Chapter 5
My body was no longer cooperating with me.
Neil
I’d lost track of time between Jennifer’s thighs.
I held myself suspended above her, elbows on either side of her face, my body slick with sweat, my forehead pressed into the pillow. My breathing was thready, and I struggled to regulate it.
“You okay?” she murmured breathlessly. She looked worn out but sated. She watched me with concerned, heavily lidded eyes. Her lips were wet, and her plush breasts pressed against my chest each time she inhaled.
She was still embarrassingly wet between her legs, and that pleased me.
She’d come three times in a row while I had just kept moving like an automaton, slamming into her like an unstoppable machine. I fucked her through it like a good lover, and then, just as my thrusts became more violent and impatient, I failed to come.
Fucking again.
It had been happening—or failing to happen—for weeks now.
My body was no longer cooperating with me, refusing to respond to my basic human need to experience a simple orgasm.
I felt arousal, I felt pleasure, and I could still get an erection.
In fact, it lasted a long time. But whenever I got right to the edge of an explosion, right when I was about to release all my frustrations, right as I was tensing up and preparing to give myself over to those fleeting seconds of physical pleasure, my body would throw up a block.
I could feel the rush of rapture all down my spine, and I hoped, as always, it would keep going, straight to the place where I needed it the most. Instead, it bounced back, leaving me unsatisfied.
I sighed in resignation and pulled off the condom, which I always wore with everyone.
Except for Babygirl.
I got up out of the bed, feeling suddenly cold, and threw the empty condom into the trash can. No drips, not a trace of semen. I ran both hands over my face and through my messy hair before letting out a growl of frustration that made Jennifer flinch.
My blond lolled weakly on the pool house’s bed, studying me. I was starting to get seriously concerned because nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, and I hadn’t talked about it with anyone because…
Because I was ashamed.
That feeling of shame had been suffocating me for days, keeping me from confronting the problem or confiding in anyone.
“You didn’t come…” Jennifer noted, like that wasn’t clear to me as well.
They’d all noticed it by now, not just her.
Though, for the women, not much had changed.
In fact, as my stamina increased, so too did the duration of the sessions, allowing me to make them climax several times in a row.
The only problem was me and the desperate race toward orgasm that my body refused to let me complete.
My lovers were satisfied, but they began to doubt their own appeal in the bedroom.
Several of them had asked me if they were doing a good enough job with the preliminaries because they felt so awkward and helpless.
They even apologized to me, upset and overcome with a stress that was solely the fault of me and my inability to come.
Though they tried their best to make me feel good, nothing improved the difficult situation in which I had suddenly found myself. I just couldn’t feel that spike of intense sexual pleasure. No ecstasy. No nothing.
“I know, I know, for fuck’s sake!” I snapped at Jennifer, raising my voice, and she flinched.
My mood had also deteriorated lately. Everyone went in fear of me because I was full of animal aggression, especially right after sex. I wasn’t sure if I could attribute it to recent events in general or only to my new dysfunction.
I stalked naked around the bedroom, searching for my pack of Winstons. I could feel Jen’s eyes on me, watching my back and my ass, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t shy, certainly not prudish.
In all my history with women, I’d never had any kind of emotional connection. Simply put, it made me feel good to force them to submit to me, to satisfy them, and watch them fall apart while I fucked them.
And that was all.
Showing off my naked body was never a problem for me. What was a problem was displaying any vulnerability or losing control. I held my control tight in a protective fist and now I was watching it slip away all because my body had decided to ignore my will and start doing whatever it wanted.
The Boy, the brain, and the body were no longer connected.
The last time they had been was when I last took Selene, right before she left for Detroit.
That was the last fantastic, freeing, all-encompassing orgasm I had experienced.
Every time I relived that moment, I paused to savor the sublime feeling at the end of it all, the one that had left me drained of all energy and completely satisfied.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how good I had felt when I was inside her. I was welcomed. Right. Safe.
I felt like a man.
A man who wasn’t, for the first time, doing something wrong, immoral, or perverse.
Then, I’d fucked up once again on Halloween.
I did something stupid and made Babygirl run away from me and then get into a near-fatal crash.
The only time I’d seen her at the hospital, she leveled that crystalline gaze at me, prepared to defend her dignity against the pathetic attempts I’d made to convince her of what I was.
I had gone into that room with the knowledge that she was going to spit poison at me and that she had every reason to do so.
It was ridiculous, then, what I felt during that tense conversation: pain at the thought of no longer having any place in her life because I had done everything I could to push her away and the relief that I might have actually done the right thing.
I still wasn’t going to apologize to her, though.
If I’d done that, it would erase everything I had tried to show her about my true self. Selene needed to hold on to those memories of us to keep hating me. So she would stay away from me and wouldn’t be involved in the clusterfuck that was my life.
Maybe I hadn’t gone about it in the best way, but I only had one goal: to protect her.
I wanted her to go back to her life, back to her charmed, brightly colored universe.
A world that had no space for the cruelty of human beings.
Selene had no idea what people were capable of.
She couldn’t see the world through my eyes.
In fact, I’d often wished I could look at the world through hers.
She really was a fairy: tiny but with an enviable strength.
Her heart had the capacity for the biggest, most beautiful feelings.
Feelings not everyone was able to experience.
Like…love.
Selene was capable of love, and I admired her for that. Love required courage, and she had that in spades. She was definitely braver than I was.
A pain in my chest made the hand on my left pec tremble. It felt like someone had just punched me right in the heart, as if to shake it loose.
Fuck.
Why was I so mixed up?
Hadn’t I gotten just what I wanted?
Hadn’t I driven her away by showing her what kind of twisted son of a bitch I really was? I wanted her to go back to Detroit, and I wanted her to take something of me with her, but I never wanted to see her eyes so empty.
I had let her down, and there was no way to fix it.
I also strongly suspected that her wreck had been no accident, and I was afraid that piece of shit Player was involved somehow. I was determined to put a name and a face to him, though I still didn’t know exactly how to do that or even where to start.
“Let me try to make you feel better.” Jennifer’s hands meandered from my sides to my groin. I hadn’t even noticed her getting out of the bed and coming over to me.
Her nipples poked into my back, and she mouthed greedy kisses on my shoulder. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach because of my height.
Any man would have been excited by that delicate contact, but not if he’d just been fucking for about an hour without ejaculating. And definitely not if he was in the kind of terrible mood I was in.
I was frustrated, tense, worried, and still hard. Jen moaned when she encircled it with her palm, admiring my dimensions.
But I knew that not even her considerable prowess could solve my problem.
Yes, my fucking problem. I had to admit it to myself by then.
Women worshipped me, and I knew how to get them hot, how to keep them satisfied, and how to draw out a clinch.
I had a powerful body that often brought a little pain to mix with the pleasure, but none of that made me a superhero or unbeatable.
I was just a regular man, one who was suffering from an increasingly tangible, obvious disorder.
“Don’t touch me!” I snapped, violently throwing her hands off me. “You can’t touch me when I don’t consent. Jesus!” I raised my voice and Jennifer stumbled back. She was afraid that I was going to hurt her; I could tell from the way she lifted her arms protectively.
She’d been afraid of me ever since that time I caught her attacking Selene. I’d grabbed her by the throat and slammed her against a wall. I didn’t want to hurt her, just scare her and I succeeded.
I only hit women in bed, usually when they were on all fours in front of me, never in other circumstances.
What was it about me that I could arouse both want and terror? What kind of creature was I turning into? What was I becoming?
Every day, I felt less and less like a man and more and more like a monster.
I couldn’t even face my own reflection in the mirror because, whenever I did, the Boy kept urging me to go find his Tinkerbell. But I was never going to listen to him.
I tried to stay calm and empty my head of thoughts. Then, I breathed in the fruity perfume that Jennifer had left on me, mingled with the smells of sweat and sex that we both shared. I felt the urgent need to scrub myself clean even though I had, as always, already taken several showers that day.