“And that’s where you’ll miss out. You have to feel direct confrontations with people. There’s no sense in having pity for people if you’re being ruled by performance and profit. There’s no point in being charitable if you’re really not experiencing the compassion directly like a stab to your heart. I have a shitty boyfriend, I’ll be the first to admit that. But at least we have passion. We fight with passionate anger in our hearts.”
“That’s useless to me,” I said. It sounded heartless even as I said it. When had I become such a callous, insensitive jerk? “I’ve had no close relationships with anyone in my life—ever. Not since Zelpha Pratt.”
“You mean romantic. But you love your men.”
I stood tall and proud. “I love my men like a protective mother hen. But passion with a woman? Nothing. At least you have that with your idiotic boyfriend.” It irritated me that she had even an idiotic boyfriend. I’d grown close to her the past week, strange to say. We sort of fit together like hand in glove, though I knew she loathed me for my business practices. I was used to that. I’d been denounced for my field of work for a long time now. It was only because we serviced such a large denomination of pious men and women in the community that no one had harassed us to move.
She said, “Decisions such as whom to fall in love with, how to discipline a teenager, which beloved things to sacrifice, which dreams to follow or abandon—all of these choices should be made with emotion ruling, not wiped out and deadened by your logical thinking. If I let myself be ruled by logic, I’d never have hooked up with my worthless Italian boyfriend.”
“And that’s a good thing?” I scoffed.
She shrugged. “I’m actually trying to get rid of him. Emotion keeps drawing me back to him. But you see what I mean? You’re missing out on such a broad array of human experiences if you don’t go through any of those things.”
I was getting riled, maybe with the more Jim Beam I drank. “You don’t understand. I was kicked out of the bosom of my family. I was told that I was a thing, a bother, an inconvenience. I was a miniscule number in a perpetual multitude of numbers—an ‘it,’ not even an ‘I.’”
She folded her hands in front of her soberly, though she had drank as much as I had. “I understand. You won’t let yourself feel because that would dredge up all those angry, bitter feelings.”
“But I am angry and bitter! ‘Angry and Bitter’ is my middle name! It washes over me time and time again, trapping me in my bitterness, my rage, my inability to even remotely forgive anyone connected to that incident.”
“You have to learn to forgive, Levon, or else you can’t move on. Don’t you want to marry and have a regular wife? One that wasn’t chosen for you by some moldy old elders? Don’t you want to feel regular, normal passion and love for a woman—a woman you chose yourself?”
I don’t know what the fuck came over me. All at once, I knew I had something to prove to Oaklyn. Suddenly her waist under the furry jacket looked so small, so fragile, like she needed my big hands around it. When I grabbed her, she jumped, as though I was going to hurt her. She held onto my forearms as I lifted her onto the deck railing. She was so fucking light, with bones like a little bird! I parted her thighs with my massive ones, feeling like an ancient tree next to a swaying birch. I touched the tip of my nose to hers, and she didn’t try to pull away.
“I might not know romantic feelings,” I murmured, “but I know that sex can masquerade for emotions of that type.”
And I kissed her.
I gave it my all, letting my usual rage and indignation stand in for passion. I bit her pouty, full lips over and over again until I felt the breath of her sighs against my mouth. Her entire body did a full melt, and she even wrapped her ankles around the back of my knees.
Something happened during that wild kiss. My asshole self, who had never even really felt a passionate sexual urge—it was strictly business with all of us—began to cave in. Just like Oaklyn was folding up, dissolving like a sinkhole beneath my onslaught. Some of the walls I’d built up carefully over fifteen years began to dissolve. I could almost feel it, at the edges of my awareness, like a curtain someone was lifting on the two of us.
Like a spotlight shining on us coupling there on the deck railing, I began to feel like the star of our show. Only there were two of us, because it wasn’t just me performing like a trained seal. This was a woman who wasn’t my client. I was voluntarily licking her lips of my own free will. My cock was burgeoning, swelling against the wood railing, just an inch from her pussy. It made a giant tent in the loose lounging pants I wore, but I wasn’t embarrassed. Real feelings rushed through my lungs. Every breath I snorted against her cheek, every intake of air was like breathing true, real emotion.
I didn’t hate Oaklyn. I sort of even liked her.
My hands moved up her ribcage, felt her bony shoulders, cradled her strong jaw. Of course I never kissed clients, so I hadn’t kissed a woman in a year, maybe even two. It just wasn’t in my wheelhouse—I didn’t have the time. So feeling the true, hot, aroused sensuality of a woman beneath my very palms, well, it was a fucking turn-on.