#26 – Support
"Thanks for sharing – I mean, partaking," the group leader said as Sheri sat down, embarrassed that he'd slipped and used the word "sharing" – here, of all places. "I believe Albert wanted to add his input, next."
Albert stood up, his face already reddening even though he hadn't said a word yet. "My name is Albert, and I'm a former controller."
"Hello, Albert," the rest of the twenty-something member group droned.
He hesitated. "I've been having some…um…intimacy issues with my wife," he admitted. "See, I was infested and she wasn't. For three years, my Yeerk turned down all of her…sexual advances. He wasn't interested. I guess it became habit for us to just not be…intimate."
Nobody interrupted. The only sound was Homeless Joe slurping his black coffee noisily in the corner. Homeless Joe claimed to have been a controller, but most of the members suspected he was only in it for the free coffee. Albert continued. "Now that I'm free, I have feelings about it all the time. I want to make up for the lost…experiences. But my wife just isn't into it. I don't know if it's because she's just used to not being intimate with me. Sometimes I feel like she's disgusted with me because of the fact that I was a controller for so long. I don't know what it is. All I know is that we don't have sex anymore, and I feel like it's my fault."
A girl of about nineteen raised her hand. "May I?" Albert sat down and nodded. The girl stood.
"I'm Jeannie, and I'm a former controller."
"Hi, Jeannie," the group said as one.
"It's the same for me. My boyfriend won't touch me ever since my Yeerk reported me for the de-infestation process." She looked Albert directly in the eye. "I love him, but I think I'm going to leave him. I think I need someone who will fully…understand." Her voice thickened, and everyone in the room could see that she was choking back tears. "Maybe we're not fit to be with normal people."
"We are normal," the group leader reminded her. "We're normal people who were forced into an extremely abnormal situation." He spent the rest of the support group meeting hammering that idea into the members' heads. Everyone nodded along like they agreed.
But, at the end of the meeting, Jeannie slipped Albert a piece of paper with her cell number written on it.