I only wanted to fuck my therapist. Everyone wants to fuck their therapist, to put an expression on those carefully noncommittal faces, to make their professional skin flush and sweat, to hear their perpetual question change from “How do you feel about that?” to “How does this feel? And this? And this?” I wanted that too.

And more. Once, when I shouted at my therapist, “You only like me because I pay you to!” he defused me into a discussion of relationship boundaries and therapist ethics. Turns out all the movies only show Hollywooded therapy. In reality, therapists can’t touch their clients, sleep with their clients, or have a personal relationship with them for up to three years after therapy is ended. If a therapist crosses that line, breaks that rule, he can lose his license. If another therapist knows that the first therapist is stepping out and doesn’t report him, he can lose his license too. Guilt by association.

And so it became my goal. It wasn’t much of a challenge to get a man at a bar to sleep with me. My dates bedded me all the time. Bagging a married man was the biggest challenge I faced so far, and even that wasn’t difficult. But a therapist, someone who was legally bound to know me intimately, but never lay a hand upon me…that felt like desire of the highest order. I wanted someone to risk all that for me…just for me, for my body, for the touch of my skin against his.

God, what an achievement.

My first therapist said no. And no. And then no again. I even pulled a Sharon Stone and it didn’t matter. So I gave it up and just used him to talk to about all my other issues. Childhood sexual abuse. Raped when I was fourteen. A foul, foul marriage and a worse divorce. To me, it was pretty obvious how the dots were connected. Sex was taken from me, I was just the person attached to the body, the reservoir. I could have been anybody, or really, I was nobody, I was just the means to an end. So I wanted someone to really prove that he wanted me, just me. My therapist and I talked about this endlessly, about how I could feel better about myself and so on. I didn’t tell him my plan. I didn’t tell him about the other therapists. He would have had to report them.

So I went through the Yellow Pages and set up a group of ten therapists. I saw one set of five Monday through Friday on odd weeks of the month, and the other set on the even. All of the sessions were during my lunch hour, except for my real therapist who had a regular appointment on Wednesdays at four o’clock. I had to buy an appointment book just to keep them all straight and keep track of how long I saw each one and what happened. I gave each therapist five chances; if sex hadn’t happened by the end of the fifth session, it wasn’t going to, and so I moved on and replaced him with someone new. I went through fifteen therapists this way and I was feeling pretty lousy. I spilled myself over couches throughout the city, leather couches, cushy couches, suede couches. One therapist had a recliner, which made it really hard to spread myself, so I sat sideways and dangled my legs over the arm. I let my shoes drop off, one by one, and I played with my hair. He didn’t flinch. I dropped that one after only a couple of sessions.

But after that first fifteen upright, uptight and ethical therapists, I had some success. I began to etch little marks, little stick figures of men, in the back of my appointment book like a cartoon character who keeps stencils of his victims behind a curtain.

Dr. Henry Millhouse. It only took three sessions with him. He leaned toward me every time I let my eyes fill and so I turned on the waterworks big time. At the third session, I reclined on the couch, kicked off my shoes, stretched my bare legs out onto the cushions, arched my back and wailed, “I just want someone to love me! I just want someone to want me!” On cue, he knelt by the couch, stroked my hair from my face, told me that of course someone loved me. I wailed more, he began to kiss me, and the sex was incredible. I felt pretty high until I walked out and saw the next client waiting to come in. She wore a very short skirt, a tube top, and she winked at me and motioned that I should straighten my hair. I heard her husky voice as she greeted Dr. Millhouse and I knew I was just one in a line. Not what I wanted. He called a few times, but I never went back.

Dr. Mark Delaney. It occurred to me after my experience with Dr. Millhouse that maybe I should approach a sex therapist. So I spent the first four sessions with Dr. Delaney telling him how hard it was for me to reach an orgasm. Which was very untrue. I described trying every position I could think of…and I could think of a lot and in great detail. Then he asked me to describe my fantasies. So I lay back on the couch without asking, shut my eyes, and began to narrate the steamiest fantasy I could think of. I made sure he was the hero. I let my hands rove and soon I was masturbating and then he was there on the couch with me. All the way through, he kept saying he shouldn’t be doing this, which only served to turn me on even more. But at the end of the session, he straightened his clothing and gave me the card of another therapist. He said he couldn’t see me again, that what he did was wrong, that he’d “betrayed our sacred contract.” I told him I hadn’t signed anything, certainly not in blood, and that the buzz he gave me was worth every ounce of his supposed betrayal. But he handed me a second card, identical to the first, then stammered me out the door. The deadbolt echoed in the hallway.

Dr. Frederick Malcolm. I really thought I had one with this guy. It only took two sessions to bag him and then he fucked me for four sessions straight. The last time, he didn’t even attempt to therapy me first. He just pulled me in, flung me onto the couch, yanked up my skirt and had at me. I was overjoyed, thinking the next step was an apartment close to the office and a real bed and then a real relationship and maybe a real life. But the next week when I showed up for our session, his door was open, his office was empty, and his nameplate was gone. I asked about him at the information desk by the elevator and they said he closed up shop and left town. Just like that. With a year and a half to go on his three-year lease.

And there were others. Lots of others. Some I slept with, others said no, but none existed with me outside the office walls. Through it all, my original therapist kept talking to me about feeling better about myself. I said I never would until I found someone who desired me above all, who would risk everything for me. My therapist said to quit reading romance novels and watching chick flicks. I told him I did neither, that the last book I read was Animal Farm by George Orwell and the last movie I saw was March of the Penguins. Then he told me to get my head out of the clouds and I asked him if therapists had a special license to spout clichés. I also told him that I didn’t think it was so bad to really want to be wanted. He said I was looking for unconditional love. I said no fucking kidding.

He told me that unconditional love was a myth. But every day, as I walked to and from the therapist appointments, that myth was all over the street. There were couples everywhere, even on weekday afternoons when they should have been at work. Couples cuddled in doorways, kissed goodbye in cars, reached under skirts and pantlegs under tables at coffee shops. Once I even saw a couple doing it in a phone booth. Everyone else just walked by, but I stopped and watched. I told my therapist that the myth was there, on their faces. Unconditional love. That wanting so much to be with each other, they didn’t care who saw, they didn’t care where they were, they couldn’t wait until they got home. He said that was lust. I said I didn’t see the difference. If you could fuck someone in a phone booth in the middle of a busy city street, you certainly could love them no matter what. There were no rules, or there were, but they no longer mattered. It was just I wanna fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. It was the whole world.

My therapist shook his head and said that was the crux of my whole situation. Crux you, I said. He laughed.

And then I met Matthew. From the moment I walked in to my first session, I wanted to touch him. There was just something about his skin that shouted heat and texture, soft and hard, all in the right places. He had a deep and gravelly voice and just the tiniest of lisps, making all his s’s sound like th’s. I wanted to giggle and touch his tongue, guiding it to where those sloppy s’s would do the most good. He looked at me with sleepy lowered lids at that first session. At the second, his eyes became wide and hungry, and sometimes he left his questions dangling in mid-air.

Then, on the third session, he sat next to me on the couch. He unbuttoned my blouse while I spoke. I kept on going as if nothing was happening. But when he lifted my breast out of the bra, when he bent over it and began to suck on the nipple, I shut up. We had silent sex on his couch and I found that when my voice was stunned away, when I couldn’t shout, oh, yeah, baby, or give it to me, it was the best ever. I thought the waves and shudders and aftershocks would never stop.

And then he showed up that night at my apartment. Paydirt. I called in sick at work the next day and then told them I was taking my two weeks of vacation immediately for a mental health break. I cancelled with all my other therapists, including my real therapist. I don’t know what Matthew did with his patients, but he never left. We never left.

We spent the next two weeks fucking. We fucked while we ate, we fucked while we showered, we fucked while one of us sat on the toilet. I would wake up with him inside me, and I straddled him while he snored.

I was raw and sore and exhausted, but I felt like I was filling. Like there was this huge basin in me and Matthew was pouring himself into it. I was on top of the world, to use one of my therapist’s clichés. Matthew threw everything away just for me during those two weeks. Nothing else mattered but that he be in me, attached to me, wrapping me around him.

I reached my goal. I was the object of the deepest desire, the desire of the highest order. He wanted me to the exclusion of everything else, even his practice, left behind the locked door of his office. I was all that mattered. We were in my bed, not his couch. For two weeks.

The morning I was to return to work, I woke up and realized I’d slept for eight hours. Matthew wasn’t in bed. My shower had been used, but the towels were neatly hung and the toilet seat was down. In my kitchen, coffee was made and one cup and one plate were rinsed and sitting in the sink. I floated to work. How considerate, I told myself. He wanted me to get some rest after our marathon so he didn’t kiss me goodbye.

At lunch, I went over to his office. I craved his touch so badly, I couldn’t keep my own hands off myself. But when I got there, he was with a patient. I waited until a balding man walked out, dabbing his eyes, then I darted into the office.

Matthew blinked at me. “What are you doing here?” he asked quietly.

“I came to see you,” I said and started to undo my clothes.

He quickly stilled my hands. “Go back to work,” he said. “Vacation’s over. It was a blast, but now we both have to get back to our lives.”

I looked at him and that basin in me opened up like the biggest blackest sinkhole in the universe. I felt it drain and yet the more I emptied, the more stagnant swampy mud there was. “But you’re my life!” I wailed. “I love you!”

“God, babe,” he said. “We barely talked. But there’s something about you that’s so animal and I could tell that sex with you would be phenomenal. I wanted to fuck the hell out of you and I did. You did too. But that’s it. We’re done now. I figured you were the type to understand that.” He glanced at his watch. “My mother is meeting me here for lunch in five minutes. You have to go.” He turned my numb body and nudged me out the door.

I ran the six blocks to my therapist’s. When I got there, his office door was closed and I just stood outside of it and howled. If there was an animal in me, it gave voice then and the sounds I made reeked of the black sinkhole. My therapist quickly ushered his client out and pulled me in and for the next hour or so, I sat on his couch and howled and howled and howled. I put words where I could, but most of it was just noise. I did my best to turn inside out, to make the sinkhole reverse out of me like a deflated balloon, but it seemed the more I howled, the more pockets and potholes and fissures appeared.

When I was quiet for about fifteen minutes, when my body seemed to solidify again and stop shaking like a threatening mudslide, my therapist patted me on the arm. A Hollywood, unethical, but human and oh-so-welcome touch. “I think maybe we can get some real work done now,” he said.

I looked at him with empty eyes and loved him, but not unconditionally. I was the type to understand that. I pulled my head out of the clouds and into the sinkhole. God, what an achievement.