Buying Time

I settled into the routine. Three days on, at four hours per, then two days off. My average take-home was about $1800 a week, considerably better than my old job as a welder on a construction site. And, I didn’t even need goggles.

Isn’t it every guy’s dream to get paid for doing what you enjoy? I used to enjoy sex. I used to enjoy fucking and being fucked. Hell, I still do. Mostly. But after a couple of months of doing it fifty times a week, it became just one more boring job.

It had been years since I was in anything resembling a relationship. I’m shy around people and opening myself up to them is like pulling the scab off a badly-healed wound. Anonymous sex was easier — and safer — and that’s probably why I got into the sex machine habit in the first place. But being an SM Inc. Customer Service Specialist — what they used to call a “whore” in the bad old days — was probably the ultimate in depersonalized sex. I began realizing what was missing from my life.

Touch. Simple human touch. And by that I don’t mean body parts mingling and interpenetrating. I mean *lives* mingling and interpenetrating. Talking. Hugging. Kissing. Sharing with a partner what happened to you at work. Experiencing laughter and tears together. Living through joys and hardships together. Maybe raising a couple of kids. Walking the dog. Barbecuing in the back yard. Having the neighbors over. Sure, sleeping together. But also waking up next to each other.

What was wrong with me? I was staring to yearn for an old-fashioned marriage. Something like in the ancient sitcoms from the 1950’s that they sometimes show down at the Retro Visual-Media Museum. Sheesh! Manning that damned sex machine was demultiplexing my cognitive nodes.

I had started confiding in Galatea. She was a patient listener, and her manner toward me had softened considerably. I think she was starting to actually loosen up toward me a bit, and she had even let slip a couple of times what a cute ass I had. Sometimes she seemed to have trouble prying herself loose from that cute ass of mine… Lately our sessions had been lasting considerably longer than the allotted 45 minutes.