Sex and the Southern Sinner

I’m young(ish), fun and divorced, living and dating in a small southern town. Most of the options for dinner are relatives, sad but true. I was just lying in bed, awake at 3 am, seeking answers from the air. Why am I still single? Sure, I’m a single mother, but I’m a catch. I have a nice house, great kids, a fulfilling job and an excellent family behind me, I’m also not hard to look at, or so I’ve been told. I’m a very sexual woman, and have had plenty of it in my life.

I’ve decided to write about it-the search, the quest for that one, the one that my (jaded) romantic brain still tells me exists. I’ve always been told that if you look too hard, you’ll never find it, but I’m tired of waiting. To be proactive about anything, you need to make a change to make it happen. Sounds very motivational speaker, but it’s true. Maybe this will reach out to other people who are feeling the same frustrations I am? I guess we should just start from here and see where it goes.

I became sexually active at a relatively young age. I was 16 and so was he, we were young and in love and it seemed the natural progression of things. We stayed together through high school and on into college before it ended in disaster and the most anguishing heartbreak, as any first love does. There’s really not very much to tell about that one, because it’s the same story I believe most women hold dear. Sometimes he pops into my head, his young and promising smile or the blue of his eyes, the bluest I’ve ever seen, and my heart still jumps at the thought. I can see his tan, summer body in my mind and still feel the silky texture of his blonde hair curling through my fingertips. We were always laughing, laughing and making love, that time really was spectacular. I wish I could go back for just a day.

Then there was my first live-in relationship. My parents were scandalized because we moved in together at 20. Again, I was raised in a small southern town, nice young girls (of which I was one) just didn’t do that, it wasn’t the natural order of things. You get introduced at some social gathering, either through family or in college. Your families are of like standing, or he’s a little more advantageous socially. You spend college in a haze of formal parties, football, and you make school a priority too, only that’s just behind your MRS degree. Somewhere just before or just after graduation, he proposes in some sweet but probably less than memorable fashion, having earned a degree and the proper wife in one fell swoop. He’s probably finished his master’s degree, or is working hard pursuing it as you’re planning the wedding. Perfect flowers, should his second cousin be a bridesmaid? Oh, let’s go to Atlanta to find just the right dress! You’re married, he’s employed, you spit out 2.5 babies and drive a minivan hauling soccer equipment. Juice boxes, white wine, diapers, antidepressants. Bright smiles for everyone, all around, all the time!

Ugh. I didn’t go that route and maybe more the fool am I? I see those families, and they’re happy in a reserved, repressed kind of way. I just have always sought out my own way of living and that was not it for me.

So we moved in, too young, careers got in the way, so did other women after his late nights out drinking beer with the boys. That life wasn’t for me either and I soon was living in my own apartment, no attachments, thank you very much.

Then came the wild and free years, 21-23 was the time of legend. I was an arts reporter and my job was literally getting paid to socialize then later write about it. I reviewed restaurants, critiqued art shows and interviewed local and regional bands. A normal night started late and had me rolling into my apartment (or someone else’s) when the sun was coming up. It was decadence and drunken debauchery at its best.

One night, I was at a large nightclub with several of my friends. We were dancing, drinking, and looking as hot as only a group of 22 year old party girls can look. The music was really pensive, the singer was hung up on this girl and was pouring every bit of his repression out into the crowd and it was hot and steamy as fuck. The things he wanted to do to her had me ready to jump out of my skin and into his. This guy must’ve noticed I was swaying a little softer, really intent on the stage. He came up and pressed his body behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist and nuzzled on my neck. I turned and rolled my chest up the length of his before devouring his lips. It was summer, so hot, and I was wearing the cutest, tiniest skirt. His hands were on my hips and I grinded my pelvis into his. I don’t know which of us moved first, but we left the dance floor and headed upstairs to one of the back table booths, darkened and not completely visible from the bar. We kissed like we were each other’s air, hands in hair, bodies, writhing. He pulled my arms away and slipped under the table where he slid my panties to the side and devoured me. I was dripping wet, there were people walking, dancing nearby and I had the hardest time not screaming out. He was literally fucking me with the length of his tongue, fingers pressed into my clit, his other hand splayed across my stomach to keep me still. I came quickly in this glorious explosion of freedom. I’d never done anything like that before and it was so damn hot. Trying to be quiet, still and straight faced while his tongue was reaching spots I didn’t know existed made the whole experience even more salacious. When I came, I bit so hard down onto my lips, I could taste iron.

After it was over, I got up and walked away like I didn’t even know him. I saw him looking over the crowd for me, but I found my friends and left without ever knowing his name. I do still fantasize about his talented tongue and I bet I’m his go-to wet dream. The best? No one knows that ever happened. My friends had no idea and I never told them, a secret, naughty smile on my lips.

Cut to 15 years later, though I don’t feel any different. I’ve since been married, bore 2 children and then discovered my husband was my third before a painful and drawn out divorce. I have been apart from him for almost 5 years now, and I have no doubt we’ll talk about him at some point.

My last real relationship was with a high school librarian. A speaker of 7, if not 8 languages, traveler to 30 something countries, and 40 odd years a bachelor. He picked me up to take me to his high school’s prom bearing a corsage of pink tulips before we headed off into the night. My children watched from the stairs, wide eyed at how well I cleaned myself up in a black silk dress with Swarovski crystal straps. I’d worn it to my own junior prom and still looked stunning in it, returning to prom as a supervisor this time around.

He’d been a snorer, with wicked asthma and allergies to literally everything. His snores came deep and wet from the back of his throat and sounded like the hollows of hell, or at least as I imagine it sounds. His body would drape over me like overdone pasta, arms limp, cold, sweaty noodles but still feeling like vices constricting my chest.

It didn’t end well, it never does, I guess. We’d broken up relatively painlessly a couple of years before. I mean he cried and threw up in my driveway, but I was fine and was able to walk into my house and close the door. Interesting sidebar, he’s the second sober man to throw up in my driveway after I ended things. Maybe it’s me? Nah.

Back to the point, I ran into him a couple of years later, going to see a band I’d avoided since the breakup. It was one of 2 places we’d go, socially, to see this band wherever they might be, or to trivia night where his friends’ ugly wives all had master’s degrees, wedding bands, and bad attitudes towards the well-dressed skinny brunette with hair that curls like snakes from her head. I digress. I did see him again, I mentioned it was a small town.

He walked me to my car that October night, and tried to kiss me, his tongue like a floppy goldfish, his breath smelling of sour milk from the white Russians he drank to seem cool, like the Dude. I tried to gracefully dip out but he’d just told me his dad had succumbed to heart disease. So the only son of an impossibly accommodating mother was now the grieving only son of an understandably needy cancer stricken mother. In a moment of weakness, I agreed to date him again although I only saw him once during the following 3 months. He texted me at 7 pm on New Year’s to see what my plans were, I had no reason to believe he felt we were exclusive.

In this day and age, it’s so easy to flub a relationship because of social media. It can be at the onset, when one feels it’s more exclusive than the other, or maybe a mistake when someone gets tagged in a photo and the other side feels like they’ve been slighted. It could just be that the relationship is already over to one person but is still completely relevant to the other. Then there’s the rare combination of all 3.

I had no idea we were exclusive in his mind. I hadn’t seen him in nearly 3 months and had only shared a few texts, where I’d politely declined every invitation out. There was not a barrage of turn downs, he only asked maybe 3 times over the course and one of those times was New Year’s. Anyway, I thought nothing of dating other men; I’d started casually seeing one 10 years my junior.

One night in February, months from October, I went out with my fella and my bff since second grade. She took a candid shot of us, nothing lurid, just us sitting beside one another, his arm draped across the back of my chair.

The world can be a savage place and people can be heartless, so jaded to other people’s feelings. That was not the case here. I had not talked to the librarian even once on the phone in months, maybe since we had actually been a couple, right after my divorce, those 2 years before all of this. He’d not texted since New Year’s.

Within minutes of her posting the picture and tagging me in it, I got a journal entry for a text message from the librarian. Not only was I a heartless bitch, I was a heartless bitch that cheated on him after the death of his father and under the demands of his mother. Hell was a very real place he hoped I’d burn in and I deserved every bad thing that had ever happened to me or would ever happen to me because I had broken his heart at his most vulnerable.

I cried for days. No sarcasm there, I cried for days. I had not intentionally hurt him and would never intentionally hurt anyone. Around that time I began my hermitage, whereupon I’ve sworn off dating. I’m not kidding, I can’t handle the pressure. Men either really, really love me or they really, really don’t. There is never a between space, a grey area. That kind of power must be respected.

I’ve been alone for months now. My ass is so tight you could bounce quarters off of it, I have a wardrobe that cannot be beaten, some people say I’m funny and I know I can be charming when I choose. I have a face that people like to look at, I wouldn’t say I’m classically beautiful, but I must be interesting to watch. Also, I’ve been told that I smell like honey and sex. There is no one here for me and I don’t really know what the next step should be.