I do not volunteer. They’d never believe me if I told the truth about why I’m here. But wait, bad sex, bad sex. These folks have potential. Oversexed people trying not to have sex could be real bad. Or would they be real good, heading toward better/best, like reformed Catholic girls let loose?

At the break, the speaker comes directly to me and introduces himself. “My name is Tony,” he says with a gorgeous grin. Oh my. I don’t even have to ask, I know he’s a Tiger, as in the Year of, the Hour of, the Moment of, the Bed of, the Cock of, and I’m heading for trouble.

“I just stopped in here accidentally,” I say. “Giving up lust? This is like a bad dream.”

“I know,” the Tiger says. He pauses, and then takes my arm firmly and guides me out toward the dark back corner of the bar. He smiles. “But I bet your dreams are spectacular, darling. You look like a girl who knows how to dream.” Fresh drinks in hand, strong arms wrapped around me. “Do you dream in color, Kenna?”

That’s the best pickup line I’ve heard in ages. “Everyone does, Tony, or can. Did you know that nobody ever questioned this fact before the advent of black-and-white television in the fifties? Not Freud, not Jung…” I hear my little librarian voice being smart, and at the same time I feel my knees shaking like a little girl and I just want to climb up on his lap and let him turn his lust over to me instead of God.

He listens to me as though every word I utter is gold. He knows the secrets. Words and hands and eyes and laughter. Attention paid; intensity gained. But it keeps sneaking through the haze of my desire that this man is one of them.

“Tony, didn’t I just hear you discussing ‘sexual sobriety’ as a way of life?” I ask as he pulls me onto his lap and his hand is higher and higher on my thigh, so high and so right that I think I imagined it all and that this is my punishment or maybe my reward for thinking and dreaming about sex day and night and forever, ever, pretending I know a single thing about what it all means.

“For you, darling, I’m willing to fall off the chastity wagon.” His mouth is on mine, and he’s biting my lip with the force that I need and I am going going gone. I don’t believe a word he says, and I don’t care. The cock of the Tiger is hard beneath my ass and all the lines are slipping away and good is blending into better and heading off the chart and he’s whispering in my ear and I want it all and we’re out the door.