Chapter Nine #2
“Thank you for telling me about all of this. You made some great progress here.”
“Oh,” Chris said blankly. “Wait, was this, like, real therapy?”
She laughed. Nicely, not mocking him even a little. “Yeah. What did you think we were doing?”
“I don’t know. I thought you would just tell me how to freak out about everything less.”
“We can work on techniques for anxiety, too, but it helps to know why you’re freaking out before we try.”
“Makes sense.”
“Okay.” She clapped her hands together. “I have one more thing I want to say, and a piece of homework for you, and then you can go home and enjoy your day off.”
Going home meant seeing Luca and having sex, or at the very least talking about having sex. Chris was not in any hurry. Still, he didn’t want Michelle to sense his reluctance to go home with her therapist superpowers. “More homework?”
“The thing I have to say first, and I’m sorry for mentioning this again, but I want you to know this. You don’t have to answer.”
When she raised her eyebrows as if expecting an answer, he nodded.
“Okay. You don’t have to be in a relationship or get married and have kids to be happy—”
“I know that.” Phil had told him so, and he hazily remembered Jax saying something to a similar effect as well one time when he was drunk. Chris might be an idiot, but he did listen when people talked.
“I know you do. But if you want a relationship or marriage or kids, not enjoying sex is also okay. You don’t have to have sex to have a loving, fulfilled relationship or to have a happy family.”
Chris blinked. “But—”
“No buts. Maybe you want sex, maybe it’s important to you, but it doesn’t need to be. Whatever the reason, you never have to have sex you don’t want to be having.”
Chris mulled over Michelle’s words. They didn’t sound real, but he’d thought the same thing about axolotls and blobfish before he watched a creepy nature documentary in a hotel in Nashville, so what did he know?
“What’s my homework?”
Michelle took her glasses off and smiled at him. “Do something nice for yourself. Not to make someone else happy or help them. Just for you.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep.”
He took a long route home, stopping by a Trader Joe’s for the expensive organic coffee Luca preferred and some hummus to go with dinner.
“Therapy homework achieved,” he muttered to himself as he stuck his purchases on the passenger seat.
Then he remembered he didn’t like hummus.
He kept it around because Luca ate it straight from the package.
Next, he went to a pharmacy. Feeling apprehensive about going home didn’t mean he should be underprepared.
He hadn’t kept condoms at home since he and Amélie split, and he’d learned the hard way in high school that most acts involving a dick his size and a second person required lube.
He got himself an alibi lip balm as well, but the tiny plastic tube didn’t make him feel any less anxious and embarrassed when the cashier rang him up. Another fail on therapy homework.
Finally, he couldn’t put off driving home. He could put off going indoors.
Chris put the car in park outside the garage of the apartment building so he would still have a phone signal and scrolled through Instagram for a while. He liked every team post and commented a few fire emojis on a workout vid Howie had posted.
When he reached the inevitable flood of influencers he didn’t follow clogging up his feed, he refreshed. The NHL had uploaded some segments from the preseason interviews in the last few minutes, so he watched those.
A second refresh yielded no new material, so he called Matty.
It took Matty until the fifth ring to pick up. “’Lo?”
“Matty?”
“Hey, bro. Wassup?”
“Are you okay?”
“You woke me up.”
It was ten thirty, so it must be past noon in Montreal. “Don’t you have class?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Oh. Right.”
Across the street, a mom corralled two kids who were begging her to go into a toy store.
She carried two bags of groceries and had a kid-sized backpack slung over one arm.
Her hair fell in her face, and she didn’t have any free hands to reach the kids and stop them from picking up every single item in the display outside the store.
“Why are you calling?” Matty asked around a yawn.
“Gotta check up on my little bro. How’s university?”
“Fine.”
“Fine? That’s it?”
Matty groaned. “Seriously, I’ve been awake for thirty seconds. University’s great, my classes are cool, my dorm room is shitty, and I’m making friends. It’s all good.”
“And girls?”
“Is this about Tabby again? Are you—”
“No, no. Just wondering.” It was only sort of a lie. Chris had texted Tabitha a few times to ask whether she liked Vancouver and make sure she knew he still cared even if Matty had broken up with her. But he’d never pressure Matty about her or even mention it to him.
Matty hesitated, and then he said, “Yeah, I met a cute girl at a party last weekend.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well, Dad would hate her.”
Chris snorted. Her and so many other people. “So she’s not Italian.”
“She’s Métis and super into activism for indigenous people and stuff.”
“She sounds awesome.”
“Yeah.”
“So are you seeing her again?”
“Eh. Probably not.”
Chris frowned. “Not because of Dad, though, right?”
Matty scoffed. “Please. Dad won’t be satisfied no matter who I date.”
“He’s never said anything about any of the girls I dated.”
“You were never super into any of them, though, were you?”
Chris had hit his limit on embarrassing conversations about his lack of dating prowess for the day. Maybe for the year. “If not Dad, then why aren’t you seeing her again?”
Matty didn’t say anything for a while. The mom across the street had finally gotten her kids to move on, but one of them bawled as he walked. His whole face turned red, his mouth stretched wide open, and Chris was scared to roll down the windows and hear how loud it was.
“Wasn’t feeling it, I guess.”
“I know what that’s like.” The words came out before Chris could reconsider saying them, but Matty either decided to be nice about his string of failed relationship attempts for once or hadn’t woken up enough to mock him.
“I guess you do. Anyway, is this really why you called?”
The mom and two kids moved out of his line of sight. “Matty, growing up…were we a happy family?”
Matty laughed. The sound was so sudden and jarring Chris had to hold his phone away from his ear.
“Chris, we were fucking miserable.”
That didn’t sound right. “But nothing bad happened. I mean, Mom and Dad stayed married, and none of us got sick or anything. And I mean, you turned out fine. You’re in university and everything.”
“You’re a literal millionaire. We both turned out fine. You don’t need to be sick or—or in danger to be unhappy. Sometimes people just are.”
“But why?”
“Mom and Dad never sorted their shit out, and no matter how hard you tried to keep the peace, you couldn’t fix their relationship.”
Chris mulled his words over. “So you don’t think it was my fault?”
“What? No! If you hadn’t been there, it would have been so much worse. I would have been a teenage runaway or something.”
“You would not.”
“Okay, but with no one to get in between me and Dad, I would have ended up hating him and Mom as much as they hate each other.”
“They don’t hate each other.” Even as he said it, Chris wondered if it was true.
Matty didn’t have to say anything for Chris to picture his skeptical expression. “What brought this on? Usually you pretend everything’s fine.”
Chris swallowed around nothing. “I think I’m getting tired of that.”
“Okay. Hey, you know Anna Karenina?”
Frowning, Chris tried to parse the abrupt change of subject. “Uh, no. Is she a Russian chick? How many girls are you meeting?”
“It’s a book, numbnuts. There’s this famous opening line where it’s like, ‘all happy families are the same, but unhappy families are cool and different.’”
“What a downer.”
“I mean, yeah, it’s a Russian book. But the point stands.”
Chris wished he was in Montreal to hug his brother. Matty hadn’t accepted hugs outside of greetings and goodbyes for years, but Chris was bigger and stronger. He could hug his little brother if he wanted to no matter what Matty said about it. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“Hey, anytime. Love you, bro.”
Chris pulled his phone away from his ear to make sure the call was connected. Had he heard that right? Wow. “You too, Matty.”
They hung up, and then there was nothing left for Chris to do but drive into the garage and go home.
He did not feel like having sex.
He wasn’t sure he ever had.
Sure, he got hard sometimes, but it didn’t occur with any regularity.
Some guys on his Juniors team talked about masturbating daily, which shocked Chris both because they described it as an urgent issue, which it had never been to him, and because he didn’t understand why they would want to tell other people about it.
For him, it was more of a bodily maintenance thing.
Masturbating helped him relax when he got wound up.
The idea occurred to him when he was already frustrated and irritated and couldn’t figure out why.
Then he would get cozy in his bed and have a long, leisurely jerk-off session, followed by a nap, and then he felt better.
Sex had never been a relief in the same way. It involved too much buildup with too little payoff. And if what Michelle said was true, maybe it was okay for Chris to feel that way. Maybe he was allowed to just…not bother.
The thought caused panic to rise sharply in his chest. If he didn’t figure out how to start wanting it, if he allowed himself to keep avoiding this perfectly normal human experience he was supposed to want, he’d be weird and alone forever.
No matter what Michelle said, no one wanted to do all the good parts of dating without the sex.
Luca had been kind enough to offer his help, and Chris desperately needed it.
With his heart in his throat, he unlocked the front door.