Post Published: January 17, 2023

A preview from my 2014 novel, Sex Acts And Emotional Problems

“So what if she doesn’t take me back,’ you thought. ‘She used to be mine and I came all this way, I’m gonna get a piece of that for my travels.’

“Right? I mean because you only came for one of two reasons: either to have sex with me, or to convince me that we should try again. And if I’d agreed to get back together then sex would be guaranteed. But since you claim to know we’re not getting back together, and we already had sex, you get what you came for anyway.

“Because fuck friendship at this point. You’re just feeding your own romanticized physical attraction. You don’t care about my hard time or my confusion. You just wanted to fuck me. Stacy’s message and Cassandra dumping you gave you the perfect excuse to kill a few days and get your rocks.

“If you wanted to work on our friendship, we could’ve done that over the phone. We could’ve worked that relationship out. But it was irresponsible for us to have sex. People who are broken up shouldn’t sleep with one another. That familiarity makes it difficult to maintain realistic perspective.”

“It’s just sex,” David sighed. “We’re just two people needing to be physical.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

“How?”

“When it’s ‘just sex’ that’s just two people wanting to be physical. Ex-sex is two people being physical out of habit, when one wants it and the other needs it. And you’re the one who needed it.”

“So if you didn’t need it…” David posited.

“Doesn’t mean I wanted it,” Caitlyn objected.

“You didn’t stop me,” he turned up his palm.

“I didn’t really have a choice last night.”

“What?”

“You were all over me as soon as Sam left.”

“Why’d you have sex with me,” David pressed, “if you didn’t want to?”

“You forced my hand,” Caitlyn said. “You didn’t make plans to stay anywhere else.”

“I would’ve stayed in a hotel.”

“Last night,” Caitlyn acknowledged.

David nodded.

“Yeah, but you’d have called me every day you were here until we finally slept together.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You were all over me the second Sam walked out the door,” Caitlyn reiterated. “I felt a little pressured.”

“Are you kidding me? I didn’t pressure you to have sex with me, Caitlyn.”

“You kinda did,” she said, “but I don’t even really mean about that. I mean you didn’t even tell Shan you were coming. You didn’t reserve a hotel. You said you could get one, after it was more or less established that you didn’t have a place to go. You assumed you’d be coming here after dinner and you came here, and you put it on me the instant we were alone.

“And we’re both consenting adults, so you’re right. I didn’t stop you. But you only made things worse by telling me you love me. That’s pressure.”

Tell me what you think before we both die