"Would you like to talk about the pirates today, Gwen?"
My grin disappeared. I had told Dr. Annon that I did not want to talk about them today, tomorrow or ever for so long as the universe may turn.
"I think we'll have to talk about them sometime," he'd said, that little half smile playing on his sexy little lips. "You've been coming for two years." I'd told him I disagreed vehemently enough to shove a coat rack up his ass next time he asked.
"Gwen?"
"Oh, sorry...for a moment I thought you said you wanted a coat rack up your ass." The truth. " You didn't really say that, did you?"
Dr Annon got that thoughtful look and then looked deep into my eyes. "I said I think you should talk about that. I think that's what's doing it."
He'd confused me there. "Doing it?"
"Your frigidity?"
I was furious. "I told you I'm not frigid, I just..."
"Can't get close to anyone, can't stand to perform oral sex, can't masturbate to orgasm--"
"That doesn't mean I'm frigid, I mean, I still like sex--"
"You have sex because it's expected of you. That doesn't count." He gave me a little smile then, and my heart melted again. And then I realized that I still wouldn't fuck him if I had a choice, and knew he was right. It wasn't that I didn't like sex, it was that I didn't care about it. At all. "You are never ever passionate about sex, Gwen. You said so yourself."
"That doesn't mean I'm going to pour my heart out about some buried part of my past..." I realized that was a stupid thing to say to your psychiatrist. " About that, I mean."
"Who are you going to tell, if not me? Do you hope it will go away if you don't look at it, like monsters in your bedroom?"
"Yes. That's what I want. I hope it does."
"But it's not," he told me, and gave me that heartrending caring look. "It's shut down your sex life and your social life. What will be left when it's done?"
I was getting desperate, I so did not want to talk about this now, or ever. But he was insistent and I couldn't say no to him much longer. "I don't—some things you just--"
"They raped you, didn't they?"
I panicked. "You leave me alone!"
"Okay," he said right then. He sat down in his big chair and looked at me.
I sat down on the couch and he just looked. So I looked back, and we looked and it became like a fight. I knew he had to look away or say something, I wouldn't be the one to drop my eyes, so help me God, and my jaw dropped open and out it spilled.
Gwen was a virgin. She was old enough to be living a life with sex in mind but not in body, and too young not to be terrified that she wasn't 'normal' because of it. Old enough to know pirates were real, but too young to really believe in them. On board the Bellemae, her parents had said, it will be fun and leisure and plenty of time to read and think, and grandma telling her (she never asked) that she must "come with us across the sea to Portugal for our fourth honeymoon and we'll show you the new place...Have Jack take us over in the Bellemae."
But Gwen had found it a nightmare. Her first day at sea she was sick over the side most of the time. On the second day a deckhand she had come to know as Jacques, a dark man with an accent of indistinct origin, produced a hand-rolled cigarette that smelled faintly of skunk. "Take this, little now, little later."
"I don't smoke," she'd told him.
"Dat why you still sick," he'd answered, and gone on to explain how they were in international waters and no-one else was sick because they were all stoned et cetera. She know it was a line of crap but by then she was bored to tears and it was something to do.
Now, on day 8, she was smoking pot with Jacques most of every day and she liked him a lot, but she could feel tension starting and knew their friendship was almost over, that when she said "I'm celibate" was when he said "I'm gone".
"Hey woman," he called, head sticking up from below decks. "We done!" He grinned. "Cmon my bunk." She went after him without hesitation; he had a killer CD collection, and he was a dope fiend. He kept her amused with sleight of hand tricks and knew how to blow a tune on a comb and waxed paper. He was interesting, and after 8 days at sea, interesting is good.
She walked into his cabin and sat next to him on his bunk.
"It's boring now, at sea," he told her with an air of pathos. "always get boring now. 8, 9 day."
Gwen nodded. "What do you do to keep from getting bored?"
"Well," Jacques replied, eye widening, "we WRESTLE!" And with that he grasped her around the waist and dumped her on her head. She fought her way up, fists clenched.
"You die!" She screamed with laughter and threw herself at him. He caught her and skillfully pinned her beneath him on the bed. Gwen giggled as she caught her breath.
"We don't always wrestle," Jacques told her, and bent to kiss her.
"Hey, whoa, there's something you gotta know..." She twisted her head to keep their lips apart.
He pulled back a little, but kept her pinned. "What?"