by Gina Messina
“No kiss on the cheek?” her doctor probed.
“Not even a hello!” she hissed back. “I was speechless. I sat there with a stunned look on my face as he signaled for the waitress and ordered himself a vodka on the rocks with a twist of lime. He didn't even bother to ask me what I wanted to drink and my glass was empty!” Charlie thumped her finger into the middle of her chest, “I’m not the kind of girl who likes to be ignored!”
“I can see that,” Dr. Harrison stated in a low snarky voice. Was that meant to be insulting? Charlie thought. Did the good doctor just show me her fangs?
“But he did ignore me and it drove me crazy. He spent the next hour talking about himself. I heard the words ‘me’ and ‘I’ repeated over and over and over again, like a broken record that I wanted to smash into a million pieces.”
Charlie remembered how she had studied his face when he was gabbing away about himself, taking note of his perfectly formed full lips and strong jaw with a centrally placed dimple.
“So he was egotistical?” Dr. Harrison asked plainly and then raised her eyebrows with a hint of skepticism.
“He was, and still is, a complete narcissist,” she replied, rubbing her temples and sarcastically telling herself that maybe she was the one who should be sitting across from the couch, asking the questions and making the comments with the garishly framed diploma that justified such ludicrous fees. She couldn’t help but to envision what a great pair of shoes she could buy for the cost of two hours of therapy. Not Hermes ones, but a nice Chanel pump for sure! She quickly tried to calculate how many weeks she’d been in therapy and then multiplied it by $350.00. But she couldn’t seem to do the math. She grabbed her iPhone and used the calculator instead. “Sweet Jesus,” she muttered under her breath when she stared at the mind boggling number displayed on her screen and concluded she could have probably bought half the shoes in the Hermes boutique by that time.
“I doubt that I’ve ever met someone so preoccupied with themselves before. So incredibly egomaniacal,” she announced, still sickened by her recent discovery.
All at once, a wave of nausea overcame her. It was the same way she’d felt when that first date with Sean dragged on so tediously that it bordered on torturous. Charlie wasn’t sure if it was because she was being forced to talk about Sean and that night or because she was so sick about the Hermes shoes she could have purchased in lieu of her therapy.
“Charlie? Charlie! Are you with me?” Dr. Harrison asked, snapping her fingers in the air. She looked up in a daze to meet her psychiatrist’s eyes. “Your daydreaming again.”
“I’m not daydreaming,” she shot back. “I’m trying to remember that night! It was a long time ago and it’s not something I like to think about unless I have to!”
“There’s no need to be defensive, Charlie.”
“I’m not defensive. I’m frustrated. Let me see…, I do remember plotting about slipping into the restaurant’s kitchen and out the back service door. I wanted to get the fuck out of there and jump a taxi back uptown to my apartment where I could’ve at least spent the rest of the evening in the preferred company of my cat Sneakers. At least Sneakers would have acknowledged me by kneading my chest with her soft, white paws,” she blurted out. “I doubt if Sean would have noticed me gone.”
Charlie suddenly experienced another dull ache in her forehead. It reminded her of the brilliant performance she’d given that night when she feigned a headache in an attempt to set the stage for her exit.
“Are you feeling alright?” Sean had finally asked, after fifteen minutes of watching her dramatically rubbing her forehead.
“I have a splitting migraine,” she whimpered.
“I'm sure if I ask one of the staff, they’ll get you something for that,” he suggested.
“No!” she exclaimed a little too loudly. Before he could say another word, she stood up and grabbed her coat, then threw a twenty-dollar bill onto the table. “I need to get home! My head is about to explode!” she added dramatically, which was a little over the top even for her. But never the less, it had been a stellar performance, worthy of all sorts of accolades and awards.
Sean had really surprised her when he handed her back her money and paid the tab. “I’ll give you a lift,” he offered, not waiting for her to refuse him. He then stood up and followed her out the door. Once outside, he asked where she lived and she told him Midtown. It was the only question he’d asked her all night.
“When we were walking to his car, it started to pour. He pulled out one of those tiny umbrellas that can barely cover one person. You would have thought he would have handed it to me, right? I mean that’s what any real man would have done on a first date! But not Sean! Instead, he held it between us. It was three blocks to the garage where he parked and I was soaked by the time we got there. I remember gazing down at my new suede Stuart Weitzman boots, which were ruined and was on the verge of tears. I hated to see the soft suede absorbing all that water. It was all Sean's fault and he didn't seem to care. The least he could’ve done was fetch the car and pick me up in front of the restaurant. But instead he made me walk with him. In the rain! What a self-absorbed, arrogant asshole!”
Once they were in his sardine can of a car, she was on the verge of either strangling him or having a nervous breakdown. It was a toss-up. So to steady her nerves and spare her date the danger of physical harm, she reached into her purse for a much-needed cigarette. “You don’t mind if I smoke in your car?” she asked while simultaneously rolling down the window a crack.
She was shocked when he leaned across her and physically pushed her hand from the window button, very matter of factly saying, “I don’t let anyone smoke in my car.” Charlie had been miffed! She wanted to ask if he was serious, but deep down she knew that he was. Instead, she heard herself say, “No worries,” in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own.
“All I can say, Dr. Harrison, is that he had some grande pair of cojones. He actually told me I couldn’t smoke in his car! And in a very rude way!”
“What are cojones?”
“It’s Spanish for balls.” This time, Charlie did roll her eyes. This sudden reminiscing about the Mexican restaurant where they had their first date must have subconsciously rubbed off on her brain along with the massive headache that she was suddenly experiencing. She didn’t normally use Spanish words in her vocabulary unless she was trying to stress a point with her maid Izzy. “You don’t happen to have a few aspirin?” she asked.
“No, I am not allowed to give my patients aspirin.”
Charlie couldn’t believe her ears and ironically thought, She can give me narcotics that could put a horse down but she can’t give me two little Tylenol?
“So you didn’t like it when he told you what to do?”
“It was breathtakingly rude. Not to mention the fact that I wasn’t used to men telling me what to do, unless of course, it was in the bedroom,” she snorted out before adding, “And not even there.”
“How did you feel when he said no to you?”
Charlie blinked once … twice before horrifically admitting, “I was instantly and thoroughly attracted to him. More so than any man I’d ever been with.”
Dr. Harrison pinched her eyebrows together in an exacerbated gesture of frustration—or maybe just weariness—and reached into her drawer and pulled out a bottle of Advil.
Really? Charlie eyed the bottle with a look of contempt and longing.
“Did you tell him how you felt? Show him maybe …”
She knew what her psychiatrist was insinuating and wanted to shake her! Does this woman think I fuck every man that pays attention to me? she asked herself.
“Of course not!” As soon as we pulled up to my building I got out of the car without even saying good-bye. I wasn’t going to let him get the best of me.”
“Did you regret making that decision.”
“Not at first. I mean, why would I be interested in someone like him? He wasn't even wearing nice shoes that
night!” Charlie still often wondered what had happened to those luscious snakeskin Stetson’s he had been wearing the night they met in Philadelphia.
“But you were interested?” Dr. Harrison asked, seeing right through her.
“Very.”
As soon as she’d entered her apartment, she lit up a cigarette and took a long, urgent drag. She spent the rest of the evening chain smoking with the television muted watching useless infomercials and contemplating Sean’s luscious lips. She found herself dreaming about the touch of them on hers and how they would taste when they lightly brushed against her own. She couldn’t help but to fantasize about him caressing her with his large hands all over her body and his fingers exploring her-the warmth that they could unquestionably bring her. She had been burning up with desire for him.
“It must have been hard for you to be rejected. To have him show no interest in you at all, right? You weren’t used to that, were you, Charlie?”
“It was devastating,” she confessed, remembering the fitful sleep she’d experienced that night, tossing and turning. She must have woken up a dozen times in a pool of sweat! She kept staring out her bedroom window trying to figure out why he hadn’t asked to see her again, notwithstanding that she really didn’t give him much of a chance. And he hadn’t even texted, for Christ sake. Charlie couldn’t come up with one valid reason! She had been stumped! He went from suffocating her to ignoring her, then infuriating her and finally, to exciting her beyond her wildest imagination. She wanted him more than a new pair of Jimmy Choo’s which was saying a lot!
“I remember laying in bed a few weeks later. I’d just turned off the light when the phone rang. It was Jane. She wanted to apologize for her behavior and drunken strip tease. I told her all about Sean and how he turned out to be the biggest dick I’d ever met.”
“Charlie,” Jane had declared, “It’s the god damned twenty-first century! You live in mid-town Manhattan, not in a convent. Just pick up the fucking phone and call him yourself.”
“I have to admit, Dr. Harrison, I was becoming obsessed with him.”
At the mention of the word ‘obsession,’ Dr. Harrison’s eyes lit up with interest.
“I became that woman.”
“What kind of woman would that be?”
“The clingy desperate kind. The kind I swore I’d never be!” Her eyes darted from Dr. Harrison’s face all the way to her shoes and Charlie imagined her to be that kind of woman, too. Of course she was. Who would marry her otherwise.
“When he didn't call, I had no choice but to follow Janie her advice. Again! If you remember, Janie was the one who told me to ask the next guy who walked through the door for a ride. So a few days later, I picked up the and spent hours hunting him down. Me! Men usually came to me!”
Charlie had felt like a stalker. She hadn’t known Sean’s last name so she repeatedly called and googled every department of the Goldman Sachs office on Gold Street where he’d mentioned he worked, harassing countless secretaries and assistants until she was finally patched through to his extension.
Charlie replayed that short phone call in her head. That call that literally made her drool into her cell phone.
“Sean Murphy speaking,” he had officiously answered the phone.
“Sean …” She tried her best to control her voice.
"Who's this?" he questioned suspiciously.
“It’s me. Charlie,” she breathlessly announced, then started to salivate buckets into the mouthpiece. “I realized when you dropped me off a few weeks ago I forgot to thank you ... properly.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line and she wondered if he had hung up on her. Finally, his voice came through, confident and full of the arrogance she’d expected.
“What the hell took you so long, Charlotte?”
CHAPTER SIX
“The shoe is very much an X-ray of social comportment.”
Christian Louboutin
“He absolutely hooked me,” Charlie admitted during her next appointment. “It was as if he were the big bad wolf, huffing and puffing until my whole world came tumbling down like a little straw house.”
“Tell me about it,” Dr. Harrison remarked. This time her doctor was prepared. She had her notebook and a pen and was furiously jotting things down. Charlie briefly wondered if she wasn’t writing a tell-all book about her patients. If that was the case, she was sure to take up more than a few chapters, especially when it came to her tumultuous relationship with Sean. Where should I begin? She guessed at the very beginning. She took a deep breath and began hoping that Dr. Harrison’s hand would cramp from all of the writing she was going to have to do in order to keep up.
“We were inseparable after that call, or rather I clung on to him for dear life. I couldn’t get enough of him. Within days he practically moved into my apartment. He left his toothbrush on by my bathroom sink and took over my already limited closet space, which was a really big deal for me I’ll have you know! I’m very territorial, in case you haven't noticed. But for Sean, I would have done anything. I even went to the hardware store and made him a spare key to my place.”
“This is for you,” she remembered shyly whispering in bed one night after particularly soulful sex. She leaned over to the bedside table and reached into the drawer to gingerly hand him the shiny brass key. It was as if she’d given him the key to her heart.
“What's this for?” he asked, taking it from her and twirling it around between his two fingers.
“I thought that since you spend so much time here already, you might as well have a key.”
He shrugged and placed it on the nightstand then rolled on top of her and pulled down her panties in one fluid move. His hands traveled up her nightie and began caressing her breasts, slowly at first, with his fingers circling lightly around her erect nipples. When he mounted her and began to thrust, his head buried in her neck and his teeth biting her skin, she closed her eyes and forgot all about the key that lay carelessly on the nightstand.
Charlie and Sean would hole up for days on end, never leaving her bed unless it was to grab a quick bite at the local Italian or Indian restaurant at the end of her block. She skipped most of her classes, blew off plans with all of her friends and even canceled dinner dates with her father who was often in Manhattan on business. She simply couldn’t get enough of him. It was an undeniably bittersweet time in her life.
“So the sex was good?” Dr. Harrison asked while looking up from her notebook. Charlie couldn’t help but think that she was definitely giving her psychiatrist stellar material.
“Well, let’s put it this way… we couldn’t get enough of each another!” she answered with such enthusiasm it caused her doctor’s eyes to widen in surprise. “He dominated me in the bedroom like I’d never experienced before, murmuring his desires into my ear. I’ve been around, you know, but the things he would say to me ... well, it even made me blush. It was so kinky, so exciting. I was doing things I never thought I ever would. And he brought me small gifts too, to help us with our fantasies …”
“What kind of gifts? Did he buy you shoes?”
“Not shoes at first, though he bought me many pairs later. In the beginning it was mostly lots of small things. Sexy things! Like handcuffs, silk masks and blindfolds, even edible oils that tasted like licorice and bubble gum. Some nights he would bind my wrists to my ankles with long satin ropes and tie me to the corner of the bed. I remember once when he masturbated over me until I was begging him to come all over my face.”
Dr. Harrison winced when she heard this little detail. Her expression didn’t go unnoticed by Charlie and reminded her of how she, herself, used to grimace when Sean tried to get her to be more vocal during sex. “I’m going to make you come at the top of your lungs!” he would shout, urging her to scream out in ecstasy when she was about to orgasm. She was always worried about what her neighbors would think. The walls in her apartment were paper thin. But Sean wasn’t worried-not in the least. He clearly want
ed everyone to hear everything, especially the cute little second grade teacher, Lauren, who lived next door in apartment 2B and who shared a bedroom wall with Charlie. She had always known he was attracted to her. She couldn’t help but notice how he flirted with Lauren several times when they ran into one another in the hallway. There was one particular night that Charlie was supposed to meet Sean back at her apartment after her last class, but got stuck on the subway due to a psycho who had flung himself onto the tracks. She kept trying to call his cell to tell him she’d be late, but he never picked up. When she finally got home and was unlocking her front door, he sauntered out of Lauren’s apartment next door looking startled and disheveled.
“What’s going on, Sean?” she questioned.
“Lauren asked for help with her window. It was jammed and she couldn’t lift it herself so I gave her a hand,” he offered by way of an excuse.
“Why would she open her window in twenty-degree weather? It’s downright freezing outside!” she suspiciously asked, wrapping her scarf tighter around her neck.
“How the fuck should I know?” he blasted back.
“Well, I don’t like her. Not since she borrowed a pair of Steve Madden heels for a blind date and returned them with a big divot in the cork heel! And, she didn’t think anything of it! Seriously, who does that?”
Charlie had been a fool to let her borrow those shoes. It had cost her forty bucks to get them repaired. She had also been a fool to believe Sean. Remembering that night made her realize that she’d always been naive when it came to his many excuses. From the moment he had hooked her, she’d been a naïve little fool.
“Keep going, Charlie. Tell me more about the gifts.”
“The gifts,” she repeated. “There were so many of them. The whole top drawer of my nightstand was stuffed to the gills. There were all sorts of things that inflicted pleasure and pain, sometimes both at the same time. Feathers were used to tickle while leather cattails would score my flesh; aromatic oils and creams were slathered all over my body and hot wax would leave tiny red marks on my skin. I became a willing sex slave to his whims. I was always ready, always willing and always anticipating what was inevitably to follow but I never truly knew how far things would really go.”