“No, they weren’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“How?”
I roll my eyes. “I can tell when a woman’s enjoying herself.”
She looks at me with such doubt that I begin to wonder if she’s right. Can I be one hundred percent sure the women I’ve been with haven’t faked it? I suppose I can’t. But I’ve gone to enough effort that I’m pretty certain they haven’t needed to.
“So how often do you believe a woman has had an orgasm when she’s had sex with you?” she asks, her curiosity overriding her embarrassment.
Am I really discussing this over fish and chips? “Every time,” I say. “Well, since I figured out what I was doing, anyway. Since I was about twenty.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” I tell her. “Of course I’m serious. Anything else would be impolite.”
She snorts. “Don’t make me laugh.”
This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. I know there are men, of course, who are clueless about giving a woman pleasure, but I’m sure most of the girls I know wouldn’t settle for anything less than a satisfying love life. Why has Poppy?
“How many partners have you had?” I ask her.
She pokes at her fish. “A few.”
“And none of them made you come during sex?”
“Like I said, it’s quite normal.” She obviously doesn’t understand my confusion.
“Poppy,” I say as gently as I can, looking into her eyes, “it’s not.”
She stops with a forkful of fish halfway to her mouth. Our gazes lock. I don’t smile, making sure she can see I’m serious.
She lowers her fork. “So you’re really saying you give a woman an orgasm every time you sleep with her?”
“More than one, usually. And that’s something else I found out—apparently if a guy goes down on a woman first, it can increase the amount of semen he produces.”
Her jaw drops.
I eat a couple of fries. “I’m just saying. I think it would be more fun than having IVF. And a lot cheaper and less hassle.” I sigh. “I can tell by the look on your face you don’t believe me.”
“I don’t. And anyway, you’re saying that not only could you give a woman an orgasm every time—every time—you had sex, but that you could time it to within a minute of your own climax?” Her voice is heavy with incredulity.
“Give or take. It’s not an exact science.”
“Jesus, Marc. How on earth would you do that?”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. “Sleep with me and you’ll find out.”
Both of us eat our fries, studying each other.
“You really are serious about this,” she says eventually.
“I am.”
“Because you want to have sex with me.”
“No. Well, yes, obviously—I mean not only because I want to have sex with you. I’m saying give me one month to try to get you pregnant the traditional way. We’ll have sex as often as I can manage it, and I’ll do my best to carry out the other suggestions to increase the likelihood of it happening. And hopefully, at the end of the month, you’ll be pregnant, and you’ll have fallen so madly in love with all those orgasms I’m going to give you that we’ll end up getting married, grow old and gray, and play Scrabble in the retirement village together with our teeth in a glass.” I smile.
She doesn’t. “You want to try to seduce me into a relationship,” she says.
I don’t see any sense in lying. “Yes.”
“It won’t work,” she advises softly.
“We’ll see.”
“I won’t fall for you,” she states. “I won’t let myself.”
I get the first twinge of warning that I could be putting myself in the path of a potential disaster. But it’s too late now. “What have you got to lose? Hopefully you’ll get pregnant if nothing else.”
“And if I do? Are you going to want to see the baby? Tell everyone it’s yours?”
“I’d like to. But I swear to you, if you get pregnant, and after a month with me you tell me then that you don’t want me involved, I’ll back away, and I won’t cause trouble for you. Cross my heart.”