Knocked Up on Valentine's Day

by Amy Brent

  Times have changed, and protocols must be followed so there can be no doubt. Meeting up in a bar was one thing, but if I hit on this girl directly while she was interviewing me for her employer, Psychology whatever magazine, if I made overt suggestions that maybe we should move this conversation to the king-sized bed in the master suite, there would always be that shadow of doubt in her mind that maybe she was coerced or forced into doing something she didn’t really want to do. And shadows of doubt lead to tawdry tabloid headlines and ugly public relations scandals and expensive law suits.

  Besides, I was not that guy. I didn’t have to force myself on anyone. I’m Dr. Lane Curtis. I could have women lining up outside my door if I wanted. I’m not being cocky. It’s just the truth. It’s one of the things I love about my job. Fame and wealth have benefits. You’ll hear no apologies from me.

  And unless my “horny meter” was failing me big time, Meredith and I were both thinking the same thing. I leaned in and gave her a salacious grin. “In fact, I love all sorts of jobs.”

  Her cheeks flushed red and she directed her eyes back to the list of questions on the iPad resting on her crossed legs. She ran her finger down the pad to figure out what her next question would be. I had flustered her, but in a good way.

  Flirtation aside, I have always been genuinely curious about what makes people tick. What makes them happy. What makes them miserable. What turns them on and what turns them off. I also wonder why so many people lie about such things. They lie to themselves and they lie to others.

  You hear people say that sort of thing all the time. I love my job. I just love my job. I love my spouse. I do. I really do. And I love my life. I’m calling bullshit. Usually, the people who say such things are trying to convince themselves of the fact more than anyone else. They think if they tell themselves something enough times, maybe it will really come true.

  So, they chant it like a mantra.

  I love my job.

  I love my mate.

  I love my life.

  No, really…

  Honestly…

  I just looooove my job.

  I love getting up every morning at the crack of dawn to deal with my asshole clients and dick head customers.

  And I love my employees. They’re like family to me. I love them, one and all.

  What bullshit.

  They’re not fooling anyone but themselves.

  Trust me, I know how the human brain works and I’m well aware of the lies we humans tell ourselves, often in a vain attempt to be happy. Or be somewhat happy. Or to just not be miserable.

  You see, I’m a psychologist. A really, really good one, mainly because I don’t have a bunch of baggage of my own. I’ll be the first to admit it. Most people who go to college to study psychology, then go on to make a career out of, do so to try to figure out their own shit. Ask one hundred psychologists why they went into the field and they’ll give you some bullshit answer about being interested in the human psyche and wanting to help their fellow man. Again; bullshit. They just wanted to figure out their own fucked up shit. Some do figure it out, some don’t, most never stop trying. People in the psychiatric field are some of the most fucked up people I know. They just can’t help themselves.

  I never really had my own shit to figure out. I have just always been fascinated by how the human brain does and does not work. I hold multiple degrees in the field of psychology and have written multiple bestselling books. I have studied the human brain for most of my life. I know how the average Jack and Jill’s mind works (or more often does not work).

  People buy into the bullshit that “whatever the imagination can conceive, the mind can achieve”. Want to be rich? Just imagine yourself rich. Want to be happy in your shitty marriage? Just imagine yourself happy. Want a new Corvette? Just put out your desires to the universe and hang on, my friend, because the universe shall deliver whatever you desire.

  I know.

  It is amazing how many people believe this bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

  Want to solve all your problems in one very expensive afternoon? Go stand in a big arena full of other idiots at a Tony Robbins event and chant along with everyone else.

  Me? I know better.

  Most people don’t love their job.

  Most people don’t love their mate, their kids, or their life.

  But they say they do because they think that will make it come true.

  Or they think it’s what everyone wants to hear.

  I love my job.

  I love my mate.

  I love my life.

  Yeah, sure, just keep telling yourself that, pal. Maybe someday it will come true. Probably not, but maybe. And maybe makes the world go around.

  But I really do love my job (I know, you’re probably calling bullshit given everything that I just said). I love it because it’s not a job. It’s a calling, a vocation. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing. It helps that my job has made me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams and famous beyond my wildest imagination. My name is often mentioned right up there with Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz and even Masters & Johnson. I know Oprah and Gail and Gwyneth and Deepak and Tom, and I hang out with the beautiful people all over the world. Granted, most of them were made beautiful by their back accounts rather than their looks and personality, but that’s okay. Not everyone can look like… well… me (insert that smiling emoji here).

  So, back to my point. I really do love my job, my clients, and my life. I also love unicorns and rainbows and cute kittens and women with big tits and tight pussies. Okay, I threw in that last part because in all honestly, that’s the part of my job that I love the most.

  The women.

  The groupies.

  The fame fuckers.

  The star suckers.

  Even the stalkers, to a degree, so long as they aren’t coming at me with butcher knives or paternity tests.

  Yes, my friend, I am Dr. Lane Curtis, Ph.D.; one of the world’s foremost authorities on sex and psychology. I lecture to sold-out crowds around the globe. I write bestselling books. I conduct high-dollar weekend retreats and seminars. And I am a top guest on any talk show you can name, mostly because I talk about how we torpedo ourselves with our fucked up thinking and misconceptions about sex.

  Yes, my friends, our brains screw us, often making us un-screwable by those we’d like to screw. I mean seriously, ladies, do you want a well-hung guy who is great in the sack but a total fucking psycho otherwise? Lots of women have just that. Or would you prefer a guy with a small penis but your best interests at heart?

  Are you seriously having to think that over?

  The answer should be much easier, wouldn’t you agree?

  Thanks for proving my point.

  And it’s not just you, ladies.

  We guys are even more fucked up than you are.

  Guys, would you rather have a smoking hot nympho with amazing tits and a tight pussy who drives you fucking batshit crazy 99.999% of the time? Or a simple, decent-looking girl with a not-so-hot body who’ll let you fuck her and then make you pancakes?

  Don’t bother answering, guys.

  We all know what you’re going to say.

  Chapter Two: Lane

  So, there we were. Meredith, the aforementioned young journalist from Psychology Monthly Magazine sitting with her legs crossed on the other end of the sofa, as if she thought she had to keep her thighs pressed tightly together to keep me from crawling up them to find the treasures that awaited between her legs. I wanted to tell her to relax. I had been interviewed by dozens of pretty young things over the years and had never forced myself on one.

  That’s not to say that I didn’t fuck a considerable number of them, just that I never made the first move. Ever. Legal repercussions aside, it was a thing with me. I could fuck a different woman every day simply because of who I was, but I would never force my fame—or my sizable cock—on a woman without some clear indication that she wanted it thrust upon her. Like I said, I was no Bill
Cosby or Harvey Weinstein. To the contrary, in my practice, which I gave up a few years ago when my first book hit it big, I counseled a lot of women who were used and abused by powerful men. I would never do that to a woman. Ever. I only wanted to please, never to inflict harm.

  Meredith’s voice jarred me back to reality.

  “So, Dr. Curtis, in your latest book, Trade Offs: How Men and Women Use Sex and Love To Get What They Want, you write about how women exchange sex for affection while men exchange affection for sex.”

  “That’s right… Meredith…was it?”

  She tucked a lock of red hair behind her ear and smiled even though she was trying not to. To her credit, she was trying to keep things professional. At least for now. She had a job to do. If we ended up in bed together or naked on the couch, it would be after she got what she needed for her interview, not before. Smart girl. My brain didn’t work that well after my cock took over.

  She said, “Yes. Meredith Wilson.”

  “Well, Meredith Wilson,” I said with a warm smile. “Yes, I do believe women give men sex in exchange for affection, and men give women affection in exchange for sex. And it’s that exchange that is the focus of the new book.”

  “What about love?” she asked.

  “Love?”

  “Yes. Love.” She narrowed her blue eyes to give me a suspicious look. “Where does love fit into your equation?”

  I gave her my best “that’s a great question” face and held up a finger to accentuate the point. “Don’t get them confused. Love and affection are two entirely different things. Affection may grow into love, and you can love someone without being affectionate, but true love is not an exchange for sex. When two people truly love one another, there is no exchange. They are one. There is simply them.”

  She frowned at me. “Them?”

  “Them.”

  “Uh, exactly what does that mean?”

  “It means that when you truly love someone, their happiness comes first in your mind. You do things to make them happy because that’s what makes you happy. You don’t do things for the ones you love expecting anything in return. There is no exchange. You have achieved nirvana.”

  She still looked confused. Sigh. These young girls. Sometimes they just didn’t get it. She twisted her mouth to the side and frowned. “Nirvana? Like the band?”

  I brushed a knuckle to my lips to keep from smiling. To achieve nirvana, as referred to in Buddhism, meant that one has reached a state of perfect happiness. Bliss. I wasn’t too surprised that the word brought to mind the Seattle grunge band whose lead singer blew his own brains out. Kurt Kobain did not achieve nirvana. He was the leader of the band Nirvana… whatever… I didn’t have time to explain it.

  “Yes, exactly. Nirvana like the band.”

  She arched a pierced eyebrow and waited for me to say more, but I didn’t bother. I hadn’t noticed it before, probably because I was focused on the size of her boobs, but she had piercings along the ridges of her ears and across her eyebrows. She had a small diamond in the left side of her nose, and a stud with a gold ball in her tongue, which she had a habit of rolling over her lip as she waited for me answer her questions.

  “Look at it this way,” I said, holding out my hands as if they contained a visual display of the point I was trying to make. “The relationship between a man and a woman is much like a board game. The dice is rolled. Moves are made. Forward and backward. Options are explored. And in the process, sex and affection become tools in the game, used by men and women to get what they think they want.”

  She held up a finger to stop me. Her fingernails were painted the same crimson as her lips. “Can you explain that… to get what they think they want…”

  “Sure,” I said, crossing my legs and wrapping my fingers around my knee. I bounced my foot like I didn’t have a care in the world to try to relax her. This girl was wound tighter than a broken watch.

  I said, “People often think they want or need something, only to later realize that they actually wanted or needed something else. We spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing over things, only to realize that those things were not what was best for us. In fact, sometimes those are the very things that do us harm, physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally.”

  She glanced up from the tablet she was using to take notes and narrowed her eyes at me. She was also recording our conversation on her phone. It was lying on the sofa cushion between us. “Have you ever done that?” she asked. “Wanted or needed one thing, only to find out that you would have been happier with something else?”

  I smiled at the question. “Hundreds of times,” I said, head bobbing. “We all do it. It’s simple human nature.” I gestured toward her. “Haven’t you?”

  “I suppose,” she said with a sigh that made her frown at the tablet. So young, I thought, but so many regrets. Bad haircuts. Bag hangovers. Bad relationships. Hot guys who ended up being total douche bags who fucked her best friend. Her story was not unique. I’d heard it all.

  “You’re young,” I said. “We all make lots of mistakes in our youth.”

  “I’m not that young,” she said, glancing up into my eyes, her fingertips tucking the strand of red hair behind her ear again. “I’m twenty-six.”

  “Wow, twenty-six,” I said with a grin. “My darling, I have suits older than you.”

  “You’re only thirty-nine,” she said, scolding me playfully with her eyes.

  “Actually, I’m forty,” I said, putting a hand to my chest, making a pained face. “Granted, I’m a very young forty.”

  “Whatever. Forty is not that old. You still look… I mean…” She gave me the first genuine smile of our time together. It made her face light up. I gazed into her blue eyes until she looked away.

  “I still look what?” I asked playfully as the imaginary door between us started to creak open. “Please don’t say that I still look good for my age.”

  “You still look very nice,” she said, uncrossing her legs. She turned sideways to face me on the sofa and held the tablet to her breasts. Lucky tablet. “At any age.”

  “Well, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Good, because that was how it was meant,” she said. “Now, tell me more about the tradeoff of sex for affection.”

  Ah, warming up, but still on the clock. That was perfectly fine. I still had half an hour before the seminar began downstairs in the Grand Ballroom. Plenty of time to do whatever came next.

  I said, “Quite simply, the male/female relationship is a series of tradeoffs and exchanges. Women trade men sex in exchange for affection. And other things, of course, like attention, security, safety, and hopefully, eventually, love. Men trade women affection in exchange for sex. Men are not nearly as concerned about where it might lead.”

  “Because men just want to get laid,” she said, one eyebrow arching in judgment of all men and their naughty cocks.

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” I said, smiling, nodding. “It’s the way we men have been wired since the dawn of man. It’s in our DNA. From the moment our cavemen ancestors first came out of the cave, we have been wired to want and need sex, to procreate, to spread our seed. To get laid.”

  “In the book, you refer to men as ‘bees with penises, spreading their seed like bees spreading pollen through a field of sunflowers’.” She narrowed her blue eyes at me again. “Do you really believe that?”

  “I wouldn’t have put it in the book if I didn’t,” I said playfully, leaning in and rolling my eyes. “Yes, men, by our very nature, are wired to spread our seed to ensure the survival of the species. Think about it this way, if it wasn’t for the male libido, the male need to reproduce, the human race would have died out eons ago. If we waited on women to initiate sex, well, there goes the planet.”

  “Because most men are too lazy to get off the couch,” she said, giving me the look I had just given her. “And the only thing that will get them off the couch is the promise of pussy.”

  I grinne
d at her use of the word. “Yes, the promise of pussy. And maybe beer and nachos. It depends on the man.”

  “What does it take to get you off the couch, Dr. Curtis?” Her tongue went across her lips. The little gold ball in her tongue wedged between her teeth. She glanced around the hotel room. We were alone. The door was locked.

  “What do you mean?’” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Is the promise of pussy enough to get you off the couch?” she asked, pursing her lips. “Or do you require beer and nachos?”

  I smiled. Bingo. I turned to mirror her posture on the couch. “The promise of pussy can make me do all kind of things,” I said. “Especially when I don’t even have to get off the couch for it.”

  She picked up her phone and tapped the button to turn off the recorder, then set the tablet and phone on the coffee table and slid toward me. Her hand started at my knee and slid slowly up toward my cock, which was waiting patiently and smiling slyly.

  She cooed at me. “So, you wouldn’t get off the couch to have sex with me, Dr. Curtis? My pussy hair is red, just like the hair on my head. Most men love red pussy hair. Do you love red pussy hair, Dr. Curtis?”

  “I am a big fan of red pussy hair,” I said, setting my hand on the back of the couch as she slid closer, her hand finding my cock chubbing up inside my linen pants. She gasped a little at the size of it. “And I would definitely get off the couch for you. Although, as hotel couches go, this one is pretty nice.”