Maeve blinks at me, unmoving.
“You haven’t watched any of my content, have you?”
“Are you asking if I’m a subscriber? Of course I’m fecking not.”
I laugh again and it relaxes my shoulders. “Fair enough, but if you were, you’d see that a lot of the content I make is abouthelping people get more out of their so-called sex lives, and the way to do that is often by working on things that aren’t actually sex.”
“What do you mean?” Maeve gives me another blank look.
I shift in my chair so I can rest my elbows on the table and lean even closer to Maeve.
“Intimacy begins long before we take our clothes off. It also begins long before you even meet someone else. It begins with how we view ourselves and our bodies. It begins by understanding who we are, what makes not just our bodies feel good, but even more so our minds and our hearts and our spirits. It begins by owning our sexuality.” I look at Maeve and as she blinks at me, another thought pushes it way to the top of my mind. “No, not sexuality, our sensuality, our spirituality.”
“Is this some more astrological shite?”
“No, Maeve. I mean, maybe yes, because I do believe that everything in this world is interconnected and that includes the stars, but I guess what I’m trying to say is what I do, or at least what I’m trying to do, is not just to help people have better sex but to have a better experience of life.”
Maeve tosses her hair over her shoulders. “But that implies that you need to have sex in order to have a better experience of life, which is just not true,” she says, and her tone is challenging if not angry or irate.
“True,” I nod, “absolutely true. But in some ways what I try to do with my content is prove that point. There are so many reasons people don’t or can’t have penetrative sex – let’s not be ableist here, right? – but what I like to show is that you can still have a connection… no, actually, it’simperativeto have a connection without penetration, without stimulation of genitals, without intercourse. It’s the connection that makes sex good whether that’s a sexual connection or sensual or emotional or spiritual or whatever. You get me?”
For a few seconds, Maeve stares at me, almost through me, but then she starts to nod.
“But how?” she asks and there’s so much air in her question, I start to think it’s not air at all but something else. Something like hope.
“Well, if you were a subscriber,” I tease.
She reaches out and swipes the back of my hand. “I don’t want to have to trawl through videos of ‘good’ gaping arseholes to find the answers,” she says with air quotes and a loud tut. “Give me the, what did you say, CliffsNotes version.”
I want to lean closer. I want to have this conversation somewhere else, in a place where Elvis Presley’sViva Las Vegasisn’t playing for the third time in at least an hour. I want to hold Maeve’s hand.
But I don’t move. I open my mouth and…
“Oh my God, it is you!” a loud voice hollers in my ears. Maeve and I both swing our heads to the side and see two young feminine people who can’t be much more than twenty standing by our table.
Oh, shit. Fans. I swallow and ready myself.
“I told you!” one of them is saying to the other before turning back to us. “We’ve been literally like staring at you for an hour and she totally didn’t believe me it was you.”
“I totally did believe you,” the other one says. “I just told her we shouldn’t bother you.”
I’m about to tell them that it’s okay. I’ll take a photograph with them or sign a napkin or something but then I realize they’re not looking at me. They’re not talking to me. They’re talking to Maeve.
“We love you so much,” the first woman says. “I’ve been following you since I was like fifteen and I feel like I’ve grown up with you.”
“Sounds like you kind of have,” Maeve says with a smile I haven’t seen during lunch. It’s the smile she gives her followers, and Jim Harlow’s camera.
“Could we get a photo with you? Our friends are going to die when they see this!”
“Do it on my phone!”
“No, mine!”
I stand up. “How about you give me both of your phones and I’ll take a photo of you all together with both?”
“Oh, that would be awesome!”
“That’s so nice of you.”
