The Bedtime Tales of Be287m

Friends and Benefits, Chapter Twenty-four

I slumped onto the couch.  With Sherri’s departure, that made three.  Three women who’d walked out on me.  Rejected me.

Although, to be fair, Sherri hadn’t really rejected me the same way as Sharon and Tina.  She’d just pulled back.  That could be her as much as it was me.

It still hurt.

But I didn’t hurt as much as I did before I’d met Sherri.  She was right—telling my story had helped.  I could see how things hadn’t entirely been my fault.  That didn’t mean I was blameless, but there was plenty of blame to go around.  Certainly Sharon’s role looked a little different now, rather than how it’d looked when I’d first called Sherri.

As did Tina’s.  In hindsight, I was embarrassed at how clueless I’d been.  She’d clearly fallen in love with me while I’d been living in Tucson, but I’d been blind.  Rather, I’d been too busy looking to get out of Tucson to really see her.  I’d tagged her as a too young, wedded-to-Arizona ‘friend with benefits’ to pay attention to who she really was, deep down.  She deserved better, much better than the way I’d treated her.

And there was that phrase, ‘friends with benefits,’ again.  I shook my head ruefully.  I didn’t know what it meant anymore.  I’d done more sexually with Sherri than with Sharon, but would be hard pressed to call us ‘friends.’  The word was too general to really mean anything to me.

Words, words, words.  Hamlet’s rant about words was certainly on target.  They didn’t mean much and were easily misunderstood.

I snorted softly.  They weren’t the only things that could be misunderstood.  Sherri had found me distraught and drunk on wine and jumped to the conclusion that I was suicidal.  No such chance.  In ‘to be or not to be,’ I was definitely ‘to be.’  I didn’t have Hamlet’s indecisions, despite joking about it from time to time.

I froze and my heart pounded.  It wasn’t a joke.  I did have Hamlet’s indecisions.  What had Sherri said—my over-thinking is what made me unattractive?  That I needed to be more decisive—take more pages from Allen’s book and just go for it?

Oh, God.  What a horrible thought.  I was Hamlet!

I’d first met Shakespeare’s indecisive prince in junior high.  I’d gotten a book on the Danish astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, which I’d devoured again and again.  I loved the idea of Kepler boldly proposing new theories that revolutionized astronomy.  I’d said as much to my dad one night, as we huddled hear the telescope, waiting for some clouds to clear so we could look at Jupiter.

My father had smiled at my enthusiasm.  “More bold than his fellow Dane, then.  Hamlet.”

Seeing my confusion, he explained the basics of Shakespeare’s tale.  The next day, he loaned me his college text for me to read myself.  I struggled with it, but finished it out of stubbornness, more than anything.  Hamlet was a wimp, I decided.  He wasn’t heroic like Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk.  My father had laughed at that observation and told me to read Henry V.  I loved it, and I loved Prince Hal and the way he’d ruled and won the decisive battle of Agincourt.  By then, the Elizabethan English wasn’t too tough, and so I read another play.  Over the next few months, I finished the entire tome, making me the only twelve-year-old I knew to have read Shakespeare’s entire canon.

I’d dreamed about being Prince Hal, but somewhere along the line, I’d turned into Prince Hamlet.

Now I was disgusted with myself.  And the disgust drove out the self-pity.

No more vacillating.  I needed to act.

It might not change anything with the women, but it’d be better than going quietly into the night.  It might end up being the Alamo instead of Agincourt, but better to go down fighting.  It’s what Allen would do.  It’s what I needed to do.

So what was first?  If I was going to fix things with the women, I needed to start somewhere.

First was getting off this couch.  A little exercise would help me shake the tenseness in my body and might even help me think more clearly.

I threw on my coat and decided to walk down to the 7-Eleven.  It was about two miles round trip, which ought to be plenty.  I locked up my apartment, and headed down the same steps Sherri had taken just a little while before.

At first, my thoughts swirled and flitted from subject to subject.  But I’d done this circling before and quickly recognized the old ruts.  I needed new ground, even if I just ended up making new ruts there.

So what would be new?

Sherri was new, I realized.  There hadn’t been time to create mental ruts about her.

So what did I want from Sherri?

I thought about it for a while, slowly trudging down to the store.  I bought a quick scratch-off lottery ticket to justify the destination.   When I didn’t win anything, I turned around and started back.

I wanted several things, I realized.  I knew I wanted her approval, but I wasn’t going to get that unless I stopped being Hamlet.

I also wanted her help.  Talking things out had helped, and I was going to need someone to bounce ideas off of before I tried once more to fix things with Tina or Sharon.  Allen might be able to help, but Sherri would certainly have perspectives neither he nor I would.

But then, I was curious about her brother now, and in fact wanted to hear her entire story.  She’d continually promised she’d tell me when I’d finished mine.  I wanted to hold her to her promise.

I also needed to be honest with myself.  I wanted to have sex with Sherri.  I’ve loved the blowjob and I wanted another one.  I also wanted to feel her legs wrapped around me as I plunged my cock into her.  It wasn’t an overwhelming desire, but it was there.  Better to acknowledge it up front, than let it seep in and poison things.  I’d already been down that road once.

I arrived back at my apartment a little chilled, but a lot calmer.  I didn’t quite know what all lay ahead, but I knew the next step.

That afternoon, I called Sherri’s agency.  I asked for a dinner date with her, and they said her next night working was Friday.  I said that would work and I’d meet her at the Union Station Center Café.  I told them she should look for a well-dressed man holding a red rose and that my name was Joseph.  They asked me to confirm the appointment again on Friday and I agreed.  Then I hung up the phone and settled onto the couch, this time with a smile.

The next couple of days went quickly, but comfortingly steady.  It was like those first days back in the office after the flu.  The in-box is full and there’s a ton of work to do, but just being there is gratifying.  I settled into a groove and cranked out a lot of good code in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Friday night I arrived at the restaurant early, wearing my suit, holding the biggest rose I’d been able to find at the florist.  I let the hostess seat me, a little nervously, because I didn’t want to miss Sherri when she arrived.  I also hoped to see her before she saw me.

I wasn’t that lucky.  I sensed someone behind me and turned to see her smiling at me, clearly amused.

“Hello, Joe,” she said.  “I suppose I could have guessed that you’d be ‘Joseph.’”

“Guilty,” I said, standing up.  “With the way you left, I wasn’t sure you’d show if I just said it was Joe.  Besides, I wanted to surprise you.”

I handed her the rose, and then nodded my head to where the envelope with her fee sat discreetly on the table.  Her eyebrows rose when she saw it.

“Time and companionship, I believe?” I said.

She smiled and nodded, her eyes not losing their ironic twinkle.  I didn’t know if I should risk trying for a hug, so I just stepped back and pulled her chair out.  She graciously seated herself and let me push her chair back in.  By the time I’d returned to my side of the table, she’d pocketed the envelope of cash.

“So,” she began.  “How are you doing?”

“Pretty well,” I said.  “And you?”

“I’m doing fine.”

“Good.”

Sherri waited for me to go on, but I just smiled and didn’t say anything.  She waited some more, before picking up her water glass and taking a sip.

“So,” she asked, her tone business-like.  “What do you want?  Do you want me to help you fix things?”

“Eventually,” I said.  “But there are other things I want first.”

“Like?”

“You told me to decide what I want and be assertive in chasing it.  So I’m doing that.”  I paused for dramatic effect.  “What I want is to hear your story.”

She chuckled.  “That wasn’t what I was expecting.”

I looked a question at her.

“Well, I was expecting you to explain why I shouldn’t be mad at you.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No.”  She grimaced.  “But I did lose a lot of respect for you toward the end of your story.”

“That makes two of us.”

She arched her eyebrows.

“I don’t have a lot of respect for me, either.  So I’m not going to try to justify why you should respect me.”

She slowly nodded.  “I was also expecting you to say you want my body.”

“Oh, I want that too.  But later.  First, I want to hear all about how an educated, attractive woman such as you ended up being the one to show up when a drunken sod called a few weeks back.”  I smiled to show that I was kidding.

She smiled back.  Before she could speak, the waitress approached and asked what we wanted to drink.

“Iced tea,” I said, winking at Sherri.  “I’ve had enough wine recently.”

Sherri ordered the same and the waitress left.  She looked at me intently.

“You are in a surprisingly good mood,” she said.

“Nervous energy,” I said with a dismissive shrug.  “But it won’t last if we start talking about my problems.  I want to hear your story.”

Sherri smiled and pursed her lips.  Whatever question she was about to ask faded, and she nodded. 

“What part of my story do you want to hear?” she asked.

“All of it.  Begin at the beginning.  At least, that’s what someone told me to do once.”

Sherri chuckled.  “Well, my story’s not quite so long, but okay.”

“Thanks.”

She nodded.  Then she took a sip of water.

“I’ve told you some of it,” she began.  “I grew up with my mother and little brother here in Maryland.  Dad took off when I was very young and never wrote, or called, or had anything to do with us besides sending child support checks.  Mom called him that ‘lazy wimp bastard’ more than once in front of me and my brother Danny.  She made it clear that, after him, she had no use for men.  But that was true for a lot of her life.  My mom was—is, a professional Feminist.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

She rolled her eyes.  “Her phrase would be ‘political activist.’  Except she only worked for feminist organizations.  She worked for NOW for several years, primarily in fundraising, but she also worked for NARAL, UUAW, and even for a couple of Congresswomen.”

I raised my eyebrows.  “That’s a lot of different groups.  I’m impressed.”

“So was I, when I was younger.  But when I got to high school, I realized it actually wasn’t that impressive.  There’s an informal ‘girls’ network’ here in D.C..  Once you’re ‘in,’ you don’t have to worry about getting a job—one of your friends will hire you for something.  It’s the same with all the other lobbying groups in town.”

I snorted.  “Sounds incestuous.”

“Oh, it is.  Particularly when you consider where congressional staffers get hired from.”

“Or hired by later.”

She nodded.  “People pay attention to the Congress members, but often don’t realize how powerful his or her staff is.  The Representative doesn’t have time to study up on all the issues they’re going to be voting on, so they almost always ask a staffer to do the research and make a recommendation, which they almost always follow.  My mom spent a lot of time wining and dining the staffers.”

“I can imagine.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said.  “It’s not all sleaze and shady influences.  For a long time, Mom’s job was getting the national members to write their Representatives.  You’d be surprised how effective the squeaky wheel can be, when it’s voters in their district.”

“So how did all this politics affect you?”

She snorted again.  “How does water affect a fish?  I was immersed in it.  I regularly helped stuff envelopes, even when I was little.  When I was older, I made fundraiser calls and helped my mom’s friends set up conferences and meetings.  Then, in the evening, I’d sit around with them while they told war stories and bitched about the Neanderthal men they’d encountered that day.”

“Must have been hard on your little brother.”

Sherri fell silent and looked down at her menu.  She took a deep breath and looked up.

“It had to be.  Danny was always a quiet, sensitive kid and he’d just sit in the corner as our honorary ‘aunts’ disparaged anything that had a penis.”

“Ouch.”

“Oh, if they noticed him, they’d say that they didn’t mean him.  They’d say they were sure he’d grow up into a nice, sensitive guy.  But often they’d forget he was there, particularly when they’d been drinking.”

I grimaced and took a sip of my iced tea.  I definitely needed to stay off the alcohol, at least for a while.  The waitress came over and took our order.  When she’d left, Sherri looked at me, more composed than she’d been so far.

“When I was twelve,” she said, “I developed my first serious crush.  She was handsome—she had this patrician air about her and these high cheekbones.  I used to dream that she was a countess instead of just one of my mom’s colleagues.”

“Wait—‘she’?”

Sherri smirked.  “So how good is your gaydar, Joe?”

“Obviously not good enough,” I muttered.  “But you sleep with men.”

“Sure.  And sometimes I even enjoy it.  But I don’t fall in love with men.  And I don’t fantasize about men when I’m alone.”

“So you’re bi?”

“Bi, lesbian, straight—they’re just labels.  They’re not who you are, and they don’t do a good job of describing what you do.  Or at least what I do.”

“I can see that.”

Sherri smiled over the rim of her glass before taking a drink.  “So, anyway, I developed this crush on a woman who literally was old enough to be my mother, and it didn’t take long for either her or my mom to figure it out.  They both gently discouraged me from pursuing it, but it was my age that was the issue, not my gender.”

I chuckled.  “Well, I imagine a lot of your mom’s friends were lesbians too.”

“Most of them,” she said with a nod.  “Of course, I didn’t realize that when I was little.  They were just my ‘aunts’ when they came over to visit.”

“Was any of them your mom’s lover?”

“Yes.  A couple of them, at one time or another.  Like I said, it was a ‘girl’s network,’ so it wasn’t uncommon for women who’d broken up to make an effort to remain civil afterward.  They handled it far more maturely than the breakups I saw happening between boys and girls at school.”

“I’ll bet.”

“So,” she continued, “since my age was the problem, I started checking out girls at school.  I had my first girlfriend a couple of months later right after I turned thirteen.  I lost my virginity with Jenny, and discovered I really liked sex.”

I laughed.  “I’d figured out I really liked sex by thirteen, too, but I was reading Penthouse.”

Sherri shot me a wry grin.  “So was I.”

I chuckled.

“Seriously,” she said.  “Mom wouldn’t buy it for me, but she didn’t get upset that I had it.  Like I said, I had a lot of privacy to do whatever I wanted in my room, alone or with a lover, as long as I didn’t disturb the rest of the house.”

“Must have been some childhood.”

She smirked.  “My teenage years were a lot of fun.  Jenny and I broke up after nine months, but I never lacked for lovers.  Some of them were serious and some were just girls looking to experiment.  I did go out with guys a couple of times, mostly out of curiosity, but it never went anywhere.”

“You weren’t attracted to them?”

“They couldn’t kiss well.  My girlfriends were much better.”

“So when did you start sleeping with guys?”

Sherri paused, and a slow, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin spread across her face.

“That… that was in college.  I met this older woman at a conference at the Mayflower hotel.  Well, actually she wasn’t at the conference; she was just staying at the hotel.  She was… is… striking.”  Sherri ran her tongue over her lips as she remembered.

“I’ve always had trouble believing that Susan was my mother’s age,” she said, “because she always struck me as being so young.  Not just how she looked, but how she acted.  She’s become a good friend and something of a mentor to me.  We still get together when she comes to D.C..”

“Wow.  As lovers?”

She grinned.  “Not always.”

I chuckled.

“So,” I said, “how did guys get involved in this?”

“Well,” she said, “Susan’s male lover was meeting her in D.C..  I wanted her… he was there… to make a long story short, she persuaded me to give sex with him a try.  I loved it.”

“Too make a long story short,” I said with a snort.

She chuckled.  “Susan’s much better at telling that story than I am.”

“So do I get to hear it?”

Sherri cocked her head.  “I’ll ask her about it.”

I considered pushing for her to tell me, but before I could, our food arrived.  I held off eating until Sherri had managed a couple of bites and was ready to start talking again.

“I started college as a women’s studies major,” she said, “which made it easy to find lovers.  Not all my classmates were gay, of course, but enough were, and enough were curious, that I could always get a bed partner when I wanted one.  I even got a reputation for being a little wild, if any girl wanted to experiment.”

Sherri took a few more bites.  While she was chewing, the liveliness drained from her face.  Whatever memories of fun and passionate flings had been flitting through her brain were now replaced by something darker.

“The night that Danny died,” she said, “I’d agreed to help my friend Debbie out.  She’d planned an erotic birthday for her girlfriend Brigitte.  We tied Brigitte to the bed and then Debbie and I pleasured her until she couldn’t take any more and collapsed in a puddle of bliss.  I was eager to go that night, because Debbie had promised they’d do me next.”  She paused for a moment.  “I often wonder why that was so important to me, so much that I didn’t want to listen to Danny.”

“You had no way of knowing,” I said.

“No, I didn’t.  But even after all these years, it’s hard to believe that.”

“So tell me about Danny.”

Sherri met my eyes.  I realized I wasn’t nervous or worried right then—all I wanted was for her to feel better.  That must have been apparent in my face, because Sherri noticeably relaxed before she began speaking again.

“Danny was this nice, quiet, sensitive little kid.  He used to follow me around when we were little, asking where his ‘Cher’ was when I wasn’t there.”  She cracked a sweet smile.  “He didn’t have many friends, and I don’t think he made them easily.  Mostly he read, or drew pictures in this sketchpad Mom got him.  He’d obediently help out with any chore Mom or I asked him to do, and he never complained about anything.  He liked to hear about my dates when I was in high school, though I never told him the explicit details.”

“How old was he?”

“He’s four years younger than me.  He killed himself when he was sixteen.”

Her tone was so matter of fact, that I was temporarily stunned.  Then I realized it wasn’t blasé because she didn’t care, but because she’d obviously said that phrase too many times for it to have much punch left.

“He did tell me about this girl he’d become interested in, about two months before that night.  She wasn’t quite in the popular crowd, but on the edge.  He said she had an incredible smile and wavy long black hair.”

I smiled, noting how Sherri had pulled her own dark hair back and pinned it this evening.

“So this girl invited him to a party at one of the other kid’s houses, the week before he called me.  It was one of the blowouts where the parents aren’t home and everybody gets wasted.  I didn’t have any interest in them when I was in high school, but I think you know what I mean.”

I nodded.

“Well, later I got the story from the girl.  Around midnight, after some ribbing from some of her friends about Danny, she decided to take him into the back bedroom and have sex with him.  She said she was drunk and was doing it because all her friends were doing it with their boyfriends that night.  It didn’t go well, though, because Danny didn’t have any idea what he was doing.  All he knew about sex was what he’d read about in Penthouse.”

I shuddered.  That was definitely the wrong source.

“She said… she said she didn’t intend to be mean about it.  She was just drunk and frustrated.  After it was over and they’d returned to the party, she complained to a couple of her friends that Danny was lousy in bed and had a small dick.”

I sucked in my breath.  I could too easily guess how Danny had felt when that got around school.

“I’ve… I’ve tried not to blame her,” Sherri said.  “She was just young and stupid.  She wasn’t being malicious.”

“But the kids at school the next week were.”

She nodded.  “Mom said Danny came home every afternoon crying and locked himself in his room.  She tried to help, but he wouldn’t talk to her.  He just said it was clear he’d never be worth anything to a woman.  Since she didn’t know about what had happened at the party, she didn’t understand.  She just said that it was possible for men to be worth a lot to women if they were sensitive and helpful.”

Sherri paused and bit her lip.

“She didn’t get it,” she said.  “She still doesn’t get it.  She blames the ‘male patriarchy’ for setting expectations too high for Danny to live up to and she blames my dad for not being around.  She also blames pornography, which is ironic because she has a large collection of lesbian erotica herself.”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“Needless to say,” she said, “my mom and I don’t talk much these days.”

I nodded and then took a bite of my own meal.  I chewed slowly, thinking.  This was one of those times where picking my words correctly was important.

“So,” I said after a few minutes of silence, “who do you blame?”

Sherri slowly considered my words, though I knew it couldn’t be the first time she’d been asked the question.

“All of us,” she said.  “Me, my mother, our ‘aunts.’  To quote Susan, ‘men are not the enemy.’  They’re just as lost and confused and bewildered by sex and relationships as us women.  But Danny was surrounded by women who thought of men as nothing but dicks.”

She paused, the disgust and anger clear on her face.  Her eyes flashed when she looked at me.

“You men aren’t just as lost,” she huffed.  “You’re more lost.  We women can talk to each other and help each other and spend our nights sitting around the table swapping stories, like Mom and her friends.  You men have nothing.  You don’t talk to each other, and you don’t know how to talk to most of us.  You’re all alone when it comes to sex.  Just like Danny.”

“It sounds like you’ve thought about this a lot.”

She nodded.  “After Danny died, I took a year off from school.  I’d be sitting in my dorm room and the phone would ring and I’d tear up.  So I decided I needed some time off.  I did a lot of thinking then.”

“A year off?  What’d you do?”

“This and that.  I went down to South Carolina and stayed with Susan for a while.  Then I went to Berkeley to talk to my father.  It was… unpleasant.”

“Huh?”

Sherri made a dismissive gesture with her hand.  “Oh, he was upset about Danny, of course, but he made it pretty clear he still didn’t want anything to do with Mom.  He called her an ‘idealistic angry man-hating bitch’ and he’d see pigs fly before he talked to her again.  He didn’t mind seeing me, but he didn’t do much to make me welcome.  After dinner the first night, he was ‘too busy’ writing his book when he wasn’t teaching or going to the bar with his friends.”

“Writing a book?”

“A novel.  I read part of it and it wasn’t very good.  It was supposed to be a murder mystery, but it was obvious that the ex-wife did it by the end of chapter one.  The supporting characters were clichés and it was full of run-on sentences.”

I snorted.  “It sounds like a lot of the stuff I downloaded from Usenet for Sharon.”

“Probably,” she said.  “My dad dreamed of hitting the best sellers list, but the reality….”

“It wasn’t going to happen,” I said, finishing her thought.  “Well, it doesn’t sound like a very fun visit.”

“Oh, it wasn’t a complete waste.  That trip is when I met Margot Anand.  I saw an ad for one of her workshops and since I was already in the Bay area, I signed up.”

I stared at her blankly.

“That’s right,” she said.  “You don’t know much about Tantra.  Well, Margot’s one of the top Tantra teachers in the West.  She got me started into sacred sexuality, though I’ve had several teachers since then and I don’t particularly subscribe to any one school.  In fact, I’ve come to believe that most Western tantra is a little off, even though it does do a good job of tying sex to the Kundalini experience.”

Sherri chuckled at the confused, wary expression on my face.

“I’m sorry, this is probably like you telling me about quasars and pulsars.”

I nodded. “I’m not sure what Kundalini is, nor how even how sex can be ‘sacred.’”

Sherri paused, biting her lip.  After thinking a moment, she nodded and looked up.

“You know that God is not a white bearded man sitting on a throne in the clouds, right?” she said.

“Yeah, I got past that in high school.”

“Good.  Well, do you understand the idea that the Divine is all around us and inside each of us?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know how much I buy that.”

“Well,” she said.  “I believe it.  And a lot of people do, even a lot of Christians.  You just have to get past an anthropomorphized God.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll grant that.”

“So, if the Divine’s inside each of us all the time, then the Divine’s inside us when we’re having sex, right?”

“Logically, yes.”

She grinned, baring her teeth.  “So, why not use the sexual experience to connect with God?”

I shrugged.

“That’s what sacred sexuality is, Joe.  The Christian fundies would have us believe that sex is something dirty and nasty, to be hidden away, instead of something beautiful to celebrate.”

“I’m not sure that’s just Christians.”

“No, and not all Christians think that.  But a lot of the vocal ones do, and that’s one of the reasons we need voices speaking out against them!”

I leaned back in my chair and silently chuckled.  Sherri’s eyes were bright and she’d speeded up her speech as she’d gotten more enthusiastic about her explanation.  There was still a crusader in her, but it just wasn’t on her mother’s issues anymore.

“Okay,” I said.  “But that doesn’t explain escorting.”

Sherri sat back with an amused grin.  “True.  It took me a while to decide to do that.”

I tilted my head and waited for her to go on.

“After I left Berkeley, I traveled some more.  I scraped some money together to go to Asia, and I also went to see some Tantra teachers in Hawaii.  Eventually, I returned to Maryland, where I changed my major to psychology.  I’d never thought of sex as something other than pure physical fun, but now I wanted to learn more.  I studied Freud and Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and a bunch of people you’ve probably never heard of.  And in the process of all this study, I learned about sexual surrogates.”

“Huh?”

“Sometimes a person will have a really severe psychological problem around sex, in which case a psychiatrist might want him to have some controlled, practical experiences.  That’s where the surrogate comes in.  He or she can work with the client, touching him and even having intercourse if that’s what’s called for.  It’s all very controlled and carefully monitored, of course.  But it’s legal in a handful of places.”

I raised my eyebrows.  “You’re kidding.”

She shook her head.  “No, I’m not.  You have to be trained, and you can only work as a surrogate if the client is also seeing a psychiatrist licensed to do that type of work.”

I snorted.  “It sounds like a form of legalized prostitution.”

“Well,” she said, “in a way it is.  But so is making X-rated movies.  People are getting paid to have sex.  What’s the difference?”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

“Well, when you do, you’ll realize how silly and arbitrary most of our laws about sex really are.  Look at sodomy laws, for example.  Or what’s legal or not legal to do in a strip club, or—”

Sherri cut off when she saw me lean forward and put my elbows on the table.

“Sorry,” she said.  “I was getting on my soapbox again.”

“You do that a lot,” I said.

She shrugged without looking particularly bothered.

“So, why didn’t you just become a surrogate?

She smiled.  “Most men who need a surrogate won’t think to call one.  Or if they do, they won’t because it’s too embarrassing.  You guys are too isolated.  About the only thing you will do is call an escort.”

She had me there.  I’d certainly avoided a shrink the last couple of weeks.  Somehow, calling Sherri didn’t seem to be as much of an admission that I was screwed up.  In a weird sort of way, it let me keep my dignity.

“Besides,” she said, “I didn’t feel called to be a surrogate.”

I paused.  Something about the way she lightly emphasized ‘called’ brought up a sense of déjà vu.  She’d said that before.  In fact, a lot of what she’d said tonight was stuff she’d already told me.  It felt a little too… rehearsed.  Which was unsettling.  My first instinct was to back away.  I didn’t want to start making accusations and get jumped on, particularly because I could be wrong.

But that was fear speaking.  So my second instinct was simply to plow on ahead, asking question after question until I was satisfied.

But that was overcompensation.  Which meant I was reacting out of fear just as much as if I left it alone.

While I sat, mulling my choices, Sherri took advantage of our conversational break to finish her meal.  Since she’d been doing most of the talking, I’d finished a while ago.  I smiled when our eyes met, but neither of us spoke.  The pause was refreshing—almost like halftime at a game, or intermission at a play.  If she had rehearsed her story, a play was certainly an apropos analogy.

My mind skipped from plays to Hamlet.  I was being Hamlet again.  I let out a low, earthy chuckle.

Sherri looked up, her eyebrows raised.

I decided to act.  “I think there’s more to your story than you’re saying,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Well….”

Before I could answer, the waitress approached, refreshing our iced tea and bringing us the dessert menus.  It looked like our intermission would have to last a little longer.

--Fin--

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Read the next chapter in this story: Chapter Twenty-five

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