Like a Virgin

Lauren is crazy about her secret lover Mr.Big. And she loves having sex with him, but it happens only occasionally.
Which is why she’s having dinner with someone who could become her second lover.

“How did I manage to miss this?!”
That was a sentence I was thinking a lot, the first half hour Salvatore and me had our date. Our short fling had lasted only a few nights and that was already nine years ago.
But how had I managed to miss he was this smart?!
Not just on an emotional level, but I had also failed to register the simple fact that he had been working on his PhD.
Had I been so blinded by his surfer/ musician act, that I had never considered that part of the attraction might have been that he was a brilliant academic?
He was now a fulltime engineer, and had gotten married to a Dutch girl, within a year after our little fling.
The moment I had seen the first baby photo on Facebook, I was glad how things had turned out. Because he was a younger than me, but I had not considered that he would want children.
Maybe because I felt that he was my senior.
It was so obvious he was totally okay with his sexuality, and I was still so scared.
I suffered from a phobia for hiv/std’s, that had kept me locked up in safe long-term relationships for decades. Salvatore met me after I had become single, in order to discover my own sexuality, despite of the fears.
He was one of the early lovers who had to deal with that, before I could relax, enjoy and have sex.
So here we were, nine years after it had all happened, getting to know each other again over dinner.
We were both taken: He had his family, and I had my secret lover Mr.Big.
But we were very aware that this situation might actually work in our advantage.
Firstly, there was no longer the option of us getting serious –
something that he had been resisting.
And there was also no longer the danger that I would get clingy or needy. My affair with Mr.Big had proven I could be a loving, and discrete mistress.
A wise mistress even.
The power difference, where I had wanted Salvatore to save me from my fears, was gone.
That I had not noticed the level of his education nor his emotional intelligence – his ability to work around all those humongous fears, comfort me, and initiate me into rough sex, all in one go- that was strange.
But I was even more taken aback by something he told me in the first five minutes:
“I was absolutely crazy about you.”
Not “in love”. He didn’t say that. But it wouldn’t have sounded right coming from him. He was one of those men with whom “absolutely crazy about you” meant “I was in love with you”.
I had told myself the story, that the reason he had let me go was because he was just not in love with me.
When in retrospect, I definitely should have been able to recognize that our wonderful, tender, emotionally charged love making, only happened because we both had feelings for each other.
His constant tuning in to my feelings of fear, lust, insecurity, and finding out what I wanted and didn’t want?
Solving all riddles of mixed signals – of a mind that was confused, and a body that was simply begging for sex?
His generous oral sex for me?
And him asking permission even then – with that dripping wet and hungry body underneath him.
He asked everything.
He was the most consensual lover I had ever had, and yet he was the one who introduced me to rough sex, or play rape. Which just proves how dominance and submissiveness are actually the most consensual thing you could possibly imagine.
And it was a role play I had never done up until that point, but Salvatore knew in his bones that I would like it.
I would always remember him as the first man who understood the submissive nature of my sexuality, and the first to satisfy it.
Something that after him, only Mr.Big had been able to do.
No wonder I had been with Big for so many years now.
My affair with Salvatore happened summer 2009, just prior to my birthday.
To this day, it was the saddest birthday I remember. And I created a whole story in my head that he had not been in love with me.
When everything he gave me had been signs of pure love, of pure connection.
And of pure fear that we were going to hurt each other so badly, that he felt he had no choice but to end it, before it would turn sour.
When our main course was served we had already relived our whole affair. And we could both understand how painful it must have been for the other.
There was a lot of crying and comforting, and at one point all I could say was:
“We did well. We did well.”

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

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Like a Virgin is the twentieth chapter from Project M.
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tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now – I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.