That early experience was a precursor of my doomed love life to come. No one wanted to date the crazy girl. But I was pretty, which meant that if I solely wanted to hook up with guys, I could. And I did want that, especially when everyone else started doing it. I wanted to French-kiss; I wanted to feel a guy grow hard in my hand; I wanted to keep up with my friends as they rounded the bases, one by one.
The difference was, my friends were hitting these milestones with their boyfriends. Sophomore year of high school, Andie gave her boyfriend, Tommy, a blow job after they’d been together for over a year and he’d been begging her for months. A few weeks later, I hooked up with a guy I’d just met at a party in Southport and gave him head in the laundry room. I was too drunk to remember his name, but I told the story proudly.
That summer, Andie and Tommy lost their virginities to each other, and I was twitchy with jealousy. Lexy had lost her V-card several months earlier, and Isabel and her boyfriend, Kevin, weren’t far behind.
I hated that I was a virgin. That August on Nantucket, my summer friend Becky and I convinced my brother to bring us to a party. I drank vodka cranberries and squeezed my cleavage in front of every remotely attractive guy. I ended up on a dock with an older guy named Kip—a sophomore at Colgate—and I knew the moment he pressed me down against the cedar planks that I would let him screw me. I was too drunk to notice if it hurt, but the next day I had bruises on my back from where the dock had dug into my skin.
This was how it went with me and boys, for high school and college and throughout my twenties. With the exception of Max LaPointe, I refused to let myself get close to anyone. And Max LaPointe turned out to be an astronomical mistake.
Two and a half years after I graduated from college, a friend from Barnard referred me to Dr. Salam. I walked into her office expecting nothing and spent our sixty-minute session bawling my eyes out. Dr. Salam was kind and curious, and I could tell she was genuinely concerned about helping me as I cried for my mother, for my broken future, for the disaster of Max LaPointe, for every agonizing, mortifying compulsion I’d had to endure over the past decade. During our first session Dr. Salam led me back to the beginning, back to the awful, stifling waiting room at St. Vincent’s Medical Center and the unfathomable pain in my twelve-year-old heart, straight to the onset of my obsessive-compulsive disorder.
For the first time in ten years of therapy, I truly connected with a doctor, and as I walked home from Dr. Salam’s office that day after our first appointment, my face sticky from crying, I felt buoyant with fresh hope.
This morning, five years after our first session, I sink down into the plush cream love seat across from Dr. Salam’s desk and let the smile take over my face.
Dr. Salam’s eyes light up and she raises one dark eyebrow. “Let me get a closer look at that rock.”
I extend my arm in her direction. A thrill shoots through me when she says it’s absolutely stunning, and I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of this. Lexy said she got so tired of having to show everyone her ring after she got engaged, but I think she was just saying that.
Dr. Salam crosses her lean runner’s legs and leans forward in her chair. “So, Skye. What else is going on? What ground do we need to cover today?”
I’m not in the mood to talk about anything OCD related. My symptoms have been relatively under control lately, and having Burke has been a game changer for my confidence. I think about the email from Max LaPointe, about the questions spinning around my head since he made contact. How on earth did he find out I was engaged? And before even Andie knew? I consider broaching the subject with Dr. Salam, but it seems irrelevant, and besides, I don’t want to focus on Max. He’s a snake who likes to ruffle feathers—he has always been.
Instead, I tuck my legs under my knees on the couch and launch into the wedding-related drama of Andie being all judgmental at how fast everything is moving, and for the first time in Dr. Salam’s office I feel like a normal twenty-nine-year-old woman with normal problems having a normal vent session with her therapist. The thought makes it difficult not to smile, the corners of my lips twitching as I relish feeling ordinary.
Chapter Eight
Burke Michaels’s Diary
OCTOBER 5, 2018
Dear Dr. K,
For the first few weeks this thing with Skye was just supposed to be about sex. I’d been going into the city to see her every few nights, telling Heather that my ex-colleague Oliver from Credit Suisse was committed to helping me find a job and had set up a number of dinners with clients he knew who were hiring. These dinners almost always went late, I explained to my wife, and it was easier if I crashed in Oliver’s spare bedroom rather than risk falling asleep on Metro-North, missing my connection, and winding up in Waterbury （yes, this has happened before）。
Oliver didn’t exist. I made him up for the sole purpose of continuing my affair with Skye, which I promised myself was just physical. After twenty-five years of marriage, sex with Heather had become stale, routine—we did it to convince ourselves that nothing between us was fundamentally wrong. But the heat was gone, the passion extinguished. The sheets cooled.
Fucking Skye reminds me of fucking Heather during the early years, a primal desire so overwhelming that everything on the periphery becomes blunted. When I’m not in bed with Skye, I’m thinking about being in bed with her, and I swear, Dr. K, I feel like a teenager, so hyperfocused on this pure, animal want. And that’s all it was.
Until last night.
Skye and I had dinner plans, and I was about to leave for the train station when Heather nagged me again about making sure I’d be home on the first train the next morning so that she could go to work and I could meet the water-heater guy. She then mentioned that the Visa was maxed out, and could I please take care of paying the balance. Twenty minutes later, I got on the train and used the Metro-North app on my phone to buy an off-peak ticket to Grand Central, and my MasterCard was declined. The only other card I had on me was the Visa, so I tried that, but sure enough, that was declined, too. Naturally I didn’t have cash on me, so I spent the rest of the train ride hiding in and out of the foul-smelling bathroom dodging the conductor, while angry passengers pounded on the door. I can’t live like this, Dr. K.
I debated staying on the same train and riding it right back out to New Haven because you can’t go on a dinner date with a girl with nothing but two maxed-out credit cards in your wallet. But I’d been looking forward to seeing Skye all day, roused by the thought of running my hands all over her smooth, naked body, and the idea of spending another two hours in the train bathroom avoiding the conductor made me want to splay my worthless self across the tracks. So I headed to the restaurant.
Skye had made us a reservation at Le Bernardin, which had four dollar signs on Yelp. I got to the restaurant just after seven and Skye was already there, drinking a glass of red wine at the bar. She wore a silky black top and smelled delicious, like spicy vanilla.
I kissed her cheek and gave my prepared spiel: I was an idiot and had forgotten my wallet in Brooklyn. Could we bag the reservation and order Chinese from Skye’s couch?
Skye looked at me with those bright brown eyes and cocked her perfect blond head. “Burke, have you ever eaten at Le Bernardin?”