3
Jo
I livedin a bubble of well-being, limiting my outreach to family members and a handful of girlfriends I’d befriended over the years. Despite my social anxiety, it was easy for me to talk to women.
Men were a different story. Men made me nervous.
Once I was comfortable around a man, I became my outgoing and obnoxious self. Reaching that point either required that I expose myself to him until I was comfortable, that I was drunk, or sex. Sadly, expressing my willingness to have sex required that I be drunk or comfortable. Being comfortable took time. Men were impatient creatures, which normally meant they gave up before I relaxed enough to be myself.
The anxiety created by my social inadequacies wreaked havoc on my sex life.
“What do you feel like eating?” he asked.
Making decisions wasn’t one of my strong suits. To maximize my social skills and minimize the awkwardness between us, I drank two glasses of wine before he arrived. Even so, he was still a man, and I was a few drinks away from being my outgoing self. If he wanted me to be at ease in his presence, he needed to pour half a bottle of wine down my throat, park the car, and fuck me.
I wished I had the ability to tell him it was that easy.
“I’ll eat anything.” I offered a grin of reassurance. “Really.”
“I want to eat somewhere that’s got something you like. Something you enjoy. What’s your favorite food?”
We were parked at the curb in front of the bookstore. His right hand clutched the steering wheel tightly, which caused his muscles to flex. I hoped he and his bicep would decide where we were going to eat without any input from me.
“I don’t really have favorites.” I shifted my gaze to meet his. “I like everything.”
While he focused on jockeying through Allen’s evening traffic, I thanked the tee shirt gods for crafting a garment that fit him like a thin layer of powder blue paint.
He glanced in my direction. “How does seafood sound?”
It sounded hideous. Eating seafood often made me sick. It happened more often than often. Always was more like it. Seafood was nasty, and my digestive system knew it.
My stomach churned in disapproval of his suggestion. I forced myself to smile. “Sounds great.”
I didn’t want to give him a reason to reject me. Choking down a piece of fish was the least I could contribute in exchange for a date with him. An evening filled with muscles, pearly white teeth, and a mile of dick were well worth vomiting in a restaurant bathroom.
“There’s this place called Rockfish over on Park Boulevard.” He checked for traffic before changing lanes. “It looks like a shitty little dive and they serve the food on plastic plates that don’t match, but it’s really good.”
Men who looked like he did asked girls like me on dates for one reason, and one reason only.
Sex.
Some girls were able to measure their successes by counting the months they’d been in a relationship. I wasn’t so fortunate. My relationships simply didn’t last. Having sex was my means of measuring success, and I was hoping for a successful night.
There was no doubt that vomiting during our dinner date would end the possibility of a post-meal sexual romp. Frustrated at the thought of getting sick, I gazed out the car’s side window.
Changing his seafood plans was paramount to our night’s successes. Sucking his dick while he drove should make him forfeit the dinner plans, leaving us with nothing to do for the evening but have sex.
Introducing the idea of an in-car blowjob would require that I consume at least two of the miniature-sized bottles of Apple Crown Royal that were rattling around in the bottom of my purse. Sneaking them in the confines of his car would be impossible.
There was no way around it. Seafood was on the horizon.
“Sounds great,” I said cheerily.
“How long has the bookstore been there?” he asked.
Shifting the subject matter from fish to books was a nice change of pace. I decided to sprinkle clues of my willingness to have sex throughout our conversation – Hansel and Gretel style.
“Five years. I opened it right after I graduated college. Romance novels are the store’s specialty.” I gave him my best sultry look. “Steamy contemporary romance novels.”