Ethical behavior, Leopold tells us, is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal, but what happens when you're complicit in your own demise? What happens when the wrong thing is the right thing in the moment, when the silence is necessary?
Because she needed to know she could be casual again, she allowed the lawyer-type into the flat, knowing full well what would happen but not really feeling invested in the situation. She felt removed, almost indifferent as though she were separate from her body. She knew it was because she had caught feelings on summer afternoon the previous year, that she had mistakenly merged sexual desire with potential, such an amateurish mistake.
All her talk about building a sex wall post-divorce and really, she was discovering, she trying building a wall against the memory of that afternoon. It had been such fulfilling sex, it bordered on traumatic. It was deeply unlikely to happen again, and that hurt even more.
Because her body had literally been crying out for affection, for human contact that summer, she had made an irresponsible choice in the moment to become fluid bonded with the guy. So irresponsible, really. It is taking awhile for her to forgive herself. She sometimes laughs at the irony that the at least with the sexual assaults she's survived, the assaliants used condoms, even the one who had roofied her.
There is no connection with the legal eagle. She finds him slightly revolting, doesn't actually want him touching her but he is insistant and it has to happen sometime, doesn't it? He has no skill, no refinement. She finds herself yawning at one point, whilst his tongue moves around getting her nowhere. When his minstrstions turn painful (why are they obsessed with squirting? Why do they not ask?!), she forcibly removes his hand. 'You're being too rough. You're hurting me.'
'You like it.' He shoves his hand in to her again, using his other one to twist her wrist, brushing her. 'This is what you deserve.'
She shuts off then, focuses on her breathing, on trying to minimise the force of his hand. It will be months before she admits to herself that she was actually focusing on staying alive. Her pelvic bone will be bruised for weeks.
She says nothing, realising on a primitive level that of she fights him now, if she screams, it will turn violent. Not that it isn't already, but yeah. This situation though, she knows what the outcome would be, knows he is a prominent lawyer and that he could very easy ruin her life in addition to ruining her sex drive.
When he leaves, she showers carefully. She toasts herself on a haplessly laid brick, looks in the mirror. 'Better choices, dear heart. Better choices. But it's done now and you never have to see him again.'
Months later, she is a chat group with her sex positivity group and she shares the story. The whole story, the fear she felt in that moment when she realised she wasn't going to be able to get him to stop. The rage afterwards and the ease with which she removed him contacts. And that is when she realises it's probably time to revisit working with sexual surrogate, to work through these issues, the skittishness combined with recklessness. She remembers a chapter in Emily Nagoski's 'Come As You Are,' and thinks about her sexual history, the early imprinting, the sexual abuse, the abandonment issues and she sighs.
The work, she reminds herself, it never completely ends. And this work, this is the next big thing to bringing her closer to her b'shert, and to herself.
She knows that she's still trauma-bonded a past experience, that one of the hooks in her mermaid's fin is from something(s) in her past she hasn't worked through, that she hasn't quite cracked how to move on from it.
Looking back at that first encounter post-divorce, the recklessness shakes her to her core. It genuinely left her bit shell-shocked, for want of a better word. The aftermath heightened her skittishness. She is concerned because it feels sometimes like she is half trapped in ice, half on fire with a raging perimenopausal libidio. The flip side of side of over-caution is recklessness, walking around locked and loaded for bear.
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