“Maybe not. Maybe it wouldn’t be right for you. Maybe you need to have trust between yourself and the guy you’re hooking up with,” Fia said.
Yet again, all she could think of was Justice. She felt like the way Bix was staring at her meant that she was thinking of him too. Bix who had jumped right on suggesting she have a baby with Justice like it wouldn’t make her feel like her face had been dipped into a bowl of lava.
She had been envious, once upon a time, that those women knew something about her that she didn’t.
Now the image of what he might look like hovered at the edge of her consciousness and it made her want to turn her brain off altogether. Made her wish she didn’t have an imagination.
“I don’t know. I might have to put a pin in that. Right now I’m not really even sure that I could go out and attract a guy.”
Which was its own raw-feeling wound. It had just left her not feeling attractive.
“Men do not care about attractiveness.” Bix said that with an entirely straight face. “Do you know how many men get arrested for putting their penises into weird things? A man doesn’t cheat on you because you’re not attractive, he cheats on you because of something in himself. Beginning and end of story. That’s the bottom line. Something was wrong with him. He didn’t want to deal with it. He was probably running scared from the next step you were taking. Hell, seems likely to me. You know I read a lot of self-improvement books. If you have an issue with your partner, you have to talk to them. So either he had an issue with your sex life and he didn’t address it, which is still on him, or he didn’t want it all, and he took his own issues and projected them onto you.”
They all stared at Bix. An unlikely philosopher.
“I guess so,” Rue said.
“I know so,” said Bix. “What you do after this should be about you. About what you want. If you want to go out and tear it up, by all means, go out and tear it up. But it has to be about what you want, not about what you think you need to do feel better about yourself.”
“I’m planning on jumping in a pond,” she said.
“What?” Arizona asked.
“That’s my plan for tomorrow. I’m jumping in a pond. I’m facing discomfort.”
“I would personally go have sex,” said Fia. “But you do you.”
She was feeling scratchy and a little bit threatened. “I just feel like sex is overrated. So yes, I am aware that I’m having a little bit of cognitive dissonance. I want to feel pretty, but at the same time I don’t think going out and hooking up is going to get me anything. Sex has just never been that fun for me.”
All three women were looking at her like she had grown another head. “Well, it’s true. I don’t, you know, I don’t... eh...climaxthat easily with a partner. Or at least not with the one that I’ve had.”
“Bad form, Asher,” Fia said, frowning.
“It’s not really his fault. I never talked to him about it. I never said that I wanted anything else. I was happy to give it to him when he was in the mood and keep going through my to-do list in my head.”
“No,” Arizona said, frowning deeply. “No. I don’t like that.”
“Well, it’s just how it was. I wasn’t upset about it or anything. It just works that way for me, so if I go outand I try to make myself feel better by proving that men are attracted to me, I still feel like I’m going to be missing something.”
“But you never wanted to find it before,” Arizona pointed out, and Rue didn’t like that. She felt a little bit seen.
The truth was, she took great pride in the fact that she had never fully lost her head over Asher. That she had never fully lost her head over any relationship. And the idea of doing something to change that wasn’t comfortable.
She didn’t want to do anything that might turn her into one of her parents. People who followed every random urge that popped up inside of them rather than doing the right things for the people they loved.
“I think that’s the real problem. You have to decide what you want. Do you want to feel attractive, or do you want a man to make you scream,” Bix asked.
“Nobody actually screams,” Rue said.
Fia, Bix and Arizona all shared a look that made her deeply uncomfortable. But she couldn’t deny they had a point. If she was going to get out of this pit then she really needed to decide what she wanted. She had told Justice she was curious why somebody would give up what they had for sex. But that was because she hadn’t thought of sex as anything beyond an intimacy they shared in their committed relationship. It hadn’t been anything wildly pleasurable for her. In fact, it hadn’t been about her at all.
Did she want it to be?
She thought of Justice again, and she felt something stir low within her. That was just uncomfortable.
“Well, I guess that is one gift of this,” she said. “I really just need to think about what I have to do for myself.”
She was unencumbered by a lot of things right at the moment. She didn’t have Asher; she didn’t even have her own house. She would have the yarn store to go back to soon, but she didn’t have to work for a little bit.
