Along for the Ride

Chapter One

Hormones are a bitch.

They rule our lives. Men and women alike, but mostly women, we have all the luck.

They allow us to feed our babies and make us fall in love with the wrong men. From that first embarrassing spot on your white pants in geography class until death, you can’t escape the effects hormones have on us.

I’m menopausal. That sucks.

I’m sweaty, cranky, bitchy, twitchy, rolly polly, sleepy, weepy, and sometimes just plain nuts.

I cry when I should scream and I scream when I should cry. And I’m pretty sure that the treatment I had for my breast cancer amplified all of this by twenty.

Now add two teenagers.

I adore them but…

My daughter’s hormones make her act like a heartless bitch. Sometimes.

My son’s hormones make him act like a libidinous dodo, all of the time.

And last, but certainly not least, my husband’s hormones, or lack, thereof, have made sex a rare commodity in our home. And that’s just tragic.

I love sex. Always have.

The initial flirting, the kissing, the groping, those surprise pokes in the morning. In the bedroom, in the car, in the dark outside a bar, on a train, in the rain.

I love sex.

Those are hormones too.

From the first moment I went lip to lip with a man, my entire life changed. I could feel every cell in my body buzzing in a new and addictive way.

I had been a late bloomer. Almost eighteen years old before my first kiss. But I surprised myself by what a natural I was. With no nerves at all I just melted into that tall golden frat boy with the slight scent of keg beer on his breath and did what came naturally.

When I went to college, I made up my mind that my first frat party was going to be my first kiss… if not more.

I figured there was no better place for a sexy, busty, Italian girl to get lucky than a crazy loud party filled to the rafters with drunken, self-important frat boys. My two best friends and I made a sworn oath to stick together until we had a chance to vet each guy before going our separate ways. But true to form I lost track of Laura as soon as she realized that there was a band.

She had wanted to be a groupie ever since she heard John Green playing America the Beautiful on his recorder in middle school.

So I walked around trying to find my other best friend, Angie. She’s little and hard to spot, But out of the corner of my eye I saw what looked like an outtake from a porn version of the Wizard of Oz.

Angie, at not quite five foot one, and the tiny guy she was with was, were deeply into each other’s mouths by the time I spotted her. So I wandered off, leaving them to their munchkin PDA.

There must have been at least two hundred people in the frat house and more overflowing into the overgrown back yard.

The frat girlfriends were holding court by the pool table. They were so sure of their superiority over the rest of us giggling and flipping their perfect hair like human GAP mannequins as their less than attentive boyfriends took their pool games more seriously than their relationships. I knew that my guy wasn’t going to be in that crowd. So I drifted outside looking for Prince Charming and just in case I bombed out, the beer-keg.

I wasn’t looking for someone too sober in case I sucked at sucking face, and afterwards would need to pretend like I had never met the guy.

As I pushed myself through the wall-to-wall polo shirts, I was beginning to worry that I was going to come up empty handed, so to speak. There were just too many plaid shorts and sweaters over the shoulders guys carrying on entire conversations using only the words braw and dude. I was about to give up and head over to the band, when I spotted him.

My frat boy.

Tall and smiling, with a beer cup in one hand, his other casually stuffed in the pocket of his UCLA sweatshirt. He was wearing tennis shoes, not Dock Siders.

Just non-standard enough to intrigue me.

So I moved closer and managed to catch his eye. I’m not shy. So I shot him my best sexy smile and flipped my long dark hair. He smiled back.

Of course he did, the sexy hair flip has never disappointed.

Even all of these years later my hair flip has gotten me out of two parking tickets, extra flowers from the florist and free tutoring for my math challenged son.

There were two blondes in his group.

Blondes were always giggling like ninnies, they had the advantage of that bright shiny hair, but they let that make them complacent. As a brunette, and on the shorter side I always brought my A-game and played hard.

I stayed away from his group, trying to entice him with my indifference.

I grew up with three very popular brothers and learned early on that men really are addicted to the chase.

I bit the lip of my beer cup and gave him a giggle. Then looked around as if I was waiting for someone better to show up. He bought it and came towards me. As he got closer I could see that he had emerald green eyes and a cleft in his chin.

Yum.

He ran his hand through his long blond, surfer do. Certainly it was intended to make me week in the knees, but I resisted swooning. He was cute, so it wasn’t easy. But I already knew that I wanted to be the one in charge when it came to sex.

So how lame is this party? I said with a laugh.

Trying my best to keep my tone sounding bored but not bitchy. Not the easiest tone to achieve under the influence.

What you’re not having a good time? He asked, looking hurt. In my memory, his green eyes twinkled.

Well, I sexy pouted, the line for the keg is too long, and your members don’t seem that friendly.

He bought my act and came to my rescue. Men are hardwired to be heroes.

There’s actually another keg around back, you just have to know someone to have access. He said in all seriousness. I almost laughed because it was a frat party, not the Pentagon, but I wanted to go home with experience and this boy was my best shot.

I smiled sweetly and cooed, so do you count as someone? Flipping my hair again for good measure.

I’ll have you know that I am a very important someone. He whispered in my ear.

The feel of his warm breath on my ear made me go jelly between my legs.

I love an important someone. I whispered back, making sure to allow my lips to graze his ear.

I leaned in, eyes half closed, and finally after what seemed like forever he put his arm around my waist, pulled me in and pressed his lips against mine.

In that instant, that very first time I had a man’s lips on mine, a bolt of electricity shot down my spine making a stop between my legs and kept going all the way down to my feet. In less than three seconds I casually let my tongue slide into his mouth, as if I’d been French kissing guys at frat parties forever.

He kissed back, no doubt he had been kissing girls at frat parties forever.

At that very moment I discovered that my tongue was some sort of extra sensual appendage that I didn’t know about. Our tongues got to know each other as my hands moved on their own from his back to his butt and I pressed myself against him, pulling him in closer. I felt him hard against me and was so turned on that I was ready to go off with him somewhere more private and go all the way. I was ready to see what happened next.

Our kissing and the feel of him against me had me so turned on I was ready to give him an all access pass to take it to the next level. But then, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately in hindsight, I saw Laura and Angie weaving towards me, either laughing or crying. One of them was holding up the other and that was a three-person operation, so the party was over for me.

I really, really wanted to stay and finish what I had started. But my friends had drunk walked me out of parties before. We had a no man left behind policy so I gave the frat boy one last long deep tongue kiss, broke contact, said I’ve gotta go.

My guess was that he wasn’t expecting that.

Wha, Wha? was all he managed as I walked away to prop up Laura, the gelatin skeleton.

I wasn’t going to look back. I wanted to be cool but I couldn’t resist. And as we walked far enough away, I turned around hoping to see Prince Charming waiting to chase after me like I was Cinderella. But instead I saw that he had moved on to the pack of blondes. One of them was going to get my Prince that night and it made me laugh.

Since that first night I’ve wondered if my brain and my erogenous zones are short-circuited.

Because as soon as a man puts his mouth on mine and kisses me the way I like, he can pretty much go as far as he wants, or more accurately, as far as I want.

I blame it on my hormones.

My older sister, the psychiatrist, has always contended that I seek the attention I feel I didn’t get as a child by having sex with people for personal validation. Sounds about right to me, but then, I think she became a psychiatrist for the exact same reason.

I am the middle child in a brood of seven. If I didn’t seek attention I would have been dead somewhere around eight or nine years old.

There were seven of us!

It’s like being on a baseball team full of all stars, and I was the right fielder with no throw.

My father always told me that he thought of me as an only child who happened to have six brothers and sisters. That’s probably a very nice way of describing my behavior.

I own up to the fact that I’ve always been a bit of a drama queen. I like to think of it as classic middle child syndrome, cubed. Our family began in proud Italian fashion with a first-born son.

Gino, was born a prince, and could do no wrong. When he was eighteen he grew pot in my mother’s herb garden right next to her basil and oregano. When she asked him what it was he told her it was hemp. She believed him without question since he was the prince, and tended to his plants as lovingly as she cared for her famous zucchinis.

After the prince, Mom quickly gave birth to a perfect daughter, Teresa, the aforementioned psychiatrist. Born brilliant, she was already psychoanalyzing the rest of us from the time we could speak.

She’d do ‘hostage negotiations" between us.

So tell me, why do you think that Antonia stole your sweater? Is it because she has a better body than you and deep down inside you resent that?

She’d ask calmly while I waved my sister’s favorite blouse in one hand and clutched a pair of scissors in the other.

Uh,no. It’s because Toni is standing right there in front of us stretching out my sweater with her enormous boobs. I’d screech.

All four of us girls were fairly well endowed, but Antonia blossomed first and best. At forty-one she still has an impressive rack, and she still steals my sweaters.

Luckily for the honor of our family, my mother gave birth to another boy right after Teresa.

Italians get nervous when they don’t have enough boys in the family right away. But then Antony was born premature and remained a sickly child. He was dangerously asthmatic and required a lot of care. Naturally my little Italian mother threw herself one hundred percent into looking after his health. When I was born 18 months later, my mother was still preoccupied with keeping him alive, and I was sort of a healthy afterthought.

So I fought against Antony’s physical ailment with hysteria and outbursts.

Then before I was even two years old and verbal enough to complain about my dissatisfaction with the way I was being ignored, my mother gave birth to the most beautiful twin girls anyone had ever seen.

Chubby, blonde-haired, blue eyed, Antonia and Bettina were show stoppers. My mother claimed they were Florencian, from her side of the family. In family portraits they stood out like two little beautiful, blonde, sore thumbs.

Just when I thought my life couldn’t get any worse, along came Michael. The baby of the family.

If I had been born in Elizabethan times I’d most likely have spent a good part of my youth tucked away at some quiet estate in the country taking the ‘rest cure.’ But since I was a child of modern times, my parents did what good parents with seven children did. They ignored my histrionics and told me to go to my room until I could act like a normal person.

And I did.

In fact I think that I acted like a reasonably normal person throughout my entire adult life. Until now, that is.

Now my children tell me to go to my room until I can act like a normal person. I’m not sure I remember what normal is anymore, and I’m not even sure that I give a damn.

Chapter Two

My doctor has told me that I am on the young side to be experiencing menopause. He also told me that menopause and effects of my cancer treatments would most likely turn my vagina to dust.

Well… that didn’t happen.

Instead my sex drive woke up like Godzilla from the ocean. I had a seriously Godzilla-like need to have sex, to be touched just to be sensual again.

The return of my slutty side might have been a blessing in most marriages, but Gavin, my husband, was never nearly as big of a slut as I.

Even in the early days of our marriage I worked hard trying to get my husband hard.

He’s a few years older than I am, so I took it in stride, chalking it up to the age difference. But over the years, sexual fulfillment became like a full time job. In my opinion a woman shouldn’t have to work so hard to have sex.

We are the ones with the boobs, after all.

I did all of the cliché things one is told to do in that situation. I did my kegel exercises, fed him oysters, watched porn and tried fantasy scenarios.

One of my many ill-fated attempts at seduction involved me showing up at my husband’s office wearing nothing under my trench coat but stockings and garters. His office is on our ranch. So a few of the ranch hands gave me strange looks as I walked the distance from our home to the offices near the barn in my buttoned up trench coat. My normal house to office attire was more like down coat over my robe, so my outfit drew some stares.

I walked into the office dramatically. Gavin, seated behind his desk, just looked up, slightly annoyed.

Can it wait? was his impolite greeting, before he even laid eyes on me. His grouchy response panicked me so I just whipped my coat open and flashed him. He went from cranky to borderline hostile. Looking around frantically, he whispered as loud as he could.

Jesus, what the hell are you thinking?! There are two dozen men wandering around here.

I was well aware of that, as I had walked past eleven men on my way to his office. I counted them, six smiled and said hi, and the other five looked at me curiously and then turned their heads as I walked past.

For God’s sake Woman, just go home and put your clothes on. Why can’t you stop acting crazy? He hissed.

That pissed me off.

I don’t consider it crazy to offer yourself up as a sexual treat to the man you married.

In fact, I consider it to be a very thoughtful gesture, along the lines of a floral delivery or fresh baked cookies.

Offended by his response I just blurted out, I don’t want to go home Gavin, I want to have sex, right here right now. I kept my coat open, challenging him.

I’m busy, god dammit, he whisper-hissed at me. Will you please just go home? This is a place of business!

I kept my coat open and flapped it like wings trying to bring his attention back to me.

We can talk about this later and at home like normal people. Then he looked me straight in the eye and added, Although you haven’t been acting very normal at all lately!

That was just below the belt. Not that I was wearing a belt. So I turned around and walked back to my house. I thought about flashing a couple of ranch hands on my way, you know, because I wasn’t acting very normal, lately.

After all of the rejection and humiliation, you’d think I’d just give up on ever having sex again. But never let it be said that I’m a quitter.

I’m not.

I had breast cancer and went though week after week of chemotherapy.

That shit kicked my ass.

So many days I just wanted to call it quits. I really, really wanted to just go home, crawl into my own bed and let my body decide on it’s own what was going to happen. The cure seemed worse than the disease. I was certain that one of them was going to kill me.

But I didn’t quit.

It’s entirely possible that the sight of my gorgeous oncology resident helped keep me going back to get poisoned and beat down, but whatever the reason, I didn’t quit.

I did, however, finally give up on the sexy scenarios as a way to get my husband in bed.

I was tired of his stupid comments trying to make me feel like a raging nympho for wanting him to have sex with me, his own wife. He wasn’t holding up his end of the marital contract and that didn’t seem to bother him.