“Guilty. But seriously, I think the only way you’re going to fix this is to figure out how to dig past this stuff and tap into that shamelessness I talked about. Let nothing shock you. Get comfortable with sex as just another topic to discuss in an open forum.”
“I thought I was,” she said, unable to hide the frustration in her voice. “It’s not like I’m a prude or anything. When it came time to give my little brother the sex talk, it was like a targeted missile strike with how efficient and angst-free it was. And I never balked when I interviewed teens for my research. But I guess there’s a big difference between discussing the basics of sex and health with beginners and hearing the kinds of things I’ll hear in sessions here.”
“Wow, you got stuck giving the sex talk to your brother? How’d you end up with that duty?”
“Long story.” She looked over to him, not wanting to get into the tragic history. “Did you go through this kind of awkwardness in the beginning?”
He shrugged and sipped his wine. “I think I got inoculated to it when I did my research. I had to talk to people about sexual fantasies. I read erotica for ideas. I watched all kinds of porn. Then I had to put some of my own personal fantasies on recordings that everyone, including my professors and fellow grad students, heard. And once upon a time, I had this perfectly nice girl catch me with a hard-on while I recorded a kinky scenario. Once you get past that kind of embarrassment, you’re pretty set for anything else.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Yeah, that’s pretty good exposure therapy. I’m just not sure how I could re-create that in a short time.”
He cocked his head, watching her, and drummed his fingers on the back of the bench. “Mind if I get all shrinky on you for a second again?”
She took a big gulp of the wine, already feeling the tingly buzz working through her system. Maybe this is why he’d brought the wine. He had to counsel her like a client on day one. Wonderful. “Lay it on me, doc. Shrink me.”
“All right. Total honesty?”
She waved her hand in a bring-it-on motion.
“Usually when we feel embarrassed or awkward about what other people say regarding their sex lives, it’s because we’re carrying that natural shame about our own sexuality—the shame that society teaches us to have. Acknowledging theirs is like outwardly acknowledging that we’re sexual, too. That we have those kinds of thoughts, do those kinds of things.
“It’s why you reacted when Lawrence suggested you had a toy at home. Whether it was true or not, he was outing you as being sexual. We all know that it’s a part of being human, of course, but we walk around pretending that it’s this other outside thing that we’re not a part of. It’s why no one wants to hear their parents talk about sex. We like our heads to stay firmly in the sand.” His eyes traced over her face. “So when you blush, it’s because your head was yanked out of the sand and that veil was lifted. You saw that secret part of the person or they saw that part of you. Like when Lane told you what he did for a living. He said it and then he was naked in your head, sleeping with some stranger, right?”
She straightened. “No, I—”
“Come on. It’s a natural reaction. We’re visual creatures. Someone says, ‘I sleep with strangers for my job,’ your thoughts are going to go there. The key is not being scandalized by where your mind goes. Just let it happen and then let it roll off you.”
“But how do you do that?”
He shrugged. “Once you’re exposed to those images enough times or do some of those things yourself, it becomes old news. I’ve observed Lane’s sessions on occasion. I know what that kind of therapy looks like. I’ve researched the sex toys, so I wasn’t shocked by what Lawrence said.”
“I promise I will never be purchasing a porn star faux vagina.”
He smirked. “Well, no, probably not. But remember how scandalous and exciting everything seemed when you were young, before you had any experience under your belt? When I was in middle school, I remember having this intense reaction to seeing the girl who sat in front of me’s bra strap exposed. My face got hot. I got all sweaty and nervous.” He shook his head. “Man, I jerked off to that image of her for months.”
Marin rolled her lips together, biting down on the smile. “Must’ve been some bra strap.”
He grinned. “It was pink, and it was spectacular.”
The wine was taking effect, and she had to swallow down a laugh. “I once wrote a whole poem about the sliver of lower back this football player in high school used to expose when he bent down to get stuff out of his locker. It was so tan and muscular . . .”
He raised his cup. “Ha, see, exactly. But that tells you something. Now if you saw that, your eyes would just skim over it. You wouldn’t blush or feel awkward. It would just roll off you. So you need to figure out a way to see everyone as a sexual being without being embarrassed or affected by it. Just have it be a simple fact. A part of life. Everyone’s doing it.”
“A companion piece to Everyone Poops,” she joked.
“Yep. Everyone Fucks.”
His frankness set her off balance for a second, and she glanced away, focusing on the grass. He was wrong. Not everyone.
“It doesn’t have to be that hard.” He put his hand to his chest. “You’ve seen me naked, and we’re having this conversation without any awkwardness.”
She watched him out of the side of her eye. “Actually I never did, but I understand what you’re saying.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
She waved a hand. “You were behind—I was—never mind. Let’s not go there.”
I will not picture how he must’ve looked behind me that night. Will not picture open jeans shoved to hips and straining muscles. Will. Not.
She set aside the wine.
“Now you’re getting red.”
She groaned. “Stop pointing it out.”
He touched his shoulder. “Is my bra strap showing?”
“Shut the hell up,” she said, smiling despite herself. “It’s just embarrassing that the guy I’m now working with has seen me the way you have.”
“What? Masturbating at work and then bent over a desk for me?”
“Donovan!”
But, of course, he didn’t look ashamed at all. He waved a dismissive hand and took another sip of his wine. “No, no, this is good. This is part of the idea I had. I know I told you we could pretend the past never happened. But maybe instead, our former . . . knowledge of each other can be to our benefit. There’s already a built-in comfort level here.” He bent his knee, turning more toward her. “So you can practice with me.”
She stared at him. “Practice what?”
“Immunizing yourself to sex talk. I’ll try to get you to blush or get flustered, and you work on fighting that reaction.” He grabbed the bottle of wine and poured a little more in each of their cups. “Alcohol will help for this intro session.”
“Donovan. Seriously. We’re so not doing this.”
“Better with me than reacting badly to a client. And we know more about each other than we should already. This could be helpful.”
“This is a bad idea.”
He leaned back, mischief in his gaze.
Uh-oh. She could sense him loading his slingshot.
“I was fifteen minutes late this morning because I had a hot dream and jerked off in the shower.”
“Oh my God.” She closed her eyes. “You can’t say stuff—”
Of course before she could even put her words together, her head filled with the image of him in the shower, naked, stroking himself, making those sounds she remembered. Her face flamed.
“Look at me.” He voice was soft but firm.
“No way.”
“Come on. No need to hide. Be bold.”
She forced her gaze upward, her jaw clenching. “I hate you so much right now.”
His eyes met hers, clear and unaffected. “Give me statistics about masturbation, Rush.”
She blinked, her thoughts falter
ing. “What?”
“I know you know them. I saw them in your sex ed program.”
She ground out a frustrated breath and pushed her hair off her forehead, grasping for the figures she knew were already in her head. “Uh, ninety-five percent of men admit to doing it, more than half do it weekly. For women, the numbers are only a few points less—eighty-nine percent.”
“I love that you can quote statistics even buzzed on wine. It’s kind of awesome. We should do shots and try to quote studies.”
She rolled her eyes. Though, she’d totally play and win that game.
“But my point is that you already know that, statistically speaking, masturbation in normal. It’s healthy. It’s natural. It’d be odd if I didn’t do it. So why should it embarrass you to know that about me? Or anyone. Lane does it. The clients we saw today do it. I’m sure my assistant does, my boss, the guy who sold me coffee this morning.”
“Yeah, but there’s a difference between knowing something in theory and knowing it in reality.”
“Sure there is, but that’s the point. You have to break down the wall between the two, take the taboo factor out of it.” He tilted his head. “Do you masturbate, Marin?”
“We are really, really not having this conversation.”
He lifted a brow in challenge.
“Ugh. You use that brow lift on your clients. I saw you do it today. It’s not going to work, West. I am immune.”
He didn’t relent. The brow only went higher.
“Goddammit.” She looked to the sky. “Of course I do it. You know that. You’ve seen me.”
He tapped her cheek. “Look at you. An admission to something personal and no blush. Progress.”
She ignored him and took another sip of wine. She had a feeling she was going to need all the alcohol-laced fortitude she could get.
“Here’s let’s try another,” he said. “Those fantasies you helped me with in college? Many were personal ones of mine. I like playing games of control in the bedroom and enjoy kinky sex. It’s what drew me to this field in the first place. I wanted to know why I gravitated to that.”
Marin’s belly tightened. Her free hand curled around the edge of the bench as she remembered those fantasies she’d listened to, his voice narrating, how so many of those fantasies had intertwined with hers. “Donovan . . .”
“Now. Ask me a question. Pretend I’m a client telling you that.”
Marin couldn’t look his way. The pictures in her head were too much. Too loud. And the last thing she felt was embarrassment. But she took a breath, steeling herself, and let it out. “So does that mean you’re a dominant?”
“Good question. I wouldn’t label myself that. I work closely with a BDSM group in New Orleans and offer reduced rates for their members since it’s hard for people to find kink-friendly therapists. So I have clients in the lifestyle and have studied it. But in my personal life, I don’t really take it to that level. I’m more flexible about the dynamics. I enjoy games, role-plays, power exchange for the thrill of it. A lot less formal than D/s.”
She cleared her throat and shifted on the bench. “Okay.”
“Now, it’s your turn. Claim something of your own. No shame. What do you like, Marin?”
The question slid through her, making her want to run. “I don’t know.”
He lifted his cup and nodded at her in a you-can-do-it motion. “You don’t have to be scared. Think of all the things I’ve heard in this job. I’m unshockable.”
“I doubt that.”
His lips lifted at the corner, bordering on smug. “You really think you have something that scandalous?”
The wine and the conversation were making her nerves edgy but her thoughts slower. “Maybe.”
“Well, now you’ve got me intrigued, Rush.”
She shook her head. This was not a conversation they should be having. She would never have done this with any other co-worker, but somehow from the very beginning, Donovan always had this truth serum effect on her. He’d gotten her to talk about fantasies when she’d barely been able to say them aloud to herself. And now she found herself wanting to confess again. She didn’t want to carry this around every day that she was training on this job. She didn’t want to blush and feel uncomfortable every time someone said something surprising.
“All right.” She downed the rest of her wine and then looked out toward the dark silhouettes of the gnarled oak trees. The cicadas had gone full throttle now, and the sky had turned from orange to silvery purple. Night in the bayou reclaiming its land. An otherworldly place where secrets almost seemed safe. She forced the words out. “I don’t know what I like because since you last saw me, I’ve been raising my little brother and trying to graduate and keep a roof over our heads. There was no time for anything else. No time for dating and certainly no time for sex. Bianca has more experience than I do.”
The words drifted on the night air, mixing in with the bubbling of the fountain and the thick breeze. Donovan didn’t say anything, and Marin couldn’t bring herself to look his way. She kept her hands clasped around her cup and her eyes on the changing horizon.
The silence stretched on too long, and unease curled around her like choking vines, her throat tightening. The crush of anxiety sent her to her feet. “I told you this was a bad idea. I’ve gotta get going.”
Donovan’s hand shot out like a striking snake and grasped her arm, urging her back down. “No, please, don’t. I’m sorry. I’m just . . . taking that in.”
Her butt hit the bench again, and she ventured a peek his way. “Looks like I shocked Mr. Unshockable.”
He stared at her, his gaze searching. “Are you telling me you haven’t—”
“No. Not since you.”
Deep lines appeared in his forehead, like he couldn’t understand her words. “I— It’s been nine years, Marin. You’re saying . . .”
“Yep.”
Wonder filled his face, like she’d revealed she was really a life-form from another planet, but concern quickly replaced it. “What the hell happened?”
She set her cup aside with a sigh. She hadn’t wanted to get into this with him—ever. But she knew there was no backing off of it now.
“The short version is that everything in my life exploded that night we were together. My mom had suffered from severe bipolar disorder for most of my life, but that night she had a psychotic break. She’d been recovering from a bad breakup with a guy and had been faking taking her meds. I thought she was stable, but she was on the verge and something triggered her that night.” She stared at her hands, worked the ring she wore on her right index finger off and on. “Probably me. I was supposed to stay home, but we got in an argument, and I spent the night with you instead. Nate said that after I left she started drinking and got paranoid, talking about everyone leaving her, that she was going to die alone.” Marin looked out into the night, not seeing it, the horrible scene vivid in her imagination even though she hadn’t been there. Hearing her little brother describe it had imprinted the images on her brain like it was her own memory. “So she decided she wouldn’t die alone. She’d take someone with her.” She peered over at Donovan. “By the time I got home, she’d attacked my brother with a kitchen knife and had slit her wrists.”
Donovan’s lips parted with soundless shock.
“Nate was bleeding out when I got there, but the paramedics arrived in time to save him. He had to have transfusions. Surgery. Nothing could be done for my mom.” Marin still had nightmares where she stayed longer with Donovan, where she took that offer to go to the diner with him and got home too late to save Nathan. “I had to drop out of school for a while to put our lives back together and figure out how to keep Nate with me instead of losing him to foster care.”
“Christ, Marin.” There was no filter on his expression now, no therapist face. He looked . . . stripped. “I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”
She rubbed her hands on her thighs, trying to get them to stop trembling. “Yeah, it sucked.”
Understatement of the century. “But Nathan and I have made out all right. He’s about to start art school and I’m here”—she sent him a half-smile, trying to lighten the somber tone the conversation had taken—“embarrassing clients because I’ve managed to become the most inexperienced sex therapist ever.”
He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, his palm warm through the thin cotton of her shirt. The naked empathy in his eyes made something twist in her gut. “That last part’s a minor blip on the radar. Look at you. It’s a damn miracle you’re here at all. When I lost my parents, I fell completely the fuck apart. And I was in my twenties, had a trust fund, and didn’t have anyone else to take care of. You were a kid, had no help, and became a doctor while raising another human being on your own? That’s superhero quality, Marin.”
She looked down, the praise and his awed tone winding through her, nudging things she didn’t want nudged.
He released her shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You can catch up on the experience thing. That’s easy.”
She laughed, though the humor felt forced. “Right, so easy. I just need it done in time for tomorrow’s sessions. No biggie. Maybe I’ll just run into town and pick up a guy who could show me a few things. Have him give me some kinky CliffsNotes. Or maybe I could call Lane. That’s what he does, right? Teaches.”
Frown lines bracketed Donovan’s mouth. “You don’t need Lane.”
His sudden shift in tone caught her off guard. She tilted her head, matching his frown. “I was kidding.”
Mostly. Lane was a tempting proposition. A good-looking guy who seemed nice enough, who could teach her a few things with no pressure or expectations, and who could keep it businesslike? It sounded ideal. Safe.
Donovan’s gaze turned shrewd. “You’re not going to go from novice to unshakable in one day. And bedding some random dude isn’t going to do much good. You’re not embarrassed by the basics of sex. And that’s all most guys are going to give you—the blandest version of vanilla. And at least half have no idea what the hell they’re doing anyway.”
She smirked. “I love that you say that like obviously you know better. Humble, much?”