Chapter Four

She nodded and turned the coffee cup around in her hands. “Yeah. I know.”

They sat in silence for a few seconds.

“OK,” she said. “I – this is hard for me to talk about. Really hard. So… can you just let me talk? I’m afraid that if you interrupt me or ask me anything, I’ll lose my nerve. Can you just – just let me babble? You can say whatever you want after. Is that OK?”

He leaned back, suddenly deathly afraid of what was coming. “Yeah. I’m listening.”

She took a deep breath. “I know you know that I’m – that something happened to me. That I was hurt.” She forced herself to meet those steady gray eyes. “Even without me or Emma or Liv or Kat telling you anything, you and the guys, you all know… they never get too close to me, and you never stand between me and my escape route.”

Escape route? Is that what she sees when she looks at a door?

“I can’t talk about that right now, Chris. I want to tell you, and I will, but not now, OK? If I start to talk about that, I’ll get distracted from what I really want to ask you.”

He nodded.

“The thing is – what happened to me happened over six years ago, and I haven’t let a man touch me since. I’ve been totally fine with that since I haven’t wanted a relationship, at all. But I’ve come to realize lately that I'm thirty-one years old, and I actually do want a relationship one day. I’d like to… to have a boyfriend. A husband, kids. But the way I am right now, none of those things can happen.” She swallowed. “I’m scared of a man’s touch. I’m – I’m scared of men.”

His hands clenched. Fuck. Leave me alone with whoever hurt her, just for five minutes. He’ll never scare or harm anyone ever again, I promise you.

“The thing is, though, I’m not scared of you.” She looked down again. “I mean… I am sometimes, but not because it’s you. It’s just – it’s force of habit to be afraid of men. But the truth is that you’re the only man I’ve known since it happened that I can be alone with like this. I trust you, Chris.”

Chris smiled, glad to hear that she felt this way.

“So… the thing is that Lori and I have been talking about how to retrain my body and my mind. Right now, I associate a man’s touch with hurt and fear, with bad things only. I need to relearn that men can be gentle, careful. Loving. That a man’s touch can be good, that it can give pleasure.”

She paused. He waited.

“Normally, Lori would find a surrogate to help me with this. A trained sex therapist, someone non-threatening and experienced in dealing with the kind of trauma I’ve had. They’d practice physical contact with me, you know. Like, hold my hand and stroke my hair and hold me. Eventually, if and when I was ready, they’d – he’d… well, you know. We’d have sex.”

Chris sat bolt upright on the sofa. “What?”

“Yeah. Men and women who do this are called sex surrogates, and if I got one, the whole idea would be for him to help me get more comfortable with a man’s touch. He’d help me retrain my body to respond to men differently. To not freak out or panic.”

Chris held his breath. She’s going to ask some therapist to touch her? Kiss her? Have sex with her? Jesus Christ.

“The thing is, I can’t imagine having someone that I don’t know do this. You know? I can barely imagine Dean giving me a hug, and I know and like the guy. So how can I be comfortable with some stranger having sex with me? It’s – I just can’t.”

He was breathing a bit more easily now.

“So.” She bit her lip. “So… I wanted to ask you.”

“Ask me what?” he said.

“I wanted to ask if you’d be my sex surrogate.”

Chris stared at her, completely stunned. “You – you what?”

“I know it’s crazy,” she blurted, starting to lose her cool now; her words came faster, as she decided to just say it all while she had the courage:

“I mean, you’re not trained and it’s a lot to ask, and you can say no if you want to, of course, but I trust you, and sometimes I even want you to touch me – like give me a hug – so I know I’m not afraid of your body. And we’d take it really, really slow… and I’m not even sure that I’d be able to have sex, to be honest, maybe all I’d ever be able to do is let you hold me. Maybe I’m really that broken, after what happened. But I have to try, you see. I have to ask. I have to see if you’ll – if you can. Help me.”

Chris was frozen with shock. “You – you’d want me to… touch you? Even though it scares you?”

She nodded, her throat too tight to speak.

“And if things went OK, then we’d move forward? Like… make love? Eventually?”

Jenny looked down, her eyes welling with tears. “God, Chris. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. It was wrong of me to put you on the spot like this.” She stood up. “I’ll go.”