No one had been sure what had caused his sudden passing, but in hindsight Lauren believed that his unexpected death at the moment when the first reports of aids came out, were the cause of her sexual education going wrong.
She was phobic to get aids, and the only one who understood what this meant was her lover Bear.
It wasn’t that Lauren had been trying to hide it from other people. Not at all. Her anxiety attacks had been so violent that they often needed an explanation, and she wasn’t shy about any part of her love life.
At least she had not been until she actually started sharing it.
That’s when she realized she was all alone on this one.
Responses to her aids phobia fell into two categories. Either they were of the brush-off variety, stating that if she would get tested, she would have peace of mind.
Or they were of the worrying kind, and this included her mother, her doctor and even the therapist she had been referred to. Lauren had been very frank with the therapist.
She told him that she was so phobic of contracting hiv that if she had oral sex without a condom, she would get an anxiety attack. First she would start feeling really cold, and then the trembling would start.
It could last for days.
And she told the man that this was a problem because she really liked oral sex, but was ashamed to ask for a condom just because she was phobic. She also told the psychologist she liked gay men, or bi-sexual men. And that they liked her back. Making her fearful condition even more problematic.
The only thing she didn’t tell the therapist, but that was because he proved to be so unqualified that she had not gotten the chance to get to that part, was that she was also very interested in anal sex, but that she knew that was particularly risky because the condom could break.
Before Lauren had been able to share that part of her concern over how she would ever get this ambitious love life back on track after virgin-clean Jonathan had left, the therapist was already trying to convince her that she had no phobia at all. It made sense to be so careful.
She had been terribly disappointed with him and decided she’d solve it herself.
That’s when she hooked up with Bear, a boy her age who had a reputation for being a womanizer. She had laid her cards on the table.
That she had not been having a normal sex life since Jonathan, the boyfriend who looked like Jon Bon Jovi, had left her and with whom she was going to lose her virginity. Jonathan had stayed in touch for a while, and had been hinting at picking up their oral sex, but Lauren just didn’t want that anymore.
He had betrayed her.
And she could have forgiven him any misstep. In fact she had found womanizing one of his most charming characteristics. But to walk out on her, and crush her dream of having a condom-free first time with someone she was deeply in love with?
That was unforgivable.
And one year after the piano party jam where she had met Jonathan, she found herself in a cafe talking to Bear.
They had not even been friends, and Lauren had been surprisingly business-like about it. 
She told him sternly that she needed to get rid of her virginity, but that she was getting nowhere because she had not been in love with anybody and she had panic attacks after oral sex.
She was the world’s worst single.
Bear had listened patiently, and had asked her a few questions.
He’d also made her laugh multiple times and there were other signs that Bear was the right man for the job. Recruiting him was still something Lauren was proud of.
Over the years she had gotten attached to him, although they never held family introductions nor did they know each other’s friends.
Bear had stayed in his hometown for his studies just like she had, but they had managed to avoid each other and had no overlap in their circles of friends.
The impersonal living space with the 30+ student rooms and the endless changing of its inhabitants, had definitely helped keeping their affair a secret.
And Lauren had plenty of male friends who visited her room because her study was almost entirely male. No one thought much of Bear being there every once in a while.
And if they did, if they heard that they were having sex or if they saw him in a bathing robe hitting the shower, they still didn’t know they had been doing this since December 1989.
Sometimes she didn’t see him for months. She assumed these were when he had a girlfriend he was faithful to. But she didn’t ask and he didn’t tell.
All in all she had been very happy with their arrangement.
Not only had Bear been extremely concerned for her safety, both physically but in particular mentally.
But the thing she was most happy about, was that Bear had proven to be a true sexual asset. He was a full match to her sexual taste, although she assumed he was a full match to any woman’s sexual taste. That this was his skill, to mirror exactly what a woman wanted.
But whatever it was, it worked.
Initially Lauren didn’t really appreciate it, as much as she did later, because she didn’t really know that her sexuality demanded a particular type of partner.
That 99% of the men, scouted in the role Bear had, would never have been able to make it so enjoyable or last that long.
It wasn’t until Lauren started to share her sexuality, in terms of what she liked, and really just in casual conversation because to her it wasn’t a big deal, when she discovered other people didn’t think that way.
Her curiosity for anal sex and all other acts that dangled somewhere on that delicious spectrum of pain and pleasure, were either brushed off or met with disgust which was only slightly more pleasant than the worrying her aids fobia had been met.
It were all annoying responses, and the year she started speaking about it openly, which must have been 1990 their first full year together, was also the year she quit. She would never speak to others about her phobia or her preferences again.
With Bear things had kept evolving.
She had lost her virginity with him, and her anal virginity too. But her favorite thing were their shared fantasies, of domination and abuse. He actually became her favorite sexual fantasy himself, which she thought had kept all other suitors out of her life.
She had not had any feelings for any man, ever since Bear was in her life.
His adventures with other women only made him more attractive to her, and gave her a sense of allmightiness. Especially because she had heard rumors of the hearts he had broken, and girlfriends he had betrayed.
Although she had no formal status, and did not rule out that he would lock himself up in a marriage in order to be saved from himself, she felt their bond had become almost unbreakable.
Because they had to conquer each other time after time, and there were never any rules or guarantees when they were together. Aside from their only rule which was an unspoken one. That they always had full attention for each other.
She was convinced it could not end.
The option that they would start again, at another time and most likely the same place, would always stay there.
Lauren had been convinced that Bear and her would make the transition from their student lives to their working lives, and that nothing would change much.
Although she did realize that by opening up the can of memories of Bon Jovi, she was pulling the door open for Jonathan to come back in.
Maybe she wanted that, maybe that was what she was looking for.
She didn’t know.
But she knew a hell of a lot more, when she read the countless A4 copies the seller of the VHS tape had sent her. A hell of a lot more, about the direction her life was going to take.
The good news was:
It wasn’t Jonathan.
Reading the fanfiction stories made it clear to Lauren that her Bear was a lot closer to what would be her ideal partner, than what Jonathan had ever been.
But the bad news was, and maybe that was good news too Lauren didn’t know, was that although she didn’t know precisely what the fanfic story was telling her?
That it was dark.
Darker than she had ever thought of going.
And that the fanfiction story had brought her on the brink of disgust, an emotion she had only felt once when she had picked up a discounted copy of 120 Days of Sodom from Marquis de Sade.
It had been in the first year she and Bear had been together, and he had given her an erotica book by Anais Nin. Which had been an epiphany, and they had read from it to each other in bed, frequently.
Hungry for more where that came from, Lauren had picked up the classic work on what she thought would be a form of sexual play.
But there was no play, it was just murder and torture.
The fanfic story she had received was not that brutal, far from. But it had a deceptive build up, where you became so invested in the vanilla, overly romantic story line, that it became almost unbearable to read the bdsm scenes.
If these scenes had been in 120 Days of Sodom, Lauren would have stored that book next to Nin and keep it forever.
But after the romantic scenes of Part 1, which ended in a breakup, the rough sex of Part 2 and 3, were so hard to take.
At one point part 2 did begin to make sense to Lauren. She overcame her first impulse to stop reading, or even to throw the story out, and she saw how these scenes had something to tell her.
First of all, the protagonist. Or maybe “antagonist” was a better word here.
This was Nikki Sixx*, the singer from Motley Crue. The writer’s taste for rock bands had apparently not been limited to Guns N Roses and Bon Jovi.
Lauren had never been into Motley Crue, but even she could see this Nikki character was a priceless one.
Nikki Sixx*, as the story wrote about it, was like Marquis de Sade done right. Yes, he was a cruel dominant who used knives, whips, ropes, and most of all distance and a played or not-played disinterest in the sub’s well-being.
All things Lauren despised in bdsm.
There had been a time where her fascination for rough sex with Bear, had made her curious about local sex events and bdsm. But she had soon discovered she didn’t like it there.
The moment things were outspoken as dominant or submissive, she stopped wanting them. What she wanted was Bear’s full attention, and him making bold suggestions, or gently setting up a scene where she would be abused, but he would have such a good way with it that she never had to ask anything.
Hell, she didn’t even have a safe-word. He was so with her, there on that boundary of pleasure and pain, he knew what she wanted before she did. And what she didn’t want.
In the brief period she had been a visitor in the bdsm scene, the people there had tried to convince her that what she and Bear did was unsafe. But she had found their dressed up plays and especially the Yes Master stuff, repulsive. She liked Bear’s intimate mental presence, as he was “doing stuff to her”.
The bdsm terminology has something called “subspace”: a mental state of being where the submissive only has the pain to concentrate on.
And all other thoughts are forgotten.
Lauren didn’t want subspace.
Instead, she and Bear created a reality together, and were never apart.
After a few conventions and local parties, Lauren gave up looking for connection there. Maybe that flawed experience, of trying to name her sexuality by bdsm and reading De Sade, had made her extra sensitive to yet another disappointment that despite the first part of the fanfic being absolutely compelling, in part 2 and 3 Nikki Sixx* came to fuck things up.
And yet, this time something was different.
It really was.
First of all because the fanfiction reminded Lauren of her love for seeing male-male pairings. In highschool Lauren had read as many gay literature as was allowed, and she had found it exciting. She felt that inside her female body, there was obviously a gay man, because it felt like it was all written just to please her.
Lauren had forgotten this strange preference, and the fanfic reminded her.
But there was more here, that made her realize this piece was not another bdsm scene adventure gone wrong, nor was it another book tossed in the trash can.
And that was because she realized she liked Nikki Sixx.
She liked him a lot.
She, who had only been the submissive one, the play-raped one, the one who had been blessed with a dominant lover who carried full responsibility for their time together and who watched her well-being like a hawk;
She was falling for the cruel and unpredictable Nikki Sixx*.
Especially because the writer had put in enough scenes that explained that ultimately Nikki was just playing a game. That it was about the pleasure of his sub.
The same way Bear had always taken care of her.
Lauren folded the A4s with their explosive content back into the envelop. No one would ever be allowed to see this. Part 1 had been her cup of tea.
That reading about male-male sex turned her on was not that much different from simply liking porn.
But it was part 2 and part 3, that she just didn’t want to have to defend to anybody. She didn’t want to take the fall for something that had not turned her on.
Except for the black haired rock star it featured.
It had started to make her think about Bear. She appreciated that he had stayed within her limits, all those years. But at the same time she was the first to see that her limits had been severely messed up, from the start. A frightened virgin, who had managed to get herself a lover in the midst of having been dumped and suffering from anxiety attacks no doctor could cure.
She was proud of herself, for having picked up her sex life, for sure.
But the sadistic rock star with his knives and his cruelty, had sparked a fire inside of her. She felt like she had been lulled to sleep by how careful Bear had been with her. Rough sex dated years back. She wondered if he had other women with whom he was doing that.
She wondered if he had fantasies of his own, where he dominated her. If he had been aching to get back to taking her so rough, just like he had done in their first two years.
The final year of their education had been taking its toll on the relationship. They had even been living abroad, as he did an internship in London and she did one in Australia.
But the downfall had started earlier, much earlier. The last thing she heard with regard to other women, was that he was currently dating a woman, probably in her thirties, who had children.
Maybe this was the time when she would lose him to mundane family life. At least for a while.
She felt awake and sexually restless. She had been placing her fate in his hands for too long. She wondered if the time had come to put herself on the market again, in order to get the type of sex life you could write fanfiction about.
Or you could have, if it had been a celebrity.
Or had she already hit the jackpot with Bear?
And was he then ready to do the things Nikki did? Share her, abuse her, rape her, hurt her?
Or did she need to go out and be her own woman?
And find herself a Nikki Sixx.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Click here for part 2, Mutuals

* In this YouTube video refer to this story (A Letter from a stranger) as being the one where I (wrongly) describe Nikki Sixx as unpredictable.
However, the word unpredictable is not used here in this post.
My apologies. 
It was most likely one of the many other ones, or in a post under my real name. 

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