Page 5 of Pretending I'm Yours

Or something very brave?

Maybe both…

What the heckam I doing?

I’ve clearly lost my mind.

Or maybe I’ve entered an alternate reality, where good girls from rural Maine visit fancy, New York City sex clubs on Christmas Eve all the time.

Or maybe this is a dream, and I’m about to wake up in my cozy bed in Sea Breeze, where I’ve slept alone every night for the past twenty-four years.

Only, I don’t want to wake up.

I’m a lobster out of water in a place like this, and more than a little scared, but also…fascinated.

I’ve never been anywhere like The Garden of Earthly Delights.

It’s nothing like I imagined. Thanks to my friend Sydney and her billionaire boyfriend I know a little bit about the preferences of posh Manhattanites. On the cab ride here from my dingy, Midtown hotel, I was picturing gleaming hardwood floors, sky-high ceilings, tasteful modern art, and those heavy velvet drapes I’ve only ever seen in museums and Sydney’s fancy Union Square penthouse.

The only thing I nailed was the drapes.

There are deep blue, velvet drapes everywhere, cloaking the entryway in shadows, muffling the sounds from deeper inside the club. The only thing I can hear is faint jazz music and the occasional tinkling of glass.

Thank God…

If they’d thrown me straight into a room filled with half-dressed people moaning while they did intimate things in public, I might have lost my nerve and run for the door.

Nope. No running, no matter what,the inner voice pipes up as I fidget on the thickly-padded bench where the bouncer instructed me to wait for a hostess.Not even if Weaver’s friend can’t help with your “special request,” and tells you to learn what you can from lurking in corners and be out by one, before the really kinky stuff starts.

You will lurk.

You will learn.

Heck, maybe you’ll even meet someone you like enough to experiment a little…

My cheeks burn at the thought while my stomach churns with a mixture of terror and something I can’t quite name.

But it feels a little like excitement.

Or food poisoning.

Or a tumor about to explode in my upper intestine.

I’m not entirely sure.

But it’s okay that my insides are in knots. Normal, even! Until tonight, the spiciest event in my personal history was the time Sully, Elaina, and I went to a male strip club during our senior trip to Atlantic City. I spent the entire show giggling my head off, until the sexy firefighter knelt down to waggle his “hose” inches from my face, and I blushed so hard I almost passed out.

Sully had to haul me out to the lobby for a breath of fresh air. There, Elaina put my head between my knees and rubbed my back until I stopped hyperventilating and insisted they go back inside and enjoy themselves.

I spent the rest of the show in the lobby with the cranky-looking bouncer, leaning against the wall, listening to the happy shrieks and music from inside, torn between feeling sad that I was missing out and relieved that there were no thinly-covered penises in my vicinity.

At eighteen, I wasnotready for sex or anything sex adjacent. I was way too shy, and I’d seen firsthand how badly teenage romances could go awry. My cousin’s long-term boyfriend dumped her at seventeen, just in time for her to give birth to their child alone, and my older sister Mallory had dated every abusive loser in a seventy-mile radius.

Only they didn’t seem like losers at first…

Watching Mallory’s boyfriends go from sweet and attentive to screaming at her in the driveway at midnight taught me a healthy respect for the changeable nature of men. And with a course load chocked full of AP classes designed to ensure I graduated with both my high school diploma and my associate’s degree in business management by the end of my senior year, I didn’t have time for stressful or unpredictable things. I was happy to stick to hanging out with my girlfriends and binge-watching episodes of House Hunters on nights when Sully and Elaina were out with their men of the moment.

I didn’t start thinking seriously about kissing until I was twenty, and for the first year of my “awakening,” I was content to read steamy romance novels and enjoy quality alone time with my vibrator.

---