Chapter 13

One of the more difficult things I’ve done in my life was to leave Lisa’s apartment that night. It wouldn’t have taken much for me to stay ... pretty much just her asking would have done it. But I knew that Lisa had established a no-sex boundary for relationships, and I felt it would be disrespectful to disregard that boundary. I was not about to start us out on that note.

However, at her invitation, I returned first thing in the morning for breakfast: coffee and a couple of breakfast sandwiches from the Sheetz convenience store down the street. It was waiting on the coffee table in front of her couch when I walked in. She, herself, was waiting on the couch for me, and patted the space next to her, inviting me to sit.

As I maneuvered myself onto the couch (hey, you try scooting back on a soft cushion when your feet don’t touch the floor) she leaned in and kissed me. “Good morning, love,” she said, something I immediately decided that I would enjoy hearing every morning for a very long time.

We drank our coffee and ate our sandwiches in silence for a few minutes before I spoke. “I was thinking last night how much I didn’t want to leave.”

“Mmm.” She nodded her head as she swallowed her food. “Me too.”

I looked off to the side. “Yeah, but I know how you feel about ... I mean ... I would have slept on the couch, but I really didn’t want to, if you follow me.”

She chuckled, and a slightly lecherous grin spread across her face. “The only reason I let you leave last night is because it’s that time of the month. Otherwise I would have asked. And you wouldn’t have slept on the couch, either.”

A look of surprise overtook my face. “But ... what about ... I thought you didn’t...” I was perplexed by my hesitation and shyness, wondering why I was having so much trouble verbalizing this to someone to whom I had confessed my feelings just hours earlier.

She looked away for a moment and sighed. “It’s hard to explain. Mostly what it is ... I don’t want to get used for sex anymore. I mean, you wouldn’t have recognized me two years ago, I don’t think. I was on telephone chat lines, in online chat rooms, talking to pretty much every guy who came along. I would tell them my name, and within about five minutes they were asking me everything from my cup size to whether I’m shaved to whether I would send them nude selfies. And usually, before the night was over, we’d meet and be in bed together.”

“And that has been the way it was for me for a good chunk of my life because even back in high school, that’s what I learned. I learned I really liked sex, and I was really good at it. And word got around. I fucked everyone from the geek freshman to the 50-year-old married gym teacher.

“My counselor ... her name is Sandra; I think I might have mentioned her to you once before ... anyway, Sandra has a great way of putting it: some people stay in bad situations because they decide that being wanted for murder is better than not being wanted at all. That was me. Even though I was a human blimp and not all that pretty and not all that popular, I was the girl every guy wanted to be with, even if it was only for ten minutes and even if only I was making them see stars when they came and I don’t believe I just said all that to you.”

This was the first time I had ever heard her use a word stronger than “damn” or “hell” and it was certainly the most explicitly she had ever spoken to me. I was a bit taken aback as she continued.

“And then I went to college. I’m smart, but I have really bad test anxiety. I earned some of my college credits on my knees and my back. I’m not proud of that, but I did, and it’s not like I didn’t do any classwork. I did it to get from a D-plus to a C, or a C-minus to a C-plus so I could keep my scholarships. At least I could tell myself that I was using the professors just as much as they used me. Oh, and not all of them were men, either.”

I shifted in my seat. Her words were creating a mental picture that, compelling as they were to my baser instincts, I really didn’t want. I had probably never been more uncomfortable about developing an erection as I was at that moment, including getting one when a nurse was trying to catheterize me.

“And I got my accounting degree and I went to work for one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. I don’t care how good a lay you are, you won’t survive there if you don’t have the skills. I am good at what I do. Damn good. I’ve been there for eighteen years, I command a lot of respect at work. But outside work, I’m still just the fat girl who can suck the chrome off a bumper.”

She paused and looked down, running her hand through her hair. She kept looking down, avoiding eye contact with me for what came next.

“I got pregnant a little over a year ago. I wasn’t even sure who the father might be because it could have been any one of about five different guys. I’ve been on the pill since I was 15, so when I missed my period, I knew something was up. I went to my doctor to get everything checked out and also found out one of them gave me the gift that keeps on giving on top of it.”

She wiped her eyes, tears welling up at even the memory of it.

“So ... my doctor put me on an antibiotic, and not only that, that night I had a miscarriage and it was a huge mess so I ended up in the hospital overnight. When I went back to her for followup, I just started sobbing hysterically from out of nowhere. Once I calmed down, she asked me to fill out this questionnaire and told me that based on the results, I had signs of depression.” She looked at me meaningfully.

I absently rubbed the inside of my wrists. I hadn’t told her about my ill-fated quest to lose my virginity, but I had acknowledged cutting my wrists several years prior, shortly before I moved to Colorado.

“So the doctor put me on an antidepressant and asked me to get into counseling. I went online and did some searching and found Sandra. I picked her because she was a woman, she had evening appointments available, and her office was in the same building as mine.”