Had he been a virgin the first time they had sex? She hadn’t given the matter much thought at the time, and had been too intent upon her own role in the proceedings to be aware of his experience or lack thereof. It hadn’t really mattered then, and she couldn’t see that it mattered now.
And, she’d just told him, he’d been her first boyfriend. No need to qualify that; he’d truly been her first boyfriend, real or otherwise.
But she hadn’t been a virgin. She’d crossed that barrier two years earlier, a month or so after her thirteenth birthday, and had had sex in one form or another perhaps a hundred times before she hooked up with Doug.
Not with a boyfriend, however. I mean, your father couldn’t be your boyfriend, could he?
Lucas lived alone in a large L-shaped studio apartment on the top floor of a new building. “I’m the first tenant the place has ever had,” he told her. “I’ve never lived in something brand spanking new before. It’s like I’ve taken the apartment’s virginity.”
“Now you can take mine.”
“Not quite. But this is better. Remember, I told you my lucky number.”
“Six.”
“There you go.”
And just when, she wondered, had six become his lucky number? When she’d acknowledged five partners? Probably, but never mind. It was a good enough line, and one he was no doubt feeling proud of right about now, because it had worked, hadn’t it?
As if he’d had any chance of failing…
He made drinks, and they kissed, and she was pleased but not surprised to note that the requisite chemistry was there. And, keeping it company, there was that delicious surge of anticipatory excitement that was always present on such occasions. It was at once sexual and non-sexual, and she felt it even when the chemistry was not present, even when the sexual act was destined to be perfunctory at best, and at worst distasteful. Even then she’d feel that rush, that urgent excitement, but it was greatly increased when she knew the sex was going to be good.
He excused himself and went to the bathroom, and she opened her purse and found the little unlabeled vial she kept in the change compartment. She looked at it and at the drink he’d left on the table, but in the end she left the vial in her purse, left his drink untouched.
As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered. When he emerged from the bathroom he reached not for his drink but for her instead, and it was as good as she’d known it would be, inventive and eager and passionate, and finally they fell away from each other, spent and sated.
“Wow,” he said.
“That’s the right word for it.”
“You think? It’s the best I can come up with, and yet it somehow seems inadequate. You’re—”
“What?”
“Amazing. I have to say this, I can’t help it. It’s almost impossible to believe you’ve had so little experience.”
“Because I’m clearly jaded?”
“No, just because you’re so good at it. And in a way that’s the complete opposite of jaded. I swear to God this is the last time I’ll ask you, but were you telling the truth? Have you really only been with five men?”
She nodded.
“Well,” he said, “now it’s six, isn’t it?”
“Your lucky number, right?”
“Luckier than ever,” he said.
“Lucky for me, too.”
She was glad she hadn’t put anything in his drink, because after a brief rest they made love again, and that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
“Still six,” he told her afterward, “unless you figure I ought to get extra credit.”
She said something, her voice soft and soothing, and he said something, and that went on until he stopped responding. She lay beside him, in that familiar but ever-new combination of afterglow and anticipation, and then finally she slipped out of bed, and a little while later she let herself out of his apartment.
All by herself in the descending elevator, she said out loud, “Five.”
A second round of Rob Roys arrived before their entrees. Then the waiter brought her fish and his steak, along with a glass of red wine for him and white for her. She’d only had half of her second Rob Roy, and she barely touched her wine.
“So you’re in New York,” he said. “You went there straight from college?”
She brought him up to date, keeping the responses vague for fear of contradicting herself. The story she told was all fabrication; she’d never even been to college, and her job resume was a spotty melange of waitressing and office temp work. She didn’t have a career, and she worked only when she had to.
If she needed money — and she didn’t need much, she didn’t live high — well, there were other ways to get it besides work.
But today she was Connie Corporate, with a job history to match her clothes, and yes, she’d gone to Penn State and then tacked on a Wharton MBA, and ever since she’d been in New York, and she couldn’t really talk about what had brought her to Toledo, or even on whose behalf she was traveling, because it was all hush-hush for the time being, and she was sworn to secrecy.
“Not that there’s a really big deal to be secretive about,” she said, “but, you know, I try to do what they tell me.”
“Like a good little soldier.”
“Exactly,” she said, and beamed across the table at him.
“You’re my little soldier,” her father had told her. “A trooper, a little warrior.”
In the accounts she sometimes found herself reading, the father (or the stepfather, or the uncle, or the mother’s boyfriend, or even the next-door neighbor) was a drunk and a brute, a bloody-minded savage, forcing himself upon the child who was his helpless and unwilling partner. She would get angry, reading those case histories. She would hate the male responsible for the incest, would sympathize with the young female victim, and her blood would surge in her veins with the desire to even the score, to exact a cruel but just vengeance. Her mind supplied scenarios — castration, mutilation, disembowelment, all of them brutal and heartless, all richly deserved.
But her own experience was quite unlike what she read.
Some of her earliest memories were of sitting on her father’s lap, his hands touching her, patting her, petting her. Sometimes he was with her at bath time, making sure she soaped and rinsed herself thoroughly. Sometimes he tucked her in at night, and sat by the side of the bed stroking her hair until she fell asleep.
Was his touch ever inappropriate? Looking back, she thought that it probably was, but she’d never been aware of it at the time. She knew that she loved her daddy and he loved her, and that there was a bond between them that excluded her mother. But it never consciously occurred to her that there was anything wrong about it.
He would put her to bed and tuck her in. One night a dream woke her, and without opening her eyes she realized that he was in bed with her. She felt his hand on her shoulder and slipped back beneath the cover of sleep.
She’d lie awake, pretending to be asleep, and at last her door would ease open and he’d be in her room, and he’d stand there while she pretended to be asleep, then get into bed with her. He’d hold her and pet her, and his presence would somehow give her permission to fall genuinely asleep.
Then, when she was thirteen, when her body had begun to change, there was a night when he came to her bed and slipped beneath the covers. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “I know you’re awake.” And he held her and touched her and kissed her.
The holding and touching and kissing was different that night, and she recognized it as such immediately, and somehow knew that it would be a secret, that she could never tell anybody. And yet no enormous barriers were crossed that night. He was very gentle with her, always gentle, and his seduction of her was infinitely gradual. She had since read how the Plains Indians took wild horses and domesticated them, not by breaking their spirit but by slowly, slowly, winning them over, and the description resonated with her immediately, because that
