She looked across the coffee table at him with her head cocked sideways. "All that guilt is nothing but a burden for you, and it keeps you from enjoying your life. Don't you sometimes get a bit angry about that? Or even at yourself?"
We had been talking all evening, my loving partner Rachel, my best friend Dave who I had known since high school, and I. Dave grew up in a thoroughly catholic house where guilt was on the family curriculum from an early age. Rachel was the therapist tonight.
"Tell me something you feel guilty about, Dave."
"Feeling attracted to other women." Dave was married, though the relationship had soured a long time ago and was now exclusively an economic arrangement.
"'Feeling attracted other women'." She considered this. "So, how often are you attracted to other women?"
"Sometimes," he answered.
"Often?" she asked. She raised an eyebrow and looked softly at Dave.
"Yes."
"Pretty well all the time except when you're asleep, and then in your dreams?" she asked. It was a rhetorical question.
"Pretty well," he muttered anyway.
"You poor boy," she said. "So you're telling me you walk around feeling guilty all the time."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"All because extramarital sex, or probably even sex in general, is on the bad things list and all bad things make for guilt?"
"I know it doesn't make sense. And this is not the way I want it, believe me. But it's so solidly ingrained in me. So how do I overcome it?"
"Well," she said sagely, "guilt is a learned behavior. You were taught it, and you practiced it a lot, and that's why you got very good at it. So to unlearn it, you need to practice the opposite, again and again, until you've mastered a more appropriate set of associations. Like for example, 'sex is a lot of fun and being in the intimate embrace of attractive women is one of life's great gifts'."
"I wish I could do that. That would be wonderful."
"Well, Dave, you had help learning the guilt thing. Maybe I'm thinking your mother, sorry to bring her up, maybe I'm thinking your grade school teachers in catholic school, no disrespect intended. You didn't learn this by yourself. So you don't have to unlearn it by yourself. You have friends, you lucky devil. You have two very good friends right here." She turned and looked at me, "Lover, do you mind if I help Dave a little with his guilt problem?" She had a strange look of determination and mischief in her eyes.
"I think you should try to help Dave," I said. I knew this is what I had to say, but was not at all sure where this was going. I just had a growing suspicion. She had an occasional adventuresome side, and my past experience was to go with it and reap what came. It was always rewarding for us both.
"You'll have to support me on this," she said, looking at me carefully. "You will have to promise you won't make me feel guilty for helping your friend. 'Cuz we are going to work on Dave's problem about guilt and sex."
I promised, and I was suddenly very curious, and just a little apprehensive.
But she didn't stop long enough for me to filter anything. She focused all of her attention on Dave, who was still sitting across from her. She had already quietly moved her chair over a couple of feet, so that the coffee table was no longer between them, and she lined up her beautiful body square facing him, and crossed her elegant legs. She was wearing a dress. "So Dave," she said, "imagine you are looking at a very attractive woman." She paused to let that work in, and folded her legs very slowly and deliberately the other way. I watched Dave's eyes follow every move. "And lets say you almost immediately start to have dirty little thoughts about her."
She smiled at him. She was at her seductive best. And he, for all his hangups, was an easy mark. Dave visited from out of town, so we didn't see him often. But we both always remarked, after he left, how obvious it was that he found her extremely attractive, and when he phoned between visits he always seemed most eager to speak with her, not necessarily his old friend, me. Looking at her now, I can't say I blame him.
"Lets say later that day or the next day you are ..", and she paused for effect, "... masturbating – don't blush now, Dave – you are masturbating and thinking about that attractive woman." She kept her beautiful eyes fixed on his, and she smiled so sweetly as she said it. And she unfolded her legs. "Would that make you feel guilty?"
"Yes. No." he said, "Afterwards". He said it very softly, in a trance, and he stared down to where her thighs disappeared under her dress.
"What about that would make you feel guilty? The fact that you'd be touching your cock? That's pleasure, and you have done it all your life without it falling off. The fact that you are thinking about her while you do it? That doesn't hurt her. She might even be flattered if she knew." She paused again. She opened her legs very deliberately.
"Dave, have you ever masturbated thinking about me?"
"Oh God," he confessed to her, "maybe ... I have."
"See I am flattered. I like that. I don't want you feeling guilty about that. I want to know that you feel really, really good when you cum thinking about me. In fact I insist on it. I want those to be your best cums."
There was a stunned silence, as all three of us listened to her boldness echo in our heads. But not for long, because she was on a mission. "Dave, sex is a gift, guilt is a curse, and the two should have nothing to do with one another. Do you feel good when you cum thinking about me? Right in the moment when your cock boils over and you are imagining it's buried deep inside me?"
"Yes" he said after little wait.
"I like that. I like that a lot. Darling," she turned to me, "do you also feel good when you cum thinking about me?"
