Deep {COMPLETED}

t h r e e

Riley

I was sitting on my couch in my small apartment, pushing around some Chinese food and trying to listen to some boring reality TV show about some boring family.

"Riley, look!" Natalie exclaimed as she sat herself down next to me, with our old high school yearbook in her hand. She shoved it into my lap and pointed to a picture of a boy.

"I knew I had seen him before, his name sounded familiar. He was in our class."

There on the page was a picture of seventeen year old Ian Walker with his mouth shut in a closed smile and his glasses sitting perfectly on the bridge of his nose. His hair was much longer and he looked more like seven years younger rather than just two.

"Huh, would you look at that." I said. She began flipping through pages again, focused on finding something else.

"I must say, he's much better looking, quite fit actually. And he doesn't wear those glasses, or not that I've seen." Natalie nodded and added,

"Yeah, and my god he's tall! I'd say he's rather hot." She giggled and looked up at me as I nodded in agreement to her statement.

He's not hot, I thought, nor is he handsome, he's beautiful. Though I would never say that out loud, not to anybody. I couldn't control the small pang of anger that rushed through me because of her talking about Ian that way. I just bit my tongue and continued to shove around my dinner. To reassure myself I just thought, He's too good for you anyways.

*

The next Saturday, I walked under the banner and into the room at exactly 10:30. Kathy beamed at me and gestured towards a seat for me to take my place. Though not everyone was there and I doubted they would be for another ten minutes, I sat and waited.

As the room and seats gradually filled up, I was pleasantly surprised when Ian Walker crossed the room and sat, almost as if on purpose, directly across from me. He leaned forward with his elbows perched on his knees and his head down, unfortunately not providing me with the view I had hoped for.

Kathy began our session like every other session; reading off a new inspirational quote that was written in perfect penmanship on her whiteboard. Then we recited the ever-headache-inducing phrase, "Trust without Lust" and began marking progress.

The system for marking progress was that each person would volunteer and then walk up to the board where our names were all arranged with a certain amount of tally marks next to them. We each started off with five and every time we weren't 'clean' for a week, we had to take one off, but each time we made it through the week without having sex we added one on. There was no actual point to it other than to humiliate us but Kathy insisted that it gave us a sense of accomplishment, unless of course you had to take a tally off.

I currently had two tally marks next to my name.

I noticed that Kathy had added Ian's name to the list, at the very bottom, with five straight tally lines next to it. I couldn't help but think that he would be losing his tally's awfully fast.

The first person to volunteer was a man named Mike. He was fairly tall and a bit overweight, if you looked hard enough you would notice that he's balding, which is odd considering he's only 30. He wore thick glasses that took up most of his face along with his scraggly beard. He walked up to the board and proudly added one tally mark next to his name, everyone clapped unenthusiastically and he beamed as he sat back down.

Next was a girl named Cara, I couldn't stand her. She had this annoyingly loud and perky voice, and her dumb blonde hair was always in perfect shoulder length curls. She wore too much lipstick and it was hard to imagine that anyone would want to kiss her let alone have sex with her. She also liked to pretend that she was some sort of saint or something because she was getting help for her addiction. Besides, even though she gave herself another tally mark every week, everyone knew she was lying.