And then she is gone. The relief is physical, like when your ears pop at altitude.
I don’t really need to freshen up but it gives me a reason to delay going downstairs. Nothing has changed in my parents’ bedroom. The huge wrought-iron bed with the chintz canopy over it is still there. I used that bed the first time that I fucked Peter. I used it because I liked the headboard, because I wanted revenge on my mother for all the times I’d had to listen to her thrashing in this bed in the middle of the night, and because I wanted to see if good, nice, sensible Peter Brader would do what I wanted him to do.
I sit on the stool by the dressing table and summon up the memory of a nineteen-year-old Peter, lying on this bed with his wrists tied to the headboard; so calm and trusting that, except for the impressive erection he was saluting me with, he might almost have been ready to sleep.
Other boys I’d known had only pretended to submit. They’d made comments as I tied them to establish that it was all a game and, as soon as they’d come, they’d started to fret at their bonds, demanding to be let free. Peter didn’t do any of that. He just waited for me to use him. But his serenity wasn’t passive. Somehow it managed to amplify everything I did. The harder I fucked him, the harder I wanted to fuck him. His cock was my lightning rod, calling me forth, daring me to spend myself on him, taking everything that I could give and leaving me discharged and sated.
Afterwards I’d left him tied to the bed while I sat and brushed my hair. A beam of sunlight was shining down on him, highlighting the sweat on his muscles and the small scratches and bites I’d visited on him. He looked happy, even grateful. I’d shown him my wildest side. I’d sworn and fucked and bitten and scratched and shouted my come with my head thrown back and he hadn’t pulled away, he hadn’t been threatened. He was waiting for more. He was waiting for me. For the first time in my adult life I felt as if I’d found a home.
Peter wasn’t my first fuck, but he was my first lover. Actually, he is my only lover. To me that is a statement of how rich my life is rather than how narrow my experience has been.
“Helen dear, if you’ve finished up there, you can help your father lay the table.”
The sound of my mother’s voice makes me feel guilty and furtive and childish. I get off the stool quickly and smooth the cover of the bed, as if I had just used it. Why does coming home always turn me back into a little girl? And why do I hate that so much?
There are six of us at dinner but there is food for at least a dozen. The conversation is stilted at first. Troy and Peter have the mandatory road-number-filled review of the drive to my parents’ house, even though I actually did the driving. I ask Dianna about the baby, revealing my ignorance of modern child-rearing with each question that I ask. Mother fusses over Dad, ensuring that he gets the best slices of meat, touching his hand when she passes him things, keeping his glass full. She always makes sure that he knows he is the centre of her attention. Dad catches me watching them and gives me an unapologetic grin. This is how the world is, that grin says, and it’s too late now to change it.
As the wine flows, words become easier for everybody but me. I feel as though an invisible barrier has settled between me and everyone else. I watch but I don’t speak.
Peter fits in so well. He is a good listener. People relax when they talk with him. When they talk with me it is as if they are always just a little on their guard. Dianna is talking to him now. Peter isn’t talking to her about the baby. Somehow he has learned that she paints and within a few moments the woman I could barely exchange a word with is sharing her passion for abstract art.
As the courses go by, I drink and eat more than I should. I want to speak to Troy. I want to sit and exchange deep truths with him, except that those truths remain just out of reach of my tongue so I remain silent. By the time we reach dessert I am quite drunk. It seems to me that Peter has abandoned me. Everyone has abandoned me.
“I think you might want to have little lie down, dear.” My mother is leading me back to my little virgin bed. I’d protest except that I can’t find the words. And I’m tired. Very, very tired.
I wake with a fierce thirst and a vicious headache. It’s dark. I’ve slept through the afternoon. I groan in self-pity. I’ve made such a fool of myself. I know that mother will be secretly pleased.
I want Peter. Except Peter isn’t here, my mother saw to that.
Sitting up is not pleasant so I lie down again.
The room has not changed since I left it seven years ago. I’ve changed so much since then that it seems incongruous for me to be occupying the same space that I did then. Peter is responsible for most of those changes. Living up to how he sees me, using the quiet space he provides for me to seek refuge in, has changed who I am.
Who would I have been without Peter?
Back before Peter, I’d never really been that comfortable with boys. It wasn’t that I was shy; it was more that I saw them too clearly and I didn’t like what I saw. For them, girls were trophies to show off to other boys. I used to imagine them at swap meets, talking to each other about girls like they were baseball cards: “Had her. Had her. Had her. Want her. I’ll swap you two Heathers for an Alicia.” But the worse thing was that, when it came to sex, they all seemed to want to be in charge although very few of them seemed to know what to do.
I knew enough about my own body to know what I wanted: where and how I wanted to be touched and for how long. I also knew the kind of body I wanted to do the touching: tall, lean, strong. Unfortunately, most of those bodies seemed to come with the supersized ego option as standard.
I tried a few anyway. It wasn’t hard to get their attention – I was attractive enough in a petite, androgynous sort of way – the challenge was to stay in control. The first couple of attempts were an education.
“Tall ’n’ Lean #1” put his hands everywhere but he didn’t know what to do with them. And he got irritated when I moved around. I was supposed to be his bendyfucktoy, something he could pose for his convenience. His dick was nice, smooth and hard, but he wasn’t interested in me touching it for long, he wanted to “slide it home”. I moved to climb up on his lap but he wanted me on my back. He wasn’t in me for long before he came. Then he asked me if I wanted to go get a burger. I realized I’d just had the sexual equivalent of a drive-thru meaclass="underline" smells good, is over too quickly and lies like a lump on your stomach afterwards.
“Tall ’n’ Lean #2” wasn’t interested in entering anything other than my mouth. He wanted me on my knees, looking up into his eyes. I had no objection to the idea in principle. It was corny but it had a sense of theatre to it. What turned me off was him placing his hand on the back of my head and using my mouth like an extension of his hand. I’ve seen drains unblocked with more finesse. I had to grab his balls to make him stop. I thought he’d be angry with me, maybe even try to hit me, but he actually whined like a little boy, “What did you do that for?” It was the question I was beginning to ask about sex as a whole.
I decided to do some research before seeking out “Tall ’n’ Lean #3”. I went to Barnes and Noble to see what kind of books I could find on sex. I’d done the “Insert Part A into Part B” manuals and the Joy of Sex hippy-type manuals but they didn’t give me what I wanted. They were too much like cookery lessons and not enough like good food. I moved on to the erotica section and found The Story of O and The Taking of Sleeping Beauty. They definitely got my attention. Hours of it. The thing was, I didn’t want to be O or Beauty, I wanted to be the person doing things to them. Well, not them in particular. I wanted to be doing things to “Tall ’n’ Leans”. I’d lie in my narrow little bed, exhausted from my reading or listening to my parents having sex in the room next door, and I’d think about what it would be like to have that kind of control. Then I got to thinking about how I might make it happen. As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult but it wasn’t that much fun either.