“Then what?”
“I just…” but he trails off.
“What? And don’t say nothing.”
He sighs. “It’s a personal thing.”
I laugh. “Um…I just told you the names of my sex toys, Jamie. Not sure how much more personal you can get.”
“It’s about my ex.”
I arch an eyebrow at him. “Okay?”
He sighs again. “I think I told you the primary reason for our divorce was me wanting this job.”
I nod. “Yeah. But…I guess that doesn’t seem like enough of a reason to get divorced.”
He shakes his head. “No. We’d been having issues before that. Um…she was raised very, very conservative. Like, women weren’t allowed to wear anything but skirts and dresses, nothing exposed above the elbow or knee, hair worn long, church twice a week. That kind of background.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah. Part of a background like that is extreme sexual conservatism. She, um—she was a virgin when we got married. I wasn’t, but she was.” He pauses, scratches his jaw, sips tea. “So, she’d grown up being taught that sexuality is a sin.”
I frowned. “Allsexuality?”
He rolls a shoulder. “Um? Sort of. Within the context of marriage, sex is acceptable, but not really…celebrated, or talked about. Sex is basically procreation to make children, and that’s all.”
I grimace. “Wow. Sounds…really restrictive.”
He nods. “I mean, it’s what they believe, and people are welcome to their beliefs, and I’m not going to try to judge people for their beliefs. I personally think it’s kind of closed-minded at best, if not actively harmful psychologically. But that’s not the point. The point is, masturbation is a sin, and therefore she grew up a virgin in every way. We kissed for the first time when the pastor told me to kiss the bride.”
I blink. “Whoa, wait—really?”
He nods. “We held hands, and that’s it.”
“But you weren’t a virgin?”
He huffs a somewhat bitter laugh. “Nope. I’d had a few girlfriends before her, and had lost my virginity at…seventeen? Eighteen? Somewhere in there. Which was very late, in the context of my social circle, actually.”
“But with your ex, you didn’t even kiss?”
He nods. “Yeah. It was her beliefs, and I wasn’t going to try to push her out of them. I loved her. I was willing to wait.”
I shake my head. “That’s…amazing.”
“It sucked, to be honest,” he says, laughing. “I was so damned horny all the time I was going nuts.”
“I bet.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but…I was, um…raw, by the time we got married.”
I laugh, hand over my mouth. “I can only imagine.”
He sighs again. “So, we dated, and we had a chaperone for every date—usually her older sister or her aunt. We were allowed to hold hands, and hug, but not too close.”
“Jeez.”
“Then we got married, and we kissed for the first time at the wedding. Her first kiss, ever.” He rubs his face with both hands. “We went on our honeymoon, and our first night together was…” He swallows hard, looking away, struggling with the memory. “It was awful. No other way to put it. She was scared out of her mind. Tense, awkward, frightened, and not at all ready. I told her we could wait, but she insisted. I think she felt it was part of her…duty, or something. I don’t know. Her mom probably had some kind of talk aboutmarital duties, or something like that. Like she was obligated to have sex with me, but that she shouldn’t expect to enjoy it.”
