The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2) - Rosie Danan Page 0,86
it is a big deal, and that’s okay too.”
The restless room grew quieter.
“Maybe this is the kind of dare that only appeals to me, but what if your next great sex doesn’t come from a position or a technique or a toy? What if it comes from you, letting go of whatever it is you thought you were supposed to be?”
A hand went up, an older woman she’d never seen before. “It sounds like you’re saying that if we try hard enough, any of us can have great sex?”
“Yes,” Naomi said, catching a flash of dimples in reply. “Absolutely. I’m not gonna lie, sometimes you have to work for it. But you can have great sex even if it takes you hours to come. If you cry afterward, or hell, in the middle of it. Believe it or not, I have it on good authority that you can have great sex even after accidentally giving someone a bloody nose.”
An unfortunate accident.
“There are a lot of ways to be intimate with someone. And what you need will change over time. One of the things that makes sex worth having is the ways in which it can surprise you.”
Something hit the door of the auditorium hard. Heavy, like a person’s entire weight pushed against the wood.
“What the hell?”
Naomi was up the aisle before anyone else could react, pushing open the door to see what in the world was going on. Her breath caught in the base of her throat, and she fell back a step.
Oh no. Not again.
* * *
• • •
SHAME STARTED AS a hot breath against her neck. The scene in the hallway hit Naomi by degrees. First, the posters with images frozen from her films, screamingly vivid. Then the flyers, scattered across the ground like broken glass, corners torn like they’d been ripped from someone’s hand. She had to bend her knees and tilt her head to make out the photos of Ethan’s face Photoshopped over Josh’s to create a warped version of Frankenstein’s monster. She closed her eyes. Took a step back until her heels hit the wall.
Their words crashed together, slamming against her temples. As ruthless as any hit she’d ever taken at the gym.
When Naomi had first decided to star in adult films, she’d conducted an exercise alone in her room. She’d written down every word she could think of that disparaged women and sex workers, her hand shaking as she formed the letters, carefully, one after the other, on scraps of paper until they covered her carpet. When she was done, there were close to a hundred of them. Each sharper than the last.
Words meant to leave shrapnel in their victims. Words with teeth. She made herself look until her vision blurred. If she couldn’t take them alone in her room, she’d never survive. Naomi read the slander, the curses, the labels, one after the other. She let them sink beneath her skin, testing their weight. It got easier after she started imagining herself as a master of poisons, building up a tolerance by letting the insults pollute her body, her mind, until she built up a resilience. Her plan to reclaim her identity required that sort of immunity.
It had taken a week for her to be able to say some of them out loud without growing nauseous. The first two nights, she’d actually thrown up. Not from the definitions, but from the memories they evoked.
A different hallway, the mass of people younger then, and with less to lose. The startling knowledge that life as she’d known it was over, wiped clean, or rather dirty, by a single night. A single boy.
Slut had been the clear favorite back then. She’d wondered once, years later, half laughing, if it was because of the hard T at the end. The satisfying way teeth came together at the back of the word. She’d considered, briefly, getting it tattooed somewhere on her body. So that the next time someone called her a slut, she could flash them her wrist or her shoulder and answer, “Damn straight.”
The thing that had stopped her in the end was an old rule. Leviticus. She couldn’t be buried with her Jewish family if she bore the ink. Enough doors had slammed in her face by that point; she wasn’t going to invite another one just to prove a point.
What a fool she’d been to think she and Ethan could get away