Hot Under His Collar - Andie J. Christopher Page 0,29
had staged an intervention/sex toy party. She’d been so traumatized by her forced feminist awakening that she heard the sales rep’s voice telling her that her fake orgasm would propagate fake orgasms with any woman that her lover slept with every time she was tempted to fake it.
Sasha was a terrible person, but she really didn’t need that kind of karma. Better for guys to think she was cold and withholding if she was only having sex with them to be polite.
“Not yet?” Pam parroted her words.
“We’ve only been on three dates—like, four hours total!” Patrick was right. She should give it a chance. Unfortunately, Patrick being right about everything was another attractive thing about him. If only he didn’t have those twinkly eyes and godforsaken dimples, maybe she could give Nathan a fair shake.
“So you want to want to have sex with the groomsman, and you seem frustrated that you actually want to have sex with a Catholic priest?” Pam summarized her problem perfectly.
“Yes!” Sasha threw up her hands and stood, pacing to the window that she couldn’t see out of because there were too many plants vying for the scant sunlight. “I know. I know. I know. I always do this. I always want what I can’t have and just totally discount what I have in front of me. I’m ungrateful, and I can’t seem to do what’s good for me.”
“You’re not ungrateful,” Pam said, interrupting Sasha’s self-directed diatribe.
She turned around and folded her arms across her chest, knowing that Pam would read that, rightly, as defensive. “What!? Of course I’m ungrateful. I should be kissing the ground in front of Nathan that he’s interested in me, considering I’ve almost reached my expiration date.”
Sasha tried not to talk about her expiration date with Pam. The first time hadn’t gone so well. Her therapist had turned red in the face and given Sasha an entire stack of literary fiction about women in middle age who learned something and then usually died to read as homework. After that, Sasha had kept her worries about aging out of desirability to herself.
“You know, I don’t know your mother, but you sound a whole lot like your mother right now,” Pam said.
Sasha gasped. “Take that back.”
“That’s not how therapy works.” Pam looked pointedly at the seat that Sasha had just vacated.
“You’re not supposed to traumatize me in here. I know that’s not how therapy works either.” But she sat down.
“Let’s talk about this whole ‘expiration date’ thing.”
God, it sounded so unbearably stupid when Pam said it. She was totally holding Patrick responsible for having to talk about this. If he didn’t scramble her brains, if he had just let her get hit by that car, she wouldn’t be here trying to explain to a woman of indeterminate age why she had to get married and have two babies within the next four years or literally perish from the weight of her mother’s disappointment.
“I am—I feel like—I’m running out of time.”
“For what?”
“To get married and have babies.” Sasha made a rolling motion with her hand. “And all that stuff.”
“You want all that—stuff?” Pam looked over her glasses at her. “Or does your mother want it for you?”
Sasha was so tempted to say that she really wanted to get married and have babies, but then she remembered when Pam had almost kicked her out of therapy during her second session. If you’re as happy as you say you are, why are you here?
“I don’t know. I feel like I should. I’ve been training my whole life to be a wife and mother.”
Pam squinted in the way she usually did right before she was about to drop some knowledge. “Have you, though?”
“What do you mean?” Sasha tried to be perfect. Really hard. And when she wasn’t perfect, she buffed it over. She did what was expected of her. Always. Even if it was the opposite of what she wanted.
Oh.
“Yeah, if you wanted to be married, you’d be married.” Pam doodled on her pad. After one of her sessions, Sasha had peeked at Pam’s yellow legal pad. A diligent researcher, she’d wanted to know if Pam had written anything down that would help her be better at therapy. She’d been disappointed to just find doodles. “More precisely, if you believed that you deserved to be married, you’d be married.”
“So if I didn’t want to sleep with a priest, then I’d be attracted to Nathan?”
“None of these men have anything to do with you, other than how you