The First

I don't like talking about sex.

I was brought up in a strict, fundamentalist church, and as a child I was taught that sexual thoughts of any kind are tantamount to adultery. In which case, happening to have some decidedly sluttish tendencies roiling beneath the surface of my outwardly Puritanical demeanor, I've committed more than my fair share.

I think about sex. A lot. I have sex. A lot - and with few reservations when it comes to the action that takes place between the sheets. Or bent over the hood of a car. Or in otherwise unoccupied theatre restrooms. I just don't talk about it.

I'm not even quite sure, at this point, how many sexual partners I have had.

Before I got married, I think the number was hovering somewhere around twenty. Since I got married, I've lost count. The number has tripled, at least. I am an adultress. A sodomite. A whore.

When I was a kid, and still actively attending church, I used to masturbate and then pray. Not too long ago, when my husband asked me about my masturbatory fantasies, I could barely speak; evading and stalling, finally, hiding my head under the blanket (we were already in bed, post-fucking) until he managed to wheedle out of me stammered descriptions of the scenarios that I imagine to make myself come. He said he knew that I wanted him to know; and he was right, I did. But, on some level, I think that I should not have these thoughts, that they are unclean, and that by extension thinking them makes me unclean.

Sometimes, when I am laying alone in bed, vigorously rubbing my clit with the fingers of one hand, clenching my nipples or filling my cunt and asshole with the fingers of the other, imagining that they are not my own but the hands, tongues, and cocks of others, I find myself ashamed of my thoughts. And after, the compulsory impulse toward my childhood prayer nags in the corner of my mind -

"Dear God, please don't send me to Hell. I won't do it again. I promise."

I always did it again. Because, paradoxically, the burn of shame heightens the pleasure - I'm certainly not the first wayward soul to discover that truism. I know that I am not alone in my experience of the tittilation to be found in the taboo. In this, my husband understands me better than I understand myself.

He makes me tell him, and makes me act on the desires that I don't even want to admit to, because he knows that I want to be made. My perversities are his pleasures - not to say that it is an ideal situation. There have always been significant drawbacks and frustrations in my inability to be voluntarily forthcoming with my sexual appetites.

For starters, before meeting B., who is older, more experienced, and more comfortable with his own sexuality than I, few satisfing encounters can be found on the long laundry list of my sexual past. I have been so conflicted in both my motivations and desires that I have too frequently found myself having the wrong sex for the wrong reasons. And after, when the shame overcame the desire - as it must when such inner conflict is unresolved - despising myself for it. Sometimes because I didn't like what I had done, and sometimes because I had liked it too much.

But I am getting away from my point. Where was I?

I don't like talking about sex. Which, because I am a married, bisexual slut who likes to have affairs with random strangers, can be challenging. This is my attempt to reconcile what I want and what I do with what I'll admit to and what I pretend to be.

These are the things that I don't talk about. This is the pillow-book of my secret life.