“All right,” Jarvis said, smiling gently. “Let me go back a little. You said that you think that losing your brother who was your best friend left a hole in you that you tried to fill with first, by marrying the girl he was seeing at the time of his death, and then you met Josiah and Sammie, and they became your family, too.”
Nodding, Denny said, “Right, and that since my first marriage failed, I practically jumped at the chance to try fix that part of my life when I met Stacey.”
“And that didn’t work out, either.”
“No.” Denny sat up. “Do you mind if I walk a bit while we speak?”
“Not at all, be my guest.”
He started to wander between the furniture, ending up at the windows. “When I met Kristin, that was pretty much when I thought this was it.”
“When you got married, who was your best man?”
“With Janet, it was a mutual friend. With Stacey, it was Josiah. With Kristin, Josiah couldn’t attend because his then-boyfriend had a family emergency, so Sammie was my best person.”
“Right.” Jarvis hummed thoughtfully. “How has your sex life been with your wives?”
Denny turned his head abruptly. “What?” When Dr. Jarvis raised an eyebrow at him, looking amused, Denny rolled his eyes. “With Janet, it was nice at first, then a chore, and then nonexistent. Stacey was young and wild and wanted to experiment a lot.”
“How was that, the experimenting and being with someone different from your first wife?”
“It was… interesting? No, I mean itwasinteresting. But it became more of a show than actual intimacy.”
“And with Kristin?”
“It was more about affection. Not at all regular, either. She has endometriosis, so a lot of the time sex would’ve been painful for her. So there was rarely any penetrative sex and the rest was, as I said, affectionate.”
“More about the mental side than the physical?”
“I guess.”
Jarvis wrote down something. “Have you felt like you wanted more sex than you were getting in any of your relationships?”
Denny thought for a while. “Not really. I think I always thought I had a low sex drive?” He caught the hanging chair and sat in it gingerly, then moved his body back until his feet didn’t touch the ground. It felt weird, exhilarating. He wondered when he’d last been on a swing.
Jarvis got up and grabbed a chair from by the wall so he could sit closer to Denny instead of the other side of the room. “Have you always considered yourself as heterosexual?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Here’s something for you to think about. My sister is bisexual, and she only realized that in her late forties.” Jarvis looked at him and added, “I do have her permission to talk about this, by the way.”
Something in Denny’s chest eased before it really had time to feel uncomfortable. “Okay.”
“She once told me that before she met her first female partner, she thought she was ‘default-straight.’”
Denny frowned. “You mean, like that’s what we’re taught how things are?”
Jarvis beamed. “Exactly. So many times, when someone comes to me and I begin to unravel whatever their problem is, I ask them this; do you think you are heterosexual, or do you think you just haven’t truly looked beyond the possibility of being something other than default-straight?”
Denny could hear the bloodwhooshin his head, as if his blood pressure had jumped through the roof. Suddenly, his heart was beating too fast.
“I-I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’ve always….” Flashes of the closeness between him and Josiah ran through his mind. Closeness that he hadn’t really had with any of his wives. Not to that degree anyway. “Well… fuck.” Denny glanced at Jarvis, who was smiling again.
“And now here’s the thing, I know you said that your relationship with your best friends has always been completely platonic. Has it been the same with both of them?”
“No, not really. I mean we’re all incredibly close, but sometimes Sammie doesn’t like touch and Josiah almost always does, so….”
“Does this change whenever Josiah is in a relationship or whenever you are?”
And that right there was the crux of it, wasn’t it? Josiah was always more affectionate when he was single. So on some level that must’ve meant that Josiah didn’t feel comfortable being as physically close to Denny when he was dating someone.
His mind was spinning with this new information. He thought of what Kristin and Sammie had said, what they’d implied, and with a terrifying clarity, Denny realized what had gone wrong.
“He’s in love with me, isn’t he?”
