Page 53 of Two for Charging

“Oh,” Chris said blankly. “Wait, was this, like, real therapy?”

She laughed. Nicely, not mocking him even a little. “Yeah. What did you think we were doing?”

“I don’t know. I thought you would just tell me how to freak out about everything less.”

“We can work on techniques for anxiety, too, but it helps to know why you’re freaking out before we try.”

“Makes sense.”

“Okay.” She clapped her hands together. “I have one more thing I want to say, and a piece of homework for you, and then you can go home and enjoy your day off.”

Going home meant seeing Luca and having sex, or at the very least talking about having sex. Chris was not in any hurry. Still, he didn’t want Michelle to sense his reluctance to go home with her therapist superpowers. “More homework?”

“The thing I have to say first, and I’m sorry for mentioning this again, but I want you to know this. You don’t have to answer.”

When she raised her eyebrows as if expecting an answer, he nodded.

“Okay. You don’t have to be in a relationship or get married and have kids to be happy—”

“I know that.” Phil had told him so, and he hazily remembered Jax saying something to a similar effect as well one time when he was drunk. Chris might be an idiot, but he did listen when people talked.

“I know you do. But if you want a relationship or marriage or kids, not enjoying sex is also okay. You don’t have to have sex to have a loving, fulfilled relationship or to have a happy family.”

Chris blinked. “But—”

“No buts. Maybe you want sex, maybe it’s important to you, but it doesn’t need to be. Whatever the reason, you never have to have sex you don’t want to be having.”

Chris mulled over Michelle’s words. They didn’t sound real, but he’d thought the same thing about axolotls and blobfish before he watched a creepy nature documentary in a hotel in Nashville, so what did he know?

“What’s my homework?”

Michelle took her glasses off and smiled at him. “Do something nice for yourself. Not to make someone else happy or help them. Just for you.”

“That’s it?”

“Yep.”

He took a long route home, stopping by a Trader Joe’s for the expensive organic coffee Luca preferred and some hummus to go with dinner. “Therapy homework achieved,” he muttered to himself as he stuck his purchases on the passenger seat. Then he remembered he didn’t like hummus. He kept it around because Luca ate it straight from the package.

Next, he went to a pharmacy. Feeling apprehensive about going home didn’t mean he should be underprepared. He hadn’t kept condoms at home since he and Amélie split, and he’d learned the hard way in high school that most acts involving a dick his size and a second person required lube. He got himself an alibi lip balm as well, but the tiny plastic tube didn’t make him feel any less anxious and embarrassed when the cashier rang him up. Another fail on therapy homework.

Finally, he couldn’t put off driving home. He could put off going indoors.

Chris put the car in park outside the garage of the apartment building so he would still have a phone signal and scrolled through Instagram for a while. He liked every team post and commented a few fire emojis on a workout vid Howie had posted.

When he reached the inevitable flood of influencers he didn’t follow clogging up his feed, he refreshed. The NHL had uploaded some segments from the preseason interviews in the last few minutes, so he watched those.

A second refresh yielded no new material, so he called Matty.

It took Matty until the fifth ring to pick up. “’Lo?”

“Matty?”

“Hey, bro. Wassup?”

“Are you okay?”

“You woke me up.”