Lust (3 page)

“Have you lived here long?”

She nodded.

I needed a question that would make her voice her answer. “How long?” I implored her to answer with my eyes, even though she still refused to meet them.

“Since I was eleven.”

“Why were you sitting in the rain?” I shouldn’t have asked that. I wanted to stick to the normal conversations that two people who just meet ask. But I couldn’t. I yearned to know why she was sitting on the curb outside of my office in the pouring rain. Usually, I was better at leading into questions, finding answers to some by nothing more than observation, but Ivy had me losing my patience and suffering from a desperate need to know everything immediately.

“I like the rain,” was all she said. It irritated the fuck out of me because it wasn’t a real answer and nothing bothered me more than deference.

“Why?” I prodded in a harsher voice, hoping it would illicit a real answer from her.

“It drowns out the noises. It makes me not feel so alone. I don’t know; I just like it.” She looked down at her shaking hands and nowhere else.

What in the hell was wrong with this girl? I needed to know. More so than normal. I didn’t only want to fix her sexual issues; I wanted to know what went on in that head of hers. I needed to know what she meant by noises and feeling alone. I could only explain that need by relating. I found myself connecting to her and I wanted to know why. I, too, hated silence and it seemed to haunt me. I hated the thoughts and sounds that ran though my head when things were too quiet. Did she experience the same things I had? Or was it worse? Whatever it was, it made her who she is, and I had an unnerving need to explore what it was.

“Are you often alone? Don’t you have friends?” Like I was one to talk. Aside from the contacts in my phone, which I only used when I had a need to get laid or see my own therapist, I didn’t talk to anyone, either. But I wouldn’t say I felt lonely. I wanted it that way. After all, I chose to be that way. I didn’t think Ivy chose to be the way she was.

“I have friends. In fact, one of my best friends is Ben. We met in high school.”

“Tell me about him.” I felt ecstatic at her small offering of information. Then, the need I had for her to help fill the silence that was threatening to suffocate me trumped that small victory.

“We were sitting at a table outside in the courtyard during lunch. It was him and his friends, and me and mine. But our friends were mutual friends, which is why we were at the same table. Anyway, he was sorting M&Ms, pulling out all of the red ones. I had never spoken to him before, but decided to ask why he did that. He said the red ones tasted different. I argued with him that they all tasted the same. So he pulled out a brown one and I ate it. Then he gave me a red one; I just knew I was about to prove him wrong. But as soon as the red candy coating began to melt on my tongue, he knew he won. We became instant friends after that.”

“That’s a good story,” I said, knowing she had more to say and hoped she would continue. She had barely spoken since she walked into my office, and suddenly, it was as if she could talk for hours. It made me wonder who this Ben guy was and what had happened to him.

“We ended up going to a party together at my friend’s house. We spent the whole night talking and realized we had so many things in common. Like… our dads both cheated on our moms, we both loved pickles, and we hated Halloween. Neither one of us liked to wear shoes and our favorite kind of foods to eat were spicy foods. We were best friends from then on out.”

“And it never turned into anything else?”

“Well, he was the one that took my virginity. We flipped a coin for it. Sounds lame now, but at the time, I was ready to see what it was like. He was the only one I trusted to give it to. So we let fate handle it and flipped a coin.”

It seemed like an odd story. One that didn’t really match the kind of person I had met. It started to make me even more curious about her past and what she had been through. I was convinced that she had been abused at one point in her life, but I couldn’t even begin to guess when or how. Maybe she wasn’t molested as a small child like I had initially thought. Maybe it was something that happened to her in her late teens. It was certainly possible.

We got to her apartment and she got out of the car, saying she’d see me the next day.

“Ivy,” I said, stopping her from closing the door all the way. “Do you drive?”

“No. I don’t have a car.”

“Then let me pick you up tomorrow for our session. It’s a late time slot and I would feel much better if you’d let me drive you. I don’t feel comfortable with you walking.”

“Nah, that’s okay. Thanks, though.”

“Ivy,” I called out again, but in a stern tone to make her halt her movements. “I’ll be here at six forty-five. Really, I insist.”

Her eyes were downcast again and the barely-there smile was now absent from her face. It was as if she had turned into a different person when she spoke of Ben, but the mentioning our session brought her back to reality. Without saying another word, she nodded her head and closed the door.

Who the fuck was this girl?

The moment I walked into my laundry room from my garage, I stripped my soaking wet clothes from my body. As soon as Ivy was out of the car, I turned the heat back off. I couldn’t take the feeling of the hot air on my skin any longer and immediately welcomed the icy relief. I also cranked up the music. Nothing spun me out of control like the mixture of silence and heat.

I threw the clothes into the washing machine and headed to my bedroom across the house, stark naked. Being naked didn’t bother me. It never had. I actually felt more comfortable without clothes on than I did in them. It came in handy in my practice, when I had to be naked in front of a client. It also helped the other person feel more comfortable. Observing me acting confident had a way of easing their worries.

I’m sure women have looked at me and thought I was arrogant, but that’s not the case. I can look into a mirror like anyone else, and I see exactly what they do. I see what everyone else sees when they look at me. A tall, tan man. A muscular build from sports and working out. Lines and definition running along my body and disappearing below the waistband of my pants. A smooth chest with a dark trail of hair running a line from just below my belly button to the short, trimmed hair around my dick. My short, dark hair that sometimes looks messy depending on how many times my fingers ran through it, and my eyes so dark they almost look black. I see what they see. And I’m smart enough to know I’m good looking. Especially when I’ve been told that my entire life. So if that makes me arrogant, then so be it. But I didn’t look at myself and depict anything special. There was nothing exceptional about my image. Trust me, there was nothing special about what was behind it, either. Only what I allowed others see.

Putting on a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else, I went into the kitchen to pour a shot of whiskey. I downed the first one with a hiss and then started to pour another when thoughts of Ivy once again flooded my brain. I tried to shake them since dropping her off at home, but I couldn’t. So I placed the bottle back on the granite countertop and headed over to my computer on the kitchen table.

I searched her name in social media sites. It was harder than I thought; I wasn’t expecting to find that many people with the name Ivy Jaymes. I had thought it to be an original name before the rows of Ivy Jaymes had popped up. I found one and knew it was her. The only reason I knew it was her was because under occupation, she had it listed as “blogger.”

Her page was filled with posts of books. The last post was a five-star review for a book titled
Between Friends
by the author Amanda Cowen. I read her review and then clicked on the Amazon link she added to it. A page was opened up right to the book. It was only ninety-nine cents, so I decided to buy it. Little did I know, I would have to own something to read it on. E-books were quite foreign to me. I didn’t really know of their existence or how they worked. I had to spend a little time doing research about them and how to buy one. Turns out, it’s rather simple.

So I grabbed my iPad and downloaded the Kindle app. Within seconds of setting it up, the book I had purchased was right there in front of me. If I were more of a reader, I would probably have enjoyed the instantaneousness of it. Maybe Ivy would make me read more. Who knew?

But instead of calling Alyssa, instead of drinking more whiskey, I sat down on the couch and began to read the book that had Ivy raving in great detail of the emotions it pulled from her. I read exactly two paragraphs before I felt the hair on the back on my neck stand on end. But I couldn’t stop there. I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the first chapter.

Who the hell was Ivy? I had no clue. I had read an entire chapter about a girl, and a boy named Ben. I read about how he sorted M&Ms and made her eat a brown and red one to taste the difference. I read about how much this girl and Ben had in common, all the way down to their love of spicy food. The chapter went on to their conversation of sex, and their decision to flip a coin to determine if they would fuck each other.

What. The. Fuck. Just. Happened?

My head was spinning as I came to the forgone conclusion.

She had made the whole thing up. There was no real Ben. No real party. No real flip of a coin.

I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into by agreeing to take her on as a client, but the more my thoughts wandered, the more intrigued I became. She lied for a reason. And it wasn’t just a lie. She told me about people, friends of hers that only existed in a fictional book. It wasn’t as if she made up these people. No. Someone else had. Someone else created these characters and wrote their lives out in a book. And Ivy adopted it.

What would make someone do that? Had she done this before?

I wondered if maybe she had a mental illness. That was the only thing I could come up with. But in any regards, I would have to wait until seven o’clock the next day to figure it out. I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything alone.

I should have called Alyssa. I needed a good fuck, but I couldn’t with Ivy on my mind. I wanted to drink more, if only to lessen the obsessive thoughts that ran rampant through my head. But that would only do more harm than good—I knew that from personal experience. So instead of letting myself go by immersing in whiskey or pussy, I carried my iPad to bed with me and finished reading the book. I figured that way, if she tried spinning any more tales of Ben, I would know if they came from the book or not. I also thought about going through her list of reviews and checking those books out as well. If she used this one, I wouldn’t doubt that she’d use others, too. But I didn’t have the time to read all of the books she had reviewed. There were a shitload of them.

*****

The next day went by slowly. It dragged. All I wanted was for it to be seven so I could talk with Ivy. I needed to know why she had lied. I had to find out why she came to me in the first place. If she had a mental illness, I wouldn’t be able to help her. And that was something I needed to know before we continued with our sessions the way I planned.

Luckily, I didn’t have too many patients on the calendar. Most of my day was filled with personal things. I had lunch with my cousin, which happened once a month. It wasn’t something I looked forward to, but she insisted on it. She said I needed it. Except, I didn’t. She just refused to acknowledge that part.

I was thirty-four years old. I didn’t need my cousin to sit down with me for an hour every month and watch me eat. Because that’s pretty much what she did. She’d ask me questions about my life and I gave her the least amount of information that I could between hurried bites of food. It annoyed her, I know. But it didn’t stop her from scheduling lunch once again for the following month.

After lunch, I had an appointment with my own psychologist. It wasn’t that I necessarily needed to go, but I started years ago and never stopped going. Most of the time, we talked about work. I found it easy to talk to someone that knew kind of what it was that I did for a living. He never openly admitted that he disagreed with my line of work, but I could read between the lines. He believed anyone could work through any problem by sitting on a couch and discussing it. I didn’t see it that way. I believed that sometimes people physically had to work out their issues. It was a sink or swim mentality. If you can’t swim, jump in a pool once without water wings; survival will kick in and you’ll learn to swim.

And if those issues that needed to be overcome were sex related, then sitting on an old couch wouldn’t solve shit. But we silently agreed to disagree on the topic. However, it didn’t stop me from talking about my work with him. Most of the time, it was strictly shooting-the-shit kind of talk, but that time, it was about Ivy.

I had asked him what would cause someone to lie about their life. He didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Self-esteem issues. Hiding from one’s past. Lack of self-worth. The list went on. Since I didn’t really know much about Ivy, any of those reasons could suit her. It made me want the clock to read seven o’clock that much more so I could know more about her. It had quickly become a dying need to know. I had never experienced that kind of irrational need before.

At five thirty, I had a basketball game. I wasn’t friends with any of the guys from the court, but I still showed up every Tuesday at five thirty to play. They didn’t mind because I was rather good at the sport. I had played it most of my life. It was another form of therapy for me, not to mention, exercise.

I always played skins. The feeling of my shirt stuck to my skin from sweat made me revert back to the illness inside of me. I couldn’t stand that feeling. So I was always skins, and I was always captain. And… I always won. I took the game seriously, much like I took everything in life. It may have been called a game, but I played it as anything but. It was a form of release for me, and that my competiveness spirit didn’t allow me to take lightly.

Once I toweled off and put my dry tee shirt back on, I headed over to pick up Ivy. My heart raced with anticipation the entire drive to her apartment, which looked as though it should have been condemned years before. The thoughts and feelings that ran through me were unfamiliar.

Part of me was mad. She had lied to me when I was there to help her and it fucking pissed me off.

Part of me was confused. She could have told me anything, but decided to take on the life of a character from a book she had recently read, and that had me questioning so many things.

Part of me was intrigued. Something about Ivy spoke to me. It was as if we were born from the same darkness. Lived in the same shadows and harbored the same emptiness. Her eyes, void of emotion, made me want to know everything about her. Out of all the emotions that coursed through my body, intrigue was the strongest.

She ran to the car before I even had it in park. I felt relieved that I didn’t need to go knocking on doors until I found hers; she was outside and waiting for me as I pulled in. Normally, I would have taken that as impressive punctuality, but after my revelation the night before, it made me wonder if she even lived there. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that had been a lie, too.

“Where are we going?” she asked in a quiet yet scared voice. She noticed we weren’t heading in the direction of my office and that seemed to have worried her.
Good
. I had other things planned for our evening.

“Have you eaten yet?”

She shook her head slowly as if she debated her answer. It was a simple yes or no question. Either she had eaten or she didn’t. So her slow reaction made me question her even more. Why would she need to think if she’s eaten or not? Did she not remember eating? Was she hiding something like an eating disorder? Or was she simply worried about my change of plan?

“Good. We’re going to eat. I’m starving.”

I expected a response, but I didn’t get one. She just sat there, staring out the windshield in silence.

Surrogate dates never happened that early in therapy, but ours wasn’t a date. No. The entire reason for going out to eat was to get some answers from her. If she wanted to act like a scared little kitten, then that was exactly how I’d treat her. How do you catch a scared kitten? You corner them. You trap them.

The hole-in-the-wall sports bar was rather crowded for a Tuesday evening. I could feel Ivy tense up next to me as we were escorted to a booth against the wall. I made sure to keep a close eye on her, watching for anything she might subconsciously do that could tell me something about her.

“Do you suffer from social anxiety?” I asked as soon as we were seated.

“No,” she answered with a shake of her head.

“So being in a crowded room doesn’t bother you?”

“Not at all.”

I thought for a moment, pretending to look over the menu. “Do you go to places like that often?”

“Sometimes.” Her answers were short, noncommittal, and quiet as her eyes moved quickly around the room. It was almost as if she were searching for something. An exit maybe? Her tone was convincing as she answered my questions, but her body language conveyed something completely different. Everything she did, every action she made screamed social anxiety, so why not just admit to it? Maybe she had never been diagnosed with it. Maybe it wasn’t something she had ever given any thought to. The explanations were endless; I knew I had to continue my pursuit in order to find the answers. She wouldn’t easily give me any and if she did, I couldn’t trust that she was being honest.

“With Ben?” I pressed, testing her on her lies from the night before.