by Helen Hoang
She presses her mouth to mine before I can finish the question, and hell if I don’t respond. I could kiss her for hours, just kissing, nothing else. Her mouth is perfect, her tongue, those breathless sounds she makes.
“Don’t worry about me,” she whispers between kisses. “This is enough for me, kissing you.”
She palms my cock through my pants, scrapes her nails over the denim, and my blood rushes, everything tightens, every hair on my body stands on end, I almost come. Damn if that isn’t the sexiest thing.
But then her words sink into my brain.
Kissing is enough? She doesn’t expect to get anything out of sex with me? She’s okay if I nut on her like she’s a blow-up doll or some shit?
Like I’m some kind of charity sex case because I’m not whole anymore.
My fly comes undone, and she reaches inside, and I can’t help it, I stiffen, I jerk away, I put distance between myself and the couch and her.
She stares at me, her eyes wide and startled. Her hair is disheveled, her dress open, showing off her gorgeous tits and thighs. The sight is almost enough to bring me to my knees. I take deep breaths and run my hands over my face, only to smell her on my slick fingers. I stifle a groan and drop my hands to my sides.
“Anna, I’m sorry. I just . . .” I shake my head. Honestly, I don’t know what to say.
She pulls the folds of her dress together and seems to shrink in upon herself. With her face turned away from me, she asks, “Is this it? Are we done?”
“Can we talk through this?”
She grimaces and opens her mouth like she wants to speak, but words don’t come. She takes a breath and tries again to speak, but, again, words don’t come.
I take a step toward her. She’s so clearly struggling, and I hate seeing that. I want to make things better. My fly is hanging open, and I zip and button everything before sitting in the armchair adjacent to the couch.
“Remember when I told you it’s been a while for me?” I ask softly. It doesn’t feel good sharing about myself, but I can’t stand the idea of her misunderstanding the situation.
“Your surgery,” she says.
“Yeah.” I exhale tightly. “I often feel like . . . my body isn’t right anymore. Tonight, I was hoping to, I guess, prove that I’m still—I don’t know. If you’re not with me, if you’re not feeling it, I can’t—” I make a frustrated sound. It would help if I gave her specific details, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t want her to look at me differently. I don’t want her to think I’m less. “Do you know what I’m saying? I need you to be just as into it as I am.”
She frowns at me for a long moment before she says, “Maybe?”
“Is there anything that I could have—”
She covers her face with her hands. “Can you not, please? People don’t talk about this stuff.”
“They do. I do.”
“They really don’t,” she says.
I tilt my head to the side as I try to figure this out. “How does a guy know how to touch you, then? I tried the regular stuff, and it didn’t seem to do it for you.”
She makes a miserable sound and shrinks deeper into herself.
A suspicion rises, and I ask, “Are you a virgin? Have you never . . .”
She drops her hands from her face and gives me an impatient look. “I’m not a virgin. I’ve had sex many, many, many times.”
“Have you ever come before, like, had an orgasm? That’s, uh, when your body—”
She claps her hands to her face again. “I know what an orgasm is.”
“Have you had one?”
She draws her knees to her chest, and after a while I hear a muffled, “Yes.”
“Do they happen on accident? Or . . . can you make them happen?” I feel like I’m playing a guessing game, but I keep going.
“They do happen on accident sometimes, during sex, a few times when I was sleeping,” she confesses, and I arch my eyebrows. From my perspective, that’s a clear sign that a girl isn’t getting the proper loving. “But I also”—she clears her throat—“by myself, I can—” She drops her fingers to her mouth, and her face is red, her expression painfully embarrassed.
Because I can’t stand her discomfort, I move to the couch, next to her, and she immediately curls up against me, pressing her face to my neck. I wrap my arms around her, and those same feelings from before swamp me: tenderness, protectiveness.
“I don’t really see why that’s so embarrassing. I do it all the time,” I say, and her body shakes as she laughs. “Like every day, sometimes more than once a day.”
“It’s different for guys,” she says, hitting me lightly on the chest with a small fist.
I pick up her fist and kiss her knuckles. “It shouldn’t be.”
“It still is, though.”
“I think it’s hot as fuck when chicks do it,” I tell her.
She laughs again, and I gently pull on her until she looks at me.
“I mean it,” I say, completely serious. “If you can’t tell me what you like, you could show me.”
Her lungs expand on a sharp inhalation, and her face flushes an even deeper shade of red. “I could never, ever, ever . . .”
“Why?”
“Quan,” she says, her tone accusing, like I should know why.
“It’s just you and me here. It’s not like anyone is watching.”
She shakes her head quickly and looks away from me.
“You’re okay with never having good sex, then?” The idea is horrifying to me. “And what about all those times you’ve had sex in the past? They were all shitty?”
She says nothing.
“Anna, it would have been so easy just to—”
Her body tenses, and she sit upright, shooting daggers at me with her eyes. “It’s not ‘easy.’ Not for me. If it was, I would have done it.”
“I’m sorry. I just think—”
“I think this is as far as we’re going to get,” she says, and there’s a finality in her voice that tells me she’s done. Her dating profile was clear that she only wanted one night, and this was our one night—since the first night didn’t count.
A sense of loss threads through me. I don’t want this to be how we part. I didn’t accomplish what I wanted, and I don’t think she did either, not if she wanted to get over her ex—whoever that dickhole is—by having rebound sex. But we really are at a standstill. We both want things the other won’t give.
I stand and pick my shirt up off the ground. As I pull it on, I’m aware of her eyes on me. She likes what she sees. That’s something, even if it’s only skin-deep. With the right person, I think she’ll open up, and it’ll be fucking glorious. But that person isn’t me.
“Thank you for tonight,” I say when I’m standing in front of her door. “I know it was rocky in the end, but I had a great time.”
She joins me in the entryway. “It was the same for me. Thank you—for being you.”
It seems like the right thing to hug her good-bye. When I have her in my arms, it feels like the right thing. She fits against me like she belongs here. I don’t mean to kiss her. It just happens. And she kisses me back. There’s a moment when we hesitate, both unsure of what we’re doing, but our lips come together again. I don’t know who initiates it, her or me, maybe it’s both of us, but I kiss her like it’s our last kiss. Because that’s what this is.
When we finally separate, her eyes are dreamy, her lips red. I run my thumb over her swollen bottom lip, unable to stand the fact that this is the last time I’ll be able to do this.
Without stopping to think, I say, “What if we tried again?”
She blinks several times, her brow wrinkling. “You think we can finally have a proper one-night stand if we try one more time?”
I huff out a soundless laugh. “Third time’s a charm.”
“But you—I—we . . .”
“I think there are things we both could work on. Why not try it together?” I hold my breath and wait for her to answer.
She concentrates on tracing the MLA graphic on my T-shirt with her fingertip as she says, “I don’t think I can do . . . the things you wanted.”
“Maybe we can figure out another way, meet in the middle somehow.”
“Do you have any ideas?” she asks.
“Not yet,” I admit. The thought of fucking her while she lies there, wishing for it to be over, puts a bitter taste in my mouth, but there has to be another way, something else we can do. We can’t be the first people in history to have this kind of problem.
“Okay,” she says, squaring her shoulders as a determined glint enters her eyes. “Let’s try it one more time.”
I don’t attempt to stop myself from smiling. “Okay.”
“Next weekend?” she asks.
“That works.”
“Are we completely ridiculous?”
“Maybe,” I say with a laugh.
She laughs along with me, and for a moment, we stand there in each other’s arms, just looking at one another.
Eventually, I pull away. “I’m going to head out, but we should text and decide on next weekend.”
“Sure.” She flashes a smile at me. “Bye, Quan.”
Giving her one last, quick kiss on the lips, I say, “Bye, Anna.”
Then I leave, and she shuts the door behind me. As I walk to my car, I brainstorm different ways we can approach our intimacy problems. Nothing seems quite right, but I think we’ll get there.
TWELVE
Anna
“How have you been, Anna?” Jennifer Aniston asks. Today, she’s wearing a loose dress with Aztec designs and leather sandals that loop around her big toes and ankles.
The usual answer slips from my lips. “The same.” But then I hesitate. “Well, not entirely.” A lot has happened in the weeks since our last appointment.
Her eyes spark with interest. “How so?”
“My boyfriend decided he wanted to have an open relationship.”
She opens her mouth to reply, but it takes a second before she actually speaks. “There’s a lot to unpack there.”
“Yeah.” I smile awkwardly and look down at my hands, which are clasped together in my lap as usual.
“How do you feel about it?” she asks.
I hesitate to answer, examining her face as I try to determine what her opinion is on the matter.
“How do you feel, Anna,” she says softly. “Not me. What I think isn’t important.”
I push a long breath out through my mouth. “You say that, but you’re not a stranger I’m meeting for a one-night stand. You’re someone I’ll be seeing on a regular basis for the foreseeable future. If you don’t like me, that makes things difficult for me.”
“Well, I do like you,” she says with a kind yet amused smile, “and I have no interest in judging you, only helping you. So tell me what happened. Are you in an open relationship now? Since you mentioned it, do you want to tell me if you had a one-night stand?”
“We are in an open relationship now,” I say. “I’m certain he’s seeing other people.”
The corners of her mouth droop downward, and her eyes darken with understanding. “That’s got to be hard to accept.”
“It was. I cried when I found out. But then I immediately arranged to have a one-night stand with someone from a dating app.” I sit straighter, trying to make myself look bold and indifferent, but my muscles tighten as I brace myself for her condemnation.
“I might have done the same thing, in your shoes,” she says. “How did it go?”
At her casual acceptance of my attempt at revenge sex, my stomach muscles loosen a notch. Still, I struggle to describe my time with Quan. He’s been on my mind nonstop, what we did—and didn’t do—and I’ve been restless and extra absentminded all week. This morning, I forgot I’d left my contacts in last night, and I stuck in another pair. I thought I was going blind for an entire hour before I realized what I’d done.
“It wasn’t a success,” I say finally. “We didn’t . . . you know.”
Jennifer gives me a commiserating look. “That happens. But that’s the nice thing about one-night stands. If they don’t go well, you just brush them off and keep on with your life.”
I nod in agreement. “That’s what I had in mind. I thought a lot about what you said last time about masking, people pleasing, and worrying too much about what others think. I hoped that I could use the time during a one-night stand to experiment.”
“That’s such an interesting approach. Did it work?” Jennifer asks.
“A little, but I was so nervous for most of the time that I couldn’t think clearly. And then in the end, it was just . . .” I shake my head. “People are—they’re so confusing. Sometimes, if I think about things long enough and hard enough, I can understand them. But other times, no matter how hard I try, it’s impossible.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that, actually,” Jennifer says, and there’s an expression on her face that I haven’t seen before. I can’t read it.
She gets up and goes to the desk on the other side of the room to sift through one of the big drawers. She extracts a thick manila folder, which she hands to me before sitting back down in the chair across from me.
“This is for you,” she says. “Go on and take a look.”
Feeling strange, I open the folder. There’s a paperback on top of a stack of printouts held together with various staples and a large paper clip. I run my fingertips over the book’s title, Aspergirls: Empowering Females with Asperger Syndrome, and give her a questioning look.
“I recommend you read that book in your free time,” she says. “It’s not a comprehensive source by any means, but I do think parts of it will speak to you.”
“Okay. I’ll read it,” I say, though I’m still not sure why she wants me to read it. I mean, there’s one obvious reason, but I discount that immediately. There has to be another reason.
Because I’m curious, I set the book aside and inspect the printouts. In bold print, the top sheet reads “Understanding Your Autism.” Various sentences and bullet points have been highlighted in yellow, but when I read them, I don’t understand their meaning. All I can think about is the title.
“Based on what you’ve told me about your current issues and childhood, and what I’ve personally seen over the past months with you, it’s my opinion that you’re on the autism spectrum, Anna,” Jennifer says.
In a flash, it’s like the air is sucked from the room. A loud ringing fills my ears. My thoughts narrow to those words—autism spectrum. She continues speaking, but my brain is too shaken to pick up everything. I catch only bits and pieces.
Difficulty socializing.
Need for routine.
Repetitive motions.
Sensory issues.
Consuming interests.
Meltdowns.
She’s describing autism, I realize. It also sounds eerily like she’s describing me, but that’s simply not possible.
“I can’t be autistic,” I say, interrupting her. “I hate math. I don’t have a photographic memory. I fit in. I have friends, a boyfriend, even my mom’s friends like me. I’m nothing like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory or—or—or the brother in Rain Man.”
“None of those things are diagnostic criteria. They’re stereotypes and misperceptions. And I believe your fitting in is a result of a great deal of masking on your part. It’s common for high-functioning autistic women like you to acquire late diagnoses because they ‘pass,’ but it’s not healthy. I’m concerned you’re on your way to autistic burnout—if you’re not already there,” Jennifer says with a worried frown.
I have no response. Her observati
on has literally made me speechless.
We get through the rest of the session, but when I step outside the building, I don’t remember much. I squint up at the blinding brightness of the sky. It’s the same sky that’s always been above me, but it feels different now. Everything feels different. The sun, the wind in the trees, the pavement beneath my shoes.
There’s a green bench to the side. I’ve walked by it for months without once sitting on it. I sit on it now, open the book Jennifer gave me, and read. Hours pass. Clouds race over the sun, momentarily shrouding me in darkness before passing on. In these pages, I read about other women, their experiences, their difficulties, their strengths. But it feels exactly like I’m reading about myself—the way I copy my peers so I fit in; the way I don’t understand them but I pretend; the way I used to hide under the table at parties to avoid the noise and the chaos and the stressful social interactions, much to my parents’ embarrassment; the way I need rigid structure in my day or I can’t function; the way I can’t stand to focus on something unless it’s interesting to me and then I get tunnel vision; even the way I’m tapping my teeth right now. I’m stimming. In secret. In broad daylight. I’ve been doing it my entire life.
Just like the women in the book, there’s always been a lot “off” about me, so much to change, to suppress, to hide—to mask. It was painstaking, often exhausting, work, but my efforts were rewarded with my family’s approval and the acquisition of friends and a boyfriend. By changing myself, I earned a sense of belonging.
But maybe I belonged all along. Just with a different group of people.
I did all that work. I experienced all that confusion and pain. And maybe I didn’t need to. Maybe with the proper insight, I could have been accepted the way I was.
When I’m done reading pertinent sections of the book and everything in the manila folder, it’s the golden hour. This used to be my favorite time of day to play the violin because it feels like there’s magic in the air. Logically, I know it’s not magic, it’s light falling at an angle as the sun descends toward the horizon, but it adds something indefinable to the gravity of now.