why are you so worried about how young she is? She doesn’t seem very young.”

“Well, how old do you think she is?” I asked him.

“I don’t know, twenty-four?”

“I regret to inform you that that’s almost a decade younger than you.”

He shrugged. I felt an irrational hot flare of anger at him. He had never looked better to me than he had over the last year. His face was tanned and lined like he’d been working outside, though he never had been. His hair was longer, and his beard was flecked with patches of silver. His shoulders were broad and strong. Men really did look better older, more solid and defined. I had a deep sense that I, on the other hand, was smudging, that soon I would be nothing but a splash of pale color.

At the same time, I wanted his body pressed into mine. I wanted it to press past mine so that we were one body. I wanted him. Or I wanted to want him and felt the failure of want animate my body instead, my desire transmuting into a more primal need to be soothed.

“Don’t be worried, Franny,” he said as he brushed my bangs out of my eyes. He let his hand linger in my hair and ran his thumb back and forth across my forehead. I closed my eyes, and for a second, his hand became my mom’s hand, pulling my hair back into a barrette.

A blood vessel had burst in her brain and she had died.

That was all it took to leave me here without her.

On Sunday night as we were prepping the coffeepot and putting away the dishes, Ben’s phone buzzed. Before we clicked the notification, my heart began to thud against my breastbone. At that point, it was the promise of Lily, not Lily herself, that excited me. The promise of a new kind of sex, vibrant and weird and unexpected. The promise contained in her single text:

Hey, it’s Lily from last night. I’d definitely be interested in meeting up!

The galaxy of subtext contained in the little winky-faced emoji.

On Monday, after Ben left to teach a seminar, I lay in bed late into the morning, as I had been doing for a few weeks now. But that day, I drank four cups of coffee and watched lesbian porn. I imagined all the women as Lily, round cheeks, her sly smile, her dark hair, the tiny divot on the bulb of her nose. The way, I thought, her shoulder blades might curve under those satin straps. The way she might look at the woman she wanted to fuck.

Even though I was already behind schedule for the memoir I was ghostwriting, I did the same thing the next morning and, later that night, heard myself tell a truth and a lie: that I was feeling more like myself, and that I felt I’d been very productive. I ordered a new dress that reminded me of one I saw on one of the porn stars, tanned and drunk, hopefully fake drunk. I wanted to wear it on Friday, and I wanted Lily to see me in it and eat me alive. I had it rush delivered.

On the third day, I tried to watch threesome porn, but it invariably disappointed me. I hated the loud whiny sound that is ubiquitous in porn involving men and that I—like every girl—had imitated for several years in my early twenties in lieu of having actual orgasms. Twice, I flung my phone away in disgust and closed my eyes and imagined Lily instead. At first, I would lick her and bite her and touch myself while Ben watched, unable to keep himself from coming. But then I would find myself lying next to her in bed, our faces underneath white sheets, the morning sun seeping through and making her skin glow beneath my hand. I would run my fingers down the side of her cheek, feeling her dewy skin. I would lean into her and kiss her forehead, soft under my lips, her hair smelling like rosewater and dry shampoo. Our brown hair intermingling on the pillow so that I couldn’t tell which was mine and which was hers.

On Friday, I fretted and puttered around the house. I washed the sheets and then realized I’d probably wash them again tomorrow. I bought fresh flowers and put them out and then worried that they made us seem too domesticated. I considered booking myself for a full Brazilian, because what if she had one? I never worried about my pubic hair. I had practically forgotten it existed. Ben didn’t care how wild it was, or at least he said he didn’t. But now there was going to be a direct comparison. In the end, I didn’t book the app. . .