Chapter 5 #4
It was amazing to be in nature like this and not be at risk of an encounter with an animal that could unalive you.
There were no bears in New Zealand. No snakes.
Also—I learned when I went to the convenience store, which they called a dairy—no applicators with their tampons, which was truly unhinged.
Women here were apparently just stuffing tampons inside themselves with their bare hands?
I was both awed and freaked out by that.
Or maybe New Zealand women didn’t use tampons.
Maybe the menstrual cups here didn’t feel like aliens sucking out your cervix.
Honestly? I was procrastinating calling Caroline.
I could pretend that this was because I was waiting until three a.m. to catch them both so I only had to tell my sorry tale once, but really, I just didn’t want to do it.
I sat down on the stones in the river. The temperate water rose to my ribs, a slow, but steady flow, and I slapped the current with my hands like a child.
I could have waded toward the bank on the other side where it looked deeper, but swimming into the depths by myself felt like a bad idea.
My parents didn’t even know I’d left New York—how awkward would it be if someone had to tell them I’d drowned in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand?
They’d never believe it wasn’t on purpose—which had more to do with how much they loved “The Lady of Shalott” than with me.
The text launched into my head like a T-shirt out of a cannon at a concert.
For ere she reach’d upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.
The Lady was cursed to stay in her tower, making art about life instead of being part of it. When she sees Lancelot and gets all horny over him, it ruins her life, so she floats down the river to her death. The obvious message was that dying a sad, lonely, horny virgin was pitiable in any century.
I couldn’t help but take that personally.
Not that I was a virgin—and virginity was a flawed concept anyway.
When most people talked about virginity, they meant penetrative heterosexual stuff.
But as Caroline was fond of lecturing people, sex was far more than that.
I’d done a lot of the things on her list, so by any metric you cared to use, I wasn’t a virgin.
But I’d never had an orgasm.
I sat in the river, thinking about this.
My unfulfilled state wasn’t because I was sexually disinclined or not trying.
I’d tried lots of things, but nothing worked.
At first, I thought it was just a matter of not finding the right Lancelot to lust over.
When I met Paul at work, I was a goo for him.
But fooling around with him still hadn’t led to any kind of climax.
In hindsight, this might not have been my shortcoming—Paul was one of those men who was hotter in theory than in reality.
In the office, his aloof and critical demeanor was sexy.
In bed, (or crammed in one of the fashion closets), it was selfish and uninspiring. But I didn’t care about Paul anymore.
I cared that the trolls who were still pestering me had hit upon a raw nerve, a truth that I had never discussed with anyone but worried that it was plain to see: I was simply not a sexy or alluring person.
My lack of sexual allure was the reason Paul could so easily cast me aside and why everyone quickly believed we had never been a thing in the first place—this never would have happened if I’d had obvious sex rizz .
If I was the kind of woman who people lusted after, none of this would have happened.
Unbidden, I thought about Mike.
According to reputation, he’d had a lot of sex—by any definition you cared to use.
Caroline hadn’t given me details about Mike’s sex life ( Eww Lyssa ), but she’d described him as a moving target, from which I inferred that he must be well acquainted with the elusive art of the orgasm if he kept getting more invites.
And looking like a lusty lumberjack probably helped his cause too.
Obviously, Mike was the answer to my sex problems.
He had the experience to help me figure out what I was missing. Okay, yes, there was the small problem that he’d turned me down last night, but my offer had been vague and poorly timed. I could do better than that.
As the sky above me grayed and water ran over me, my fingers pruned.
I cast all sex-based shame from my mind and focused on the seeds of the plan that had first germinated when Mike had hoisted me onto the counter at Levitate.
That moment had made my intimate parts clench in a way that was as sudden as it was promising.
Mike could teach me how to sex correctly. I was sure of it. Then my sex charisma would become obvious to all and sundry, and all the trolls who were bullying me online because they didn’t believe Paul would ever have looked twice at me would have to eat crow.
Let Operation Sex Appeal commence.