Hey Nineteen

She began, and I felt myself rising to the occasion quickly. My mind didn't wander at first. I just watched her, fascinated by her expert manipulation. She made no eye contact, but her position sitting on a stool between my knees let me see her face just past my rigid shaft. Close enough to....

"Would you be offended if my imagination ran away with me here?" I asked.

She smiled. "You can imagine anything you want. Don't expect me to play along, but no, I won't be offended. It would be unusual if you didn't imagine anything. And since you are not the medical professional here, you cannot be blamed if any of that is directed at me."

I nodded. "OK. Because from this angle, your mouth looks like it is just a nod away."

She ignored the comment and continued stroking my dick, up and down in a steady pace, her hand twisting over my head at the top of each stroke, while her other hand cupped my balls. Her gentle massaging of them felt good, even though I knew she was just feeling them for lumps or strange whatever. Maybe checking how well they contracted when it was time for them to do their one and only job.

She knew her way around a dick alright, and not just from being a dick doctor.

"And you are a very, very attractive woman." My mind finally started wandering, and I hoped I didn't just say that out loud. If she'd heard it, she had no reaction.

Images started to flash through my mind. All of April, each one with fewer and fewer clothes on her. Images that had me no longer on this table, and she no longer sitting on that stool.

I still had trouble getting over the top. It was a little soon for me, after last night, but nothing I hadn't done before.

"I'm never going to be able to look at you the same, you know."

April nodded. "You will. Just like you were able to after the other times you've masturbated to fantasies of me."

I had never told her that that had happened. I doubt she was so full of herself that she couldn't imagine anyone not jerking off to fantasies of her naked body. She just knew men, and knew me. Maybe she'd caught me looking at her a beat too long once or twice. And of course, she was right.

"We can discuss it later," she said, "Get it out in the open. It will mitigate the awkwardness."

"OK. And in that spirit, you are naked right now, and your head is bobbing up and down, making your tits rock up and down and..."

"You don't need to tell me every detail. Unless saying it out loud helps you."

"I know, I just wanted to mitigate the awkwardness. And, yes, it helps."

My mind stuck on that image. I tried to warn her, but she already had the clear glass receptacle out and was bringing it quickly to replace her hand over me. She timed it expertly, making sure her hand brought me to the point of no return before replacing it with the beaker. It had a rubber membrane over the opening that surrounded me, leaving the end of my dick poking up into the beaker like it was a museum display.

We both watched a hot jet of semen splash against the inside of the glass, sliding quickly down its sides to pool at the membrane. Another, then another, the fact that her hand was still massaging my balls, or should I say, performing a medical evaluation of the reactivity of my testicles, made my cum shot more intense than usual. But eventually, I was reduced to small spurts and dribbles that got lost in the white mess inside the beaker.

As it ended, she squeezed her hand around my glans as she pulled the cup away, letting that membrane squeegee the last drops into the beaker. It gave me one last shudder, but contributed only a minor volume to the whole.

She stood and held the cup up to the light. She swirled it a bit to settle the contents and checked the level against the graduated scale on the side of the glass.

"So how did I do, doc?" I asked.

"Your emission volume is a bit low, but in or very near the normal range. Given that you've ejaculated less than three days ago, it indicates a pretty healthy production for your age. Even accounting for the increased intensity often produced by testicular massage during ejaculation, your semen was projected with at least the expected force."

"So I'm good to go?" I asked with a bit of a leer. I couldn't help it.

"You're no teenager. You'll have to pace yourself, but yes, it does seem you are good to go. I will have to get this under a microscope right away, but assuming the sperm count and motility are sufficient, I will have to warn you to use protection if you don't want to give Claire a surprise brother or sister."

She walked to the little hand sink and washed her hands, then put another pair of gloves on before taking the beaker into a back room.

I waited in her office after getting cleaned up and dressed. She came in twenty minutes later with a happy look on her face.

"It all checks out," she said as she sat at her desk and shuffled some papers in my file. She looked up at me. "All the indicators are at a level that say that, on paper at least, you are fully capable of impregnating a female. Your sperm count is a little low, but not unusually so for your age. You'll need to attend to contraception if you're going to have vaginal intercourse without pulling out - though I'm sure you're aware that that method is not entirely reliable.

"If you do wish to have a child, it might take longer than it would have taken you at a younger age, but there's nothing I can see to make it unlikely. And most couples I've seen don't really mind having to try over and over again."

She had a smile on her face as she said that. A smile that said that now we were friends again, our professional relationship left back in the stirrups. But she had a few doctoring loose ends to tie up.

"You're pretty healthy overall, though you could lose a few pounds and get some exercise. I see no sign of heart issues, respiratory issues, nothing that warns against vigorous sexual activity. You're not in shape to engage in any extreme acrobatics, but you can certainly enjoy a variety of positions. Just be aware that at your age, you're inevitably going to have to slow down a little."

I had slowed down entirely for the last two and a half years.

"So you're saying that I'm fully capable of making a woman moan and scream, and getting her pregnant," I said. But I felt the smile on my face falter. I might be physically capable, but mentally was an entirely different question.

"As to the former, I've heard on the grapevine that you know exactly how to do that."

My face froze. That grapevine could only have been Annie. I had direct evidence that I knew how to do that, for her at least, but it had never crossed my mind that she'd bragged about it to her friends. Girls talk, I knew that. I should have known that her circle of friends would have gotten at least indirect hints that I could give as good as I got.

April reached a hand across the desk to mine. "Tom, you made her very happy, in every way. We were very close friends, and she couldn't have hidden it if she tried. She told me a few things here and there, after a few glasses of wine. Girls' stuff, which sometimes includes complaints about our sex lives, and all the things that we love about it. Trust me, Annie's complaints were few and trivial. She was happy, Tom, as happy as anyone I've known."

Tears were running down her cheeks and my own vision was getting blurry.

"Thank you," I stammered out, not trusting my voice. I squeezed my eyes shut and it squeezed the tears out. April just held my hand and let me work through it.

"That's good to know. Now I just have to remember how to use it," I joked with a tentative, hitching laugh.

"You'll remember."

She still had her hand in mine. I squeezed it. "April," I said, "I've been so full of myself that I haven't thought about how much you must miss her too. I'm sorry."

She squeezed my hand. "It's OK, Tom. I can't even imagine what you've been through. I've seen it, I've seen you at your lowest. It hurt me to see it. Mickey too. As much as it hurt us to lose Annie, but we know it doesn't compare to how much you hurt.

"I know you still do. I'm proud of how you are doing, but that hurt will never go away, for either of us. I don't resent it at all that you have focused on yourself. But know that we share that hurt. You're not alone. Me, Mickey, Claire, and our other friends."

All I could do was nod. It felt like a breakthrough of a sort. I had been focused on myself. It isolated me, made me feel even more alone. Maybe I needed that, once, but I'd kept it too long. April's words felt like a lifeline.

"You'll have to face her death," April said. "I know you have, but sexual activity and intimacy will inevitably bring it back. I know you can't separate the two, not really, Not you. You saw how it went when you tried.

"You'll have to get used to that. It will never go away, but it can take its proper place."

"I don't want it in its 'proper place'" I said, my tears turning to a flash of anger. "It's the defining event of the rest of my life. It's important, April, not something to be compartmentalized away."

She nodded. "Of course it is. But the defining event of your life ism isn't her death, it is the joy you had together. It ended far too soon. But the end is not what defines you. That you had it does."

It didn't staunch my anger. "April, we had..." But she knew it, knew it all. There was nothing I could tell her about what we had, and what we'd lost. What we'd all lost.

What Annie had lost.

She'd lived long enough after the crash, remained conscious enough, to know. She knew she was not going to make it. She knew that what we had was coming to an end. She had lost it every bit as much as I had, in those last few moments.

Her grief must have been as bad as the pain she was clearly in. But she'd thought of me. Her last words were for me, words of hope. She wasn't giving me permission to find someone else. She'd told me, in the few words she could manage to speak, that the one thing that could let her accept the end was knowing that I would try my honest best to live. She wanted to know, she needed me to promise, that I would find someone.

I felt like even more of a selfish asshole, and my anger dissolved into wracking sobs. I don't now how long I sat slumped over April's desk with my head in my arms, pouring tears into the rich mahogany. However long it was, April sat patiently, letting me get it out.

After a while, I composed myself. I went into the bathroom and washed my face.

It felt like the grief and guilt were all I had left of her, that I had to hold on to them or risk losing her all over again. I'd often resented myself for the times I did not think about her, the times I'd managed to go a whole day, or even an hour, without remembering her, without openly grieving for her. I resented myself when I saw an attractive woman and took a second look.

But now, as I contemplated letting them go -- not her memory, never that, just the wracking, crippling grief and the guilt -- it felt like it would mean finally saying goodbye to her. Finally starting to grieve.

What April had just done back in the examination room, it was undeniably intimate, but she'd managed to keep that at a distance. It let me accept the enjoyment of it without giving any room for the guilt to sneak in. I smiled at her, realizing how she had benevolently manipulated me.

One very tiny step at a time. She returned the smile with the subtlest of nods. Maybe that procedure was not medically justified. Maybe she knew that medical rules and what was right were not always the same.

I knew this wasn't the end of it. A clinical hand job was not going to fix everything, and the medical examination and assessment really was necessary. She had decided that I was ready to get out there and meet people. Hopefully to meet someone special, but to at least enjoy the search, and even the false starts. But we both knew it would be a journey, not an event.

She was setting me up for something else, but I didn't know what until a few weeks later.

---

I'd managed to stuff the horror back into it's little corner of my mind, where it would sit like a familiar thorn, constantly irritating, but not rising to the level of pain. Except when it did, occasionally, randomly, out of nowhere. I went through my days, the small irritation so familiar it was almost a comfort. I manged to be happy, to live my life, to do my work, to think of the future.

I still hadn't done much to meet women, but I found myself thinking about them differently as I passed random people on the street, or at the grocery store, wherever. I gave attractive women a second look, I briefly imagined what could happen, thought about what was under their clothes.

I wasn't perving on them, being a creep, I was just letting that split second of 'what if' go through my head without feeling like I needed to quash it before it could start.

I even shared a few smiles. My warning lighthouse seemed to dim it's harsh warning signal, and instead start to direct ships that passed in the night toward a safe channel. I was nowhere near directing them to my bed, but I was at least allowing it to be possible.

At night, when I found myself in bed, still alone, and reached under the covers for meager and temporary relief, I managed, more and more often, to not live entirely in memories of Annie, and to not resent myself for imagining a life without her.

---

We were having dinner again, the three of us, at a nice restaurant. I had invited them out, dinner on me. They accepted, knowing that my finances might not be up to it, but also knowing that I needed to do it, for myself.

"OK, give it up," I insisted after appetizers had been served. "You've all been plotting something. You can tell me." I'd known it since April suggested the examination. I knew she was not going to leave it at that. And I knew it didn't involve her. Our friendship was too precious for it, and even if it wasn't, her marriage to Mickey was too sacred. There was no way any of us would risk any of that, no matter how smoking hot April was.

But whatever they had planned, I felt like I might be ready. Maybe, maybe not, and ideas of what it could be, especially after our discussion about therapeutic prostitution, terrified me. But there was only one way to know.

"Speaking of getting things out in the open," Mickey said, changing the subject temporarily, I hoped, "and mitigating the awkwardness, I hear you had sex with my wife last week." He said it all with a snarky smile that included his eyes.

"We didn't have sex," April said. From her look, I knew she had told Mickey all about it. Probably used the story to enhance a romantic evening or two. "I just stimulated him to orgasm and collected his semen."

"Sounds like sex to me," Mickey said, chuckling.

"Technically yes, but where it was collected makes all the difference," April said.

"Oh, I'm sure it does. But Tom, buddy, I bet it wasn't so clinical in your head."

I laughed. "You want the details?"

"Mitigate the awkwardness," Mickey said. April's eyes smiled as well. I looked at Mickey. He was leaning back in his chair, a glass of wine in his hand. They wanted me to tell them. I wondered if it was for my sake, or if they were using me to enhance their sex life.

I decided it didn't matter.

There was no sense arguing about it, playing coy. I could make them drag it out of me, but what was the point? They'd have it either way, and April was right. If Mickey thought I was holding back, he could, despite himself, start having suspicions. Not of April, but of me. Honesty was the best policy.

"OK, here goes." I took a deep breath and looked from one to the other, giving them their last chance to change their minds. They didn't take it.

"Well, April had just shoved two fingers up my ass, and it got me instantly hard." I embellished a little. It had been only one finger.

I told them all the things that went through my mind in those last few seconds. I made it into more of a story than the hyper-speed slide show it had actually been in my head. And I exaggerated a bit. A lot.

They took it all in fun, even making commentary on my technique and on my imagined impressions of April's body. Mickey scolded me more than once that I had a pretty weak imagination compared to the real thing.

"I finished that way," I said at the end. "I pumped load after load into...." My fantasy story deflated just as my imagination had at the end. "Well, into the sample cup."

April laughed. "Sounds like I enjoyed the hell out of it."

Mickey said. "I bet you would, too. You're not shy about letting your O-face shine."

I watched them for a reaction. I'd let myself get carried away, both then and now. April and Mickey wanted to know the details, and they'd gotten them.

"That's a hell of a story," Mickey said. He looked at April. "We might have to borrow some of that tonight."

April barely suppressed a smile and bit her lip. "We'd have to swing by the office to get my smock." She said it like she was arguing that it was too much effort.

"Grab the stethoscope, too," Mickey suggested.

They were right. It was impossible to feel awkwardness once it was out in the open. There was no secret between them, between any of us, no hidden hopes or expectations. The fact that April had in fact jerked me off, and that through it, I imagined her being the opposite of clinical about it, it could easily become an unspoken and avoided issue, one that would fester and start corroding our friendship. Or worse.

Just as what it was that I'd imagined was now out in the open, so was the fact that it would never happen, that it was not even a question.

The story took us through dinner and dessert and an after-dinner drink. We agreed to meet back at my house. Mickey had managed to stall the answer to the question I'd come in with, but now it was time to come clean.

On the way home, something clicked. Everything I'd said, letting my imagination run away with me, it was all joking, a joke they were in on. But it was what didn't happen. I never felt that stab of guilt, the one I'd always felt even when just having a brief fantasy in private.

I wasn't serious about any of it, not even about wanting to do any of it. As a guy, yeah, but as their friend, no, I never wanted to do any of it for real. But I could imagine it. And I could imagine it without hating myself.

---

They got to my place a half hour after I did. Either they really had gone by her office, or they'd just parked somewhere and worked off some of the energy my story had generated.

"So, as to that mythical creature," April opened as they settled into the sofa across from me with a glass of wine each.

"What about it? You going to give me something else to fantasize about?"

"Not fantasy. But also, not me."

"I didn't think so. And I would have turned you down flat if you offered."

"I'm not sure how to take that," April said, teasingly.

"Oh, it would be one of the hardest decisions I ever made, but it would be the right one."

"Agreed," April said.

Mickey nodded his agreement. "The fantasies are all in fun. No straight man alive could fail to have them about April, but that is where they need to stay."

I didn't even need to say that I agreed completely.

"What if we knew someone who met your criteria?" April asked.

"A prostitute?"

"Technically you could use that term. But not by profession. A one-time thing as far as I know."

"You have a specific person in mind, don't you?"

April nodded. Mickey was grinning.

"Who is she?"

April shook her head. "I won't say. She hasn't agreed yet, but in principle, she's open to the idea."

I got sarcastic. "What, you googled 'hooker with a heart of gold'?"

April grinned. "We all know what we'd get out of that search. No, We found a candidate through a personal connection. She comes highly recommended. And we know what kind of person she is."