Chapter 4: The Body’s Betrayal

James had not been careful. He had been intense, demanding, and good in bed in a way that still makes my face heat when I let myself remember. He was the first man who put his cock in my mouth. He guided my head and told me I was doing well even when I gagged. He came in my mouth the first time, and I hated the taste and the idea of it, but I still opened again the next time he told me to. He put me in positions that made me nervous and uncomfortable. He slapped my ass hard enough to leave marks. He pulled my hair until my scalp burned. He pinched my nipples until I yelped and then told me, “You like that,” when my body answered him anyway.

I told myself I hated those things. Some nights I did. Other nights the discomfort made the orgasm stronger, deeper, and I hated myself for liking it more than I hated the act. After the night outside the party house—when he made me suck him in the grass and then fucked me against the siding while people watched through the window—I ran. He never called afterward, and the next night, when I found him inside another girl, he told me I was too shy, that I never wanted to try anything new, that it was exhausting. I left James that night, and I never told Nick the full story. I didn’t want him to know what I had come from or what I had allowed to be done to me. I did not want Nick to think I was that type of girl. I didn’t want to be that type of girl.

But on the rare times I touched myself when I was alone, or when the kids and Nick were asleep, it was the memories of James that came back. Not the gentle sex with Nick; rather, it was always when James had pushed me past what I said I wanted. The fear of being caught. The way my body had betrayed me against that wall and come so hard I had to bite my lip. I had liked submitting to him. I had never been brave enough to say that out loud, even to myself, because it felt too dirty, too humiliating, too much like the girl who had gotten on her knees in the wet grass because a man told her to.