Was I Man Enough?

Was that true, had I become addicted to the physical side of my role as a relationship councillor? Was that why I'd made no effort to step back from that side, even though Daniel and I had become a couple? Was the gratuitous sex that came with my job so good I didn't want to give it up?

I called Roger and after a lot of discussion he agreed that I needed to take a consultative role with the clients and leave the physical side to the surrogates. I wasn't surprised he agreed; I generated almost twice as much revenue as any of the other partners. On one hand it was a load off my mind, the flip side was that I was really going to miss the satisfaction that come from knowing I was able to get results where others had failed. I knew of no other councillor who was willing to assume the surrogate role when necessary.

I fetched my laptop from the trunk of my car and logged on to see if Jenny had sent me the information she'd promised me on Liz. There wasn't that much, her name was Elizabeth Ward. She was twenty-eight and still single and she still lived in the same village that Daniel had grown up in. Interestingly, she was the sister of one of his best friends from his school days. His other so called best friend, the one he'd caught Liz in bed with had disappeared from the scene fairly soon after the incident.

I kept going back and reading the note he had left me. I took solace in the message of hope that underlined it. If he wanted me to be here when he returned then that's where I'd be.

Over the next couple of days I packed up my apartment. I took him at his word that he still wanted me to move in, I arranged with a storage company to collect and store my furniture and those boxes of my stuff I didn't need. The things I wanted I took over to Daniel's and I unpacked over the weekend. It felt so right to be hanging my clothes in my half of the walk in closet. I was crying as I unpacked my lingerie and added it to the lingerie he had bought for me.

Every day I'd go for walks along the same trails I'd walked with him the past couple of months. We had marvelled at the way the land recovered from the depths of the winter and began the promise of spring and renewal.

Roger had made me an appointment with the practice's psychiatrist and insisted I go. I sat in her office, which is in the same building as ours, and poured my heart out to her. She sat listening patiently for the full hour and made an appointment to see me again in a few days.

Daniel

I left with mixed feelings, I know I love her, and she says she loves me. On one hand I wanted to wrap Mia in my arms and tell her it didn't matter what she did as long as at the end of the day she came home to me. But the flip side was now I understood why she always smelt so clean every time I picked her up after work. She was coming to my bed after performing sex acts with other men, did it matter that it was a clinical act with no love involved. More importantly, did I meet her needs?

What I did know was, I needed to understand why Liz had treated me the way she did. Her taunts had scarred me, and I was so scared that there was a basis of truth to her accusations. This made me wonder, was Mia analysing my performance as well. Was I falling short of her expectations? There was only one option I had to go home and confront Liz. I needed to know why she said what she had about me.

I managed to get a flight to Atlanta and from there one to Paris. I almost booked a flight to London but after some soul searching I decidedly was going to need a couple of days to think through my next moves.

I arrived at eight the next morning and I managed to book a hotel in the centre of the city. No sooner than I'd been shown to my room than I fell onto the bed and tried to sleep for the first time since our talk in her office. My thoughts flitted from images of Liz and Gordon, my ex-best friend, and Mia and a series of unknown clients. I fell into a fitful sleep.

I dreamt of walking into Mia's office and hearing sounds of passionate sex from the bedroom. Walking in I found her entangled in the arms of Liz and Gordon. Mia was on her hands and knees with Gordon fucking her arse while she ate out Liz.

Gordon looked up at me grinning and said, "This is how a real man fucks a woman."

Mia looked up from Liz's pussy and moaned then said, "No more wimpy cock for me."

I woke up sweating and nauseous, I only just made it to the bathroom before I began honouring the porcelain gods. After I'd stopped heaving and cleaned up, I stood in the shower and let the water attempt to wash away my doubts. I got dressed and headed out of the hotel for a walk to try and clear the images from my mind. Because of the time difference it was still only early afternoon, and Paris was enjoying a pleasant sunny spring afternoon.

The hotel was in the backstreets just off the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. I soon found myself aimlessly walking down the Champs-Élysées in the direction of Place de la Concorde. I stood looking around and recalled from previous visits that I was close to the Louvre. I headed through the Tuileries Garden and entered the Louvre Museum. I avoided the crowds heading for the Mona Lisa and found a quiet gallery and sat down on a bench and contemplated the Salvador Dali painting on the wall.

I must have sat there all afternoon as the next thing I knew was the guard tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that the museum was closing. I saw a local restaurant as I walked back to the hotel, and realised I hadn't eaten since the plane. I found a table and in my best schoolboy French ordered a meal and a bottle of table wine.

It wasn't until I felt my phone in my pocket I remembered that I hadn't switched it back on since boarding the flight to Atlanta. Crap thirty-five texts and twenty, no make that twenty-one missed calls.

I scanned though the texts most of them were from Jenny but there were several from Mia. Jenny's were straightforward; they were all on the lines of 'Where the fucking hell are you; we need to talk.' I smiled to see her use that phrase.

Mia's were interesting; at no time did she blame me for going. She was sorry she hadn't told me earlier, and I was to look out for myself and please come home to her when I was ready.

Her last text simply said, 'I love you, and I'm keeping the ring safe for you. When you're ready I want you to put it on my finger'.

I drank a glass of wine for Dutch courage and called Jenny. Before she could shout at me I told her that I was cancelling the first two weeks of the tour.

"Daniel, you can't, everything's in place, all the promotional advertising is already running."

"Sorry Jenny, that's not my problem, I need the time to sort things out. Be thankful I'm only cancelling the first two weeks. I told you I wasn't happy when you brought it forward."

"Daniel, it's not that simple, you're contracted to appear on those dates."

"I don't care; it's not going to happen. Tell them I'm sick or something. I'll make up the dates in the autumn."

She sighed down the phone, "I'll do my best, please keep in touch, and call Mia for god's sake; the girl is frantic."

I couldn't call Mia; I knew the sound of her voice would cause me to curl up into a ball. So I started an e-mail to her instead.

Mia darling

First, understand I love you. Nothing that you did will ever change that. I can't listen to your voice at the moment as it would make me curl up and die inside, so this is my answer to all of your texts and voice mails.

There are things I need to understand about you and what you do with your clients before I can move on. I don't care about names, in fact it would kill me to find out it was someone I knew. I've been betrayed by the closest people to me before and I can't go through that again.

But I need you to be truthful about the rest. I can't help feeling that I was being evaluated alongside of them. I've been found to be wanting before and I'm not sure I could go through that again.

I'm ok and I will be back. I need the sometime to slay my dragons.

Me, the ring, and your finger that's a date I hope; I will see :)

Daniel xxx

My finger hesitated over the send button and then I saved it. I needed more time to think, it didn't seem to say the right things. I finished eating and made my way back to the hotel. I booked a seat on a Eurostar train for the following afternoon and my usual hotel in London.

Interlude 2: Mia

It had been more than a week and I hadn't heard from him. I'd been calling Jenny daily and asking her for any news. From her I knew she'd traced him to Paris and he was now somewhere in England. I'd thought about flying to Europe and trying to catch him at one of his book signings. But Jenny had told me he'd precipitously cancelled the first two weeks of appearances.

I had a couple more sessions with the psychiatrist. Her early evaluation of me was quite telling, and it seems my sister was closer to the mark that either she or I had expected.

The bottom line was that she thought that I was too emotionally and physically involved with my clients. That I was taking on roles I should allocate to my assistants because they were fulfilling to me, and my own relationships ultimately suffered because of that.

But in Daniel's case, because my feelings for him were so deep, I didn't want to lose him and I was scared how he would respond. My fear was why I hadn't told him about my work. I'd become two people, the councillor Mia and Daniel's Mia, and I'd shielded one from the other.

Her conclusion was that Daniel asked me to marry him before I'd been able to rationalise the two halves; plus his history with the mysterious Liz had precipitated the current situation.

Ultimately, she said, "You need to decide what is more important to you, your job or Daniel. If it's the former then you need to understand that Daniel may not be able to cope, and you will need to let him go. If it's Daniel, then you know what you have to change and hope he's willing be part of your life again."

I knew what I wanted and my first client session on my return to work reinforced my conviction. It was a complete disaster. I'd been working with Sue and Doug for two months. I first met them when Roger referred them to me. They had been sent to Roger for a series of court-mandated marriage counselling meetings. He quickly realised that the trigger cause of all their problems was due Doug's premature ejaculation issues.

They still loved each other but she was not satisfied with their sex life, and she'd begun to consider straying from her marriage vows. Doug had overheard a conversation and had jumped to the worst conclusion and started divorce proceedings.

Roger convinced them to shelve the divorce until they met me and I was able to make them see that it could be possible for them to have a normal sex life.

When I'd first met them Doug was at a stage where he only able to last a dozen strokes at most before he ejaculated. It took a couple of emotional therapy session to get both of them to understand the cause of Doug's problem. In his case the problem stemmed from the beliefs his highly religious aunt had imparted.

She'd brought him up after his parents had died in a crash. She believed that the 'sins of the flesh' as she described them was a sin against God and she would use her cane on Doug for any transgression, real or imagined. When he'd discovered masturbation, his fear of being caught made him complete the act as fast as he could. He knew no other way by the time he met Sue at the Christian college that they attended. They were both virgins on their wedding day, and because of their natural inhibitions it had been several years before Sue had understood from her girlfriends that her sex life was not normal and that Doug had an issue.

Once we understood the root cause, we had moved on to the physical side of the therapy and to begin with I'd had Sally the sex surrogate show and describe the techniques she expected them to use. Doug just wasn't able to relax with Sally. She looked so much like a younger version of his aunt he was almost sick when she'd tried to touch him. I had to take over the surrogacy role with them. We had been making progress and with the techniques I shown him, he was now able to masturbate for fifteen minutes before he came. After I'd shown Sue how, we'd worked on their control and relaxation techniques. Sue was now able to masturbate him for almost fourteen minutes.

Sue was much happier as well because I'd taught them both how develop and extend their previously almost non-existent fore play. A few weeks ago, Doug had given her first orgasm from oral sex.

Our last goal was to get them to complete a full-extended penetrative sex act where both of them came. Unfortunately, I'd got them to try during our last session, and it hadn't gone very well. He couldn't control himself the way I'd anticipated and had ended up coming inside his wife after only a minute. I was scheduled to try full penetrative sex with Doug at our next session.

I'd approached the session with a sense of misgiving, for the first time in my professional career it felt wrong. We'd sat down in my office and I'd explained how I'd wanted that day's session to go. We were going to start with Sue making Doug cum with a combination of her hands and her mouth. Doug was to use all the techniques he'd been taught to delay his orgasm for the full fifteen minutes. When he was ready again he and I were to attempt sex with me on top so I could watch and control him. At least that was the plan and it had worked before.

Once they had completed the first part of the exercise and Doug was comfortable and erect again I moved to join them on the bed. That's when the shakes hit me. I looked around the room and saw it as Daniel must have seen it that evening. Doug wasn't sure what he should do and took my hand. I only just made it to the bathroom before I threw up in a mirror of Daniel's response. Doug and Sue came in and I could barely let them touch me. I made up an excuse that I must have eaten something bad and cancelled the rest of their session.

I walk into Roger's office and sat down. "I don't think I can do this anymore," I said and started crying. "I was physically sick when the client touched me."

He looked at me sympathetically, "Do you want to stop completely?"

I thought for a moment, "No, I still enjoy the therapy sessions; I just can't do the physical side anymore."

"You don't need to," he said. "I made a few calls and I've found two surrogates who want to work with you. You've a great reputation in the field; people want to work with you. You may need to supervise a few sessions, but the physical side now will be the responsibility of the surrogates. All the sessions that Sally can't deal with I'm cancelling until your new surrogates start. The first one is a pretty Latina woman, and she can start the week after next. Here's her file."

Her file was very impressive and for a few minutes I lost myself in it. Her name was Maria and she was thirty-one. She currently lived in Florida. Her parents had escaped from Cuba in the 80's. Her first marriage had disintegrated due to relationship issues. It was her experiences with relationships counselling that sparked her interest and she'd gone back to college. She was halfway through her degree in counselling. She was a qualified masseuse and an IPSA qualified sex surrogate. Interestingly, she had remarried and there was a note from him stating that he was fully aware of everything about her role and was completely supportive.

I made a mental note to ask her about her marriage.

"She looks very good," I said.

"I spoke to her on the phone and asked her about her marriage. He was a client of hers; his marriage had failed because of a PE issue. He sought help and she helped him. They fell in love and they now have a two-year-old daughter."

"Thank you Roger," I said.

He said, "I can't afford to lose you, and I'm sure that given a choice between this and Daniel, you would choose him. Now, tell us where you need to be to find him, and we will get you a ticket."

"England, I need to go to England that's where he is," I said.

"Well, go home and pack, we'll get you on a flight tomorrow to London and book you a hotel."

I gave him a kiss and told Rita what was happening. I drove to Daniel's to pack and check my email for any messages from Jenny. There were none but there was one from a dd101 dated the day before, and the subject line was Questions for you. I opened it with a feeling of dread.

Mia darling

I've rewritten this mail so many times over the past few days I almost don't recognize it. I'm sorry I didn't reply to your texts or calls but I couldn't find the words I needed. Please understand I do love you. Nothing that you did will ever change that. I suppose the question I need to ask should be am I man enough to accept that what you do is not a threat to us – to me?

I was in Paris for a few days but I've moved on.

There are things I need to understand about what you do with your clients before we can move on. I don't care about names, in fact it would kill me to find out it was someone I knew. The closest people to me before have betrayed me and I honestly can't go through that again.

I know that it's not rational, but I can't help feel that I was being evaluated by you alongside of your clients. Liz put me through hell, I've been found to be wanting before and I'm not sure I could go through that again.

I believe that you are the one for me. We share an intimacy at a level I've never experienced before. Yet you never hinted that there were aspects of your job that if I found out about would have hurt me. The silly thing is I would have understood. I know from first-hand experience how vulnerable the male ego can be and the idea that you gain a sense of satisfaction from helping men and women solve their sexual problems doesn't repel me. It scares me because of what I went through with Liz.

But you need to know that I'm scared for other reasons too.

What did you do with them? I think that the fear of the unknown is what intimidates me the most. Why didn't you feel you could tell me of your role?

Did you make them wear a condom? Are they tested for STD's? Why didn't you tell me earlier? Are you going to carry on doing it? And the one I need to ask but I'm not sure I want to hear the answer, do you have any feelings for any of them?

I'm ok and I will be back if only to talk. I need some time to slay my own personal dragons.

Me, the ring, and your finger that's a date, I hope; I will see :)

Daniel xxx

I read the words on the screen and I started to cry and I couldn't stop. I was still sobbing as I struggle to write a reply.

Daniel my love and yes I do love you with all my heart.

So many times over the past few days I've wished I told you about my work and all that it involved. Why didn't I, I'm not sure. I guess it's was a combination of client confidentiality and I was scared how you'd take it. I've told other boyfriends in the past and those relationships foundered very quickly.

Why did I carry on with the role even when I knew it affected my chances of a true relationship for me? I've asked myself that question many times since I met you. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me and I honestly thought I had the time before you went away in the fall to slowly let you into my other life. But they brought the dates forward and you asked me to marry you. I had made myself one promise after I fell in love with you: if you asked me to marry you I would never lie or deceive you, so I had to tell you.