Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
“With him,” she said, and I could hear how soft she made the words so I wouldn’t flinch. “Like with him with him?”
I nodded.
Her brow lifted, but she didn’t grin or squeal or tease me. She just waited, the way you wait outside the door of a room where a friend went to cry.
“It was my first time,” I said into the space between us.
Her lips parted, then pressed together. “Well, I would assume so. I know what happened in high school with Logan and you barely came out of that one. After him, you didn’t even date another boy. You aren’t a whore so it would only make sense this was your first time.” After a moment, she asked the only question that mattered. “Did you want it?”
“Yes.” The yes surprised me with how true it sounded in the air. “I did. In the moment I did. I still do when I think about, how it felt. But then after, when he realized—” My throat closed around the memory. “His face changed. His voice did too. He said some things.”
“What things?”
“That I was his now,” I shared. “He said no other man would touch me. He said I was claimed.”
Lyric’s mouth went flat for a second, like she was tasting the word. “Claimed.”
“I don’t know how to feel about it,” I admitted. “Part of me felt safe, hearing him say that at the time anyway. Another part of me—” I dug my nails into my palms, not hard enough to hurt, just to feel. “Another part of me wanted to run for the door and keep running. Giving a man power over me after Logan violated my body.” I shuttered just remembering the night. While he didn’t penetrate me with his penis, he did other things to me that night, painful ones.
Lyric moved closer, thigh to thigh now. “I get that.”
“I liked the sex,” I blurted, as if I had to prove I wasn’t broken, as if liking it were a test I could fail. “I liked how my body felt. Heck, I even liked the ride on his motorcycle before. Well, once I stopped thinking about falling off. I liked that he watched my face. I liked that he said it was good. I liked that he held me after and didn’t make me talk. Mostly, I liked that he stopped to ask me for consent.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding like we were taking inventory. “Liking is allowed.”
“But I don’t know that I fit in his world? He said we would do this for as long as he wanted. Well what if I fall in love like a fool and then he poof leaves me?” The word love felt too big in my mouth. “I don’t know that word anymore. Not the way other people use it. I don’t know how it fits.”
Lyric leaned her head back and looked up into the fan of leaves above us, some green, some browned at the edges. “After BJ,” she said, “I learned sex and love aren’t the same animal. Sometimes they share a collar; sometimes they run in opposite directions. I wish I’d learned that when I was sixteen instead of almost twenty, but here we are.”
I waited.
“I did things I didn’t want to,” she said, voice steady as a metronome set slow. “Because he told me they proved I loved him. Because he told me wives do things for their husbands. Because he told me ‘no’ was a sin against him and God. That wasn’t love. That was control wrapped in a word that should have protected me.”
I thought of the man the church wanted to hand me back to. The way they smiled with their mouths and not their eyes. The way they said “God’s plan” as a loaded gun.
“So when I got here,” Lyric went on, “I told myself I’d never confuse the two again. Sex is something I can want or not want. Love is the feeling that is inside. It means I’m more of a better me with someone than without them. And those two things can happen together or separate. If you liked sex with Thrasher, that can be true all alone. You don’t owe it anything more. You don’t owe him anything more—claim or no claim—unless you decide you do.”
“How do I decide?”
She laughed, soft and a little sad. “One day at a time. One touch at a time. One choice at a time.”
I closed my eyes and let my head tip against her shoulder.
The memory fresh of him came back again. The ride we shared, my arms around his middle, the scent of leather and soap and gasoline, the way the wind pressed us together so that I couldn’t tell where I stopped and the rest of the world started. I remembered his hands after, how careful he was when he figured it out, like I might crack if he moved wrong. I remembered the claim and how something in me liked it because it sounded like being kept, and something else hated it because it sounded like being owned.