The Game

wasn’t to use Lisa for sex. I knew I wanted to see her again, no matter what happened. I just wanted to get the whole sex thing over with so we could be normal together. She wouldn’t be trying to keep anything from me; I wouldn’t be trying to get something from her. I always hated the idea that sex is something a woman gives and a man takes. It is something that should be shared.
    But Lisa wasn’t sharing. As I began to rub the warm crease where her thigh meets her pelvis, her voice rang shrill in the air like an alarm clock. “What are you doing?” She smacked my hand away.
    We had breakfast together, and lunch, and dinner. We talked about Courtney and the PUAs and my writing and her music and our lives, and all kinds of other things that I can’t remember but must have been fascinating because hours passed in the blink of an eye. She was my age; she liked all the same bands I did; she said something intelligent every time she opened her mouth; she laughed at my jokes that were funny and made fun of the ones that weren’t.
    She spent another night with me. Nothing happened. I had met my match.
    After breakfast, I stood on the front stoop and watched Lisa leave. She walked uphill, climbed into her Mercedes, lowered the convertible top, and pulled away. I turned around to climb the stairs. I didn’t want to glance back. I wanted to look cool, and not give her any more IOIs.
    “Hey, come here,” she yelled from her car.
    I shook my head no. She was ruining my exit.
    “No, seriously, come here. It’s important.”
    I sighed and walked back down to her car. “I’m really sorry, don’t be upset,” she said. “But I think I might have accidentally dented your limo when I was pulling out.”
    My body went cold. It was our newest and most expensive possession.
    “Just kidding,” she said, stepping on the accelerator and leaving me in the dust with a wave. I saw her blonde hair streaming over the side of the car as she turned down Sunset, blasting the Clash.
    I had been played by her—again.

I told Mystery about my frustration with Lisa as we sat in the hot tub one night. I’d turned to him so often in the past for advice on women, and he’d rarely steered me wrong. Though relationship management was clearly not his forte, he was flawless when it came to blasting through lastminute resistance.
    “Start stroking yourself,” he said.
    “Now? Here?”
    “No, next time you’re in bed together, just take your cock out and start stroking it.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then you take her hand and put it on your balls. And she’ll start giving you a hand job.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Yes. Then you put your finger on your dick and put a little precum on it, and put your finger in her mouth.”
    “No way. This is like that bad joke advice you see in movies, where the friend does it and the girl freaks out and the guy who gave the advice goes, ‘I thought you knew I was kidding.’”
    “I’m totally serious. You’ve practically had sex after that.”
    Three days later, after the bars closed at 2:00 A.M., Lisa dropped by my house with Sam, Courtney’s drummer. She was wasted.
    We climbed into bed and babbled to each other for hours. “I don’t know what my problem is,” she slurred. “I never want to leave your room. I could just listen to you talk forever.”
    She rolled toward me. “Forget I said that,” she snapped. “I didn’t mean it. Alcohol is like a truth serum.”
    Now was my chance. Mystery’s words ran through my head, and I considered the pros and cons of stroking myself and placing her hand on me.
    I couldn’t do it. Not because I was scared, but because there was no way it was going to work. Lisa would have laughed in my face and said something cutting like, “You might as well touch yourself, because I’m certainlynot about to.” Then she would have told all her friends about the cheesy guy who started rubbing his dick in front of her.
    Mystery wasn’t always right.
    So we spent another platonic night together. It was driving me crazy. I knew she liked me. Yet she wouldn’t get intimate. I was teetering on the border of being LJBF’ed.
    Maybe I just wasn’t her type. I imagined her with tattooed, musclebound, leather-jacketed Danzig types, not scrawny metrosexual guys who had to take pickup workshops. She was killing me.
    For the first time since I’d learned the word one-itis, I had it. And I knew that I was doomed. No one ever gets his one-itis. He gets too