She’d come three times in a row while I had just kept moving like an automaton, slamming into her like an unstoppable machine. I fucked her through it like a good lover, and then, just as my thrusts became more violent and impatient, I failed to come.
Fucking again.
It had been happening—or failing to happen—for weeks now.
My body was no longer cooperating with me, refusing to respond to my basic human need to experience a simple orgasm. I felt arousal, I felt pleasure, and I could still get an erection. In fact, it lasted a long time. But whenever I got right to the edge of an explosion, right when I was about torelease all my frustrations, right as I was tensing up and preparing to give myself over to those fleeting seconds of physical pleasure, my body would throw up a block.
I could feel the rush of rapture all down my spine, and I hoped, as always, it would keep going, straight to the place where I needed it the most. Instead, it bounced back, leaving me unsatisfied.
I sighed in resignation and pulled off the condom, which I always wore with everyone.
Except for Babygirl.
I got up out of the bed, feeling suddenly cold, and threw the empty condom into the trash can. No drips, not a trace of semen. I ran both hands over my face and through my messy hair before letting out a growl of frustration that made Jennifer flinch.
My blond lolled weakly on the pool house’s bed, studying me. I was starting to get seriously concerned because nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, and I hadn’t talked about it with anyone because…
Because I was ashamed.
That feeling of shame had been suffocating me for days, keeping me from confronting the problem or confiding in anyone.
“You didn’t come…” Jennifer noted, like that wasn’t clear to me as well. They’d all noticed it by now, not just her. Though, for the women, not much had changed. In fact, as my stamina increased, so too did the duration of the sessions, allowing me to make them climax several times in a row. The only problem was me and the desperate race toward orgasm that my body refused to let me complete.
My lovers were satisfied, but they began to doubt their own appeal in the bedroom. Several of them had asked me if they were doing a good enough job with the preliminaries because they felt so awkward and helpless. They even apologized to me, upset and overcome with a stress that was solely the fault of me and my inability to come.
Though they tried their best to make me feel good, nothing improved the difficult situation in which I had suddenly found myself. I just couldn’t feel that spike of intense sexual pleasure. No ecstasy. No nothing.
“I know, I know, for fuck’s sake!” I snapped at Jennifer, raising my voice, and she flinched.
My mood had also deteriorated lately. Everyone went in fear of me because I was full of animal aggression, especially right after sex. I wasn’t sure if I could attribute it to recent events in general or only to my new dysfunction.
I stalked naked around the bedroom, searching for my pack of Winstons. I could feel Jen’s eyes on me, watching my back and my ass, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t shy, certainly not prudish.
In all my history with women, I’d never had any kind of emotional connection. Simply put, it made me feel good to force them to submit to me, to satisfy them, and watch them fall apart while I fucked them.
And that was all.
Showing off my naked body was never a problem for me. What was a problem was displaying any vulnerability or losing control. I held my control tight in a protective fist and now I was watching it slip away all because my body had decided to ignore my will and start doing whatever it wanted.
The Boy, the brain, and the body were no longer connected. The last time they had been was when I last took Selene, right before she left for Detroit. That was the last fantastic, freeing, all-encompassing orgasm I had experienced. Every time I relived that moment, I paused to savor the sublime feeling at the end of it all, the one that had left me drained of all energy and completely satisfied.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how good I had felt when I was inside her. I was welcomed. Right. Safe.
I felt like a man.
A man who wasn’t, for the first time, doing something wrong, immoral, or perverse.
Then, I’d fucked up once again on Halloween. I did something stupid and made Babygirl run away from me and then get into a near-fatal crash. The only time I’d seen her at the hospital, she leveled that crystalline gaze at me, prepared to defend her dignity against the pathetic attempts I’d made to convince her of what I was.
I had gone into that room with the knowledge that she was going tospit poison at me and that she had every reason to do so. It was ridiculous, then, what I felt during that tense conversation: pain at the thought of no longer having any place in her life because I had done everything I could to push her away and the relief that I might have actually done the right thing.
I still wasn’t going to apologize to her, though.
If I’d done that, it would erase everything I had tried to show her about my true self. Selene needed to hold on to those memories of us to keep hating me. So she would stay away from me and wouldn’t be involved in the clusterfuck that was my life.
Maybe I hadn’t gone about it in the best way, but I only had one goal: to protect her.
I wanted her to go back to her life, back to her charmed, brightly colored universe. A world that had no space for the cruelty of human beings. Selene had no idea what people were capable of. She couldn’t see the world through my eyes. In fact, I’d often wished I could look at the world through hers. She really was a fairy: tiny but with an enviable strength. Her heart had the capacity for the biggest, most beautiful feelings. Feelings not everyone was able to experience.
