“I’m going to confess something
I’ve never told anyone, and you are under strict orders to not tell me it’s
okay or anything similar. My first year of college I had a best friend, a boy.
We hung out all the time. We talked on the phone every day. We talked about everything.
I told him about the boys I liked, the boys I was dating, the boys who hurt me.
He would tell me everything, too. He told me he was in love with me.
“I told him I
loved him, too, just in a different way. I encouraged him to meet other girls,
but he never did. He was just there, for me, whenever I needed him. When I
dumped a boy, or a boy dumped me and I felt sad, he was always the first person
I called. I would cry. He would help me feel better. Every so often—not that
often, because he was stoic and brave—he would call crying over me, and I would
always listen. We would talk for hours. He would tell me how much he loved me,
and I would reassure him that my love for him was just as real, just different.
I would, again, encourage him to date. I would name girls I knew would like
him. I truly felt awful for him. It was a long time before I realized I was
turned on by it.”
“Kimberly…”
“Don’t.
You’re under orders.” Her voice sounded thick with tears. Her hand came off the
steering wheel and wiped her face. “After listening to him crying over me for
hours—after crying with him—I would pleasure myself. Somehow my mind managed to
separate it. Enjoying being loved without fully loving back and getting off on
it didn’t seem to conflict with trying to be a good friend and help him get
over me. I felt like I was doing the best I could with the best intentions, and
my arousal just seemed…incidental—stupid as that sounds.
“He
moved back home after our freshman year and wrote me a good-bye letter. He
wrote he had to break off contact to move forward in his life. He was very
nice, very sorry. I think he’d met someone and needed me out of his life to
make room for her, and I was glad. I was hurt, but I was glad for him. I was
fully aware of my dominant fantasies, well before that, but I didn’t plan or
expect to ever act them out. They, also, seemed incidental to my real life, but
I decided, from that point on, to always be clear with boys about who would be
in charge if we dated and the exact behavior and respect I would command. I
wasn’t going to let anything like that happen again.” Kimberly had kept her
composure, besides trace evidence of tears in her voice, but now she got choked
up and had trouble speaking. “I mean, everyone remembers their first year of
college. It’s supposed to be when you come-of-age or discover who you are or
whatever. What does he have to remember, some girl stringing him along all year?”
“It
sounds like,” Alex said. Kimberly fired a look at him, and Alex took a deep
breath—torn between wanting to comfort Kimberly and obeying the order she had
given—before continuing. “It sounds like the two of you went through an intense
experience together. You learned from it and it helped you to become the person
you are today. I’m sure the experience had the same effect on him.”
“Maybe.
I hope you’re right. Still, he deserved better. He deserved to have me spank
him and sit on his face.”
From Serving Her (Pink Flamingo, 2012), available in paperback and as an Ebook
