Dr J Entry 3
Thurs Nov 21st, 1:02 PM
I wasn’t planning to write again so soon.
But I just did something I wish I hadn’t, and if Ani Chou is right about anything, it’s that the things we try not to look at are exactly the things that keep growing teeth.
So. Honesty: here we go. Let’s write.
Ten minutes ago, I locked myself in the bathroom and pulled down my pants. Not to pee.
I’m writing that down because even seeing the sentence there feels accusatory, like it’s leaning forward in its chair. I kept half-expecting to feel something. A pressure, a warmth, her in my head. The sense that she’s noticed, that she’s listening. After Tuesday evening, when she had - to my horror - somehow taken over my brain, and then after her question yesterday - ‘Why do you need a head that doesn’t have me in it?’ - I’m hyperaware of the possibility that my thoughts aren’t private in the way one would believe thoughts were.
For the record: right now, I don’t feel her in there. And I didn’t in the bathroom.
That’s good. I think. Maybe it means she’s trying, like she said she would, to give me my space. Respect. Independence. All the words that still feel foreign in her mouth, like a second language she’s learning phonetically.
But she was very much present in my thoughts a few minutes ago. Not deliberately, not like she put herself there. It was just me thinking about her, the way I am now. Well, not exactly like I am now. Five minutes ago I was thinking about her and looking at a bikini picture of her on my phone with as much of my nine-plus inches as I could fit in my shaky hand. I couldn’t help myself - my body was screaming for release, screaming for the return of her tender touch. I practically ran to the bathroom in fact and tore down my pants. I winced when I grasped my shaft - my own hand was a poor substitute for Melissa’s. I started pumping myself anyway, but that moment's hesitation was enough that anxiety and shame started to flood into my mind. What the fuck was I doing? Why couldn't I seem to go more than 20 minutes without feeling like I need to feed my urges? Am I nothing but a loser? Unable to think about anything but getting off, and good for nothing but fueling the growth of the women surrounding me? Hot, shameful tears started to well up in my eyes, breaking my concentration even as my cock begged me for attention.
This is the part that’s hardest to admit: it wasn’t one thing that pushed me over the edge, made me retreat to the men’s room. It was the accumulation, the whole morning. The clinic itself feels saturated lately, like the air had weight. I used to joke about pheromones in a hand-wavy, pop-science way. Now I’m realizing they’re probably being circulated through the HVAC like a flowery-scented anesthetic. Melissa, diluted but omnipresent. Safety, attraction, attention - and the command: ‘Stay’.
Add to that Aubrey earlier - those buttons on her blouse fighting a losing battle. Or Lakshmi’s ass when she was leaning over to tend to Mr. Kowalcyzk in the exam room. Or the memory of her mom Anika last night, the simple, devastating comfort of being held without expectation, my face pressed into softness that didn’t ask anything of me except to rest.
Every one of those moments does the same thing to me now.
I hate that. I think I hate that. Right?
My body reacts before my mind has a chance to file an objection. Before I can tell myself a story about professionalism or boundaries or dignity. It’s like some internal switch has been rewired: arousal. Comfort equals arousal. Protection equals arousal. The curve of a woman’s hip, the swell of a lower breast, even just a female smile or wink - all arousal. Being talked to gently, like something precious and breakable, by a woman with anything bigger than a C-cup short-circuits me completely.
The mortification, Journal, is profound. I am a grown man. A physician. And yet my body responds to everything, even to things that should not - cannot - be sexual. I mean I orgasmed from a cat. Being fed from a baby bottle is like sex. Being told I’m safe by women that should be working for me is the deepest form of love. The shame of that alone is almost unbearable.
But here’s the worse part, the part I keep circling without wanting to land on it: the shame doesn’t stop the reaction. It fuels it.
Humiliation makes me smaller. Being smaller makes them more protective. Their protectiveness makes me feel exposed. Exposure makes me ache. The ache and then the release empowers them and feeds the whole system again. Round and round. A closed loop I didn’t design and for which I don’t seem to have an 'off’ switch.
Lakshmi and I talked this morning, and it was like a bomb she was setting down between us. That pleasure tied to Melissa, even indirectly, doesn’t just belong to me anymore. That if my body responds to her, just the thought of her - or to any of these women influenced by her - there’s a feedback effect of growth and strength that they’re calling “Bliss”. To me, that’s the kind of gallows humor that makes my skin prickle. And my part in that equation - my contribution - has been jokingly christened ‘Squirt’ after the nickname Randi has for me, which I pretend not to hear.
I don’t want to be an engine for this, or do I? Well, I sure don’t want to be just a resource being unconsciously tapped, until I’m empty…but I’m not sure that that’s what this is.
That’s what sent me into the bathroom. Not desire, exactly - more like desperation. The need to clear my head so I could do my job without feeling constantly hijacked by my own physiology.
There in the bathroom stall, XXXS scrubs around my knees, I told myself I could think about anything else. Anyone else. Some harmless celebrity crush, safely distant, untouched by whatever field Melissa generates. I tried. I really did.
It didn’t work.
My thoughts kept snapping back, like a rubber band, to her. Her hands. Her voice. One image - just one bikini shot on my phone, from the beach conference we’d attended together - was enough. And the moment it happened, there was this awful, unmistakable sense of completion. Not just relief. Not even pleasure, really. More like inevitability fulfilled.
For a split second afterward, before I reached for more tissue paper, I could almost feel her smile.
That’s what finally scared me. Because part of me didn’t recoil from that feeling. Part of me recognized it as familiar. Desired, even. Like a lock clicking shut, sealing us in a comfy bedroom. I loved seeing her smile.
I don’t know what that says about me. I don’t know what it means that the thing I’m most ashamed of is also the thing my body keeps reaching for. All I know is that if this is what losing control feels like, it’s quieter than I expected. Not violent. Not dramatic. Just a slow erosion of authorship, until you’re no longer sure which thoughts are yours and which ones are simply happening through you.
I’m going to stop here.
-J
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