Lust(5)

I'm sure women have looked at me and thought I was arrogant, but that's  not the case. I can look into a mirror like anyone else, and I see  exactly what they do. I see what everyone else sees when they look at  me. A tall, tan man. A muscular build from sports and working out. Lines  and definition running along my body and disappearing below the  waistband of my pants. A smooth chest with a dark trail of hair running a  line from just below my belly button to the short, trimmed hair around  my dick. My short, dark hair that sometimes looks messy depending on how  many times my fingers ran through it, and my eyes so dark they almost  look black. I see what they see. And I'm smart enough to know I'm good  looking. Especially when I've been told that my entire life. So if that  makes me arrogant, then so be it. But I didn't look at myself and depict  anything special. There was nothing exceptional about my image. Trust  me, there was nothing special about what was behind it, either. Only  what I allowed others see.

Putting on a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else, I went into the  kitchen to pour a shot of whiskey. I downed the first one with a hiss  and then started to pour another when thoughts of Ivy once again flooded  my brain. I tried to shake them since dropping her off at home, but I  couldn't. So I placed the bottle back on the granite countertop and  headed over to my computer on the kitchen table.

I searched her name in social media sites. It was harder than I thought;  I wasn't expecting to find that many people with the name Ivy Jaymes. I  had thought it to be an original name before the rows of Ivy Jaymes had  popped up. I found one and knew it was her. The only reason I knew it  was her was because under occupation, she had it listed as "blogger."

Her page was filled with posts of books. The last post was a five-star  review for a book titled Between Friends by the author Amanda Cowen. I  read her review and then clicked on the Amazon link she added to it. A  page was opened up right to the book. It was only ninety-nine cents, so I  decided to buy it. Little did I know, I would have to own something to  read it on. E-books were quite foreign to me. I didn't really know of  their existence or how they worked. I had to spend a little time doing  research about them and how to buy one. Turns out, it's rather simple.         

     



 

So I grabbed my iPad and downloaded the Kindle app. Within seconds of  setting it up, the book I had purchased was right there in front of me.  If I were more of a reader, I would probably have enjoyed the  instantaneousness of it. Maybe Ivy would make me read more. Who knew?

But instead of calling Alyssa, instead of drinking more whiskey, I sat  down on the couch and began to read the book that had Ivy raving in  great detail of the emotions it pulled from her. I read exactly two  paragraphs before I felt the hair on the back on my neck stand on end.  But I couldn't stop there. I didn't stop until I reached the end of the  first chapter.

Who the hell was Ivy? I had no clue. I had read an entire chapter about a  girl, and a boy named Ben. I read about how he sorted M&Ms and made  her eat a brown and red one to taste the difference. I read about how  much this girl and Ben had in common, all the way down to their love of  spicy food. The chapter went on to their conversation of sex, and their  decision to flip a coin to determine if they would fuck each other.

What. The. Fuck. Just. Happened?

My head was spinning as I came to the forgone conclusion.

She had made the whole thing up. There was no real Ben. No real party. No real flip of a coin.

I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into by agreeing to take  her on as a client, but the more my thoughts wandered, the more  intrigued I became. She lied for a reason. And it wasn't just a lie. She  told me about people, friends of hers that only existed in a fictional  book. It wasn't as if she made up these people. No. Someone else had.  Someone else created these characters and wrote their lives out in a  book. And Ivy adopted it.

What would make someone do that? Had she done this before?

I wondered if maybe she had a mental illness. That was the only thing I  could come up with. But in any regards, I would have to wait until seven  o'clock the next day to figure it out. I wouldn't be able to come up  with anything alone.

I should have called Alyssa. I needed a good fuck, but I couldn't with  Ivy on my mind. I wanted to drink more, if only to lessen the obsessive  thoughts that ran rampant through my head. But that would only do more  harm than good-I knew that from personal experience. So instead of  letting myself go by immersing in whiskey or pussy, I carried my iPad to  bed with me and finished reading the book. I figured that way, if she  tried spinning any more tales of Ben, I would know if they came from the  book or not. I also thought about going through her list of reviews and  checking those books out as well. If she used this one, I wouldn't  doubt that she'd use others, too. But I didn't have the time to read all  of the books she had reviewed. There were a shitload of them.

*****

The next day went by slowly. It dragged. All I wanted was for it to be  seven so I could talk with Ivy. I needed to know why she had lied. I had  to find out why she came to me in the first place. If she had a mental  illness, I wouldn't be able to help her. And that was something I needed  to know before we continued with our sessions the way I planned.

Luckily, I didn't have too many patients on the calendar. Most of my day  was filled with personal things. I had lunch with my cousin, which  happened once a month. It wasn't something I looked forward to, but she  insisted on it. She said I needed it. Except, I didn't. She just refused  to acknowledge that part.

I was thirty-four years old. I didn't need my cousin to sit down with me  for an hour every month and watch me eat. Because that's pretty much  what she did. She'd ask me questions about my life and I gave her the  least amount of information that I could between hurried bites of food.  It annoyed her, I know. But it didn't stop her from scheduling lunch  once again for the following month.

After lunch, I had an appointment with my own psychologist. It wasn't  that I necessarily needed to go, but I started years ago and never  stopped going. Most of the time, we talked about work. I found it easy  to talk to someone that knew kind of what it was that I did for a  living. He never openly admitted that he disagreed with my line of work,  but I could read between the lines. He believed anyone could work  through any problem by sitting on a couch and discussing it. I didn't  see it that way. I believed that sometimes people physically had to work  out their issues. It was a sink or swim mentality. If you can't swim,  jump in a pool once without water wings; survival will kick in and  you'll learn to swim.

And if those issues that needed to be overcome were sex related, then  sitting on an old couch wouldn't solve shit. But we silently agreed to  disagree on the topic. However, it didn't stop me from talking about my  work with him. Most of the time, it was strictly shooting-the-shit kind  of talk, but that time, it was about Ivy.         

     



 

I had asked him what would cause someone to lie about their life. He  didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Self-esteem issues.  Hiding from one's past. Lack of self-worth. The list went on. Since I  didn't really know much about Ivy, any of those reasons could suit her.  It made me want the clock to read seven o'clock that much more so I  could know more about her. It had quickly become a dying need to know. I  had never experienced that kind of irrational need before.

At five thirty, I had a basketball game. I wasn't friends with any of  the guys from the court, but I still showed up every Tuesday at five  thirty to play. They didn't mind because I was rather good at the sport.  I had played it most of my life. It was another form of therapy for me,  not to mention, exercise.

I always played skins. The feeling of my shirt stuck to my skin from  sweat made me revert back to the illness inside of me. I couldn't stand  that feeling. So I was always skins, and I was always captain. And …  I  always won. I took the game seriously, much like I took everything in  life. It may have been called a game, but I played it as anything but.  It was a form of release for me, and that my competiveness spirit didn't  allow me to take lightly.

Once I toweled off and put my dry tee shirt back on, I headed over to  pick up Ivy. My heart raced with anticipation the entire drive to her  apartment, which looked as though it should have been condemned years  before. The thoughts and feelings that ran through me were unfamiliar.

Part of me was mad. She had lied to me when I was there to help her and it fucking pissed me off.

Part of me was confused. She could have told me anything, but decided to  take on the life of a character from a book she had recently read, and  that had me questioning so many things.

Part of me was intrigued. Something about Ivy spoke to me. It was as if  we were born from the same darkness. Lived in the same shadows and  harbored the same emptiness. Her eyes, void of emotion, made me want to  know everything about her. Out of all the emotions that coursed through  my body, intrigue was the strongest.