Chapter 1 1.

It felt as though a weighty boulder rested upon my heart. The ache, dear heavens, the agony was akin to a slow-spreading cancer. Heartbreak, that's what it mirrored. Initially, there was the excruciating pain, followed by a numbing hollowness.

To be honest with myself, the numbness had set in long before just five days ago. Daniel and I hadn't been intimate for weeks, and well before that, my orgasms had ceased. My once joyful experiences had withered away like an aged prune, defying all attempts to rekindle them.

I found myself in a state of frigidity, an unexpected and unwelcome development. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. I was in my prime and should have been enjoying mind-blowing sex at least four times a week, but it had dwindled to a mere quarterly occurrence. Moreover, I had to initiate every single time.

Taking a seat on a stool at the kitchen bar, I stared at a cup of steaming tea in front of me. It was well past dinner time, but my appetite had deserted me. I clutched the cup, hoping to still my trembling hands. Never before had I felt such a profound sense of betrayal and embarrassment in my life.

"I still can't believe you cheated on me," I said, more to myself than anyone else.

Daniel and I weren't exactly on speaking terms ever since I found out that he'd been cheating on me about five days ago. That's when my world had come crashing down, the pain almost unbearable.

Despite the urge telling me not to look, I glanced over at Daniel sitting on the couch - his favorite spot in the small apartment we rented together - and I wanted to bash him across the head with something hard.

Just as the thought crossed my mind, he turned his head to look at me, his brown eyes filled with pity for me. There was a time when I used to look into his eyes only to see love and affection staring back at me.

But those days were over now. Gone. Adios. Now he pitied me.

"I don't know what else to say to you, Lauren. Anna was there for me when you weren't." He shrugged his shoulders and went back to staring at the TV, totally engrossed in his episode of Friends.

His answer caught me by surprise. Had I spoken that loudly?

"Here for you how?" I whispered.

He tore his eyes from the TV once more, his eyebrows dipping low and slanting as if I was harassing the hell out of him.

"Sexually."

One word.

That's all it took for me to feel like I'd been sucker-punched in the gut. Five days ago when I'd asked why he cheated his answer had been different. He said it had to do with me being busy and always so focused on my art, but now I got to hear the truth. It was ugly.

"You never complained about sex." My voice came out harsher than intended, the edges dripping with unconcealed pain. Why did my throat feel like I'd had cactus for breakfast?

Daniel reached over for the remote control on the coffee table and muted the tv. "I don't know, Lauren. The whole you not coming thing kind of freaked me out. There was nothing I could do to make you come. Do you know what something like that does to a man's ego? I started thinking maybe you were cheating on me or that you were no longer attracted to me. I couldn't think of a logical reason why you would just stop coming after so many years."

Alright. He was talking. This was good. Maybe I would get the closure I needed.

I wrapped my hand around the warm teacup and cleared my throat. "I told you I don't know why it happened. We talked about this, and we agreed that if I didn't come within six months I was going to see a sex therapist, but it's only been like four months?"

"And in those four months we had sex like what? About seven times, maybe eight? Most of it was in the first week after we found out about your little problem. You pulled away from me, Lauren. You didn't want to make love like before."

"I didn't, but I was always the one to initiate sex, and yes, when I found out I wasn't getting off I stopped, but you never made a move. The seven or eight times we did it was because of me. I told you I didn't have to come to enjoy sex. So stop pretending like my orgasm problem is the reason our sex life died!"

I slammed my hand on the tiled surface of the counter. The teacup rattled, but didn't fall over. This was stupid. I felt stupid as shit. Talking to Daniel was like talking to a three year old. Nothing was ever his fault.

Breathe in. Breath out. Daniel would not derail me this day... and he had better do something about those eyebrows before I went over there and plucked them out, one by one.

"Look, I get all of that. There is no valid explanation for what I did. I didn't approach you because I didn't see the point if you were getting nothing out of it. I needed to feel like a man. I needed to feel wanted and I needed to know that I could still make a woman come and that the problem wasn't me." Again, his eyebrows slashed inward and then he shrugged.

I ignored the tremor of my hand as I lifted the teacup to my lips. The burn was instant. I clamped my jaw shut, all the while rubbing my tongue along the upper ceiling of my mouth as my taste-buds shriveled up like sandpaper.

The hot liquid rushed down my throat, leaving a wake of fire on its way down to my gut. I held back tears.

The tea tasted like crap anyways. Chamomile, bland, no sugar. Just how I liked it, normally.

But today, today was different. I was tired of hearing Anna's name come out of my ex-boyfriend's mouth. The tea was supposed to help tone down the foul mood I'd been in the last past days, but it clearly wasn't working.

To top it off, I hadn't expected him to answer my quiet query, and now that he had, I felt a sharp tinge of anger course through my blood.