Pointe of Pride

Chapter 2

Every time they left on company tour, Heather told Carly to pack a change of clothes in her carry-on, but Carly almost never remembered. This trip had been no different. So she’d showered and climbed back into her grimy airplane leggings and hauled Nick Jacobs’s suitcase down the street and into the hotel lobby, where a welcome wall of air-conditioned air met her at the entrance. For a few quiet moments, she sat on a sagging armchair, enjoying the chill and waiting for him to appear with her bag. But when she looked across the lobby and realized who was staring at her, her face went suddenly as hot as if she’d stepped back outside into the Sydney sun.

Of course, she thought, her pulse pounding in her cheeks. She stared back at him. Of fucking course. What else could an asshole magnet like her expect? The man whose suitcase she’d inadvertently stolen from the airport was the very same man she’d hit with her cart. Unbelievable, she thought. And yet so very her. Even halfway around the world, upside down and in an entirely new timezone, she’d managed to fuck up. Twice. In rapid succession.

At least she could stop thinking of him as Handsome Asshole Guy, because now, she knew his name. Nick Jacobs. Nick Jacobs, who wrote two different phone numbers, an email address, and a hotel name on his luggage tag. Nick Jacobs, who had a very nice collection of what looked like professional-grade cameras. Nick Jacobs, whose shirt neckline revealed a few dark curls of chest hair and whose stubble only accentuated his sharp cheekbones. Nick Jacobs, who probably looked irritatingly hot in that suit she’d found in his bag. Nick Fucking Jacobs, who was watching her from across the room with disdain on his face and her suitcase at his feet.

Best to get this over with.

Carly would just hand over his bag and grab her own, and then she could go back to the apartment, change into some clean clothes, and pretend this never happened. Her wedding beach vacation could start in earnest.

So she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and wheeled the suitcase across the lobby to where Nick Jacobs was still waiting for her, looking haughty and annoyed.

He eyed her closely as she approached.

“You must be Nick,” she said briskly.

“Yep, Nick Jacobs.” He nodded. “Which is what it says right on my luggage tag.” His voice was less hoarse than it had been at the airport, but it still dripped with condescension.

Carly rolled her eyes. This fucking guy. Okay, so she’d accidentally absconded with his bag, but she’d made the effort to return it. And in the blazing Australian sun, no less. She gave him a sarcastic smile that felt more like baring her teeth.

“You could just say thank you,” she said pointedly. Nick Jacobs gave a humorless laugh.

“What am I thanking you for, exactly? For mowing me down with a trolley? For screaming at me in an airport? Or for stealing my property?”

Carly willed herself to keep her cool. Think of calm, good things, Carly. Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens. Magical pointe shoesthat don’t wreck your feet. A barren deserted island where we can send all the shitty men. “I didn’t steal it,” she gritted out, “I took it by mistake.” Because she’d been too enraged—by him, thank you very much—to think straight.

“Whatever,” Nick Jacobs muttered, and she rolled her eyes again. She reached out to grab the handle of her bag, but at the very same moment, he reached over to grab his own. In an instant, the space between their bodies had all but closed and her face almost pressed against his shoulder. The air was suddenly full of his cologne, something citrusy and spicy that made her stomach flip over.

She looked up in surprise and saw him looking down at her. No, looking down on her, his stormy eyes narrowed with dislike and his forehead creased with a frown. She pursed her lips, and watched as his gaze flicked down to her mouth, then back up to her eyes. Hot irritation clawed at the back of her neck as she glared, unblinking, into his face, unwilling to signal weakness by stepping back first. His frown deepened, his face clouding with what looked like confusion as he kept his eyes locked on her. The heat of their bodies and the scent of his cologne formed a small angry bubble around them in the middle of the cool hotel lobby. He held her gaze, still. So he was stubborn. But she was stubborn-er. Not a word, but I don’t care, she thought, lifting her chin and cocking one eyebrow.

His eyes widened, and he gave in, straightening up and stepping back. Carly allowed herself a triumphant smile as cool air rushed in and his scent was snatched away—but as she watched him pull the suitcase toward him and she caught a glimpse of his toned forearms, her stomach gave another irritating flip.

Hewould look good in that suit, she thought bitterly, as she pulled her own suitcase toward her, but he looked damn good in the plain white T-shirt and navy blue shorts, too. Clearly Nick Jacobs was the kind of person who always remembered to pack a change of clothes in his carry-on.

Not bothering to thank her or say goodbye, he took a step away from her, then stopped and looked down at his suitcase. “Is everything still in here?” he frowned.

Carly stared at him in disbelief. “You’re asking if I actually stole from you? My God, what is your problem?” Fuck this fucking guy! “No, I didn’t steal from you. I’m not a thief.”

He had the decency to look chastened, and she watched his cheeks turn pink again, this time from something other than anger at her. He ducked his head and placed a possessive hand on the side of the suitcase.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, “there’s just some pretty expensive equipment in here and I was worried I wouldn’t get it back.”

Carly shook her head impatiently. He could keep his half-assed apology. “Are we done here? Or do you want to file a police report? Maybe call Interpol while you’re at it? I heard MI6 has some time on its hands lately.”

“We’re done,” he said shortly. And then, because apparently he couldn’t resist condescending to her one more time, he added, “Next time you should put a tag on your suitcase. So this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

“Next time you should put all your fancy little cameras in your carry-on,” Carly retorted. “So you don’t have to worry about thieves.”

“Yeah, well, maybe next time I’ll just fill my bag with dildos, how about that?”

Carly’s jaw dropped, and her skin went cold. She stared at him open mouthed, rendered speechless for the second time today. He ran his hand over his head, seemingly uncomfortable under her furious gaze. Good, she thought. You should be uncomfortable, you smug piece of—

“You went through my bag?” It came out like a hiss, and he looked around them, presumably to make sure no one had overheard.

“Just enough to see that it wasn’t mine,” he said stiffly.

“And just enough to find my … very personal belongings? Are you kidding me right now?” Carly’s heart was pounding and indignation pushed her voice an octave higher.

He ducked his head again, wincing slightly and shrugging his broad shoulders as she glared at him. Guilt nipped at her neck. Distantly, she told herself to calm down, that she was letting her temper get the better of her yet again, but she was too tired, too embarrassed, and too furious to heed any of it. She was meant to be relaxing, goddammit. She was meant to be on a beach with her best friend, or racking her brains trying to figure out how to escape the corps. And instead she was here with Nick Bag Tag Jacobs, who had managed to ruin 100 percent of her vacation so far. Who was standing here all hot and put together and mocking the most intimate contents of her luggage. Of her life.

She gripped the handle of her suitcase and glared at him. She knew she should stop and take a few deep breaths and count to ten, like her meditation app had told her to do. She should visualize a train slowing down instead of reeling out of control and off the tracks. But she couldn’t make her brain do it. Her limbs were heavy with exhaustion, and her cheeks were burning with rage and humiliation, and right now Nick Jacobs’s face looked like an amalgam of every hot, nice-smelling jerk who’d screwed her over in the last few years.

“I didn’t go through it all,” Nick Jacobs said, his voice low and urgent, as if it was important to him that she understood, “I just needed something to identify it for the airline, and since there was no tag—” he said, but she interrupted him. The train had come off the tracks and was plowing through buildings, causing millions in property damage—and she couldn’t seem to stop it.

“Next time,” she growled, “I hope someone does take your fancy little cameras, okay? You deserve it. And they’re not dildos, you pompous perve, they’re dilators.” She grabbed her suitcase handle again, never once breaking eye contact. “Medical, therapeutic devices for people like me, with useless, broken vaginas. Hilarious joke, right? A real thigh-slapper. Have a nice life, asshole.”

Humiliation burned her cheeks, and a new instinct took over. Carly turned and stalked across the lobby, yanked open the door without waiting for it to open automatically, and was gone.

What. The hell. Just happened?

Nick stood planted to the lobby floor, shellshocked, for the second time that day, by the human hurricane that was … whoever that woman was. He didn’t know her name, not that he’d ever need to. She’d stormed away from him after accusing him of rifling through her stuff and denouncing him as an asshole. Again.

The hand wrapped tightly around the handle of his suitcase was slippery with sweat, and his heart was racing. It had started thumping unusually hard when he watched her rise from her seat and had only sped up as he’d taken her in. Despite his bruised knees and dented pride—both her fault, by the way—he couldn’t help but notice the length of her neck and her thick, expressive eyebrows. Watching her from across the room, he felt like he could read everything she was feeling on her striking face. Even when what she was feeling was exasperation, disgust, disbelief, and loathing. Towards him.

He’d known even as the words were coming out of his mouth that he shouldn’t mention the sex toys. But her jab about his cameras had gotten him right in the gut. Those fancy little cameras had cost him so much. His whole government-supported retirement fund wiped out in just a few foolish, hopeful clicks of a mouse. And what good had it done? He wasn’t a photographer, was he? He was just a retired dancer with a failed second career and no retirement savings. He’d been so panicked when he thought those cameras were lost, and now that he had them back, they only seemed to mock him. He didn’t need a beautiful woman mocking him, too, especially not a beautiful woman who had already upended his morning so completely.

And it absolutely would have been an asshole move to go through her personal belongings, which was why he hadn’t done it. He’d put the bag of—what had she called them, dilators?—back as soon as he’d realized he was looking at something very intimate. She was the one who’d rammed him with a trolley, taken his bag, and then rejected his very sensible suggestion of buying a fucking luggage tag. She was the one who’d shouted at him in public on two separate occasions this morning. So who was the asshole here, really?

He huffed out a sigh and loosened his grip slightly on the suitcase, his muscles and joints suddenly feeling every minute of the twenty-one-hour trip from Paris, and his trip onto the floor of the arrivals hall. His first thought as he’d gone sprawling onto his stomach had been I can’t break anything, I have to be able to dance. A split second after he’d hit the floor, he’d realized that no, actually, he didn’t have to be able to dance. It didn’t matter if he shattered his kneecap or tore his Achilles or threw his hands out in front of him and broke both his wrists. He wasn’t a dancer any more, and he no longer had any reason to be cautious with his body. No one would miss him if he wasn’t in class or on stage; no one would reprimand him for being careless and missing a performance season. He would just be a regular man with a regular broken wrist.

He sighed again, more resigned this time, and pulled his suitcase across the lobby towards the hotel restaurant. It was hard to imagine a less auspicious arrival home than the one he’d had today. But he was home.

Well, kind of, he thought, settling himself at a small table and looking out the window at the road down to the beach. Sydney was where he’d spent his teen years, but it had been ages since he’d lived here. In fact, he’d been gone almost half his life; he’d left as soon as he’d graduated from the School of Australian Ballet at seventeen. Only a few boys in his class had been offered places at the Australian National Ballet, and the rest of them, Nick included, had to audition for jobs at other companies. Seeing as there weren’t that many full-time ballet companies in Australia, that usually meant going to Europe—Eastern, Western, wherever they’d give you a job. His parents hadn’t wanted him to go overseas, and he was daunted by the prospect, too. But what choice did he have? He had to go where the jobs were. They’d been furious when he told them he’d accepted a contract at the Munich State Ballet, and they’d been pushing him to move home ever since.

Those first few years away had been an exhausting blur of figuring out how to be an adult with a real job, on top of learning German and memorizing dozens of ballets’ worth of choreography. But after a few years, he’d been promoted out of the corps de ballet, then made the jump to the Paris Opera Ballet, where he’d had the absurd luck to spend over a decade dancing as a premier danseur at one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world. If Sydney was where he’d spent much of his childhood, Paris was where he had truly grown up. In Paris, he’d finally begun to feel like he knew how to be a working artist. Like he knew who he was.

He sighed and flagged down a harried-looking waitress, who tucked her hair behind her ear and dug her notepad out of her apron pocket as she approached.

“What can I get you?” she asked quickly, giving him a perfunctory closed-mouth smile before readying her pen.

“May I have the full brekkie, with brown toast and extra mushrooms? And a skim cappuccino with one sugar. Please.” The waitress nodded, then hustled away to put his order in with the kitchen, and his stomach grumbled impatiently. Sure, he’d miss being able to get exquisite French pastry at a moment’s notice, but as he’d told Delphine many times, Parisians, for all their fine cuisine, still hadn’t mastered the art of the full hot breakfast.

Delphine. He drummed his fingers on the table and tried not to think about her. The woman who had loved him until he left the company and they stopped having work in common. Who had barely mustered interest in his new career, if he could call it that. Who had told him that no, she didn’t want to go with him on this trip because actually, she didn’t want to go anywhere with him, ever again.

And so he’d come home alone, and on a one-way ticket. What was left for him in Paris, anyway? Most of their friends were still dancing, so Delphine had kept them in the split. Simply buying a bunch of cameras and calling himself a photographer hadn’t made it so, and no one in Paris had been interested in yet more pictures of dancers. His dreams of being a digital Degas hadn’t panned out. And now here he was: thirty-two but retired, no longer a dancer but not a photographer, no longer totally Australian but definitely not French, no longer in love but not over Delphine. He wasn’t anything. He was just … floundering.

The waitress returned with a large cup of coffee on a saucer, and Nick gave her a grateful smile. She did a quick double take, and then glanced down at the suitcase tucked behind his chair.

“Where are you visiting from?” she asked. A more complicated question than she realized.

“Euh, Paris, I guess,” he said. Her eyes lit up.

“Oh gosh, I want to go there soooo badly. How long are you staying in Sydney?” Also a complicated question. The way she asked it, he could tell she hadn’t pegged him for a local. Which, he supposed, he wasn’t anymore. He picked up his spoon and poked it into the foam to buy some time while he considered his answer.

“I’m not sure, really. A few weeks, at least, and then …” he trailed off. And then what? For the first time in his life, he had no plan, no goal, no project. He’d spent his entire childhood trying to become a professional dancer, then his entire young adulthood trying to be a professional dancer. But since he’d retired, he had the distinct impression that he’d simply walked off a cliff and had spent the last eighteen months in an endless, scrambling free fall.

He said none of this to the waitress, who was watching him expectantly, waiting for him to finish his sentence. He forced what he hoped looked like a carefree smile.

“And then we’ll see where the wind takes me,” he said. She nodded, looking satisfied. What utter shit, he thought. He’d never once gone where the wind had taken him, and he had no idea how to do that. He’d always had a plan. Had always known who he was and what he wanted. And now he was just drifting, aimless and feeling empty.

“What are you going to do while you’re here? See the sights? The Bridge, the Opera House?”

Nick chuckled and took a sip of his coffee. He’d seen the sights. He’d spent his teenage years in a dormitory not far from the Harbour Bridge, and done his graduation performance on the big stage at the Opera House. But there was no need to tell her that. He nodded, pretending to consider the idea.

“I might do. They’re great to photograph.” Then he straightened a little in his chair and met her gaze. “I’m a photographer,” he said, feigning a certainty he didn’t feel. What did a successful photographer sound like?

“Oh, very cool,” she replied, tucking her hair behind her ear again and glancing over her shoulder.

“Don’t let me keep you,” he said quickly.

“Yeah, sorry,” she replied, with an apologetic smile. “It’s peak hour. But I’ll be back soon with your breakfast, Mr. Photographer.”

Mr. Photographer.Nick shook his head as she walked away. God, he was full of it.

Carly stalked along the baking sidewalk, tugging her suitcase over the uneven pavement. A familiar feeling of reproach crawled between her ribs and mingled with her hunger to make her stomach ache. Nick Jacobs’s low, almost pleading voice echoed in her head, matching her pounding pulse. I just needed something to identify it for the airline. He’d looked sincere when he’d said it, but then, he’d also looked sincere when he’d dressed her down and snatched his bag from her hand. Still, if she had a nickel for every time she’d flown off the handle like that, only to spiral into guilt and self-reproach mere minutes later … Well, she’d have made ten cents today. And she’d never have to take another dime of her parents’ money. She’d also spend way less of her life apologizing for her behavior.

She knew there was no excuse for it. She wasn’t a child, and there hadn’t really been an excuse for it even when she was. But it never made a difference to tell herself that in the moment, when her insides felt alight with anger and she knew the only thing that would put out the fire was to unload on the nearest available target. It was such a cliché, the hot-tempered redhead. And if there was one thing Carly hated it was—okay, there were lots of things Carly hated. But one of them was confirming anyone’s stereotypes. She spent so much of her professional life quietly obeying instructions, and it felt good to open her mouth and talk back in her personal life. Or shout back. But once she’d done that, she’d be left smoldering and regretful. Even if, as in the case of Nick Smugface Jacobs, they totally deserved it.

She was smoldering now as she made her way from the hotel back to her apartment, sweating and squinting against the sun. As she darted across the street, she tried not to think about the insults she’d thrown at him or the mortifying things she’d revealed about herself. Even by her standards, that little rant was extreme. Carly Montgomery wasn’t known for her subtlety or her self-control, but she’d never descended to yelling at a stranger about her pelvic floor before. She’d never even told Heather about her pelvic floor issues, and Heather had been her best friend for two decades.

But he’d found the dilators. The stupid, sterile, hideous dilators that she’d brought with her because her physical therapist said she had to work with them every day if she wanted to see results.

And she did. She wanted, more than almost anything, to fix her stupid, broken vagina.

For as long as Carly could remember, inserting anything into her vagina—tampons, specula, and definitely penises—had been agonizingly painful. Sometimes, it was simply impossible. It took nerves of steel to wear a pad under a white leotard and pink tights, but it was that or skip multiple ballet classes every month when she was a teenager, because no matter how many times she tried, no matter how many different sizes or applicators or angles or internet-recommended tricks she used, she simply could not get a tampon more than half an inch inside her. She’d spent hours locked in the bathroom of her childhood home, pressing the tip of the tampon against what felt like a brick wall of muscle. Her body just refused. It closed up, like there was no opening there at all.

And when insertion was possible, it was painful as fuck, even for someone with the kind of pain tolerance you needed to be a ballet dancer. The first time a boy had tried to put his fingers inside her, when she was fifteen, she’d wondered why his fingernails felt so sharp, and why they seemed to have battery acid all over them. When she’d winced and squirmed her pelvis away, he barely seemed to notice her discomfort; he’d just kept pumping his fingers into her as if touching her cervix would dispense a cash prize.

It had been the same story when she’d had sex for the first time, with a different boy. He’d slid his condom-clad penis into her, and she would have sworn the lube was made of fire. After a few minutes that felt like hours, he finally came, and her eyes burned with unshed tears. Her jaw hurt from clenching through the pain. Three weeks later, he’d broken up with her; they’d dated for almost a year before sleeping together, but sex with her hadn’t been worth the wait, he said. No shit, she remembered thinking. I’ll gladly wait another sixteen years before I do that again.

The first time she’d gone to the ob-gyn for an annual exam, at seventeen, she’d raised the problem with the doctor. He’d checked her age on the chart and told her, with a disapproving frown, that she was probably too young to be having sex anyway. When she’d raised it with a different doctor a few years later, she’d been told she wasn’t relaxed enough and to drink an extra glass of wine before sex.

She remembered the frustration that had bubbled in her chest as she searched the doctor’s face for more insights. She’d chosen a woman ob-gyn because she hoped that she’d be more sensitive and understanding than the last one.

“Is it really a good idea to impair my judgment and reflexes right before sex?” Carly had asked skeptically. Then the doctor had suggested that her tolerance for pain might just be a little low.

“I’m a ballet dancer. I basically break the bones in my feet for a living,” Carly had told her, trying not to sound too annoyed. “What else’ve you got?” At that, the doctor had raised her eyebrows and told Carly that all her tests looked normal and she was probably just too tightly wound.

Another doctor had prescribed her a numbing cream to put on her vulva before sex. I don’t want to feel nothing, Carly had thought in frustration, I want to feel pleasure. Or at the very least, not pain. Yet another doctor had told her that she probably wasn’t aroused enough and should figure out what turned her on and incorporate that into her sex life.

“I know what turns me on,” Carly had snapped across the small, brightly lit exam room, the least arousing place in the entire world. She’d never lacked for desire. She’d always wanted the sex she tried to have. Wanted it to feel good, wanted to give her partner what he needed, wanted it to please, please, please, this time, just work. It was maddening that even though her entire job, her entire life, really, revolved around controlling her body, around training it to do something so few people could do, she could not control this. She could make her body do things no human body was ever meant to, but she couldn’t do this one thing. This extremely natural, normal thing that everyone else could do.

“It isn’t that I don’t want it,” she’d told that doctor. “I just want it not to hurt like a motherfucker.”

That ob-gyn had tsked and shaken her head, and then none-too-gently suggested that Carly see a therapist, because the pain was probably in her head. But Carly was already pulling her feet out of the stirrups and reaching for her bra. The doctor didn’t believe her. That was the problem, she thought: the doctors never really believed her when she told them how bad the pain was, or how many supposed solutions she’d already tried.

And if her sexual partners ever noticed that she was gritting her teeth and faking it, they never mentioned it. Usually, she could switch off her brain and push the pain away, moaning and digging her nails into their backs in what they seemed to think was pleasure. Her mind would drift out of her body, and she’d sometimes feel like she was watching herself have sex, putting on a damn good show that none of her boyfriends seemed to realize was all artifice. When it was over, she’d struggle to come back to herself, her brain too slow and waterlogged to speak. One guy had joked, his tone barely concealing his unearned satisfaction, that he’d fucked the words right out of her.

After a while, she’d started to resent their credulousness, hating the fact that they could feel so much pleasure and not even notice that she was in pain. Or worse, that they could take their pleasure even when they suspected she might be in pain. It made her burn with fury that they could enjoy themselves and not notice or care that she sometimes sighed in relief and wiped away tears as soon as they came. Inevitably, after a few weeks—a few months, at most—she’d cut them loose.

It wasn’t until a few months ago, when she’d read an article about pelvic floor physical therapy and made an appointment at a discreet, spa-like clinic in midtown, that she’d found a doctor who believed her. And more than that, a doctor who didn’t find her complaints mystifying or her problem unsolvable. Angela saw clients like her all the time. Clients who had given birth or gone through menopause and now couldn’t have sex without pain. Clients who, like her, had never experienced pain-free sex in their lives. Angela examined Carly gently with her well-lubed and rubber-gloved fingers, managing to slide a single finger two knuckles deep into her vagina before Carly winced and recoiled against the exam bed.

Angela explained to her that even though Carly’s pain felt like it was on the surface, like her most delicate flesh was being ripped and torn, the problem was actually in her muscles. Her pelvic floor was too tight, Angela had said.

“But it’s supposed to be tight. It’s strong. My pelvic floor is working all day, every day,” Carly had said, craning her neck up from the exam table to meet Angela’s eyes. “You can’t do anything in ballet without activating your core and your floor.”

Angela had leaned back in her rolling chair and shook her head, her glossy brown waves flowing around her kind face.

“Your pelvic floor isn’t meant to work all day every day. It needs rest. It’s a muscle, and muscles get sore if you don’t give them a chance to rest. If your pelvic floor is working all the time, it’s never resting and relaxing. It’s tight and spasming, which is probably why penetration is so painful.”

Carly frowned. The explanation made a certain amount of sense. But resting wasn’t really something dancers were encouraged to do, unless they were seriously injured. Once, when she was nine or ten, a teacher had told her that after a day without ballet class, the dancer would notice the difference. After two days, her teachers would notice it, and after three days, the audience would notice. The warning had stuck with Carly, and she’d never taken more than two consecutive days off if she could help it.

“So I need to learn how to rest my pelvic floor?” she’d asked Angela. How would one even do that?

“That’s right. We can work on some exercises that will release the muscles, so they have time to switch off and become less stiff and sore.”

Carly had nodded eagerly, wondering why it had never occurred to her to approach a physical therapist for this problem. PT was usually the very first port of call for any dancer in the company. There was a physical therapy room on site at the theater, and if not for PT, half the dancers at NYB wouldn’t still be working—or walking. Plus, she trusted Angela. After years of blank faces and condescending suggestions from doctors, it was a profound relief to talk to someone who was so unfazed by her condition. But then, Angela said something that put a damper on her relief.

“And I would advise you to stop having penetrative sex for a while.”

Carly felt her eyebrows rocket upward.

“Excuse me?”

“You can learn how to release the muscles, but you also need them to unlearn what you’ve taught them over the years. Your body is smart. Every time you force penetration even though it hurts, you’re teaching the muscles that penetration is painful and they should try to protect you from it. They’re seizing up because they want to protect you. It’s a perfectly natural response.”

Carly swallowed, her throat suddenly tight. They want to protect you. Her body had known, all this time, what she needed. Had sent her one screaming, burning message after another, all but begging her to stop forcing something that was hurting her. But she’d ignored it. On some deep cellular level, beneath her skin, she’d known better. She’d wanted better. She’d pushed through the pain anyway.

She swallowed again and sat up on the crinkling paper as Angela tossed her rubber gloves in the trash can and scribbled some notes on a clipboard.

“Isn’t there some other way?” she objected weakly to Angela’s back. “Could I just double up on the exercises? It’s just that … I really want to have sex.”

Was that true, though? If she was honest with herself, a tiny part of her was relieved that Angela had told her to stop. She’d known for years that something was wrong, but it had taken Angela’s firm, compassionate order to feel like she had permission to do something about it. The kind of sex she was having now—the kind of sex she’d been having for years—wasn’t what she really wanted.

What she really wanted was sex that felt good. Sex that didn’t make her feel like her body was failing her, and like she was failing herself for continuing to have it. She wanted to want someone and have that want answered with pleasure and comfort, instead of with pain and disappointment. And if temporary abstinence could help her achieve that, then wasn’t it worth a shot?

So Angela had sent her home with a pack of sleek plastic dilators, white cylinders with rounded tops, and instructions on how to practice releasing her muscles and then inserting the dilators slowly. The thinnest one was about the width of a pen, and the largest the width and length of an average-sized penis. Once she could consistently insert the smallest one without pain, she was allowed to move on to the next one. Weirdest PT exercises ever, Carly had thought. She remembered opening the package and seeing them all lined up, a parade of the most sexless sex aids she’d ever seen, and jokingly asking Angela if they had any purple sparkly ones in stock.

Angela had chuckled indulgently and sent her on her way after reminding her that her best chance at success was to be consistent with her exercises and not put anything except the dilators inside her for a while. Carly said she’d do just that and left the clinic feeling optimistic and excited to make good on her promise.

And she had, so far. She’d been diligent about doing her exercises every day and had progressed to the second dilator, which was about the width of a thick finger. At the time, she’d just started dating Carter, a former college lacrosse player who now worked in private equity. Carter was perfectly coiffed, perfectly pedigreed, and could carry a perfectly good conversation about contemporary art or current events. Perfect, perfect. Her parents would have loved him. Carly had had sex with him a few times, but after her first appointment with Angela, she told him that she couldn’t do that anymore and wouldn’t be able to for a while. She’d taken a deep breath and explained that it was a medical issue and reassured him, with her best attempt at a sly and flirtatious grin, that there were still plenty of fun things they could do. He’d seemed fine with it. He’d certainly seemed fine when she’d pulled him into the all-gender restroom to show him what kind of fun things she meant. They’d had a perfectly nice meal after that, though they spent most of it pretending not to notice the knowing look on their server’s face. And then he stopped texting her back.

After four days of unreturned calls and texts, Carly got the message. Men couldn’t be trusted. Not to see her when she was in pain, and not to want her when she was trying to do something about that pain. Unless they could fuck her they way they wanted to, she was of no use to them. Unless she could give them penetrative sex—“real sex,” Carter had called it—everything else she had to offer was worthless.

And that was when she’d made her vow. Screw Carter and all the men like him. No more fuckboys. No more men at all, if all they really wanted was something she couldn’t—no, wouldn’t—give them.

And then Nick Jacobs had come along, with his strong shoulders and his ludicrously long eyelashes. Pulling her suitcase up the front path toward the front door of her rental, Carly pictured him mocking her, that condescending smile twisting his mouth. Asshole. Somehow, being laughed at felt even worse than the ghosting or willful ignorance, she thought, as she shouldered her way into the apartment and rolled the suitcase into the bedroom. She opened it up and let out a sigh of relief at the sight of her teal dress.

Now, should she have called him an asshole to his face, even if he very clearly was one? No. Carly was willing to admit that.

Still, she thought, peeling off her leggings at last and stepping into a pair of denim cut-offs, most assholes didn’t try to apologize right away. Didn’t look mortified when they were accused of going through someone’s private belongings. Either way, she was too old to have so little self-control.

She gave herself a little shake, trying to get the image of his face out of her head. She had things to do today, places to be and people to help. Besides, she reasoned as she buttoned up the shorts and looked at herself in the mirror, it could have been a lot worse. It wasn’t like she’d ever see Nick Jacobs again.