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Chapter One - Since We Started Trying


“Since we started trying, Nick’s been a little….” Lauren looked at me, then turned back to Dr. Walden, “...gun shy.”

I felt the blush start in the base of my neck and crawl it’s way up my skin, darkening my cheeks and heating the tips of my ears. I looked down at my lap, where I had my hands clasped, and counted to ten. I couldn’t believe she was just telling this strange dude this. Didn’t she know how fucking embarrassing this was for me?

Dr. Walden chuckled, “Feeling a little stage fright, maybe?”

If he thought he was making it better, he wasn’t.

Asshole.

“It’s perfectly normal for a man to face a little… erectile dysfunction… when they’re faced with the pressure of starting a family,” Dr. Walden said in what I bet he thought was a comforting tone.

Asshole, asshole, asshole.

I balled my hands into fists.

Lauren’s palms touched my shoulder, “Hear that, honey? It’s perfectly normal.” She smiled at me. She could feel the tension in my muscles. I knew she could because she let her palm slide away and turned back to Dr. Walden almost immediately. “I think the main concern here is how do we remedy it?”

Dr. Walden hummed, “I suppose there’s a lot of ways to remedy it. Making sure you engage in foreplay designed for the male pleasure centers…”

I took in a sharp breath.

My brain couldn’t handle it.

This old man was giving us sex advice like he was a column out of Cosmopolitan or Playboy. If the problem had been my being too erect this would most definitely have cured it. As it was, I’d be lucky if I ever got it up again. I knew I’d be battling mental replays of his wheezy old voice saying words like clitorious, masturbation, and scrotum.

If I could’ve sunk right into the floor tiles of Dr. Walden’s office, I would have.

Lauren was taking notes.

“You didn’t seem like you were much interested in what Dr. Walden had to say,” Lauren accused as we got into the car a mind-numbing forty minutes later.

I thrust the key into the ignition.

No, not thrust. Never again would I thrust anything anywhere without hearing Dr. Walden’s strange way of forming the word on his lips.

Thhhhrust.

Like he was thrusting the word out of his mouth.

“That was fucking traumatizing,” I replied.

“Traumatizing?” Lauren looked over at me. She was closing her notebook, sliding it into her totebag.

Ugh. Sliding.

Another word I’d never be able to use again.

“Uh, yes,” I said empathetically. “Did you not hear that? It was like fuckin’ sitting through sex ed all over again, except with a very personal slant, as taught by a man who was probably around when they invented sex.”

Lauren tilted her head to one side, “Are you sure this isn’t just you being frustrated about the situation?” she asked, “I know this is a touchy subject for you.” She reached out a hand and put it on my forearm. “Don’t you feel a little better, at least, knowing it’s totally normal?” she asked, rubbing my skin gently.

In my head I could hear Dr. Walden’s voice telling her how to reawaken the nerve endings in the penis should we re-encounter the problem during future attempts.

I pulled my arm away and turned the car on.




Basically, we’d been trying to make a baby for five months before seeking the professional opinions of Dr. Walden, the Over Friendly Sex Ed Dinosaur.

And it wasn’t entirely my fault we were having… issues.

See it all started back in, I dunno, June, I guess. Lauren looked over at me one day while we were sitting on the tour bus in like Cincinnati or some place -- yeah, it was Cincinnati ‘cos it was Father’s Day and Kevin and AJ and Howie and Brian all had these awesome videos to play during the show and me I’m over here like… yep -- and she says to me, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a baby?”

That’s how it started.

Since we’d been trying, obviously we’d given up on condoms, but also Lauren had read somewhere on the internet that commercial lubricants could contain spermicides that would decrease fertility chances and since then we’d been buying a lot of extra canola oil. (Holla, Mazola!)

Trojan and KY were probably both wondering what the hell happened that made their sales suddenly decrease so much over the summer. We were pretty regular customers until then.

But I mean she didn’t get pregnant immediately so we were like, okay, well let’s try to increase the odds, so…

We’d been doing everything we could: I’d been wearing boxers and was banned from the hot tub, while Lauren was carefully measuring her BMI everyday, avoiding coffee, and tracking her ovulation cycle with an obsessive flare that I’d only ever seen in BSB fans prior. She had a pocket calendar, a white board calendar, and a reminder set on her phone. For six straight nights every twenty-eight days we had the most intense sex you’ve ever seen. We were like marathon sex addicts, going at it until we literally couldn’t move.

I’d started out during months one through three bragging to Chris and Shadrick about how fucking awesome it was trying to have kids. “Let me get this straight,” Chris had said, leaning forward, and looking at me with hungry, excited eyes, “You get to have sex every single day for like a whole a week?”

I nodded.

“Fuck,” he said, leaning back and looking at Shadrick, who also looked impressed, “I wanna fuckin’ try to have kids, too, man,” Chris had declared.

Now though, honestly, sex was becoming something more like a monthly chore than something I looked forward to.

Month four was when it started getting old. And frustrating. I felt like we were doing all this stuff and not gettin’ any results and I started wondering if maybe there was something going on up in there on one of us and the more stressed I got about it, the less Thor wanted in on the action and pretty soon he just wasn’t even bothering to show up for the party.

By month five, Thor was pretty much dead on arrival.

“Maybe we should see a therapist,” Lauren had suggested, a little bit of an edge to her voice. She turned off the lamp beside the bed. “I’ll call and see if I can get an appointment with the the guy Leigh was telling me about last week.”

“Leigh was telling you about a guy?” I asked, looking over at her in the dark.

“Yeah,” Lauren answered.

“How does that even come up?” I asked, “Like, what’d she say, I know this great sex therapist?”

I dreaded the answer.

Lauren shrugged.

I dreaded it more.

“I just told her we were trying and that it wasn’t going so well,” Lauren said.

I pictured them giggling in the kitchen, watching Howie and I grilling last weekend out on the deck, while they sat in the house, sipping their virgin cocktails and talking about how I couldn’t keep my game on long enough to get Lauren pregnant.

And to think I spent years worrying what would happen if I got a girl pregnant.

Apparently it’s a lot harder to do than they make it sound like in sex ed.

Dr. Walden, of course, had been the doctor Leigh had suggested and of course Lauren did indeed get an appointment with him. And of course that appointment went horribly wrong in every way that I never could’ve expected. But even with all the notes Lauren took at his office that day and all the research she did trying to find like the best sexual positions for baby-making and all that, we still weren’t pregnant.




I woke up on the morning of the month six pregnancy test in an empty bed. Lauren’s side was already cold. I rolled to look at the clock. It was almost eight. She’d have gotten up at six to take the test. I already knew the result without even having to ask. I rolled onto my back, letting my arms spread out and staring up at the ceiling. I lifted the sheets and looked down the length of my torso. “You gotta get your act together man,” I told my penis. I sighed and dropped the sheets back to my chest and closed my eyes. Lauren was gonna be in a bad mood. She always was on testing day.

Lauren was sitting in the center of the living room carpet, the furniture all pushed back, in a yoga position, her legs crossed so severely that she looked like a human knot. On the floor beside her was a big bowl of almonds, blueberries, soybeans, and kale. Fertility food.

“Morning,” I said.

She didn’t open her eyes, “One line.”

She meant on the test. Two would’ve meant we’d finally scored a touchdown.

I was having a more pathetic season than the Buccs.

And that’s pretty pathetic.

“I figured,” I answered, and I ducked out of the living room, headed for the kitchen.

“Don’t forget to take your vitamins!” she yelled after me, “And I cooked an omelet for you, it’s on the stove, just reheat it! It has spinach in it!”

Spinach is high in zinc. Zinc helps produce sperm.

I stared at the omelet in the pan. It was flecked with green spinach leaves and red peppers and steak. I turned on the heat and let it warm up, grabbing a K-cup from the drawer and sticking it into the machine. Breakfast was ready in just a couple minutes and I carried it out to the deck and put it down on the table, staring out to the ocean as I sat down.

It was pretty chilly outside for Los Angeles, low sixties, but it was almost December so that was to be expected. I had a sweatshirt on. I enjoyed the sound of the ocean too much to go back inside. I ate my omelet slowly, watching the water break against the rocks that lined a jetty a little ways down the beach.

Lauren came out, pulling her hair down from the high pony tail she’d been wearing while working out. She settled herself into the chair next to me and leaned back without saying a word. I kept eating. The ocean kept rolling in and out with the tide. When I finished, I put my fork across my plate and pushed it away and leaned back in the chair.

“Was it good?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was fine,” I answered, “Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

We sat there in silence again, both of us watching the waves.

Lauren looked over at me, “I’m gonna volunteer somewhere,” she declared. “For Thanksgiving. Like maybe a food bank or a soup kitchen or something. Remember we did it that one time a few years back, remember how good it felt? I think I need to do something like that again,” she said. “I need to feel good about something again.”

I nodded.

“You don’t have to do it,” she said, “But I’m going to.”

I nodded again.

“I mean, you can if you want to, but you don’t have to.”

“It’s okay, it can be your thing,” I said. “Everyone needs a thing. That can be yours.” I shrugged.

We were both trying to avoid having the good try this month, we’ll try again next month pep talk that inevitably came every month on testing day. I didn’t want to hear it, though, and I got the feeling she was tired of reciting it to me.