Scooting back to sit up, I respond coyly, “I don’t know what to say right now.”
“Did you like that?” he questions in a way that feels as if he’s holding my hand to guide me to talk.
“Yes.”
“You’ve never done that before, have you?”
“No.” My answers are pathetically short.
“Are you embarrassed?”
“A little . . .” I lie and then admit, “a lot.”
“Tell me why.”
“Because, I’ve never met you, but you now know how I sound when . . .”
“When you cum?” he finishes for me.
“Yes.”
“And to you, that should be private? More private than my hearing how you sound when you cry?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“I don’t understand your reasoning. In order to cry, you have to expose the wounds in your heart. But sex, it’s just an act that doesn’t require such depth of vulnerability. What we just did was entirely free of emotion. Just two people who wanted to get off. But when you cried and told me about your mother, that was nothing but blood-filled pain and sadness.”
He makes a point and skews my perception of what constitutes intimacy. And he’s right, I was more unveiled to him the other day than what I am right now, and yet, it’s right now that I feel too exposed.
“This is what I mean about you being conditioned by society telling you how to think, act, and feel. Maybe there’s a possibility you’re more like me than you think.”
“Maybe.” I think about his words and allow them to idle for a while. This man is nothing like Landon. Everything about him is a contradiction to everything I know and am used to. The allure that draws me to talk to him day after day is this idea of what I could be because of him. That maybe the areas in my life I’m unsatisfied with are the result of my thinking and behaving the way he suggests society has ingrained in me.
“Have you ever tried letting go of your ideas of what’s normal and acceptable?”
“No. I mean, I feel like I make decisions for me, but I also take into consideration how others will think and feel.”
“When I asked you to touch yourself, you said no. But then you went against what you considered weird, and now how do you feel?”
Without thinking, I tell him honestly, “I feel good. I mean, afterward I felt embarrassed, but now—”
“Now you’re ready for round three?” he teases.
“More like a shower. I was a mess after my run, and now I’m just disgusting.”
“You also need to get back to work. I’ll talk to you later.”
After we hang up, my phone displays five notifications of missed messages from Brooke. I look at the time and can’t believe I was on the phone with him for over two hours.
When I open up the messaging app, I tell Brooke, “Hey, sorry I missed your messages. I’m about to hop in the shower, but I was wondering if you could come over tonight around eight thirty, after I put the girls down. Landon has the food critic coming tonight so he will be working really late, and there’s something I need to tell you.”
“So what is so important that you couldn’t just tell me over the phone?” Brooke asks when I walk down the stairs after putting the girls down to bed.
“This calls for wine.” I go straight to the kitchen and pull a bottle of white out of the fridge. I walk back into the living room and hand Brooke a glass before sitting next to her and taking a big gulp of my chardonnay. She watches me with curiosity, and when I swallow down the alcohol, I make my confession. “I had phone sex today.”
She looks at me like I’m an idiot, and her brows cinch together as she mocks me, saying, “Wow. Good for you. You finally got to first base with your husband.”
“Cute,” I snark. “But it wasn’t with Landon.”
Her eyes shoot open. “What?”
I take another drink.
“Hold up. Rewind,” she says. “Who the hell did you have phone sex with?”
“Remember in Vegas when we were all hanging out and Kristen mentioned that website she uses for research? The fetish one?”
“Yeah.”
“Well . . . I’ve been talking to a guy I met on there. We’ve actually been talking a lot . . . like every day for hours. And when we aren’t talking, we’re texting.” I watch her as she takes a sip of her wine, her eyes never leaving mine, and then continue. “He’s