53. Chapter 53
Chapter 53
A few minutes later Paige returned and handed David the Cardigans of the Galaxy Double IPA.
“You were saying something about pornography?” he asked as he poured it into his glass.
She sat down, drawing her knees up. “Once I owned my body, the next step was to own my own pleasure and my therapy sort of got pornographic,” she said, using air quotes around the word ‘therapy’. “In my spare time, I started reading historical romances—”
“Oh, Jesus,” he groaned. “My mom reads that shit all the time. Practically every book she reads is about a duke seducing a governess, and that’s not an exaggeration.”
“I went through a duke and governess phase, myself,” Paige admitted, only slightly embarrassed. “It lasted a couple of months, followed by a western historical romance phase, which surprised me. I had no idea cowboys on a ranch would be so compelling, but they really are.”
David took a drink of his beer and said nothing.
“Anyway,” she said, interpreting his silence to mean he didn’t give a shit about cowboys on ranches (compelling or not). “I also started reading a lot of contemporary romance, too.”
“Like Fifty Shades of Grey?”
“I did read that, but I thought it was really lame. There’s better romance out there. My all-time favorite reads are rockstar romances, but I’m also a huge fan of the motorcycle club romance, too. I’m a little obsessed with both of them, actually. But, I like the age-gap romances, too.”
“Hold up. How many ‘favorites’ do you have?”
“It depends on my mood. Sometimes I want to read something old-timey and sometimes I want straight-up, unapologetic smut.”
“Okay, that makes sense, I guess. So, do you read all this—” he cleared his throat, “—literature on a Kindle? Or do you carry around books with ripped, bare-chested men on the covers?”
“How do you know about books with ripped, bare-chested men on the covers?”
David grimaced. “My mom has some. It’s not uncomfortable, or anything, thinking about her reading them, either.”
She laughed a little at his discomfort. “Well, I do have a few of those books, but most of what I read is on my Kindle. I love my Kindle. You can be reading the dirtiest sex scene and no one around you knows. It’s fantastic. I take it everywhere I go.”
“Everywhere except the doctor’s office, though, right?”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Isn’t that where you read scientific magazines?”
It took Paige a split second to recall the ridiculous conversation they’d recently had about scientific magazines and when she did, she struggled to maintain a serious expression. “Yes. You’re absolutely right. I take it everywhere but the doctor’s office.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So, anyway,” she said, quickly moving on, “along with all my reading, I started watching porn for the first time in my life. Now, you may be wondering why—”
“Not really, no.”
“—but I really like watching good love scenes in movies so I figured it just made sense to check out some porn.”
“Sure.”
“I found that I liked ‘romantic’ porn, which sounds ludicrous because it’s porn, but I needed to see some connection between the two people having sex, otherwise it felt detached and indifferent. And I didn’t like watching that, because it made me think of … me.”
Her words, along with the flash of sadness in her eyes, had David reaching over and pulling her in for a hug. “Jesus, don’t say that. You were never detached and indifferent.”
“Yes, I was.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “But that’s what abuse does. It corrupts the natural and makes intimacy inaccessible. I know you probably don’t like to hear it—”
“I don’t. Fuck, I really don’t.”
“—but it’s the truth.”
Paige pulled back a little so she could look at him. “There was obviously something wrong with me sexually. We both knew it, even if we didn’t know what it was at the time, but now that we do, we have to let it be real. Because my sexual dysfunction was real. I spent a significant amount of time in therapy working to overcome it and that didn’t happen without complete honesty.”
Her expression turned pensive. “Do you remember the things you said to me the night you left?” she asked quietly.
He did and the memory made him want to puke.
“That was honesty. You gave it to me then and I need it from you now. It won’t hurt my feelings or make you sound like an asshole, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I don’t want you to lie about how you felt, or how you saw things, because not only does that minimize my trauma, it also minimizes yours, too. And before you say you weren’t traumatized, yes, you were. My sexual dysfunction hurt you in many ways and even though it wasn’t intentional, it did happen. Every time you pretend it didn’t, you invalidate your pain, as well as your reasons for leaving me.”
“Okay,” David agreed reluctantly. “Complete honesty.”
He must not have been convincing enough because Paige gave him a skeptical look. To prove his sincerity, he crossed his fingers and held them up for her to see. “Complete honesty and I are like this. I swear.”
“We’ll see,” she said, then picked up the thread of their conversation. “So, this was a really strange time for me. Between all the books I was reading and all the porn I was watching, I started to feel like a horny teenager.”
“I saw that coming a mile away,” David told her with a roll of his eyes, then leaned forward, as if he was going to share a secret. “Oh, and just so you know, if you’re going to tell me you were shoving your hand down your pants every day, that won’t be a surprise to me, either.”
“First of all, it wasn’t every day,” she countered with a straight face. “And second of all, sometimes I was wearing a skirt.”
He laughed out loud and a second later she joined in.
When they were finished, her expression turned thoughtful. “The need to get myself off practically every day was really unexpected … to me, anyway,” she stressed in response to his raised eyebrows. “I mean, I wasn’t an actual horny teenager with raging hormones, so embarking on a journey of self-gratification in my thirties was kind of awkward. Masturbation had never been a thing for me and my first attempts weren’t always successful. It’s harder than you think to get out of your head and just feel pure, honest pleasure, when it’s something you’ve never done before.” Paige paused, pressing her lips together. “It kind of felt like I was in training, almost like masturbation boot-camp.”
For a moment, David got sidetracked thinking of her rubbing one out. “Wait. Did you just say ‘masturbation boot-camp’?”
“That’s what it was like. It was kind of grueling.”
He had never in his life thought of jerking off as grueling and for the first time, the extent of her struggle for normalcy really struck him; it was something most people took for granted, himself included.
“But it was also enlightening and life-changing,” she added. “I know that sounds ridiculous, because all I was doing was learning how to bring myself to orgasm, but it was life-changing. And even if it’s only the first rung on the ladder, it’s still a step up from where I was a year ago, when I didn’t even know what my clit was for. But once I figured it out …” she trailed off, frowning at his expression. “Is this making you uncomfortable?”
It was, but not in the way she was thinking, and David didn’t want her to shut down, just because he was having thoughts about her (and her clit) that he shouldn’t be having. But, in his defense, it was a little difficult not to, since she was talking about it so openly. “What? No.”
“And just like that, complete honesty is nothing but a memory,” she deadpanned. Then, imitating him from a few minutes ago, Paige crossed her fingers and held them up so he could see them, before uncrossing them dramatically.
“I’m not uncomfortable,” he insisted, unable to keep the amusement from his voice, because Paige busting his balls was pretty funny.
“Are you sure? Because you look uncomfortable and that’s the last thing I want.”
“And the last thing I want is for you to worry about making me uncomfortable, because you’re not. This is just the first time you and I have ever talked about your … clit.”
Her head tilted as she acknowledged the sad truth of that.
“So it’s a little surreal,” David continued evenly. “But the more we talk about it, the less surreal it’ll be, so let’s keep talking.”
For a moment, she couldn’t recall exactly where the conversation had stopped, but he apparently had no such memory lapse.
“You were saying you figured out what your clit was for,” he reminded her. “Congratulations, by the way.”
“Thanks. It was a big day for me, almost a milestone, really. You probably don’t remember the first time you discovered the joy of masturbation, but—”
“Are you kidding? Of course I do.”
“How? That had to have been more than twenty years ago.”
“Twenty-two, to be exact, but I remember it vividly. I did it after school in my room, before my mom got home from work and it lasted about one minute.”
“It was probably the best minute of your life,” Paige teased.
His mouth twitched. “Followed by the worst twenty minutes of my life, when I had to clean up. Honest to God, it went everywhere.”
“What do you mean, ‘everywhere’? Did you spray the room?”
“Jesus. No, I didn’t spray the room,” he denied, only to lower his voice and clarify, “Not on purpose, anyway.”
She stifled a laugh. “So you did it by accident?”
“Well, shit … it was like a geyser.”
At that, she was unable to stifle her laughter any longer and it came out at full volume.
“I was unprepared,” he added.
That only made Paige laugh harder. “You didn’t think to use a towel … or anything?”
“I was thirteen. Of course I didn’t think to use a towel … or anything. I had a Playboy and lube.“ His expression turned rather nostalgic. “I still have it, actually.”
“The lube?”
“Yeah, the lube,” he said, straight-faced.
She hid a smile and asked, “So, you didn’t know what it was going to be like?”
“No. Hearing shit in the locker room after gym class didn’t prepare me for the reality of coming all over the place. Or the reality of how much there was.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“The worst part was that when my mom came home and saw me putting my bedspread in the washing machine, she got this look on her face, like she knew exactly what I’d been up to. Of course, the fact I was doing laundry for the first time in my life was probably a huge clue.”
“Your poor mom,” Paige sputtered.
“Poor me,“ David swiftly corrected her. “I was shitting myself, thinking she was going to ground me.”
“Ground you for … jerking off?”
“I didn’t know what she’d do. But I didn’t want to find out, that was for goddamn sure.”
Paige pictured a teenaged David squaring off with Valerie over jerking off and wiped at her streaming eyes; she was pretty sure all of her mascara was gone. “Please. I can’t take any more.”
He waited until she’d pulled herself together, before steering the conversation back to her again. “Quid pro quo.”
“Quid pro quo?”
“It’s only fair.”
Considering she’d done the majority of the sharing that evening, she thought ‘it’s only fair’ was a bit outrageous, and told him so. His response was to simply shrug and make a ‘Come on’ motion with his hands.
“All right,” she said. “But I’m warning you right now, that my story isn’t nearly as good as yours.” Leaning forward, Paige waited until he did the same, then made a pretense of glancing around, as if to make sure they wouldn’t be overheard by anyone before looking him in the eye. “Vibrator. Porn. Orgasm.”
Finished, she straightened up and resumed her original position, curled up in the corner of the loveseat.
His eyebrows drew together as he waited for more details. When none were forthcoming, David asked, “Is that it?”
She shrugged. “Well, I did it a few more times to make sure it hadn’t been a fluke, but yeah, that’s basically it. Now we’re all ‘quid pro quo’d’.”
“That’s the worst quid pro quo I’ve ever gotten in my life.”
“I did warn you.”
David picked up his beer and settled back into his original position as well. “So … now that you know what your clit is for, what’s next on your agenda?” he inquired, before taking a drink of his beer.
Without thinking, Paige answered, “To find a man who’s going to make me want sex so much that I’m not afraid to fuck his brains out.”