ERIK. “So, Heather was nice. I found her to be a genuinely good person, from what little we talked,” I said, hoping to get Kelli to talk a little about Heather.

“She is nice. That’s why we’re such good friends. You always talk like, well, listening to you talk is like reading a book. You’re so serious when you talk. Don’t get me wrong, I like it. I like it a lot, it’s a good quality,” Kelli responded.

Not quite what I was after.

“Bear said, excuse me, Teddy said that she was nice. I guess they’ve been out a few times. He hasn’t said a tremendous amount about it, but from what little he did say, it sounds like they’re getting along well.”

“Why did you call him Bear? Is that a nickname?”

“Yes. A club name. A nickname. His name is Teddy. The name “Bear” was a nickname for years. He is big, and looks like a teddy bear. A few years back, he accidentally knocked a bunch of bikes over at a bar, and he got a new nickname, “Crash”. People that have known him for a long time, like me, sometimes still call him Bear,” I explained as I folded the receipt from the coffee and placed it at the edge of the table.

“Why do you all have nicknames?” she asked.

“Well, most motorcycle clubs have nicknames for everyone. It’s easier that way. I suppose it started as a means of protecting people from anyone knowing their real names. If something happens and people are questioned, no one knows your name. There are guys that I have ridden with on and off for years that I still do not even know their real names,” I offered.

“If something happens? So do you guys break the law?”

I raised one eyebrow and looked at her, then took a slow exaggerated drink of my coffee, looking over the top of the cup at her as I did.

“Okay, sorry I asked. Club business is club business. I remember,” she said smiling.

“So, Heather…” I said, once again opening the topic.

“Well, Heather is nice. Just like we have talked before, she has been really unfortunate. She has spent her life looking for a guy to love her and she’s willing to do whatever a guy wants, always hoping to get love in return. She is so eager to get it, she sleeps with about every guy she meets, thinking that he’s going to love her. He doesn’t, and she moves on to the next. Lather, rinse, repeat,” Kelli said, shaking her head.

She looked great today. I admired her from across the table. Late summer tan, straight black hair, and piercing blue eyes. She was wearing an orange summer dress, and this was the second time I had seen her in a dress. For the most part, the entire time I have known her, she has worn Chucks, shorts, and a tee-shirt. She looked quite beautiful in whatever she chose to wear, but today, in this dress, she looked exceptional.

“Baby Girl, you look fabulous today. This is the first time I have seen you in that dress, and I must say, I love it,” I said as I nodded at her.

“Why thank you. That’s nice of you to say,” she responded, nodding back at me in mockery.

“You’re adorable. It pleases me that you’ve become comfortable being yourself around me. Joking around and being yourself. When we first met, you were extremely reserved and quiet. You’re not necessarily a chatterbox now, but you’re more comfortable being you. I like that.”

“Why thank you, again,” she said, nodding again.

“Baby Girl, who owns you?” I asked.

“You do, Big Daddy,” she answered.

A week or so ago, we rented a few movies and watched them at her loft. One of the movies, Kick Ass, was a kind of cute teen superhero movie. One of the characters was a foul mouthed teen girl who called herself “Hit Girl”. Her mentor was “Big Daddy”. As we watched the movie, she began to call me Big Daddy, and so far, it had stuck. She didn’t say it all the time, but jokingly, she used it often.

During sex a few nights ago, she started screaming, “Fuck me Big Daddy. Fuck me Big Daddy” as we were having sex. We both erupted in laughter.

“That’s right, Baby Girl,” I said, smiling.

“Can we talk? Like seriously?” Kelli asked quietly.

“Sure, baby, what’s going on?”

“Well, I mean seriously. I want to ask you some questions.” Her hands were on either side of her face, her palms curved and facing inward, making a little tunnel she was looking through.

“Here? You want to talk here?” I asked.

“Sure, there’s no one here, if you want,” she responded through the tunnel. Her body language indicated she was being an immature girl.

“This is fine. Let’s hear what you have to say.”

“Can I speak freely?” she asked through the tunnel.

“Always, Kelli. You’ll never be criticized by me, ever,” I responded in a reassuring tone.

“Okay. Uhhm. Well. What do you think is wrong with me? With us? What makes us the freaks that we are?”

“Well, first of all, we’re not freaks. I suppose you mean sexually?”

“Yeah, sexually. Why am I different than most girls, sexually? Why does it make me happy to have you hold me down? How come I like you to choke me? Why does it make me wet when you call me Baby Girl? And why do I love calling you daddy when you fuck me? It isn’t normal.” She asked the questions in a whisper-like tone, as if she was embarrassed.

“Well, let me try to explain. First, we’re not freaks. We’re normal. It comes down to definition, kind of like your book said, ‘define normal’. But we are normal, okay?”

She nodded slowly.

“Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung didn’t totally agree on all aspects of these theories, but they agreed on most of them. It comes down to upbringing. How we grew up. Neither of us grew up with a same sex parent in the home, so it makes our upbringing kind of one-sided, and difficult to pinpoint exactly what may have happened, but let me try.”

“There are five stages, according to Freud, of psychosexual development. Oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital. The phallic stage is between the ages of three and six years old, give or take. At this point, children become curious and begin to become aware of their bodies and the differences between boys and girls. When they become aware, during this stage, well…it develops a tremendous amount of jealousy toward the parent of the same sex. That jealousy or perceived jealousy is what caused Freud to dub the complex, the Oedipus complex. Oedipus was, in Greek mythology, someone who killed his father so he could sexually possess his mother,” I offered, surprised how much of this information I recalled from school.

“I’m kind of lost,” Kelli said, still speaking through her protective tunnel.

“Let me finish, baby, we’ll see if you understand,” I said softly.

“Believe it or not, at that young age, children become fixated on things, sexually. They notice things - they even subconsciously have an understanding of sex and sexuality. Boys become jealous of their father for sleeping with mother, and vice-versa for girls. The boy becomes fixated sexually on their mother and jealous of their father. Think in reverse for girls. The boy wants to eliminate the competition of father from the equation, like Oedipus did, by killing him.” I took a drink of my coffee and thought.

“But, subconsciously and from probably a practical standpoint, the child realizes that the father is the more able – let’s say the more physically able of the two, so he competes for the sexual possession of the mother, all the while fearing the father. Now, to clarify, all of this is what naturally happens to a child as he or she grows up.” I paused and took a breath.

Kelli had her fists clenched and her forearms flat on the table, leaning toward me, listening intently. I continued.

“That sexual desire to possess their mother is what allows all ‘normal’, as you say, kids to grow up - again I am talking of boys, wanting to have a relationship with a woman. Alterations to this stage of growth - the elimination of one or the other of the parents - be it by divorce, death, or lack of existence, causes problems in what is “natural’ for a child to experience. This natural resolve for the sexual competition for the mother or father – with the opposite sex parent of the child - is of ultimate importance for the psychosexual development of a child. If it goes unresolved, it may result in a woman who is submissive or a man who is dominant.”

“You, for instance, at a young age, realized the same things that I have described. Consciously and subconsciously. The lack of a mother in your life more than likely allowed you, or well…caused you to subconsciously look at your father in admiration. You grew up wanting to sexually attach yourself to a man that reminded you of your father. Older. Protective. Able.” I took a slow breath, exhaled and slowly reached out with both hands and held Kelli’s fists.

She opened her hands and held mine in hers.

“You’ve heard the expression, ‘we play the cards we are dealt’ before?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Does that make sense to you?”

She nodded again.

“Well baby, we’re normal. Considering all things, we’re on the upper threshold of normal.” I stopped and chuckled.

“There’s nothing wrong with us. The atmosphere we were raised in, our parents, and their involvement, or lack thereof. It’s what causes us to later be the people that we are. Realizing who we are, embracing it, and allowing ourselves to be who we are naturally is healthy. Some people fight their entire life to try to be someone or something they are not. The result is someone that lives an extremely difficult, unhappy life.” I took another drink of my coffee.

“When I talk about this, it’s kind of upsetting. Every time someone asks me. I’ve talked about this, not to this degree but about it, several times. People don’t understand - parents, primarily - the importance of being involved in the upbringing of their children. They’re too quick to give up, divorce, cheat, allow their children to see them with their respective mistress, whatever it may be…and these actions by the parents cause a change in the development of their children. The children can’t do anything about it. Parents always say, ‘Oh, the kids are young, they won’t understand’. Well, three years old is the beginning of the phallic stage of psychosexual development. We start developing, psychologically, when we take our first breath. The oral stage is from birth to about two years.” As I spoke, I began to get angry, so I stopped.

“Well, we can’t change the fact that your mother and my father, for all practical purposes, were absent since birth. So, we are who we are,” I said, and exhausted what little air was in my lungs.

“Make sense?” I asked.

“Actually, it does, now that you’re done. I have more questions, though,” she said, still holding my hands.

“Okay, baby, what are they?” I said, softly.

“What are your thoughts about love, in general? Do you think love is real? Do you think it exists, or can exist in all of us?” she asked, squeezing my hands and looking directly into my eyes as she did.

I was both pleased and shocked that she asked this question. I intended to answer it with what I believed to be the correct answer, but it may not be what she expected to hear. Although my answer was already formed, I wondered what she expected to hear, and what she wanted to hear.

“The effect that I have on you causes you to have affection for me,” I placed emphasis on the ‘e’ and the ‘a’ in the two words.

“The affection that you have is emotional. In my presence, you feel good. You feel influenced by my presence. Your heart, when you’re around me, no longer feels heavy. You realize that there is a difference in being alone and being together based on how you feel. In my absence, you feel a want or a desire to have me near you, because my presence allows you to relive those feelings that you do not have in my absence. The void of those feelings, the good ones, to most people is described as pain. When I am gone, you feel pain. Being around me is some affirmation that I exist; that those feelings that you believed you had, the last time I was in your presence, but now are absent, exist as well.” I paused for a moment and looked up at Espresso A Go-Go’s disco ball, which hung from the ceiling.

A thousand broken pieces of mirror formed the ball. Little broken pieces of a reflection of what was below the ball looked back at me. I studied the ball as it rotated slowly, the reflections changing as it rotated – every piece of mirrored glass a little different from the one beside it.

“We are all different people. We all need different things to be pleased. I believe, and I may be wrong, that we are, as your little book said, broken. We should find someone that is what we need, someone that is broken in the same fashion, and see if affection develops or exists. If and when it does, most people describe it as love,” I said, still looking at the bottom of the ball.

“Love takes determination to develop.” I paused.

“Love requires courage, persistence, and maintenance. Love just doesn’t lay there with us as we live our lives and engulf us, providing us with an assurance that it exists.”

“Love is developed, and it is never perfect. We, as people, are flawed. Therefore, love is flawed. Most people live their lives trying to find the perfect person to provide them what they believe to be the perfect love. In my opinion, people should find someone that provides them with affection, someone that makes them feel, then develop and maintain the perfect love. That is the closest thing to real love that could ever possibly exist.” I took a sip of coffee, and continued to speak.

Kelli was looking intently into my eyes, and for this entire morning she seemed content with listening to what I had to say. I felt that she had asked questions that were important to her, and that she felt she needed answers to. She was hearing what I had to say and offering little to the conversation, so I continued to express my beliefs.

“We settle in a relationship for a person that provides us with comfort. When someone makes us comfortable, we tell ourselves that it is love, and it isn’t. Love can, for most people, be found around every corner they turn in life. This isn’t love, it is settling. I refuse, as should all people, to settle.” I paused and thought. I looked back up at the disco ball.

“People believe that they fall in love, and they begin a relationship, which turns to marriage. Eventually, the relationship falters, stumbles, and they tell themselves they’re out of love. Like it has run out. There is no more. The tank is empty. If that relationship were provided with maintenance, if it were provided with the attention that it needed, affection would redevelop, and with that affection the effect of love would, without a doubt, follow.”

Warren placed two more cups of coffee on the table beside us and quietly walked back behind the counter. I looked around the coffee shop and noticed that it was still empty. The afternoon had a lot of foot traffic in and out, but not many people sat here and drank coffee. It wasn’t infrequent that we would be the only people actually in the shop when we were here during the afternoon. I looked at Warren and smiled. He smiled and shook his head slowly side-to-side as if it were no big deal.

“Other people, for some reason, settle for someone that was substandard to their requirements for a lover. These relationships, from the beginning, are destined to fail. Inevitably, when a codependent woman is involved, she tells herself that she will never find another man to want her, to take care of her, or to love her. She ends up spending a life of agony in a relationship with a man that mentally, emotionally, and possibly physically abuses her. The fact of the matter is that she could easily find someone to love her, but for the reasons we talked about before, her psychosexual development in a non-typical family setting, has left her with no self-esteem. This lack of self-esteem tells her she can’t do any better.” I took a drink of my new coffee.

I picked up the two empty cups and carried them to the trash. Kelli sat at the table, relaxed, with her chin in her palms and her elbows on the table – looking at the empty chair where I had been sitting as if she were in a trance. I walked back to her side of the table and placed my hands on her shoulders. She reached up and grasped my wrists. As I massaged her shoulders she moaned lightly.

“Erik, all of that stuff was great to hear, and I wish I would have written some of it down, so I could remember it. But, really, like you always do, you talked a little above me, and in huge circles. Do you believe in love?” Kelli asked, turning her head around to make eye contact with me.

I released her shoulders and walked back to my seat, thinking. As I sat, I looked back at the disco ball and took another drink.

“I think this, Kelli. I think that I am in touch with who I am, at least more than most people are aware of who they are. I am quick to admit my character defects, and I know my strengths. Again, I am human, so I am flawed. We all are. I think we should all be honest with ourselves and know ourselves well. We should not try to be someone that we aren’t,” I paused and thought.

“If we are honest with ourselves about who we are, and what we are capable of, and what we aren’t capable of, we should find someone that is compatible with us. That doesn’t mean that they are a certain height, or hair color, or have a particular physical attribute. The outer physical attractions help, but they don’t fit a particular mold in regard to who a person is. Now, when we find that person that is compatible, we should attempt to develop a relationship. With that relationship, over time, comes love. A love that is developed and maintained.”

“Two people that are compatible with one another can build a perfect love, but it takes both people to build and maintain it. Have you ever seen what a heart looks like? An actual human heart?” I asked.

Kelli nodded as she looked into my eyes, waiting to hear more.

“It doesn’t look like the heart that we have all drawn since we were kids. The heart that we all draw, the heart that’s on all of the cards at the store - it looks like a “V” with two semi-circles at the top. A human heart looks like an upside down teardrop of sorts. Small at the bottom, and large at the top. The heart we draw represents love. The human heart represents life. If we take two human hearts, and touch them together at the pulmonary artery, it forms a perfect shape of the heart that we always draw. The representation of love. It takes two people to have and maintain love. It takes two hearts to make love. And Kelli, to answer your question, I believe love exists, and I believe that it is developed between two people, the joining of two hearts.” I stopped and smiled, proud of my explanation.

“Do you believe that we are compatible?” she asked.

“I certainly do,” I responded.

“Do you believe that we could develop a love for one another? Do you think it’s possible?” she asked, her face expressionless.

“Possible? Yes, I do, Baby Girl,” I responded, waiting for her next question.

She nodded her head and extended her arms across the table, holding her palms up. I reached out and held her hands. She sat, with her hands engulfed by mine, and closed her eyes. As Bright Eyes, First day of My Life played over the stereo system, she sat motionless. 

And her mouth formed the shape of a smile.