"How was your weekend?"
"Awkward."
Clearing of throat, which was her way of saying, "go on."
"My cousin, Caroline, visited with her husband and kids."
Clearing of throat.
"I don't think I want to go into it, because you're going to think I'm a perv. Basically, they came over to hang out in my pool, as they do a few times every summer. It was fun to watch them romp around."
"Why would I think you a perv?"
"Well, I fucked Caroline, and, when I think about it, all I get is an erection without regret."
Clearing of throat.
"Frankly, that's how most of my erections go. I only get regret when I'm soft. When I'm hard, regret doesn't occur to me. Someone should do a study."
"Is Caroline the cousin who was Miss Teen San Diego or some such?"
I sat quietly and shut my eyes. It was my session, and if I wanted to waste it in silence, that was entirely my prerogative.
I flashed back 20 years earlier. At the time, Caroline was 18, as was I. Our moms were sisters, but we lived 100 miles apart and generally only saw each other when we visited the grandparents. Both of us had younger brothers, and the get-togethers were fun. The only tension was that our moms would occasionally snipe at each other about lifestyle. Her mom was a stay-at-home fundamentalist Christian whose two daughters wound up being Trump-supporting, home-schooling folk who distrusted Fox News as being too mainstream. My mom was a hippy and never married my dad.
I listened to my therapist clear her throat, again. "David, where did you go?"
"Ah, back to when it happened."
We were both headed to college in the fall, but, in the meantime, we were at the grandparents's house for a few days in July. One thing we did, every visit, was head to the beach, an hour away.
As usual, it would be a long, hot day for the five grandkids, my grandfather, and my mom, who was the designated driver for the event. We needed the driver since grandpa, bless his soul, would spend the day drinking a whole lot of beer. Not sure why they didn't ask one of the 18 year olds to drive. Mysteries abound in the world.
So, yes, Caroline would indeed win a couple of beauty pageants the following year, which I always thought was odd given that those pageants were all about sexualization and objectification, and her family was deeply evangelical. People are full of contradictions.
"Can you say more about the, uhm, experience with your cousin?"
"It had to do with sun screen and the air conditioner."
I opened my eyes to see my therapist smile. I knew she'd smile--she's a sucker for lack of clarity, so I try to toss in mystery when I can. It's also fun that I see a therapist with the sort of earnest wholesomeness that tends to appeal to my inner perv. But I digress.
"We'd been at the beach all day. As we got to the car, the three younger kids were edgy and unpleasant. Grandpa was drunk, as usual, and immediately fell asleep in the front seat. My mom, the hippy, was getting ready to drive, and Caroline and I were sweaty but fine. The cranky, dehydrated, sunburnt children refused to touch each other, and the air conditioner in the car was broken, and the long and short of it was that Caroline sat on my lap in the back seat.
"Ah," said my therapist.
I liked it when she said, "ah," especially when the assumption was wrong, or at least incomplete. Spoiler alert: I didn't fuck Caroline in the car, though maybe I did. Though I really should know better, I like to fuck the cracks wherever I find them.
"So, the future Miss San Diego sat on my lap for the hour drive back to our grandparents' house. Since it was an especially hot and humid afternoon, even for south Texas, and we were already sweaty from the beach, we elected to stick with our swim suits rather than put on actual clothes. Hers was a tangerine bikini, mine was a speedo, which was my go-to bathing suit since I'd been on my high school swim team and was in terrific shape."
Clearing of throat.
"So we didn't have much choice. The younger kids had already been crying and acting like total assholes, so we tried to do the right thing."
"Uh huh."
"And Caroline was--and is--a hard core, fundamentalist, Young Life devotee. At the time of the drive, she'd never been kissed. I knew these things. We were cousins. And when she sat on my lap, covered in about 2 ounces of tangerine fabric, I thought I was in heaven. Yeah, we were both sweaty and tired, and we were both bummed that grandpa was drunk, and the younger kids were annoying, and my mom--the hippy--was a really slow and haphazard driver, but I had this clear sense that it was completely okay that I had this throbbing erection, because even though my hard-on was wedged between my cousin's ass cheeks, there was no way she'd notice because she was just too religious."
I liked watching for my therapist's reaction. Those reactions were subtle, since she was a trained professional, but I think she liked the sex stories as long as I used grown-up words like erection and ejaculation.
"So," my therapist said, "your view was that your cousin wouldn't have felt your big erection because she was religious."
"Yes."
"And this was a month before you entered Harvard?"
"Ha," I laughed. One totally fun thing about therapy is the freedom to say what you want. "First off, I never said I had a 'big' erection. To me, it was the same size as the rest of my erections."
i thought to myself that, at 18, it didn't take much for me to get an erection. The wind could blow, a commercial could come on, a cloud could sail by. Bingo. An erection. Now, I'm a math kind of guy, and I own a ruler, and even if it's a little ambiguous about where one is supposed to start measuring... the side of one's dick near the abdomen, or the base, and does one search for the root that begins within the scrotum or start at the scrotum...
"Doctor, I do modestly think I'm fairly big, like 80th percentile big, maybe 90th percentile big, but that's not really the point, though I do appreciate the vote of confidence. Second, the line about my "entering Harvard" is a bit of a countertransference enactment if you ask me--you act like I should be smart enough to know that attendance at an evangelical fundamentalist church shouldn't prevent a young woman from feeling her cousin's big old hard-on, especially when the two of them are nearly naked and the aforementioned erection is wedged between her tangerine-covered ass cheeks."
"Okay, David. You're in the car."
I liked this banter, though I sometimes wondered if my therapist knew what she was doing.
"So Caroline's sitting on my lap, and--having no alternative--my arms encircle her waist. Her little brother and my brother are also in the back seat, duly separated because of salty sunburn. For the purposes of this story, they are really tired, and fall completely asleep for the hour that Carolyn rides me during our trip home. In the front seat, my other brother splits the difference between drunk grandpa and hippy mom."
Clearing of throat.
"We engage in some soft chit chat. All the windows are open. Remember the air conditioner is shot. Grandpa's drinking had other social consequences, including a failure to follow up in basic responsibilities like fixing his car's air conditioner. And with the wind blustering in, it was loud, and the only other awake person in the car was my mom, who'd found a radio station that played her music--so she was singing along with all the greatest hits."
Clearing of throat.
"Grandpa has drunk 18 of the 24 beers he'd bought that morning, and the remaining six pack is sitting in front of us, so I decide to start drinking one. While I sipped my Budweiser, I took to asking Caroline about her life goals, and her friends from school, and what she liked about church. While we sweated and my hard-on throbbed between her butt cheeks, I gradually worked up the nerve to start rubbing her skin."
Clearing of throat.
"I started by rubbing her stomach. As you know, I've been naked with many women, but Caroline had the best stomach I've ever rubbed. She was sweaty, and she smelled like the suntan lotion from those days, and I rubbed her stomach casually, and then rubbed her thighs casually. Like no big deal. We were cousins. When she didn't complain, I just moved my hands up and down, basically rubbing anything that wasn't covered in the tangerine bikini."
"And what happened?"
