Just as soon as the handsome, mysterious, authoritative stranger walks away, my phone starts ringing again.
Shit.
I can’t believe this is happening, right after Mystery Man had just told me that no personal calls are allowed here in Cubicle Hell. Luckily, I had managed to switch my phone’s volume setting to vibrate but it still sounds very loud.
I quickly hit “ignore” again, hoping to see if Mystery Man has come back— even if it’s just to look disappointed in me again— but I see that he hasn’t. I don’t know whether to be sad about that or happy that he left so quickly that he couldn’t find out I’m already getting another call so soon after he reprimanded me.
Mostly, I’m relieved he’s gone before the relationship drama I thought I had dealt with at home followed me to work. I had made it my goal to break up with Jimmy before I started working here and I’d done my best to accomplish that goal.
I’d tried to break things to him nicely.
Yesterday I’d told him, “Look, it’s just not working.”
It was an understatement, to say the least. Some of my friends have wondered out loud how I made it to the age of twenty- three as a virgin while dating someone in an on again, off again relationship for three years. To make the situation even crazier, Jimmy and I had even started living together without sleeping together. And of course everyone always wants to know how we pulled that one off.
I always tell them that it just didn’t feel right to me, implying that the timing was off or that we were waiting for marriage. But that's because the real reason is so much more embarrassing: Jimmy just never seemed that into the idea of having sex with me. We would fool around and I would push for more or suggest it and he would say he had a headache or was stressed from his job as associate store manager. Meanwhile I was working my ass off in law school and as a law clerk and I began to crave sexual release that he never seemed to want to give me.
I thought that if I invited him to live with me in the townhouse I was renting that the proximity of being near each other and the seriousness of the relationship would make it more natural for us to start having sex. But instead the opposite happened: I think I made him feel claustrophobic, as if I was putting too much pressure on him.
I began to feel stupid practically begging him to have sex with me when he always resisted my advances. I wondered if he was gay or asexual but he watched porn featuring women and straight couples. So I began to feel that the problem was that he just wasn’t that into me or for some reason he lacked the ability to have sexual intimacy with a real life partner.
We had even gone to couples’ counseling. Who does that when they’re not married, engaged, or even having sex? Mary, our round faced, curly haired counselor who reminded me of a Cabbage Patch Doll had told us we were living more like brother and sister than like a couple and she urged us to consider progressing into a “satisfying sexual relationship.”
She assigned us homework from a book called Hot Monogamy for Dummies that instructed us to write out our perfect sexual fantasy with our partner.
I’d spent over an hour describing mine. The essence of it was this:
I’ll come home from work and he’ll rip off my clothes and fuck me hard and fast on top of the kitchen table, as if he can’t even stand to waste another minute without being inside me.
I’ll say, “Don’t be so rough,” and then I’ll say, “Just kidding, keep being as rough as you want.”
He’ll turn me over and tie my hands to the kitchen chair so he can spread my legs, grab my ass, and fuck me from behind.
We’ll come together, his warm, juicy liquid filling me up and dripping out of my wet pussy onto the table after he takes his cock out of me…
Imagine my surprise when we arrived at our next session and I saw Jimmy’s description of his perfect sexual fantasy with me:
It’s late and we get into bed to cuddle. The lights are off and there’s slow music playing. I kiss her and then insert a finger into her and then we have sex. Then we fall asleep.
That was it. That was the entirety of the best vision of our sex life that Jimmy could dream up and write down.
And that’s when it dawned on me that things were never going to change. We’ve been together off and on for three years but we’d never even had sex, and our fantasies of sex we wanted to have with each other hadn’t even matched up.
I had told my sister about couples’ counseling and about how shocked Jimmy had looked about my sexual fantasy.
“At first we both wanted to save ourselves for marriage but now it’s like, how can I marry someone when I don’t even know if the sex will be any good?”
“I think he has some weird sort of virgin/ whore mentality going on,” my sister had replied, diagnosing not only Jimmy but also the state of our relationship more honestly and accurately one minute after hearing about that session than Mary had been able to do after months of couples’ counseling. “I just think he isn’t able to see you as anything other than his white dress- wearing future bride.”
“He’s never going to be able to defile me the way that I’ve come to realize I need to be defiled,” I’d admitted to her.
“You should just jump his bones,” she’d said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t protest.”
“He might,” I’d told her. “Just like the look on his face showed me he was protesting against my perfect sex fantasy.”
To be honest, I didn’t even want to have sex with him anymore. That’s when I’d decided to break up with him for good and lose my virginity to someone else. Someone whose fantasies and real-life tastes might be more in tune with my own.
And that’s when I’d gone on this mission to lose my virginity to the right person. Or at least a person who will know how to take it from me the right way.
I have a feeling that Mystery Man could be that person. Except that we shouldn’t—we can’t— because we work together. Damn it. Just my bad luck.