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“So let’s discuss your last date,” my therapist says, changing the subject. He’s sick of hearing me pining on about leaving Holly’s after dinner last night.
My folded thumbs are flicking back and forth. I’ve been trying over the past hours to recapture the tingle I felt when Holly had placed her hand over mine.
Frankly, I’m a little exhausted trying to make sense of it too. I’m glad for this session and hope it screws my head on straight. Today I hate everything about myself.
For as messed up as I am, I don’t believe there’s some magical age when you learn to keep your dick in your pants and fall in line with the committed relationship scenario. However, that’s sort of why I’m here. Most women don’t hold my interest. I’m not sure if that’s on my mom and grandma Cass and who I was supposed to be or if it’s Stanton cruelty.
It was years ago when I stepped foot in Pinewood College’s dorms. The first thing that came into focus was the number of friends who had lost their virginity with a high school sweetheart far surmounted the number whose dads handed over cash for whores. They clung to the value in those relationships. In comparison, the abundance of nameless partners I had was abnormal. I learned to keep my yap shut about it long past when my fellow freshmen considered a spiteful one-nighter with a rebound-girl to ease the pain of a broken heart.
Not that my friends hadn’t assumed I was out for a good time when it came to the ladies. Moving out from under Rexy’s roof just made his handiwork abundantly clear to me. I was on my way to being a stereotypical bachelor who’d never settle down.
Unfortunately, it took me a few more years to possess the wherewithal to address the root of the problem and go the psych route. The more sessions I have, the more apparent it becomes that Rex wanted me to be lonely the rest of my life; Living in a sort of purgatory the same way my mother claims she was. I hate the man who she decided I should call “Dad.”
Hunched forward on the couch, my stomach clenches on the same visceral level I’d experienced when Holly paused cleaning up from dinner.
“My last date was, uh—” My hands fall apart and I push a thumb and forefinger into my eye sockets, trying to rub the gritty feeling away.
How was my last date?
At my therapist’s urging to consider available ladies who are on more than online sites, I have had several.
“Not being able to remember her face or name off of the top of my head makes it pretty memorable,” I remark facetiously. “I may have given her a hug at the end of the night?” I question my memory.
“No intercourse?”
I shake my head. I’ve had plenty of female friends since college. None of whom I ever crossed the line with. I’d set out to treat my date the same as I do them.
“Did you hold her hand?”
“Not that I can… No, I didn’t.” I spread my arms wide, shrugging. “I thought that was the point of this.”
“I never mentioned applying for sainthood.” He pauses and puts down the pen he’s been using to take notes on a clipboard and sets both aside. “Pretend you have three buckets, Cary. In the first bucket your mind places your friends who are women. In the next, women who you sleep with. In the last are the ones who are, for lack of a better term, off-limits. For instance, the wife of an employee. Is it possible, given what you’ve told me before about your female friendships, that when you made a concerted effort not to engage in sexual activities, subconsciously you moved your date from the second bucket to the first?”
“I guess.”
“So perhaps, using the bucket analogy, you should concentrate on creating a fourth.”
“That’s a lot of buckets. But where you’re married,” and I’m paying him by the hour to help me fix my philandering, “I’ll give it a go. What’s this bucket got in it?”
I doubt it’s a growler filled with ice and beer.
“Women who you don’t immediately engage in sexual activities with, who are still possibilities.”
“But not Holly.”
“No different from your date, you’ve already assigned Ms. Carrington to a bucket; You relegated her to off-limits.”
“So, you think whatever I felt when she touched me was some sort of fucked up chemical imbalance? Like my dick made a bigger deal of it than it actually is?”
“There’s a definite taboo engaging in a sexual relationship with the mother of a child whom you’re mentoring. You’ve expressed before that the majority of your early experimentation was with older women.”
“Know what I hate about therapy?” I scrub my beard.
“What’s that?”
“That you don’t give me a straight answer.”
My counselor laughs. “I can’t give you the answers, Cary. It’s up to you to determine what’s right for you.”
