“Sex. Kelly wants sex. That’s what she means by intimacy. Not marriage. Not commitment. Not stimulating conversation while watching wildlife. She wants to feel a man inside of her again.”
Well done, Bethanne. My honesty garnered a few wide eyes. But Bethanne’s honesty drew a collective gasp from nearly everyone in the room, but none louder than Rhonda.
“Oh stop!” Bethanne went from nervous Nellie to an errant child not happy about being told she has to go to bed early. “I know we are in a church, but this group isn’t a sermon. And we’ve all had sex. Why can’t we call it that? Why can’t we be honest about our feelings regarding it? Either our hidden gratitude that we never have to have it again or our secret desire to have it with every guy we lay eyes on.”
And there it was … the Elsie moment. The moment when you just vomited your unfiltered emotions onto the group and prayed someone threw you a lifeline by admitting they, too, have had similar feelings.
Right.
Wrong.
Or just incredibly needy and human.
Validation meant everything when you felt completely cut off from the world.
“Kelly, maybe you should—” Rhonda began to make her mandatory intervention, but I threw poor Kelly a lifeline first.
“I miss sex. I miss the warm fullness that just can’t be duplicated with something from Amazon. I miss the way my nipples get really hard and sensitive from a single touch. I miss the heavy feeling slowly growing between my legs, all warm and tingly. I miss falling off that cliff as my eyes roll back in my head, my jaw goes slack, and my toes curl. I miss the moan of pleasure from another human finding me so sexy.”
“I miss having someone take charge.” Pauline sighed. “Toby and I were going through a rough patch a few years before he died. We saw a counselor, and she walked us through some exercises to help open up our lines of communication. Come to find out … I just wanted a night to myself to take a hot bath without hearing my kids screaming and to enjoy a good book. Toby … well, he wanted to be dominated in bed. I took care of three young kids, cooked, and cleaned. I shouldn’t have had to dominate him in the bedroom too. My whole day involved being in charge, in control, on alert. I just wanted someone else to take charge once we got into bed. I wanted him to grow a pair.”
A few of the women sniggered.
“Ladies, this is highly inapprop—” Rhonda made another attempt to diffuse the conversation.
“Well, I just want everyone to remember, most of us have children. This is a small town. And God is always watching. So maybe instead of ordering things from Amazon and missing things that are purely selfish and physical, you should spend more time in prayer, giving thanks for what really matters. What would Jesus do?” Aurora was basically a slightly younger version of Rhonda. I had a hard time imagining either one of them actually letting go of their inhibitions, spreading their legs, and allowing a penis to enter their bodies.
“And …” Rhonda jumped in on the wake of Aurora’s big speech. “Please take some time and spend it in the word of God to cleanse your minds from all the impurity of sexual immorality. The marriage bed is sacred. We need to pray for each other, that the Lord will deliver to you a God-fearing man if that’s what your heart desires. But we cannot and should not encourage sexual intercourse or any other kind of sexual immorality outside of marriage. Just because you are no longer virgins, doesn’t mean that it’s okay to commit sexual sins—in real life or in your mind.”
Great. I had to magically control my mind while sleeping. It wasn’t like I hadn’t prayed for G-rated dreams and pure thoughts. I had. A lot. God was clearly busy with bigger things than my hate-lust relationship with Kael. Besides, after Craig died (thanks to my perfect meltdown timing), I’d been questioning the status of my salvation.
My non-virgin daughter wasn’t home when I walked into the nearly empty house. Meadow greeted me for five seconds, and then she disappeared, returning silence to my new existence. After perusing the lackluster contents of my fridge, I ordered takeout and stopped by the store on my way so I had some fresh fruit for the next morning.