LITMIR.BIZ

       My two best guy friends, Jake and Derek, came over that Saturday morning to cheer me up. I poured three cups of fresh coffee and set out a plate of danishes, a sinful treat in honor of my being dumped by Stephen, my boyfriend of three years.

      Neither Jake nor Derek had the decency to look as if they felt bad for me.

      “What you need,” Jake said, as he chewed on a cheese danish, “is to purge him from your system.”

      “I could start drinking,” I said. “That oughtta flush him right out.”

      Derek shook his head. “No, something more…dramatic, I think.”

      “Take a trip?” I suggested. “Maybe some sort of spiritual journey? Or a weekend at a health spa?”

      Jake and Derek were my very gay next-door neighbors who had adopted me minutes after I’d left Oklahoma for a job in Los Angeles. Jake was a lawyer at a nonprofit organization downtown. Derek was an amazing hair stylist at an upscale salon in Hollywood. The two of them had become the brothers I’d never had. Plus, I now had really great hair.

      “I’ve been thinking about this for a while now,” Jake said. “I think that in order for you to find happiness in the next relationship, to rectify the karma, so to speak, you need to identify the single most problematic element of your relationship with Stephen and deal with it. Otherwise, you might just end up with another Stephen.”

      I sipped my coffee and thought about that for a moment. “Are you sure I only have to identify one problem? It seems like I could make a list.”

      Derek reached for a second danish. “If you really think about it, all of the other problems were just, I don’t know, symptoms of the main one. Secondary problems.”

      I looked at Derek. “It sounds as though you’ve already identified the primary problem.”

      “Come on, Emma.” Derek gave me a pleading look. “Think.”

      I didn’t know where to start. Stephen and I seemed to be pretty matched personality-wise. We both loved movies, hiking, traveling, reading, Mexican food.

      “This is just pathetic,” Jake said. “Either you’re absolutely clueless, or too embarrassed to admit the problem.”

      I looked up.

      “Sex,” Derek said. “You were sexually incompatible.”

      “I take offense to that,” I said. “The sex was fine.”

      “Was it? He always looked a heck of a lot cheerier when he left in the morning than you did when you left in the morning.”

      I blushed. There was something weird about knowing your two gay brother stand-ins were tracking your sexual progress.

      “Here’s what I think,” Jake said. “I think that Stephen pursued you because he saw you as a cute, all-American good girl from Oklahoma. Which isn’t a bad thing.” He held up a hand before I could protest. “But you also have a pretty serious inner tigress who likes adventure. And when you figured out that he might be scared off by the inner tigress, you caged her up.”

      “The problem, as I see it,” Derek added, “is that Stephen picked up on the fact that you were holding something back from him, and that you weren’t happy. And that’s why he walked.”

      “And now you’re worried that I’m going to keep my inner tigress locked up,” I said, my eyebrows raised. “That’s just weird, guys.”

      “Is it? What if, deep down, you’re really worried that he picked up on that inner tigress? What if you think you just have to work harder to keep her caged up? You’ll never be happy. The men you’re with will never be happy. And then we’ll never be happy,” Jake said. “And you don’t want us unhappy, right?”

      I leaned back in my chair and nursed my coffee cup. This conversation was getting a little embarrassing for my all-American good-girl self. “So what’s the cure?”

      “A week of hot sexual escapades that will purge the lame missionary sex with Stephen right out of your soul,” Derek said.

      I burst into laughter.

      “Uh, with whom?” I was laughing so hard that that my coffee was sloshing over the rim of my cup. “You guys?”

      “I love you to bits, Emma, but you’re just not my type,” Jake said. “But we know a lot of guys—and a few girls, too—who would totally dig you.”

      I looked back and forth from Jake to Derek. “You’re serious.”

      “Totally,” Derek said.

      “No fucking way,” I said.

      Jake pressed the back of his hand to his head in mock horror. “The inner tigress surfaced to utter a foul word, Derek.”

      “No,” I said.

      “You don’t even know what we were going to say,” Jake said.

      “I don’t have to. I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said. “Besides, I don’t need your opinion of me to sink. I feel low enough all on my own right now.”

      Derek leaned forward on his arms and gave me the most serious look I’ve ever seen from him. “Sweetheart, there is nothing that we’d like more than to see you be comfortable with yourself. How could we think less of you for that? Especially a couple of guys like us?”

      Both Derek and Jake were estranged from their families because they were openly gay. Derek’s father, a man who preached “love everyone” from the pulpit, had given Derek the boot when he’d turned eighteen. Jake’s family had tried at first to be understanding, but when his nieces and nephews were born, Jake had grown tired of the way his sisters shielded their children from him. So he’d faded away.

      I’d never really thought about how hard that must have been, leaving family and friends like that. Yet I couldn’t imagine Derek and Jake happy had they not been true to themselves.

      “You think it will take a whole week, huh?”

      “Look,” Jake said, “here’s what I think you should do.” He reached behind him to the kitchen counter, where I kept a pad of paper and pens near my cell-phone charger. “Ask your inner tigress to name the three most daring things she would like to try. Three things that she’s almost too embarrassed

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