Warning. This entire story is about sex, desire, and love. A full one-quarter of the writing could be called sex scenes. This means, of course, that three-quarters cannot be called as such. Act as you see fit.
Finally, there are two sentences of Chinese spoken in the story. Since our heroine doesn't understand them, they remain untranslated. If you want to know what they mean, you will have to send Feedback. I almost always respond.
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The trade winds drafted down the mountain valley, through the high rises of downtown, and into the little office where I sat working. The breeze tossed the light fabric of my skirt against my calves, tickling my skin and reminding me of the world outside the spreadsheet in front of me. I closed my brown and green swirling eyes to concentrate on the sensation.
The breeze narrowed, focusing on a spot on my neck, bristling the tiny auburn hairs. A breath. A cool breath from my lover coming to sweep me away. She bent over, bringing her lips closer to my neck. I leaned back into her kiss, content and happy.
She?
---
A drop of sweat collected at the end of my nipple until it dropped from my dangling breast onto her stomach. A smile spread across her face and I collapsed back into her arms.
It was that image again. I shook my head of it and went back to comparing cereal box prices.
---
My mouth was full of the woman whose legs twitched around me. My tongue moved again and again over the hair and moisture. My heart raced with excitement and fear, but my hand was wrapped in hers, so strong and comforting, calming me.
"Did you want rice or pasta tonight?" my husband asked. "Hun?"
"I can do rice again if you want."
"Spaghetti it is."
---
I liked my therapist Chantrelle personally but I didn't really like seeing a therapist in general. She always seemed to understand what I was going through. I hated that. It would be nice to be a little different from all her other patients. Instead, I would walk into her office where her assistant would be expecting me. Chantrelle would greet me in her office with a smile and that mane of dark hair tied back in large braids. I would settle into her comfy burnt orange leather chair that you felt like you could slip out of at any moment and compare the freckles on my arm against the color of the leather. Then we'd talk.
It's hard to feel special with such a routine. Comforted and safe, sure, but not special and weird, which is how I wanted to feel. But, then, I was given her name by the gay and lesbian hotline I had called in a panic three months earlier, hoping they could make the images go away. Instead they gave me the phone number of a therapist who specialized in orientation issues, a former military psychologist who had dealt with a thousand don't ask don't tell cases. I almost expected them to say, "Welcome aboard," as they hung up.
Now, here I was spending our money and telling someone I barely knew about the woman in my head, all the time feeling guiltier and guiltier. Not only was I now hiding the images from my husband, I was hiding the fact that I was in therapy as well. Chantrelle and I did get along great, though. She always cut to the point.
"So, Ashleigh, you've spent a couple months now telling me about these little movies in your head. What are you going to do about them?"
"I thought I would see a therapist."
She smiled. "And this therapist would wave her wand and make them go away?"
"My therapist would use fairy dust. Wands are so last year."
Chantrelle bounced her pen against the brown skirts covering her knees as she always did before she said something important. "Ashleigh, it's time for you to make a decision. Much as I like your money, you need to get out of that chair and act."
"What do you want me to do? Put the images together and post the movie on the Internet? Pale redhead gets dirty with girlfriend?"
"Why don't you do the obvious thing?"
"And what's that?" I stopped my hands from fiddling with the long lock of hair dangling around my bosom. "The obvious thing would be to find out if I want them to be more than images."
"I agree."
"But the only way to do that is to, you know, try it."
"Are you talking about sleeping with someone?"
I tossed the hair back over my shoulder. It's good I didn't have Chantrelle's pen, because I would have been playing the rhumba with how nervous this conversation made me.
"Ashleigh, when you say this, how does it make you feel?"
"Crazy."
"How?"
"Like I'm a horrible person." I saw my chest rising and falling faster than normal, the pale green blouse on white skin puffing in and out.
Chantrelle paused for a moment. "So you are thinking about doing it? You are thinking about trying to get picked up or something?"
"No way am I going to go to a bar to have a one night stand."
"You've thought this through. It's far more to you than images."
I didn't answer. I didn't want to say yet how I was finding my head turn when an attractive woman was near, how I imagined the feel on my thin bare legs of the visiting consultant's skirts when she brushed against me looking over my shoulder, how I could still smell the perfume of the woman who gave me my coffee every morning. I wasn't ready to say any of this.
"A relationship then," Chantrelle continued. "Is that what you are considering? It doesn't have to be meaningless, right? Find a girlfriend; find someone to move in with-"
"No!" I hadn't meant to yell, but my heart was racing so much I couldn't stop it.
"Why not? Unless you aren't sure you want to."
"Of course I want to!" Dammit, she had led me right into that. Okay, she was good at her job, but still. "You know I can't, Chantrelle, and you know why." This was why I had called the hotline. I knew I wanted more than images. I wanted to cheat on my husband with another woman.
She waited, letting me calm back down. "Ashleigh," she spoke slowly. "I need you to talk to me. You know better than I that this isn't a game. I need to know what you are thinking, why you are scared. Everyone has fantasies. We talked about this on day one. What is scaring you?"
Had I been praising her directness earlier? "It's, maybe it's that I, I think about doing what we are talking about. I don't hide anything important from Ken, but when I'm on business trips I start thinking about looking up info on the lesbian scene in the town. I find myself fiddling with my wedding ring." I looked down and found myself sliding my ring up and down my finger as I sat there. I had never done that a year ago. Chantrelle watched me gently slide the ring back into its rightful place. "I can list the names and open hours for a lesbian bar in a dozen cities off the top of my head. I've never been to one, but I know their names."
Chantrelle's voice seemed to deepen as she spoke next in a way I had not heard before. "Sex between women is some of the safest sex you can have," she said. "Few diseases, no pregnancy risk. Info on dental dams and other protection is easy to find."
"Are you telling me to cheat on my husband?!"
She said nothing.
"I will never ever cheat on Kenji."
She still refused to speak. I just had to watch her foot tap slowly in the air.
"I love him and I will not do that. I won't." I could see Ken's face as I sat there. His dark hair so full, the scruff on his broad chin, the soft full lips, and then the pain in his charcoal eyes when he discovered what I had done. No, I would never cause that sort of pain.
"I know you don't want to," she replied finally. "Then what will you do with your desires?"
Hide them; let them die; anything to keep me with Kenji. Didn't she get this?
"I will just live with them. I'm not a child. I have will power. I'll just live with the pictures in my head." And the desires. And the heart fluttering when someone attractive looked at me a little longer than seemed normal.
"Every day for the rest of your life, you will dream about having sex with a woman, and you will never actually do it," Chantrelle said.
"Love how supportive you are being. It's the only choice because I don't lie to Ken."
"It's a lousy choice, Ashleigh, and you know that. That's why you're here. Because you aren't sure you can keep bottling it up. As far as I can tell you've been happily married for six years, but you won't be if you just ignore all this. Your desires will continue and slowly but surely, you will come to blame Ken for trapping you. The marriage that you want to save by just bottling everything up will either end or be a fragment of what it once was."
"You are a delightful person to talk to today. Can you audit me while you are at it? If that doesn't suck enough, you can do a pap smear. Ooh, ooh, no. Send me out to dinner with my boss."
As always she took my crap with ease. I'm not sure what I wanted her to do. Have her own brown freckles start glowing in anger? Why couldn't the hotline have recommended someone incompetent so I would have had an excuse to stop coming? I'm not a woman who revels in exploring my feelings. I'd rather have a cup of coffee and go do something.
"Alright then," Chantrelle started, "Let's go through the options. We've worked through having sex with another woman and not telling Ken about it," she replied. "That's out, right? You've rejected that. We've worked through not having sex, bottling it all up, and also not telling Ken, and that's out, too. So what's left?"
"Telling Ken," I admitted grudgingly. She was so fucking good at her job. I never could let her know I thought so. "I can't wait for that talk," I said instead. Would Ken ever touch me again if I told all of this to him? Maybe he would conclude I wasn't interested in men anymore, and yet his touches were one of the best things in my life, behind only his companionship.
"It's been obvious for several meetings that you needed to bring Ken into this, Ashleigh. Your great fear seems to be not having him in your life. If you can't get the other desires to go away, then you have to integrate them into your life, and Ken is your life. That's the starting point. Tell him."
I wanted to fight this solution, but it was so stupid obvious I knew not to waste our time doing so. "So what do I tell him?"
