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“Yeah,” she said. Her car was a notorious, constant mess.
“Well, remember how I came over to help you clean it out?”
She nodded slowly. “Sort of.”
“You were a mess-cleaning machine,” he said. “You know, I don’t let messes build up in my house, because I’m not actually very good at cleaning them. I get distracted. I’ll be trying to clean my bedroom, but I’ll end up having to take something to the living room, and then—while I’m putting it away—I’ll find some old photo album and then end up looking at that for twenty minutes, and then I can’t even remember what I was doing. But you did this thing where you just made piles. You were like, ‘Okay, we’ll put all the things for each room in piles around the car.’ Brilliant! You were so efficient. Your car looked like a cyclone hit it, and it was pristine within forty-five minutes. You even vacuumed it.”
She nodded. “Yeah, but guess where all those piles went?”
He laughed. “Okay, but are they still in piles in there?”
“I mean…” She shrugged. “Probably. Underneath everything else. But I could do that, because it was for you.”
“Perfect. So, uh, I want you to clean out your junk room.”
She pressed her lips together.
“Would you clean it for me?” He was grinning.
“I hate you,” she said.
“Would you clean it for you?” he said. “If I told you that I don’t see you the way you see yourself? You think there’s something seriously flawed within yourself—”
“You think that about yourself too!” she exclaimed.
He sighed. “You mean, because of the violent stuff?”
“You denied yourself orgasms, Decker. That’s… that’s not healthy.”
He rolled his head on his shoulders. “We come back to this a lot, don’t we?”
“It’s not going to work,” she said. “We both know it, deep down. I’m not good enough for you. You don’t see it yet, but when you do, you’re going to be disgusted with me. I’ve seen you get disgusted with people before, and if you ever did it to me, it would break me. I need you, Decker. You’re the only person in the world who thinks I’m not… who believes a pretty lie about me. I don’t want to destroy that.”
“Okay, look, when I stopped masturbating, I was in a relationship where I was having sex, like every day. We started having more sex. And the sex, it was, like, better. So, it wasn’t some denial. I had plenty of fucking orgasms, trust me.”
“This was with Mandy?”
“No, this was with Jinia. I was kind of a kid. Senior year of college. We dated until I was twenty-four. Then, after that ended, I was alone for a year or so, and trust me, I masturbated. Just… without porn.”
She considered. “Then, when you met Mandy, you stopped again?”
He nodded. “And no other woman on earth has complained to me about it, not at all. Usually, women don’t like porn. Usually, women are jealous—”
“Well, that’s just dumb of them.” She drank a long swig of hard seltzer. “Would you be jealous of my romance novels?”
“I guess that would be dumb of me,” he said flippantly.
“That’s not an answer.” She folded her arms over her chest.
“Well, you wouldn’t even try it?” he said. “Like, just as an experiment, to see what it did to the way you experience sex?”
“Stop masturbating?” She was horrified. “No. I mean, I like having orgasms. When I masturbate, I have an orgasm every single time. And with sex, it’s, you know, maybe sixty percent of the time.”
“Well, that’s horrible.”
“That’s being a woman.”
“Whatever. With us, you will always come, end of story. It’s a priority for me. It should be a priority for you. Promise you will never let me not make you come.”
