Awkward, a Love Story Ch. 05

"What should we talk about today?"

"You were talking about a conflict with Sarah, and your involvement in the births of both Sarah and Gemma. Those might be of interest."

"Sarah, conflict? I did send her home for being topless, since that was against my house rules, but that was purely so I could get access to Gemma before school started, which is when her body would become verbotten according to the University of California. I'd still have access to her mind, since I'm a teacher, but I would no longer have 24/7 access to her genitals."

Impassive stare.

"Though I guess Sarah's masturbation at my window was filled with conflict, since a core element seemed to be her need to have me force her into sucking and fucking. That conflict was inside Sarah, or between her and her dildo. In other words, my proxy dick got all the attention. I could only watch."

"Well, you did more than watch."

"True. I did get swept up in her enthusiasm, but she didn't know it."

I looked at my psychiatrist. She seemed so intent on helping me, but I knew it was time. This was going to be awkward.

"Listen, I'm going to reel off some stuff, but I don't want to get into the details. Spoiler alert: by the end of the session, you may fire me as a patient."

"Why would I do that?"

"I think the info will get too heavy for you. My hunch is that we'll see three options, and two of them will involve stopping treatment."

"You've told me about some difficult situations. Is there something worse?"

"No. I'm gonna toss out some stuff that might provoke sympathy, before you debate whether to fire me. The negative stuff will probably be more upbeat than the situations related to Caroline, Grace, Kristen, Gemma, Sarah, Violet, and Tamara. All of those fall quickly into moral ambiguity, at best."

"At best."

"Right."

"If it's no worse, then I bet I can handle it."

"Okay, I bet you $50 that you're going to fire me."

"Huh?"

"Just kidding. Sorta. So, current updates. Gemma started school."

"Congrats."

"So that sexual interlude is over. We also agreed that she wouldn't get a tattoo or piercing, at least on my account. No hard feelings. Win/win. Violet sent away her manuscript to prospective publishers. That mentorship is done. Win/win. Sarah's away at college, and I talked to her mom at length on the phone. Her daughter told her about the masturbation marathon, or alluded to it, and, while I was discrete about exactly what happened, her mother knows me well enough that I've now promised to not touch her daughter for a decade."

"Why a decade? Why not forever? Or 15 minutes?"

"You think I'm the only one who likes a certain amount of tension? Caroline thrives on tension, plus she knows forever is a very long time. She also announced that she was entering her abstinence period, at least with me. Of unknown duration. She may change her mind down the road, but she's debating whether we should quit while we're ahead."

"Does that make you sad?"

"Makes me various things. Sad, relieved, free to do my own thing without guilt."

Head tilt.

"That prompted me to finally call Tamara. I'd been debating exactly what to say, but it didn't much matter. She brought it up while I dithered, and we agreed that it was time to end things. I realized I no longer loved her, that we were done. She also confirmed that she'd already started hooking up with a comparative anthropologist who's had the hots for her for years. Some sadness. Mostly feel like a weight is off."

"How did you confront Sarah about the masturbation, and the need to go home?"

"I kept it simple. I was going through a break-up, and a career crisis, and was feeling vulnerable. I told her I'd found myself having impure thoughts about someone who would be inappropriate, that I found her too appealing, and so I needed her to go home. I felt bad, because it was a temporary weakness on my part, but I hoped she understood that it's normal to have feelings but some boundaries are best left alone."

"That was generous."

"I try. I preach better than I practice."

"Which of those should we discuss?"

"None. That was catch-up. None of it's up for discussion, at least today."

Shrug.

"Let's go back to the summer before my sophomore year. Quite the year, especially in retrospect. Caroline is the beauty queen in the latter stages of her anal period...."

"Like Picasso's Blue Period."

"Like Picasso's Blue Period. She has the military boyfriend, who's religious and fine with getting the occasional blowjob. Grace, meanwhile, has a husband who doesn't want kids, who's hiding out in Korea, though he wouldn't have had a second thought if he'd known he was going to get to raise the lovely Gemma. Kristen is deluded into my being awesome, and we're dating when she isn't waxing poetic in her diary. I've even begun to accept blowjobs on days that I don't intend to see Grace or Caroline. For me, the math on the Kristen blowjobs is that they're balanced off by Caroline blowing her military boyfriend, and I didn't include Grace into the equation because she's married."

"Morally ambiguous but not new."

"I also become rich at this time."

"How?"

"My dad died. Cancer."

"I'm sorry. Should we talk about that?"

"A long time ago, and it's on the not-yet list. As is the fact that my mom was in a car wreck returning from visiting him at the hospital. He was up in San Francisco, where they had a bunch of specialists."

"Was she hurt?"

"Remember that I mentioned she was a haphazard driver?"

"From the beach trip. Yeah."

"She drove my brothers and herself off a big cliff."

"Oh, my God."

"Also on the not-yet list."

Serious look.

"All of that happened while I was dealing with the Caroline/Grace/Kristen triangle. And then, on Labor Day, I got a call from Caroline telling me that she's apparently pregnant."

"Pregnant?"

"Pregnant on Labor Day. Easy to remember. I drive down, and we discuss options. Abortion is my preference, of course, but she declines on religious grounds. I say I'll marry her, which she also declines. I say that I can easily support the child without revealing the parentage, which she also declines for reasons that fall under the general category of too weird."

"What else is there?"

"I say there's a 4th choice, which would be my distant 4th preference, but she could see if the boyfriend is truly interested in getting married. If so, if she really thinks he wants to get married, and if she's game, she could marry him."

"He'd just get married?"

"You haven't spent time with Caroline. Most guys would marry her after 15 minutes. I did mention she's a freak of nature, if one is interested in freaks of nature. Plus, she's sweet. So, sure. He's a 25 -year-old enlisted man. That demographic is macho and independent but also likes to get married, plus she's a beauty queen. Given that reality, there are two approaches. One would be to count on him pulling a Joseph..."

"What's that?"

"As in Jesus's father, who married a pregnant Mary even though he couldn't have been the father. I think Joseph is the unsung hero of the entire New Testament, if you ask for my opinion. He forgave Mary for having premarital sex with some other guy, and he married her. What a fucking hero. What a lesson for his son, who taught forgiveness before it was fashionable. But poor Joseph gets short shrift."

"You didn't think the military guy was likely to be so heroic?"

"The core Jesus message doesn't get a lot of traction these days, but more importantly, Caroline didn't think he'd be such a hero. And so I said that if she were really going for option 4, she needed to start fucking him asap and often, and then she could pin the pregnancy on him, and they'd get married."

"Wouldn't the dates be off?"

"Good question. Remember that Caroline is a physical freak? Well, her endocrine system was also freakily superhuman. Her periods came every 28 days. Like a metronome. Stress, sports, beauty pageants, nothing budged her from her cycle. It was one of the reasons we could count on anal and oral as our birth control. We could circle the dates of fertility, and I'd visit at other times."

"Not a perfect system."

"Ya think? When she was late by 3 days, she got a positive home pregnancy test. The test was also positive at her doctor's office, but it was still early, so I had fingers crossed on a miscarriage. Nevertheless, Caroline picked option 4. She started fucking the guy, using haphazard birth control in case of my hoped-for miscarriage. So, you're right, the dates would be off by a few weeks, but he was a jeep mechanic, not a neonatologist. A few weeks premature would be nothing to him."

"Okay."

"When I flew out from Boston, I'd see both Grace and Caroline to be supportive and sneak in a little intimacy, naturally enough. On a visit in early October, I was surprised to find that Grace's husband had arrived from Korea a few hours before I arrived from Boston. They'd been talking, unbeknownst to me, about what a great idea it would be to have a kid."

Head nod.

"Grace later told me that a key factor was that our sex had given her confidence that she could find some other guy who'd want kids, and that spurred her husband into action. And you know what happened?"

"She got pregnant."

"Exactly. By December, it was clear that both of them were pregnant, both Grace and Caroline, and, judging from the numbers, they'd both gotten pregnant in October."

"Oh."

"Right. So, I'd been having unprotected sex with both of them during apparently fertile times. Worse, Caroline's September results were false positives, but she'd taken steps to entrap her military guy into a marriage he very much wanted. Long story short, Caroline got pregnant because of my big Joseph idea, got married, and gave up her beauty queen title since she wasn't Miss Teen Pregnancy. She also gave up her intention to finish college. And the paternity of both kids was up in the air throughout the pregnancies."

"Yikes."

"Exactly. I was in Boston, stressed and lonely. So I decided to chill. In fact, for a brief period of time, I became a sports fan and decided to start hanging out with other sports fans. Those guys always seemed so cheerful. I figured it might rub off. And that led me to trying out my seduction skills outside of southern California."

"What did you do?"

"Well, I channeled what I knew. I thought back to the first time, with Caroline in the backseat on the way back from the beach. The moment that I combined random chit chat with physical touch. And, of course, we were nearly naked, with my big dick jammed between her buttocks during that long, sweaty car ride, and we were cousins, and I'd watched my mom spend a few seconds watching me fondle a perfect boob, an incest boob. A cluster of transgressions all at once."

"Okay."

"And you'll remember that later that night, in the attic, I was partly bullshitting about our religious connection in order to get into those primo panties, but I actually knew more religious crap than she did, though mine tends to be twisted by my secular skepticism, but when we made love, I meant what I said. I meant that I'd be there for her."

Head tilt.

"And when I seduced Grace, I was partly motivated by protecting our secret, since I knew that if I fucked Grace, she could hardly go around speculating about Caroline and me. Let her try, I thought to myself, and, since all my loved ones were dead, and I was rich, and I would never live in their tiny religious community, I'd be happy to loudly say that I felt guilty having had an affair with Grace, especially since it descended so quickly into BDSM, which I didn't like but was the only way that poor Grace seemed to know how to cum, which was marked by that little high-pitched yelp. Did I mention I'd made videos? All intended to prove my accusations, which I intended to release after Grace outed Caroline. And I defied her to prove anything about Caroline."

"None of which you had to use."

"Exactly. And, while I was partly fucking Grace out of defense, I also felt great passion and empathy, and she was kind to me when I was hurting."

Head nod.

"Can I give a side story? This one pales in comparison, but, depending upon one's perspective, might be pertinent, even pivotal."

"Fine."

"So, it's the dead of winter. Two babies will be born in 4 or 5 months. I could be the father to one of them, or none, or both. I didn't know, of course, that I'd eventually wind up in romantic entanglements with both of the kids, but that's a side story. And I was having to deal with all sorts of estate issues. Did I mention that my dad never married my mom because he had a first family in northern California? That we were secret and illegitimate?"

"No."

"And so, his two kids, the legitimate ones, were surprised and a little peeved when I got 1/3 of the pie, when they'd been expecting to split the whole thing. Their mom was out of the way because of a divorce a few years earlier, so they'll end up with more cash when she dies, so I really don't know what they're complaining about. Aside from the fact that I showed up unannounced at the funeral, and they'd never heard of me. There would be that."

"Yes, there would be that."

"One of the girls was a year ahead of me at Harvard, by the way, which was awkward."

"That would be awkward."

"Plus, we'd hooked up a few times, before she found out about me. I, of course, knew who she was. That's why I chose Harvard, to be equivalent to the legitimate child. I probably should have gone to a college closer to home, one that I liked more."

"You're kidding."

"Not about the college choice. Yes about fucking the sister. That was a little insider incest humor. She didn't know who I was until I introduced myself at the funeral. Anyway, the two legitimate sisters had grown up rich and angry, and so they flung lawyers at me, and I didn't have money for such things, but I did have a friend in college whose dad was a big-shot trust and estates attorney in San Diego. In fact, he was the guy I'd said was my employer that summer. He wasn't my actual employer, since I didn't have an employer, but I did spend some serious time at his house trying to help organize my claim to the estate."

Head nod.

"So, all of this was dragging through a dreary Boston winter. They'd released $100,000 to me, which was a fortune as far as I was concerned, but I was depressed. So I decided to become a sports fan. Sports fans looked happy, so I decided to become a sports fan."

"Okay."

"I also thought about whether I should get a girlfriend. Like an ordinary one, not an incestual one or a married one or a beard. So, when I went to a big rivalry game, I kept my eyes open for a likely subject."

"Like the Harvard-Yale game?"

"Just like. Elite people. Beaver coats, pennants, the whole 9 yards. And at the game, two women caught my eye."

"Two?"

"Well, one, but they were together, in the row in front of me. One was wearing a blouse with a deep v neck, so I could see right down her front, at least sometimes. And since there was a lot of action in the game, a lot of fan enthusiasm, I got a good look at a lot of breast flesh, as you like to say."

That got a smile. I feared it would be the last smile for a while.

"I thought you liked, uhm, breast flesh."

"Hers was open-air breast flesh, a non-discriminating advertisement that she had boobs and wanted guys to drop their gazes to her chest. Gazes, plural. She wanted any nearby guy to sexualize her, to imagine grabbing her. That was her intention. Grace's breast flesh was focused entirely on provoking my erection. Singular. Very different."

"Hers was diagnostic, as I recall. To assess tumescence and homosexuality? But it was focused."

"When you say it that way, it seems less special."

"So, the prim one was cute?"

"Sure."

"Cuter than her friend?"

"There'd be debate, but to me, it wasn't close."

"You're a sucker for cute."

"Who isn't? But I was surrounded by cuteness. I may be misremembering, but everyone at this game was good looking. They were at this very elite school, and were the type to go to the game, and they cleaned up nicely. But of course I liked the the prim one, the one who wore a bra. I listened to their conversation. I was shameless, and I think they noticed, since they tended to look back and giggle, though that might have been wishful thinking."

"Hard to know, right?"

"When I leaned forward, I was practically in their hair. They'd jump up after a score, and they'd knock over my hot dog or whatever, but I was smelling their hair. They had a lot of hair, and both used Prell shampoo, or at least that's what I told myself. It was my grandmother's shampoo, Prell. Does Prell even exist, anymore? Haven't seen it lately."

"Dunno."

"It's kinda like my having a big dick, but it's not like there's a global lineup."

"Of penises, by length?"

"You make a penis lineup sound ridiculous...."

"That's not hard to do."

"I'm just saying that I want my beliefs to be plausible, but they don't have to be accurate. I like my fact that these two women shared their Prell shampoo, as well as quote my fact endquote that I have a big dick. I didn't need to test the theory."

Eye squint.

"They seemed to be roommates, and the braless one was trying, unsuccessfully, to convince the prim one to attend the post-game dorm party. After the game, which we won, I followed them. At the dorm, which wasn't mine, they split up, with the braless one heading to the party, and the prim one heading upstairs to their dorm room. The party was boring, and I was disgusted by the grain alcohol punch. I helped out at the bar, flirting shamelessly with the braless one while plying her with drinks."

"This sounds like a routine effort to get somebody drunk so you can have sex with them."

"You're so cynical. Does that sound like me?"

Tilted head.

"I was not only getting her drunk but blocking her from flirting with anyone else.

Within an hour, she was leaning on me, and every once in a while, we'd make out for a bit. Anyway, by midnight, she was obviously trashed, and I gave her another of those red dixie cups filled with grain punch, which prompted some scowls from other party goers, but this was 20 years ago, so nobody intervened. Back then, this was normal courting behavior."

"Uh huh."

"What happened?"

"About midnight, we went out in the hall, and I did have a dilemma. She was cute, and she had the breast flesh, but I was hoping to get to her roommate through her, and the more we we kissed, the more this particular girl would be uninterested in being used as a path to her roommate."

"Tough situation, Romeo."

"My mind was in a whirl. I was only going to be in town until the next afternoon. If it were warmer, I'd probably have maneuvered her into a quiet place, maybe on the sloping lawn behind the dorm. I'd scoped it out. Quiet, and she was enthusiastic and pliable. Downside was the temperature. Freezing. And if the roommate weren't upstairs, I might have taken her there. Date rape wasn't as well advertised then, and she had seemed to be giving consent from the very behinning of the party, while she wasn't intoxicated, but I make no claims to innocence. I'd been dismissive to her initial offer, but, as the evening wore on, the lust urge was kicking in. She'd been asking me to take her to her room for a couple of hours, to take her to room 314, but I didn't see how that would help me get connected to the prim one. Fortunately, she passed out after a few minutes of our making out."

"Maybe she just swooned from your kiss?"

"Ha Ha. I picked her up and carried her to her room."

"Gallant."

"In retrospect, it looked like the first stage of felonious sexual assault, but my goal was the roommate."

"And if the roommate had gone to her boyfriend's, and the room was open, then who knows?"