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The other option the article suggested was to do a little… self-touching before your partner was ready for sex.
That was out as well since it went against our beliefs to masturbate.
So I was stuck with my husband and the uncomfortable or painful sex that seemed to dissolve anything sexual about my being.
Until Raúl looked at me like he was a hungry man and my body was a feast.
Despite my upbringing and the beliefs that had very much been a part of me at the time, there was no mistaking the way my body trembled inside when Raúl’s hand had grazed my lower back as he held the door open for me with the other, leading me out toward the seating area out front, and dropping down across from me without being invited.
“He’d spent the afternoon asking me all kinds of questions about myself,” I told Cary, only half in the present moment, a part of me stuck in the past, in the bittersweet memories of those early days. “No one had really been so interested in me before.” At the strange throat-clearing sound Cary made, I shook my head. “Aside from you,” I agreed. “But face-to-face, that had been a first for me.”
“So, you two started something up,” Cary guessed, his gaze going down to my plate then up again in a silent demand that I continue to eat.
“So, we started something up,” I agreed. “Though, at the time, I’d tried to tell myself that I was trying to, you know, teach him about my faith, bring him into the fold.”
It was the most half-assed lie I’d ever told myself. Because I knew that we never once actually discussed faith or religion those long, lingering afternoons when he would take me to lunch, then walk me around the area, showing me the sights and buying anything that had caught my interest.
I’d never received a present from a man before.
That would have required my father or husband to have actually thought about me when I wasn’t standing right there in front of them. And, well, both those men in my life were of the strong belief that you should never “spoil” your wife or children.
I’d become particularly obsessed with this little necklace he’d gotten me from a little shop. They’d had a million of them hanging in the window. Just thin black strings with a single bead hanging from them. A blue circle with a white inner circle and a little black dot.
To ward off the evil eye, he’d told me, a strange light in his eyes that I hadn’t really understood at the time. In fact, I’d convinced myself it was just joy at gifting me something that I’d been so appreciative of.
“It took a long time for me to realize that he’d thought of it as a joke of sorts. Since he was the evil in my life. And no little amulet was going to keep him away from me,” I told Cary, sighing.
I didn’t tell Cary, because it was just a bit too humiliating to admit, that I would curl up on my side in bed at night and stroke the pad of my thumb over the eye while I thought about the man who’d given it to me.
“It wasn’t long before he started to lay it on thick. So many compliments. So much interest.”
“Love-bombing,” Cary cut in.
“Yeah, exactly.” I hadn’t known the word at the time, or what it meant, or that abusers almost always did it at the beginning to get you hooked, and then often after each abusive episode, to keep you with them.
But it was the perfect way to describe it.
Love-bombing.
If you had asked me then, I would have told you that I was pretty sure no man had ever been as infatuated with a woman as Raúl had been with me.
So much so that I threw all of my upbringing and personal traumas and insecurities out the window one night on a blanket under the stars and let him undress me, let him be intimate with me.
It hadn’t been like it had with my ex-husband. Yes, there was insecurity. And, yes, uncertainty. But for the first time ever, my body had warmed and grown ready. There hadn’t been pain or even discomfort. There hadn’t been any sort of fireworks, either. Raúl proved just as quick a partner as my ex had been.
Despite that, though, it had been a sort of revelation for me, despite the fact that I hadn’t experienced that so-called pleasure that they claimed a woman could feel with a man.
It didn’t matter. It hadn’t felt bad. And it had felt intense and intimate.
That had been enough for me.
I was pretty sure I fell head-over-heels for him when he rolled off to my side, curled me into him, then stroked a hand through my hair as he murmured things to me in Spanish that I only half-understood. But I knew enough to know they were sweet words, ones of praise and adoration.
