Page 11 of Some Sort of Happy (Happy Crazy Love 1)
Bury my tongue in her pussy?
My hand worked faster, harder. “Fuck,” I whispered, over and over again as my cock went rock solid and then throbbed in my hand. I groaned as the tension inside me released in thick hot spurts, my leg muscles tight and trembling.
For a solo flight, it was a pretty fucking good orgasm, and it made me wonder if maybe I should try talking to her again.
Immediately, the voice was back.
Don’t be fucking dense. You think jerking off to some adolescent fantasy means you can handle being alone with her?
I wouldn’t have to be alone with her. I could just talk to her. Reintroduce myself. Be her friend.
No. You can’t trust yourself. You want her too much.
I wanted to argue, fight back.
But I had no weapons to battle with, no words to hurl at this fucking ghost that refused to stop haunting me, shadowing my every thought, my every intention.
After getting dried and dressed, I scrubbed my shower tiles and called my therapist to see if he could fit me in this afternoon.
• • •
“I had a setback today.” I wasn’t much for small talk.
“Oh?” Ken, a soft-spoken man with glasses and a thick blond beard, crossed his legs and regarded me patiently. “What do you think triggered it?”
I shifted uncomfortably on the couch in his office. “I saw someone from my past, a girl I went to school with.”
“A friend?”
“Not exactly…I didn’t really have friends in high school, partly because of my erratic behavior in years prior, but also because I kept to myself. People really didn’t know what to make of me. But this girl. She was just…nice. We were assigned as lab partners in chemistry a few times. I used to get so nervous be
fore school if I knew we had to work together.”
“Did you have thoughts about her back then?”
Fuck yes I did. I still do. “Not obsessive thoughts. Just average teenage boy thoughts and average teenage boy nerves around a pretty girl. But mine were compounded by the fact that I knew everyone thought I was crazy. I thought I was crazy.”
Those years had been such a fucking nightmare—my father dragging me to doctor after doctor to figure out why I was so obsessed with germs, why I was always counting things like leaves on trees or blades of grass or lines on the highway, why I was convinced that terrible things were going to happen to people I loved because of me. They did everything from dismissing the shit I did as adolescent quirks to diagnosing me with depression.
Several therapists were convinced I secretly blamed myself for my mother’s death from a car accident when I was eight (she was coming to pick me up from a friend’s house) and believed the fear of doing harm stemmed from that, but they couldn’t tell my dad why I had to flip a light switch on and off eight times before leaving a room or explain to my teachers why I had to click my ballpoint pen eight times before answering every test question or clue my middle school gym classmates in as to why I would play second base but not first or third. I could still recall the what-the-fuck looks on their faces when I tried explaining that two was a good number because it was even, and even better, a factor of eight, but one and three were bad numbers because they were odd.
Ken pushed his glasses further up his nose. “You once mentioned things were better by the time you finished high school.”
“They were,” I conceded. By junior year, we’d found a doctor familiar with OCD and I was put on medication, and started seeing a therapist regularly. “By then, I had more good days than bad, but the social damage had been done, and I just figured, fuck it, I’ll start over in college.”
Ken flipped back a few pages in the notepad on his lap. “You said your undergraduate years were fairly normal, but we haven’t talked much about them. You had friends? Dates?”
“Yeah. Starting over in a new place felt good. The thoughts and the compulsions never entirely went away, but I learned to cope. I felt I had control over them.” I thought about Skylar and the back of my neck grew hot. “As opposed to fucking today.”
“But we’ve talked about how having control over your thoughts isn’t the answer. It isn’t possible for anyone, really. One of your main goals at this point is to let go of that excessive need for control and learn to live with risk and uncertainty. Learn to let the obsessive thoughts be.”
“Yeah, I know that, and when I’m sitting here or when I’m alone or out among strangers, I’m fine with it,” I snapped. “But today was different.”
“OK, so what happened today?”
I told him what had transpired on the beach this morning, the image of Skylar’s blonde hair against the sand, her slender legs extending from her skirt still fresh in my mind. “And yes, I tried talking back and reasoning with myself and being an observer and all that, but nothing was working. I couldn’t deal with it the usual ways.” I shrugged angrily. “So I counted. Ran away from her.”
Ken nodded slowly. “And afterward?”
