It was Monday morning of the week for which the weather forecast predicted a heatwave. 
Lauren woke up.
Her night had been short but sweet as she had chosen to sleep on the couch with the door to the balcony open. Her cats had been able to enjoy the cool hours of the night outside, before the heat would lock all three of them up behind heavy curtains and shut blinds.
She had slept with a sheet covering her face instead of using mosquito repellent, but now she was wide awake. Not just from sleeping this night, but also from a ten day haze, in which she had redesigned her entire life, but had somehow managed to lose the two men that meant the most to her.
They had still been there, ten days ago, on the day of the rock concert and the morning after.
Maybe it had been because of the thrill of having them both, that she had gotten lazy and had – as she called it – given away the game.
She could feel both of them had withdrawn and she assumed both of them had returned to their day-to-day lives of work, children and their wives.
A life she wasn’t a part of, nor did she care to be.
But it had come as a surprise to her, how easy it had been.
Although “it” in terms of an achievement, was a dubious term here, since the rock star had not been in her life in a normal way.
And “easy” too, was perhaps not the right word either, since she was convinced few people would be able to love, to adore, to manifest, to focus, to dedicate, the way she did.
And originally, before she had started making mistakes and lost them both, she had actually been able to do it to two men at the same time.
She had felt the rock star and her lover the strongest, at exactly the same time.
And she had felt them turn their backs on her, at exactly the same time too.
This Monday morning she realized she had two options.
Since giving them up was a hypothetical one, it meant she had only one:
To get them back.
Yet, the reasons she had considered to give them up were multiple.
First of all, if she did that, then no harm would be done. All she had to do was to pull her energy out of the situation. Especially now that last week’s poor game had already sent them on their way, it would be a smooth, drama-free exit for all parties involved.
A fleeting memory.
For Mr. Big to the years he had a mistress named Lauren.
And for the rock star she was probably already gone, but maybe she would stay in his mind for a few more days. And then he would forget about her.
None of them would ever meet again, and if they did no one would feel anything and they would all feel really mature for handling it so well.
A second reason to give it all up, was that Lauren was still ashamed of who she was. She had actually had two visions within that ten day period in which she had alienated the men from her:
Two visions about two men who she had been convinced would play a role in her new love life.
One mature man, she had met going out. What she had liked about him was that he was a bit rough, unpredictable.
It wasn’t until now, that Lauren started realizing she might have liked that in theory, but that none of the men she had ever fallen in love with had possessed that quality of being rough.
Either they had a boy-like charm or they were dominant but calm.
“They don’t make sudden movements,” Lauren had often illustrated that she craved stability not so much in the relationship, but in the man himself.
Although her relationship with Mr.Big definitely qualified as exciting, this was not because he would do unpredictable things. His unique quality, and the reason she absolutely wanted him back, was that he tuned in with her.
He could read her, and in particular the darkest corners of her mind where no one had ever joined her, but him. She masturbated thinking of him, something she had rarely done with any other men she had known.
If she had, then it was an effort.
A ritual of some sorts.
It wasn’t because it came natural, nor did she ever repeat it.
But masturbating to Mr.Big had become a habit that she had fully given in to, when they were about 9 months into their affair. Before him, it had been nameless, faceless beings.
Next to the rough man she had met this week, the other man Lauren saw in her visions, or idea of her future sex life, had been a young man in his mid-twenties.
This had been the most fun, lighthearted fantasy in the world.
What a wonderful idea, to not be in those complicated relationships with married men, and have a young lover instead!
Someone who was obviously way too much to handle for the women his age, and whom she could learn how to love himself and to honor his own sexuality.
Maybe she could save him from monogamy, or save him from being jealous if his wife ever had a lover.
She would be able to save a life, as far as Lauren could see it.
Two lives, if she counted the one from his future wife.
Yes a young lover was definitely in the cards for her!
Except of course, just like the man with the rough edges, it wasn’t.
Lauren had done her share of dating younger men, and she had found it tiresome. Not so much because she didn’t have feelings for them, but because they couldn’t receive them.
With the strong ones she had to play being the cool chick.
And with the inexperienced ones, she had gotten sick of them leaving the moment they had had great sex and felt confident enough to take on the rest of the world.
But whenever she saw their Facebook status change or pictures of beautiful girls they were now dating, she smiled.
Lauren’s cougar days were behind her.
So the vision of the 25 year old, that had originally appealed to her, got stained by all the fuss it had been to date his predecessors.
And Lauren had another reason that only she could know.
Another reason why both the rough man as well as the 25 year old, were not her real calling. The reason was this:
they were an expression of her desire to be saved.
From both of her crushes.
Obviously, being in love with a rock star was idiotic. She had learned this right from when she was 12 years old, and had gotten a Dutch idol which had been around her age. She had been ashamed of her feelings then.
And of all the men that came after him.
Between 2005 and now, there had not been an international star whom she had been affectionate towards. “Just” a handful of Dutch writers.
Since The Netherlands didn’t really have a star culture, those men had counted as real life men, in Lauren’s trail of thought.
If she had been ashamed of her feelings for one of them, it had been nothing compared to to overwhelming shame that she felt for being in love with her international idols, like Brad Pitt had been.
And this rock star was now.
The eagerness, with which she wanted to throw him back into the rock star pond and get a normal lover in the real world, or a crush on a Dutch writer which was basically the same thing-  was astounding.
She was running away.
And if she ran away now, she’d be running forever.
An interesting detail to the entire conversation in her head, was that she had been running away from him since the eighties.
After a short relationship with a boy her age, who had looked like the rock star and who had even incorporated the band’s music into their correspondence, their music into their lovemaking and the acoustic guitar into songs that he wrote for her – after that relationship ended because he left her, she had struck back by giving up her rock star.
It had been like cutting off her left arm, but she had done it.
As if she had said:
“You’re leaving me? Fine! I don’t need you or our music! Keep it!”
Her grandma used to say to her mother, whenever Lauren had done something slightly crazy like dying her head red:
“Better they do that now, than when they’re forty.”
Maybe if she had saved the rock star from the ashes of her courtship, dusted him off and started over, she would not have suffered this crush now that she was forty plus.
And yet, and yet?
She could be downplayed here.
Maybe dumbing down idol crushes was a sign of society’s blatant ignorance, a need to feel superior and to have a reason to put people like Lauren down.
Just like they had done every time she fell in love with a married man:
“Well he’s not going to leave his wife.”
As if the value of her feelings was being measured by their reciprocity.
If a man loved her back, her feelings were justified.
If he didn’t, or if she didn’t have evidence? Then her feelings were stupid.
The longer she thought about it, the more she understood how this worked and why she had been so eager to switch to new men for her future affairs. The young one and the older one. Both single, both easy. Both free from the judgement of others.
So after the euphoria of feeling Mr.Big and the rock star so close by, just ten days ago, Lauren had made the mistake of jumping at the opportunity to date someone normal.
No wonder they had left her.
Now that Lauren knew she had been running away from her own feelings, and by doing that had estranged the men that had been causing them, she made a plan on how to get back into the zone.
Back to that time when she had been on the highest of the high, and then they came. She turned out to have a better understanding of what was required, than she had expected.
As soon as she stopped listening to inner-voices who had been shaming her feelings for these men;
And made a resolution to first ignore and then deal later, with the biggest bitch of them all, which was an inner-voice that accused her of having stolen the energy of the rock star and Mr.Big;
It all fell into place.
First of all, she decided to fully accept who she was, including having feelings for famous men, which was currently the rock star.
The same rock star she had run away from when she was 16, because she wanted to outsmart her ex-boyfriend.
That became the second rule.
Her feelings were allowed to change, but she would never let them be hijacked by someone who didn’t have anything to do with them. Her feelings would never again need justification.
The third rule would be that she would cultivate the feelings.
At the beginning of her affair with Mr.Big she had started writing erotica, to process the sex they had. The stories became the nourishment that he could not give her. They warmed her, instead of having a nice long talk or something else that would have made her feel loved.
The stories became like a fire to warm herself by.
And in the end she became so good at them, that she actually preferred it this way. She no longer knew how to deal with a normal relationship. She preferred to be left alone, at her desk, and reshape their time together into something that would never leave her.
And that was all hers.
But this too, had been an aspect of their affair where she had gotten lazy. She had not written erotica in years. And the most exciting things of their sex life, dated back to mid 2017.
She had blamed him for the distance that had gotten between them. For the weeks separating their dates, that had become months.
She always thought it had been him.
But now she realized she too, had done something here. She had stopped writing, because that had left her feeling exposed. And with every erotic story she felt like she was reducing her already slim chance of ever becoming the real woman at his side.
That yes, the stories had once served her, to be able to have a relationship with this difficult man. But that they were to be dropped as soon as she had upped her game and could do without them.
And she had been doing well.
She had not missed them.
But she could see now, how not writing about her sex life, had basically ruined it. That their sex life had been nourished by all the painful things she poured into the stories: Her vulnerability; Her sorrow; Her pain.
Her uneasiness with being someone’s lover and it, or her, never having a real name.
The pain of writing them had been what had made sex so sweet.
It was a miracle there was actually still something left to be saved. That the feelings between her and Mr.Big had not died out.
And the moment she had been on the super high last week, he had immediately checked in with her, to be there with her.
As if he finally saw the woman he loved, the moment she dropped her shame and rose to the level where she could meet the rock star.
It was right there, where Mr. Big had been waiting for her all along.