Getting Off

He colored. “This is hard for me,” he said.

It was certainly hard for me, she thought. But she left the words unvoiced, sensing that double entendre was not what the situation called for.

“I was married then,” he said.

She glanced at his ring. “So? You’re married now.”

“Different lady.”

“Ah.”

“See, I drank my way out of my first marriage.”

“And into a second one?”

He shook his head. He hadn’t even met his second wife until a full year after he’d stopped drinking. First his marriage ended, then his career went into the toilet, and eventually he found his way to rehab.

“To stop drinking,” she said.

“Well, that was the first rehab. For drinking.”

“There was a second?”

He nodded. “It turned out drinking was the symptom. The second rehab addressed the real problem.”

“And what was that?”

“Sexual compulsivity. I was addicted to sex.”

“Maybe that’s why you were so good at it.”

Most men would have taken that as a compliment, but he recoiled from it as if from a blow.

“It almost killed me,” he said. “I was lucky. I went through rehab for it, and I joined SCA, and—”

“SCA?”

“Sexual Compulsives Anonymous.”

After the waiter took their orders — pasta and a salad for both — he told her his story in more detail than she really required, and she found herself boiling it down to a single long sentence: I used to drink and I used to smoke and I used to gamble and I used to fuck around and now I don’t do any of these things but instead lead this glorious rich fulfilling life of fidelity and sobriety and moral decency and utter unremitting stifling boredom.

“I guess that explains the coffee,” she said.

“Uh-huh. But there’s no reason you can’t have a drink if you want one.”

“And risk an arrest for drunken bicycling? No, I’m fine with coffee. SCA, huh? Are their meetings like AA? Do you tell each other all the things you used to do in the good old days?”

“We tell our stories,” he said, “but it’s a little different, because we have to guard against getting off on what we tell, or what we hear. So the stories are intentionally vague. ‘I acted out with a partner, I acted out alone, I acted out with a group—’ ”

“ ‘I acted out with two nuns and a sheep.’ I was thinking that the meetings might be fun, but you nipped that little fantasy in the bud. So you used to act out and now you don’t, and I gather you’re happily married, and did you say you’ve got a kid?”

He nodded. “And speaking of bicycles, he’s learning to ride one.”

It’s a tricycle, and he still hasn’t learned to put it in the garage. But of course she couldn’t say that.

The food came, and he said he knew she’d offered to buy him lunch, but it was going to have to be on him. This, he said, would be a small way of making it up to her for the way he’d treated her in New York, back in the bad old days.

“You treated me fine,” she said.

“I was acting out sexually, and I exploited you.”

“Acting out? Whatever it was you were doing, I was doing it, too. And I must have enjoyed it, and felt just fine about it, or I wouldn’t have hit on you yesterday.”

“You weren’t hitting on me.”

“Yes I was,” she said. “It’s what I’m doing now, too. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Kim—”

“I know you’re attracted to me. Aren’t you?”

“You’re a very attractive woman.”

“And you’re an extremely attractive man, and if there weren’t other people around I’d be under the table with your cock in my mouth. You used to like that, and I’ll bet you still do.”

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Why not? Graham, I know you, I know what you like. Are you going to try pretending you don’t enjoy having your cock sucked?”

He just looked at her. He was getting hard, she could tell. And something came back to her, some rush of memory from out of nowhere.

“You wanted to fuck me in the ass! That’s what you promised me, when you went off to your meeting. We’d meet for dinner and come back to the room, and you’d have plenty of lube on hand, and you’d fuck me up my ass.” She looked at him levelly, licked her lips. “See? If you want to make it up to me, that’d be a good place to start. You owe me.”

The son of a bitch was hopeless. He went to AA meetings and SCA meetings, so no wonder he didn’t have time to mow his lawn. SCA might have been fun if there was a decent amount of backsliding involved, but he took it seriously, the idiot, and he took his wedding vows seriously, especially the part about forsaking all others.

It infuriated her, and she was on the verge of losing it when she caught hold of herself. No point in cursing the fish when it wouldn’t take the bait. More effective to reel in and try again.

“I’m sorry, Graham,” she said. “I guess I’m not used to rejection. It’s not something I get a lot of.”

“I’m not rejecting you, Kim. It’s just—”

“I understand. You’d actually love to fuck me, but you won’t let yourself. Because it doesn’t fit with your new life.”

“I might not have phrased it quite that way. But that’s close enough.”

“So now we’ll go our separate ways,” she said. “Will you think about me when you masturbate?”

He flushed deeply.

“I get it,” she said. “You don’t do that anymore either, right?”

“It’s a form of acting out,” he said, “that we don’t encourage.”

“We meaning SCA?”

He nodded.

“I’m glad I’m not a member,” she said, “because I have to tell you, Graham, I’m gonna have my hands full tonight. I’ll put on some music and I’ll get out my sex toys and I’ll imagine all the things you and I aren’t gonna do to each other. Oh, is this conversation making you uncomfortable?”

“I think you know it is.”

“Well, if you get all worked up, you can go home and knock off a good one with Wifey. The two of you do have sex, don’t you?”

“Of course we do.”

“You’ll be thinking of me,” she said.

“That’s not true.”

“It’s not? Oh, I think it is. You’ll be inside your precious wife, in whatever position’s ordinary enough so that it doesn’t come under the heading of ‘acting out,’ but in your mind you’ll be doing me in the ass. You’ll be hotter than a forest fire and she’ll wonder what got into you, and in the morning you’ll be all racked with guilt and have to go to a meeting to confess your sins to your buddies. But you won’t dare be too specific about it, or they’d all get hot and the meeting would turn into one big circle jerk. Which, now that I think about it, would be a big improvement all around.”

Well, gee, she’d lost it after all, hadn’t she?

ELEVEN