The Venus Fix

Twenty-Six

Noah trailed his fingers down my throat and across my chest. I closed my eyes and focused on the feeling. Or, rather, tried to focus on the feeling.

When you are a sex therapist people assume one of two things: that you are an intensely sexual person and interested in sexuality almost to the exclusion of other emotions, or that you have sexual problems of your own and are on the other side of the couch to try to convince yourself you’re fine.

But that’s not how it works for most of us. We become therapists first, and then choose to specialize in sex therapy later, because it fascinates us for a wide variety of reasons, many of which we don’t always consciously know. But for me, it was because Nina Butterfield was the most constant role model I had in my life and she was a sex therapist. So even before I understood what it meant, I wanted to do what she did.

“I am a doctor who helps heal people’s hearts,” she’d told me when I was little. And when my own daughter first asked what I did, that’s what I told her, too.

In my life, I have never been preoccupied with sex and have never thought of myself as highly sexed or a sensualist. I’ve met women who are, I’ve treated them, and I know how we differ. Sure, I’d enjoyed sex with the man I was married to, but I’d never noticed when we went through dry spells the way he did.

But now, with Noah, I was different.

His fingers trailed down my sides and made circles on my stomach. He lingered there, in the dark, spending whole minutes sensitizing a two-inch circle of ordinary skin that I had never been aware of. His fingers moved so slowly that I became conscious of the texture of his fingertips, slightly rough and callused. The intensity of the touch was magnified a hundred times. Looking at a snowflake through a magnifying glass, you see myriad crystals creating a unique and complicated design that the naked eye is incapable of recognizing. So it was with his one finger on that spot of skin. It was not a single movement that elicited a single reaction, but a constantly changing evocation of impressions that not only affected that area but sent electric warnings shooting through me.

Noah was melting me.

It was like this each time we were together. I always started off half frozen and he had to work me into relaxation.

“There’s nothing to think about but my fingers, Morgan. Nothing but my fingers and your skin.” His voice was as mesmerizing as the movement. The pressure was building to pain. I writhed.

“What do you want?” he murmured.

“More.”

“What else do you want?”

I shook my head.

“Tell me.”

I shook it again.

He put his lips up to my ear. “Let go, Morgan. Let go. Stop thinking.” The rhythm of his words was hypnotic, and the more he repeated them the less I heard them, the closer I got to disappearing into the feelings. “Let go, Morgan, let go.” The fingers moved into a wider circle. Around and around. I was seeing the circles as hot-blue neon lines going around and around, each crossing the other, exposing layers of nerve endings, shooting the same hot blue through my skin into an inner core, where they became lightning bolts of hotter blue and searing red, circles and then lines that traveled up my arms and down my legs, always coming back to settle deep in my womb, which sucked them in and still wanted more.