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“You’re acting like you know so much,” I said. “You don’t know my sexual history.”
He breathed out a cloud of smoke. “You can lose your hymen from things that aren’t sex, but the likelihood of you engaging in sex and keeping it are low. I’ve been fucking for quite a while and I know how this works.”
“Oh, really?” I sat back, trying to glare at him through his sunglasses. “Is that where the women’s clothes and the birth control are from? All your women?”
He took off his glasses and set them aside, fixing his eyes on me. “The clothes belong to Adriana.”
“Who’s Adriana?”
“Ahmed’s woman.”
“Who’s Ahmed?”
“My friend.”
“Oh, okay, this is all making sense now.”
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, Miss Scavo,” he said coolly.
That was rich coming from him. I pivoted quickly, unsure how to come back from his scathing comment. “If you’re Italian, why do you speak French? I heard you speaking it to someone on the boat.”
He put his sunglasses on, but not before I saw a flicker of something vulnerable in his eyes. I’d brushed up against a sore spot, I could tell.
“I can speak more than one language,” he said. “English, Italian, French, and some Arabic.”
“Why did you learn French?” I pressed, sensing a little weakness in his walls.
He was quiet for a moment and then he stood abruptly, stamping out his cigarillo in a bowl. “Someone taught me. Now you need to get to bed because we have a big day tomorrow.”
He knelt and his hard hand slid down the back of my calf and he unfastened the cuff. Then he led me inside and up to my room. We didn’t speak as he pushed me in, but his eyes brushed over me before he shut the door and locked me in.
I stripped and climbed into the bed, wrapping my arms around myself.
Was he right? Had I technically had sex last night?
I squeezed my eyes shut. Virginity was a confusing concept for me and it always had been. I wasn’t even aware of it until my mother pulled me aside when I was fifteen and told me never to let a man who wasn’t my husband touch me.
“It’s a sin,” she said, her voice low like she was speaking of something shameful. “You have to protect yourself from men. They will deflower you and you’ll be different. God and your husband will be disappointed in you.”
Her analogy was burned into my brain. I went out into the rose garden the next day and sat on the step and stared at the white roses. Picking one and crushing the delicate petals.
I asked my mother a few weeks later to explain that word—deflower—to me. She took me to the roses that had haunted me for days and crushed a white blossom in her hand. Grinding it until it was limp and creased.
“Do you think the rose bushes are prettier in the summer or winter, Iris?” she asked.
“Um…the summer, I guess,” I said.
“Why is that?”
“Because they have petals on them in the summer,” I said.
“Men will take all the petals off you,” she said, sending me a stare that wasn’t unkind. It was just blank, disconnected. “Men don’t want women who have no petals, who are just thorns.”
She put the ruined rose in my hand and left me there. Hollow inside. That night I went upstairs and looked at myself in the mirror and for the first time I felt a growing sense of fear towards my body. How was it possible that I was so delicate that one minute I was pure and one misstep later I was ruined?
“Do men lose their virginity,” I asked my mother the next day.
“No,” she said shortly. “It’s not the same.”
