The sex was weird. We’d walked home from his favorite Thai restaurant, hand in hand. Back at his place, Brandon put on Sade. He led me to his darkened bedroom, where we kissed on his bed for the first time. The calm lake of my belly rippled slightly as he pulled off his shirt and then mine. When all of our clothes were removed, he sat up on the edge of the bed and rolled the condom on. He crawled over to me and straddled my hips with his legs. It was less foreplay than I’d imagined or wanted, but he hadn’t had a girlfriend since medical school fifteen years earlier. I didn’t fault him for being rusty, and I hadn’t been willing to speak up.
Instead of the standard missionary-style sex I’d expected, Brandon put his right palm under my left shoulder and flipped me over in one swift motion. Everything went black as I face-planted into the pillow. Before I could lift my head or say anything, Brandon hoisted my hips up and entered me. Brandon’s thrusts were swift and clinical, though not unpleasant. I was stuck in my head: surprised and mildly titillated that someone who seemed so straitlaced, so possibly Republican, was into sex from behind.
But I didn’t want my face jammed into a pillow. I wanted to see him, to hear the music, to breathe freely. The words to get myself flipped back over—Wait. Hold up. Stop. Flip me back. This isn’t what I’m into—wouldn’t come out of my mouth. As I lay there trying to sort out how I would tell my group about this flip, Brandon’s fingers reached between my legs and my mind went blank as the pleasure rose through me, quick and hot. My back arched, and then my face hit the pillow with a muddled thud. When I rolled over to look at him, he was putting his arms through his pajamas.
Thoughts swallowed every bodily sensation as if my body rolled up into my brain like a window shade: What’s with the pajamas? Did I enjoy that? Where had Sade gone?
And this: What happened to my voice?
From the moment we entered his bedroom, we’d been totally silent. There was no moaning, no panting, no oohing, and no aahing. There was no conversation—no “What do you like?” or “How does that feel?” It was neat and tidy, just like the stack of old-fashioned pajamas lined up in his impeccable linen closet.
As Brandon slept, I replayed the whole scene, from the flip sex to the hospital corners. None of it turned me off, exactly. He wasn’t mean or inattentive or checked out. I diagnosed him as phobic about face-to-face sex and psychotic about sheets. But we all had our baggage. I could bring all my judgments, insecurities, fears, delusions, and feelings about everything that just happened to group. They would help me sort through it.
“You’re dating Dr. Flipper,” Lorne joked, “but he’s better than Reed.”
Max said it wasn’t clear if the sheets thing was endearing or a sign that he was rigid and unyielding. “You’ll probably have to get him into therapy,” Max suggested.
I told them we hadn’t discussed therapy yet, and Max raised his eyebrows at me. “I’m not hiding it, it just hasn’t come up.”
“You’re waiting for him to ask you if you come to group three times a week?” Max smirked.
The rule was to tell Dr. Rosen and my groups everything, not to tell my potential love interests everything about my therapy. “I’m not sure if I like him. My body doesn’t really respond to him.”
“Did you have an orgasm?” Lorne asked.
“Yes.”
Dr. Rosen beamed like a full moon hanging in a cloudless sky.
On my thirty-fourth birthday, Brandon stood in my kitchen while I packed my overnight bag. We always spent the night at his penthouse overlooking Navy Pier because it had imported furniture, a surround-sound stereo, and, of course, his pajamas.
“Who’s this?” Brandon pointed at a picture stuck to my fridge, every surface of which was plastered with pictures, 10K-race bibs, and ticket stubs. Of the dozens of faces he could have pointed to, he zeroed in on the one I didn’t want to discuss. Were we really going to do this on my birthday?
“That’s my—” I paused.
He cocked his head like well? and kept his finger pinned to the picture.
“My mentor.”
Brandon leaned in close and studied the picture. “Really?” It was a close-up picture of Dr. Rosen’s face from Kathryn’s wedding right before I’d introduced him and Alex. “What kind of mentor?”
I didn’t want to tell Brandon about Dr. Rosen because I had no idea what he thought about mental-health treatment. When, a few weeks earlier, I’d told him I was in a 12-step program for an eating disorder, he scrunched his face and said, “I don’t get why you need all those people or why anyone can’t stop eating when they’re full.”
“Well, actually”—fuck it—“he’s my therapist.”
He leaned toward the picture and gave it a good hard look. “Therapist? How’d you get this picture of him?”
“From a wedding. Two of his patients married each other—I’m friends with the bride.”
A flicker of alarm in Brandon’s eyes. “Two patients married each other? What, they passed each other in the waiting room and then fell in love?” I explained about group and how Dr. Rosen didn’t forbid out-of-session consortium. Brandon’s lips settled into a tense line. He paced the floor and asked a dozen questions about how group worked, where my group mates came from, how it all worked. I assured him it was like regular therapy just
