Growing Pains

“I used to consider myself like this agent of change for men in unhappy relationships. But I don’t know why I assigned myself that role. I don’t know why I made that my responsibility.”

“Well, that’s a very mature question you’re asking,” says the therapist. When she says this, I feel like a child.

“I haven’t been acting very mature lately,” I respond.

“You’re 29 years old!” She exclaims. I just turned 29. It’s a week after my birthday and I’m in a therapist’s office. It’s been a rough week.

The night after my birthday, I go to my local bar at last call and John the bartender is working. This time, from the moment I enter the bar, the game we have been playing no longer feels like a game. In fact, when I park myself in my usual spot in front of John’s register, he goes outside and I can see him talking to security. Moments later, a bouncer awkwardly comes to tell us it’s time to leave, which is unusual because we are always allowed to stick around after hours. I march outside to confront John and he explains, “You make me a bad person, I can’t be around you.”

He says that because of me he now has to, “lie to someone I love for the rest of my life.” He is referring of course to the fact that the last time I saw him, on Halloween, I sucked his dick in the women’s restroom. Since then, over Thanksgiving when I was up in the Bay Area visiting my parents, I met up with John’s Brother for dinner and sex. I had been excited to see the look on John’s face since my encounter with his brother—to see if he knew. I still thought the whole situation was hilarious. Apparently John didn’t know or care that I had seen his brother again—now he seemed only concerned about saving his own relationship by getting me the hell away from him. I tell him I want to be friends and we hug, pressing our pelvises together. He’s smirking under his resolve, and between telling me to leave him alone, he rubs his finger on my nipple, hard underneath my dress. Due to the mixed signals and because I can’t take no for an answer, I continue to push myself on him until he warily relents and lets me and my friends back inside the bar.

Later, I follow him into the storage room and suck his dick again while he’s distributing his coworkers paychecks in their cubbies. He says, “you really are crazy,” and drops a check on my head. Then he tells me he wants to “see something” so I pull up my dress, pull down my stockings and underwear and take my boobs out of my bra. I rub my butt on his crotch, and then he watches me as he jerks off to completion on the plastic mat covering the floor. These are the cliff notes. A long night of back and forth precedes this, a lot of John saying “please stop” and then, “I want to fuck you so bad.” It all culminates in this moment in the storage room, and then it’s all downhill from there. After he comes, John is visibly flooded with remorse. I feel bad for making him feel bad, and attempt to drunkenly convince him it isn’t a big deal and now that he’s come we can all move on with our lives. He looks at me like, yeah right. I follow him to the bathroom where he desperately tries to wipe the cum off his jeans. I tell him I don’t want to leave him alone, he seems so upset. He tells me that it’s not my responsibility. That’s true, so I walk away. John emerges from the bathroom and basically tells us the party is over and to get out. As we stalk outside, I see him yell at his fellow bartenders: “I’m so tired of no one listening to me. When I say everyone out, I mean everyone out!” He looks distressed and angry and sad and I’ve never seen him like this before.

It’s not until this moment that it dawns on me that this isn’t fun for John anymore. Maybe it never was. It’s a struggle for both of us, to be sure, but I thought that’s what was exciting about it—I thought it was a game. To him, I suddenly realize, the stakes are too high and my sexual whims are really fucking with his life. The moment I realize this is when I start to feel really awful about the whole thing.

I wrote a version of this story that was all chase scene and sex details. I gave it to my best friend to read and she wanted to know, not for the first time, what kept me going, what was I getting out of this? Why did I persist when John told me over and over in no uncertain terms that he did not want to cheat on his girlfriend? I justified my actions by telling her of all the mixed messages I had been receiving from him all along. The fact that when I touched him he told me to “keep it under the bar.” That between telling me to stop and enlisting my roommate’s help in keeping me away from him, he would lean into my neck and whisper that he wished we had a time machine bubble and could just have sex one time without any consequences. I told her about how I’d asked him how his sex life is with his girlfriend and he convincingly said it was good. To which I wondered, “so you just want variety then?” And he said, “I’m a very sexual person and I love women.” I told him it sounded like he wasn’t naturally monogamous. He asked if I was into girls, and said he wanted to see his girlfriend eat me out. I told him I am very sexually open and would try most things. He asked if I’d hooked up with my roommate, said he’d like to watch. I tried to express to my best friend that it was hard for me to listen to all of this stuff and then to walk away, that it’s my nature to pursue something to the bitter end even if I see the end looks dicey.

The next day I feel more depressed than I have in a long time. I spend the day sleeping and crying and feeling like garbage. I can’t stop playing last night’s events through my head and the look on John’s face at the end of the night is imprinted on my memory. I hate that my actions have turned this happy, good-natured guy into someone who looks like he hates himself. It was never my intention to make him feel bad, and that’s what I ultimately did. In a weird attempt to find some closure for myself, I go to John’s brother’s Facebook page (John is not on Facebook) and look through the photos of every single one of his female friends, searching for John’s girlfriend. He doesn’t have that many friends, so it doesn’t take that long, but it’s still insane that I do this.

What I discover only makes me feel worse: his girlfriend is really cool. Smart, funny, pretty, someone I might be friends with—a performer with plenty of online content I can absorb endlessly to feed the masochistic chasm that has suddenly opened up inside of me. I watch video after video and cry and feel even more sorry for myself, and also stupid, because for some reason I had assumed that his girlfriend was this mousy, boring person and now in the depths of self-loathing, I feel that I have discovered evidence that she is actually better than me.

I suddenly feel the unquenchable need to talk about this with anyone who will listen, but I also know that I am close to exhausting my friends on this topic, and I feel like I need to talk to someone who doesn’t know me. It is fascinating to hear the difference in perspective from the women in my life versus the men. My male friends, in particular Best Guy Friend and ex-boyfriend, are like, “boo hoo John, you got a blow job.” They laugh when I imply that I feel like a sex offender—both say he is a big boy and could have shut it down if he wanted to. The women in my life, by contrast, tell me that John sent very clear signals that he didn’t want to cheat on his girlfriend, and they all wonder why I persisted anyway. My social worker roommate rounds out the two perspectives by musing that because men have their sex organs on the outside of their bodies, it’s harder for them to control their urges, and that while his head was probably telling him to stop, his body was full steam ahead. This explains the mixed messages, and temporarily makes me feel better.

I decide I need to talk to a therapist. My best friend agrees.

“I’m very pro-therapy,” she says. She suggests I Google search “sex positive therapists in Los Angeles.” I don’t really know what to look for in a therapist, but this gives me a place to start, and finding someone who advertises themselves as sex-positive makes a lot of sense to me. My friend Paula recommends this woman who is into Jung and dream work and archetypes. She sounds cool and is nice on the phone so a week later I go in for a consultation. I am late getting to her office because I go to the wrong address and park and then walk around in the gusting wind desperately trying to find her and feeling sorry for myself and already like I might cry. I eventually find her and, within minutes of sitting down on her couch, I burst into tears.

“I know this is supposed to just be a consultation,” I gasp through the waterworks, “but I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

I tell her about Saturday night, and how bad I feel about what happened, that I don’t understand why I always have to push it so far. I don’t tell her about internet stalking John’s perfect girlfriend, or about the fact that I wrote him a remorseful letter and left it in the mailbox of the bar—a move that I now regret and actually went back to retrieve the letter only to find it was already gone.

“It sounds like you’re outgrowing this older version of yourself. This old idea you’ve had about who you are.”

I think about this, about the possibility of saying goodbye to this person who throws herself at men in relationships whom she’s decided are not happy. I wonder who will take her place. I haven’t seen the therapist again. I plan to, I just haven’t had time and the acute pain has subsided. Now I just feel lonely and tired. I wonder if I’ll ever meet someone and find a connection with a man that isn’t just about sex—the longer I go without it, the more distant it feels. I’ve stopped drinking for a month because I’m going to do ayahuasca at the end of January and you’re supposed to not drink, do drugs, have sex in preparation.

“You want to pack light for the journey,” the woman tells me on the phone. “You don’t want to be carrying any extra baggage.”

I’m hoping this journey will give me some clarity about where I’m going and what I’m doing. This final episode with John definitely felt like a wake up call. Even as I was sobbing on the bathroom floor on Sunday night, I had the sudden clarity that this must be progress, that something good must come out of all this pain, that I must be growing or it wouldn’t hurt so much.

Halloween

**Mom, don’t read this one**

I grab my phone out of the toilet and desperately suck the toilet water from its lower holes. I don’t even really think about the fact that I’m doing this in the moment, I don’t second guess my impulse to save my phone at any cost. The fact that I’ve pulled it out of a public toilet in a dive bar at 2am on Halloween night doesn’t really register.

Then I remember why I’m in the restroom in the first place and I try to mentally prepare for what’s to come. I put my phone on top of the toilet next to my purse which is still unzipped, it’s opening aimed at the water—the cause of the accident. I see that the lid to my lipstick is still floating in the bowl. I try not to think about the fact that my phone is probably dead. John the bartender enters and locks the door. He turns to me.

“I dropped my phone in the toilet,” I say, pointing to it, still wet beside my purse. As I point, I notice that my house key has landed in the no man’s land between the seat and the back of the toilet. I vow to remember to grab it later.

John doesn’t understand, or he doesn’t want to deal with this right now. He grabs my waist and pushes me up against the wall. We’re making out and his hand is up my dress and digging around inside my tights. That’s when I remember the bandages.

Earlier this morning I preemptively went to spinning class to “detox before retox,” as my instructor so eloquently put it. Not used to the incredible friction in my crotch area, I chafed something terrible and discovered later that the skin just inches from my outer labia was rubbed raw and actually peeling off in stinging sheets. I smeared on globs of Neosporin and bandaged the area. I vowed to not let any man anywhere near the region because all the bandages made it look like I had recently undergone labiaplasty. Not to mention additional rubbing would definitely hurt like hell. I decided my wounds would help me make better decisions, as I would have to weigh the man against the guaranteed pain involved in hooking up with him—would he be worth it? I didn’t consider as a real possibility that I would find myself in this dilemma with John. I just never imagined we would actually get to this point in our epic 11 month flirtation.

Earlier in the night, when I first arrive at the bar with my roommates in our matching understated yet elegant costumes of all black ensembles and masquerade masks, John greets me with a warm hug over the bar. I kiss his cheek and, when he says “Oh!” in a pleasantly surprised manner, I ask if I can have a real kiss later.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t get any more kisses,” he eyes me suggestively. I obviously know what he’s referring to—the last time I was here I went home with his brother. Why this trumps the fact that he still lives with his girlfriend, I'm not sure.

“Why?” I smile coyly.

“You know why,” says John. But he doesn’t look upset; he looks amused. I like this about him—he doesn’t seem to take it all too seriously. Underneath it all, he seems to understand that it’s just sex. Who cares that I fucked his brother and I still want to fuck him? He doesn’t slut shame me for it. He still wants me too. I find this incredibly hot.

I haven’t really been drinking lately so after a couple vodka sodas with a lemon and a lime (and a cherry that John adds without asking), I am completely hammered. I’m on the floor dirty dancing with a Jewish guy dressed as a Rasta. His dreadlocked hair keeps getting caught in my mask, so I take off my mask. I freak with the Rasta like I’m at a middle school dance, twerking my ass into his hips. He grabs my waist and tries to reach his hand into the top of my dress, grabbing at my boobs. I enjoy dancing with him—he’s fun and he can move (or at least I’m drunk enough, I think he can)—but I don’t want to fuck this guy and when he tries to kiss me, I hold my face away. When he tells me to come home with him to Pasadena, I laugh in his face and say, “Yeah, that’s not happening.”

I carry my friend’s vaporizer loaded up with weed to John at the bar and offer it to him. He takes it and puffs. I order a couple more drinks for my friends and “a shot of your choice” for John. I do this several times throughout the night but apparently he puts none of it on my tab because my bill comes out to $18 at the end of the night. When John hands me my drinks, I rub my fingers on his and we linger there for a moment. Later I make him lean in so I can tell him something and I lick his ear. Later still I suck on his fingers, which taste like lime. At some point, he declares, “You had sex with my brother.”

I say, “So? I like both you guys.”

He asks, “Was he good to you?” I think this is a classy question. Also kinky. I wonder not for the first time if these are the kind of Irish twins that would fuck the same girl in the same room at the same time. If this is a possibility, I need to do everything in my power to make it happen.

Suddenly, it’s 2am and the lights are coming on, the heavy metal designed to thin the crowd blasting out of the speakers. John comes around to sit in his usual spot at the bar to do the tip out on his computer. Naturally, I plop down next to him, and this is when things take a turn. I try to kiss him and he pushes his face into my neck and says, “I want to bury myself in you.” I try to get his number, asking if we can be friends. He says, “How am I supposed to be your friend when all I want is to fuck you?” I guess that’s a fair question. I can see that he’s struggling. He punches his number into my phone anyway.

He tells me I’m causing problems in his relationship. I tell him it’s not me. He doesn’t understand what I mean. I want to point out that if it weren’t me, it would be some other girl. He’s just not monogamous, at least not at this stage in his life. I decide not to get into it. Instead, I run my fingers down his back and along the top of his pants to the front. He grabs my hand and puts it on his fly. He’s hard. He reaches under my dress and grips my crotch.

“Now that just kills me.” He seems to be referring to the heat coming off me. He lifts his hand away from my crotch and runs it under his nose, along his lips. It's about this time that the DJ says, "This one's for you, John," and proceeds to play Britney Spears' Toxic.

John won’t kiss me but seems to want me to keep grabbing his dick. I guess because it’s under the bar and he thinks his coworkers aren’t seeing what’s going on between us. I ask, “Why can I do this but you won’t kiss me? Because it’s under the bar?” He nods. “So, do you want me to get under the bar and suck your dick?” I ask. He nods, slower this time. Wow, he actually thinks that we are being stealth enough to get away with this. I’m so drunk I actually consider it.

My friends are ready to hit the taco truck, so I bid John farewell. He looks disappointed, like he always does when I leave, and I want to say, “Make up your damn mind!”

“Do you need to go to the bathroom before you go?” He asks.

At first I don’t register what he’s really asking and I almost say no. Then I realize the meaning of this.

“Yes,” I answer and grab my purse. I march towards the restroom.

Inside, the first thing I do is put my purse down on top of the toilet, and then a couple seconds later register that I’ve dumped the entire contents into the toilet. I fish out my phone, lipstick, Altoids. Thinking at the time that all of these items are salvageable, even the mints. This is when I suck the toilet water out of my phone and immediately turn it off, remembering the advice I received the last time I dropped my phone in the toilet. That phone didn’t make it.

With John’s hand up my dress, I remember my bandages and I really don’t want to have to explain them to him. Instead, I move down and unbutton his jeans, squatting on the ground. I take his penis in my mouth. As I’m sucking on him, I reach into my tights and rip off the medical tape and gauze strips covering my outer vagina wounds. I drop these on the floor beside discarded bits of toilet paper.

Naturally, as I suck John’s dick, I can’t resist comparisons to his brother. I notice immediately that his brother was in much better physical shape and therefore (as is my experience) his dick got bigger and harder. John’s is hard but could probably be harder if he hadn’t been drinking so much. He’s been working long sweaty hours and there’s a faint smell of BO emanating from his nether regions. It’s not that bad and I don’t mind it. He’s smiling down at me in a very appreciative manner—that’s nice.

I’m not getting anywhere with his dick in my mouth, so I stand up and pull down my tights and underwear and turn away from him, putting my hands on the wall and pushing my ass into his crotch. I fumble for his penis, willing it to stay hard for just a little while longer.

“I can’t have sex with you without a condom,” he says in a moment of sudden clarity. I respect this decision, for his girlfriend’s sake. And because sex without condoms is a bad habit I need to stop. For some reason I haven’t brought one with me, probably because I really had no intention of bringing my vagina out tonight.

I lean with my back against the wall, underwear down, tit sticking out the top of my dress. John stands at the sink, staring at me and jerking off. He ravages me with his eyes. I can’t remember who decides we’re done here. Probably he says, “I should get back.” I pull up my underwear and tights but leave my tit out.

“Put that away,” he instructs before taking it in his mouth.

Then he’s gone. My roommate appears in the doorway.

“I just sucked John’s dick,” I declare. “And I dropped my phone in the toilet.”

It’s time to hit the taco truck.

After I order my nachos, I text John, “Hey John, it’s me. Let’s be friends.” With a winky face.

Him: “What”

Me: “What what”

Him: “Ok. Yes.”

Me: “Yes what?”

Him: “I don’t know”

“Our interactions are like a Pinter play,” I declare to my friends.

“What’s that?” They ask.

I tell my best friend Sadie about this experience and she asks why I want to fuck John. She thinks my story doesn’t sound very passion-driven and feels more like a challenge I’ve set for myself. She wonders if by fucking his brother, I simply upped the ante in this game of trying to fuck John—actually making it harder for myself, adding a new level to the game. I tell her I find the combination of John’s inability to have sex with me and his desire to do so incredibly hot. I wonder aloud if people who don’t know me would think my mission in life is to home wreck happy relationships. She doesn’t think so—she thinks it’s clear from my perspective on infidelity and monogamy that I don’t consider myself the cause of these men’s relationship problems. I’m a symptom.

Sadie says it sounds to her like I’m bored, that if there were anyone more exciting to come along, I wouldn’t be interested in John anymore.

“Well, of course. But isn’t that always the way it is? You mess around with people that aren’t the real thing until something more interesting comes along?”

She concedes this is probably true.

“If John said he was leaving his girlfriend and wanted to fuck you all the time, would you want that?” She asks. Probably not, but there are a thousand what ifs I could go through that have nothing to do with the actual situation.

“What will probably happen is it will turn out that John’s girlfriend is like your blog’s biggest fan.”

I laugh, “That’s what happens in the movie version of my life.”

“The brother will fall in love with you,” she goes on, “and you’ll fuck both of them and get pregnant and won’t know which one of theirs it is and you’ll all end up raising the baby together.”

I tell her about how I’ve made plans to see John’s brother over Thanksgiving when I’m up in the Bay Area visiting my parents.

“I wonder if he won’t want to see me anymore if John tells him I sucked his dick,” I muse.

She bursts out laughing.

“You are building yourself a fucking garbage fire.” Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am bored.