Chapter Nine
“Please, Jake. Wonderfuck me. Please.”
She moans, and the head of my cock nudges the tight muscles of her sex. Her eyes fire with desire and want and need. Is that love? Fuck yes, it’s love. Tara loves me. I press forward into her sex and her mouth drops open. Her face contorts with pleasure. This is heaven. Desire thrums through my body. I’m above her. I lean forward and press my lips to her eyes, her nose, and then her lips.
“Jake,” she whispers. “Jake, I love you.”
“I love you too, baby.” My back muscles tighten and heat shatters through me. “Yes,” I say, needing this release wanting this release—
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.
I open my eyes. My hand reaches for my cock, hopeful. Oh my god, please let me be hard.
My cock is soft.
Fuck.
Was it even hard when I was dreaming?
Bzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzz.
The woman I’m furious with is the woman I need. There’s a thin line between love and hate. Even I don’t need a therapist to know that I am hopping back and forth over that damn line where Tara is concerned.
I flip open my WF phone. It’s a number I don’t recognize.
‘Need to see you.’
I’ve stopped answering. I’m no good to women right now. There’s nothing I can do. Well, perhaps not nothing. I have lips and a tongue that still works, and I am good with my hands, but the level of frustration for me would be too high and eventually for them as well.
‘Sorry. Can’t,’ I type back, unsure which of my pre-Tara women this is. Silence. The silence is so fucking deafening I could lose what’s left of my mind. I’m up and out of my bed and packing for a weekend that I have no idea what it will bring.
Sex.
I’ll get the relief of sex. I need that. But will I hate myself for needing it from the woman who fucked up my life?
I walk into the bathroom and look into the mirror. Unshaven. Tired. Rings beneath my eyes. Face it, man. Face it, and discuss it, and figure this shit out. The things I don’t want to do.
The same things I avoided with Susie.
I knew. I had to know. I pretended not to know. At least that’s what I believe now. All those nights she came home and showered. The afternoons I didn’t know where she was. The phone calls when she whispered into the phone. All those times, I should’ve looked at Susie and asked, but instead, didn’t, because I trusted her. I wanted to trust her. I wanted to give the very best of me that I had to give.
And I did.
I should’ve known.
I did know, didn’t I?
My life is a mess. I turn away from the guy in the mirror because right now that guy is the last person I want to see.
***
My blood boils. I need to fuck. I need to fuck in a way I can’t possibly explain. The feeling is visceral and carnal and inexplicable. Fury rages through my chest because I’m unable to do what I need to do.
“I’m curious. What are some things you do for pleasure?” Vida asks.
Sitting in her office doesn’t help my mood. In fact I’m even more pissed off than when I saw her last week.
“Fucking.” I hold her gaze and plant my charming smile in my face. “I enjoy fucking for relaxation.”
She’s heard everything before, because the word, the thought, the idea of me having loads of sex doesn’t break through her smiling patina.
“Sex is a primary enjoyment for you.”
“Isn’t it for everyone?”
“No, not always.”
And I know that to be the truth. Sex wasn’t a source of enjoyment for Susie. Sex for Susie was like whiskey to an alcoholic, or meth to an addict; a way to numb the pain and not feel.
“For some people there’s little satisfaction in sex. What is it about the act that is satisfying for you?”
“Aside from the ejaculating part?”
“If that is the only satisfying part.”
“The physical pleasure without emotional intimacy pleases me. I like to have lots of sex with lots of women so that I don’t have to feel the emotions that come with intimacy. Emotions are inconvenient and uncontrollable. I don’t like to feel them.”
“Ah. Not always the wisest choice, to refuse to feel our emotions. You know they don’t disappear just because we repress them.”
“They become rage.”
“Sometimes, yes. They can manifest in all kinds of ways. Physical illness. Rage. Sexual dysfunction.”
I shift in my seat. Sexual dysfunction because I don’t allow myself to feel?
“Could that include impotence?” I ask.
“It could,” Vida says, with a practiced nonchalance that she’s affected to appear non inquisitive and nonjudgmental. A way for therapists to gain their patients’ trust.
I lean forward. “What would it mean if a man could only get hard for one woman?”
“Do you mean no ability to become aroused other than intercourse with one woman?”
I nod.
“Masturbation?”
“No.”
“Pornography?”
“Tried it.”
“Other women?”
“Not happening.”
Vida sighs. “It could mean that there is a high level of anxiety or stress and that this person is the one place where you feel safe.”
Bullshit. I don’t feel safe with Tara, I feel completely turned on. Trust? Nope. I don’t trust Tara.
“Or it could mean that there is a trauma either conscious or unconscious that prevents you from feeling relaxed enough about sex to have it with anyone other than that one person.”
Maybe, possibly true. Maybe even unconsciously I feel safest with Tara because she knows about Wonderfuck. She is definitely the only person I trusted enough to tell about Wonderfuck.
“Jake, is this what’s happening to you?” Vida’s voice is soft. She’s being extra gentle in asking, because men and their yam sack, nothing is more intimate to us than our erections.
“Maybe. I don’t know for sure. Ever since I started seeing this woman I can’t be with anyone else.”
“Do you want to be with anyone else?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is I want to be able to be with someone else if I want to.”
Feeling stranded, isolated, and unable to fuck, isn’t how I want my life to go.