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“I haven’t been able to…” I gestured to my lap. “With my wife.”
He glanced over with a look of confusion. “At all?”
I shook my head.
“Have you seen a doctor? That could be ser—”
“I can get it up, George. God, I’m hard all the time. The night of our wedding—it was really fucking hot, and Iwanted tomore than… But I just… couldn’t. I look at her face and…“ I exhaled and ran my hand down my beard. “I see Eleni.”
George winced, but quickly recovered, nodding.
“And I see you. And all the women who were just meaningless interactions.”
“And by nature of Decca being your wife, she’s the opposite of meaningless.”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t leave her. You have to love her. She’s your sexual partner for life,” he said, breaking it down in starkly clear terms.
“What if I fail? What if I never know the right way to treat her?”
“Well…” He tilted his head to the side and took a slow, deep breath. “What if those other women weren’t meaningless either?”
“What do you mean?”
“You always received their enthusiastic consent. You never really lured them into your bed under false pretenses or promised them relationships. Just because you had a lot of sex with a lot of partners doesn’t make it unethical.”
I chuckled. “The Church might disagree.”
“I’m not talking to the Church, I’m talking to my brother, who once told me to get my head out of my own ass, so now I’m telling him the same. All those women you fucked? They wanted to be fucked. Stop retroactively robbing them of their consent.”
“Well, shit.”
“Decca deserves for you to love her fully. And she deserves your expertise.” He gave me a pointed look. “No one said your marriage has to be immediately physical. It’s only been a few weeks. Take your wife out on a date. Have fun together. Didn’t you used to FaceTime constantly? Go back to that.”
“You want me to FaceTime Decca from my room to hers?”
“You have separate rooms?” He raised an eyebrow. “Never mind. My point is, you’ll have sex when it’s perfect; not because you’re forcing yourself through issues.”
We’d reached the Bunganut Pig, and George put the truck in park. Neither of us moved.
“Do you take Bethany on dates?”
“Uh, not exactly. We’re a bit... She’s not into romance. But we do things other things and try to schedule as much time off as we can without putting too much strain on the interns.”
“I don’t think Decca and I have spent one full day together since the wedding. We’re ships passing in the night.”
“Have you made an effort to spend time with her to get to know her in this new light? You can’t expect your relationship to transition seamlessly from a crush, to roommates, to married, loving partners without any of the work. Or any of the fun.”
“It was always seamless before.”
“Sometimes you get lucky and find a friend like that. But when that happens, you don’t develop feelings for that friend, marry them, try to fuck them, emotionally shut down, and then pretend you don’t know why it’s not working.”
“No. You don’t.”
“That requires some seams.Heavy tailoringat that. You don’t think she might be internalizing it all? Thinking about what she might have done to turn you off? And that’s why she’s become the USS Never There?”
“She… Fuck.” No. She couldn’t have thought that there was anything that would turn me off. She could fucking disembowel me, and I’d probably still reach for her as I bled out.
