Sunning like a snake

How long must a couple be married before they can look each other in the eye and say with some degree of certainty that there is nothing about the other person they don't know?
My husband and I have been married more than two decades, and I can tell you how he likes his coffee in the morning. I can tell you where he enjoys going on vacation, and I can even tell you what section of the newspaper he will read first every day.
Throughout the years, I assumed he knew just that much about me.
But last week, my assumptions proved incorrect when this man, with whom I've shared all these years, looked at me as though he'd never seen me.
To tell the story properly, I have to tell you that I am a fair-skinned person, bordering on the light. I was fair-skinned when we married, fair-skinned when we had children together, and I remain fair-skinned to this day. In fact, I have been this same ghost-like color all of my life, save for a few times when I've tried bronzers to bring out my inner sun-goddess.
You get the drift. I'm fair skinned. And as such, what happens to a fair-skinned person when the sun bores down on them? You guessed it - she gets a sunburn.
I have wished over the years that I could tan, but that has never been my lot in life. Being pale, I am destined to burn, and peel, then re-burn, and peel again. Pretty much my summer routine.
My husband, on the other hand, can literally hang his arm out the car window and get a tan. If he mows the yard, he comes indoors two shades darker than when he began the chore. I tell him how very fortunate he is, and I've always assumed he understood that I was drawing a comparison between us, and I was the one coming up short.
So knowing that no tan could ever come on my skin, I religiously slather myself in lotion before going out in the sun. Hey, I might as well save this pale skin, right?
Well, on vacation this summer, I forgot my lotion and went into the sun for two hours wearing no sun screen. And of course, the inevitable happened.
For the next two days, I looked like a crab, and felt like an idiot.
Following that pink glow, the next inevitable thing happened - the burned skin peeled. Again, a typical cause and reaction.
One day as we were outdoors I saw a piece of the peeled skin on my leg, and bent down to pick it off. My husband gasped like he'd never seen that happen before.
"What is wrong with you? Are you shedding your skin?" he asked loud enough that others also looked at my condition.
No, I wasn't wriggling out of a layer of skin, I was just peeling a little bit off my leg.
It didn't stop him.
"This explains a lot. You're actually molting," he said, with an incredulous gasp.
By this point, he had an audience and was bound to make the most of his two minutes of fame.
"Oh my gosh, you must be reptilian. And that would mean, you're cold-blooded. That's why you're always freezing cold when we eat in a restaurant, and boiling hot when we work outdoors."
His "a-ha" moment had come, and his audience was loving the schtick.
But in my book, the funny man had gone far enough. This snake got into striking position. Thankfully for my husband, he was smart enough to read the body language and step away from the danger.
I guess maybe he has learned a lesson in our decades together.