It was our 20th anniversary.
The same restaurant where I proposed. Candles.
The dress she wouldn't let me see until she came down the stairs in it.
The way she looked at me across that table — like I was still the man she married.
We got home to an empty house. The kids grown and gone. Quiet.
She kissed me at the bottom of the stairs, slow, her hand sliding up my chest.
And I wanted her. God, I wanted her.
We went upstairs. She reached for me. And I moved toward her, ready to be the man I'd been a thousand times before.
And... nothing happened.
I couldn't get hard.
I told myself it was the wine. The long week. The thousand excuses I'd spent eighteen years telling other men not to believe.
Because here's the part that made it unbearable:
I'm a board-certified urologist. This is the exact problem I fix for a living.
I have the diplomas. I've written thousands of these prescriptions. I am, on paper, one of the most qualified men in America to fix what was happening to me.
And I was lying in the dark, soft, useless, with all of it completely worthless.
She was patient. She used her hands. She whispered that it was okay, that there was no rush.
And every kind thing she did made me feel smaller — because I could feel my own body refusing her.
A little erection... flicker of hope. Then gone.
Until I wasn't even aroused anymore. I was just afraid.
Eventually she stopped trying. Rolled over. Pulled up the blanket.
And I lay there feeling something no diploma had ever prepared me for.
Shame.
The kind that's still there when the sun comes up.
Because the next morning, I had to go to my office, put on the white coat, and sell other men the same pill that had just failed me in my own bed.
I was a fraud...