Blue Rose (A Flowering Novel) (8 page)

14

For all my guilt and confusion about sex, the first time with Jack was something magical. There was no way I wasn’t going to fall permanently in love with him after that night.

The trial had just concluded and Jack wasn’t happy. His father was being put away, but he was staying close, at Jack’s grandmother’s request, and she was appealing for a chance at future rehabilitation rather than incarceration without parole. She was meeting with the lawyers and Jack asked me to come over after school.

We had never talked about sex. For all the stories about us, we’d still only kissed. It was spring and
Jerry had been gone for some time. I still cringed whenever anyone else touched me, but I had started to feel something again with Jack. Only Jack. Even Dave would send me into a panic attack with a hug. But Jack made me feel like my past was only a nightmare.

We were ta
king sex ed in gym that spring, and everyone made jokes about me in class. I worried about what they said in Jack’s class, but he never told me and I never asked. Still, all the talk about sex made me think about my own experiences with it, but I was starting to feel those stirrings again. I wondered what was wrong with me, how I could want that after what I’d been through. I wondered if maybe I really was an animal, with no self-control, some kind of immoral slut who couldn’t stop her urges. The thing is, other girls talked about guys all the time. I heard their conversations. I listened to their stories, and they were having sex, or at least they said they were. And they were doing it with lots of guys. But I still hadn’t, at least not willingly. But when Jack would kiss me, the feelings would start again.

A few nights before
Jack asked me to come over, I had tried to resist it, but I pictured him naked, and I got wet. I touched myself, thinking of him, and it felt so good. I even called out his name as I had an orgasm. It was my first orgasm and I would soon learn that it was a baby one, but I liked it – and I felt both dirty and ashamed, as well as curious, about the fact that I did.

So we were in his room, kissing on his bed, when his hands moved to my stomach. He laid his hand against my skin, under the edge of my shirt that had been pushed up a little.

“Is this okay?” he asked.

I nodded and his hand slowly slid upwards. He stopped
after every inch and asked if it was okay. Finally, as he got close to my breasts, I knew he was going to ask, and I took my shirt off and undid my bra.

“I want you to
touch me,” I told him, and I meant it. He was gentle, his hands nervous as he explored. He kissed me everywhere and, when he moved his hand lower, I guided him to the spot that I had discovered just a few nights earlier.

Jack was gentle, and he was so nervous. He waited for me to say it was okay every time he moved. It was
cute, because he had so much anger and hate in him, yet he treated me like I’d break. He brought me to orgasm with his fingers, after some adjusting and guidance on my part, and it was so much better than it had been alone. He looked taken aback as I jerked my hips up toward his hand, but after, I pulled him down to me and kissed him with far more passion than he’d seen from me before.

I felt him
grow harder against me, and I knew how to make him feel good. I’d been taught well, but with Jack, he kissed me and thanked me as I stroked him. He came quickly, because he’d never been touched by a girl like that. He wouldn’t look at me, though, and it hurt, until after, when he spoke. 

“Alana, I’m so sorry,” he said, after he came.

“It’s okay. We have time.”

“No,” he said, embarrassed. “I’ve been… I think about you… a lot. In that way. I’m as bad as those other guys. I’m so sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” I asked.

“Because every night, I can’t stop it. I can’t help what I think and I imagine doing things with you. The things they say that we do. And it’s not right. You’re so much more to me than that.”

I kissed him and whispered close to his ear, “I think about you every night, too.”

He was so ashamed that I turned him on, but I was so happy that it was normal. I
touched him again and he lasted longer this time; I even got him fully undressed so I could see him naked. His body was perfect. He was lanky and he hadn’t gotten his tattoos yet – or his muscles for that matter – but I didn’t care. I loved his body. He didn’t say anything while I touched him except my name and “thank you.” He thanked me more times than a person normally says thank you in his lifetime. This time, though, I begged him to look at me, and his eyes never left mine.

After he came again, I took my pants off, and h
e saw the scars on my thighs for the first time. “What happened?” he asked, and he touched them, which made me freak out.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told him. “Please… don’t touch them.”

After that, he never touched them again, but with Jack, I felt loved. I felt how much he loved me as he kissed me and touched me and held me, and when we were both ready, I opened myself up to him and he told me that he loved me. It was the first time he’d said it, but I believed him. And when he said I was beautiful, it wasn’t crude or vulgar. It made me feel like I was. I didn’t feel like I could only be good at fucking. I felt whole with him, especially when he held me after.

When Jack entered me that first time, his eyes held mine, and I was lost in them. They were so blue, and they grew wide as I gave myself to him. “Oh, Alana,” he whispered, and I could see the confusion behind his gaze. He loved how it felt, how easy it was to enter me, how willing I was to take him in, but I saw the guilt, too. I saw how scared he was that he was just like them. I smiled up at him, and when he pushed deeper, I groaned with the pleasure of it. As he moved faster, the confusion started to fade, because I clutched the sheets in my fists and watched him, and I felt something with him that I didn’t feel shame about feeling. I tried to tell him in the sounds I made that I didn’t classify him with those other guys, and as he came, he looked at me with the biggest grin. It was cute, not even slightly sexy, and Jack was forever scarred on my heart. I would never be able to be whole without him.

I fell in love with him as a person before that first time, but after we had sex, he thanked me again. He kissed me all over my face and then, he sat up, his naked body over mine, and his eyes looking all over me. He smiled and kissed the top of my head.

“Alana, I’m so grateful to you,” he said.

“I love you,” I told him in reply, which was the first time I’d said it. And I knew I would love him for the rest of my life.

He made love to me several times that night, and no one seemed to care that I slept over.
What made it so different was that, each time, he asked if it was okay, if I was sure, and he watched me carefully throughout. His eyes were so beautiful, so hopeful, and I used them as an anchor to keep me from floating off into the other place, the place where I would later go, when it wasn’t Jack who was holding me.

The sex was good – even though I would later learn that it could be great – but the sex was just something between us. I finally felt like I was normal. He never knew why, exactly, I loved him so much, but Jack made me respect myself. Through sex, something that had been so terrifying and dirty to me, he had made me feel good. I learned later that sex was a weapon and I realized that I’d been corrupted deeper than even Jack could heal, but that first time with him, he made me think that it was okay to like my body and the things we did with it.

15

“You said there was a party after Prom?”

It’s my
weekly appointment with Melinda, but I don’t know if I want to talk about this yet. She doesn’t know about Dave, about everything that happened, about what led to the party and what I did. She doesn’t know what happened after, and I don’t know if I can tell her.

“Can’t we talk about something else?”
I ask.

“What do you want to talk about then?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“I think you need to tell me about the party,” she insists.

I sigh and sip my tea. I’m becoming a big tea drinker thanks to her, but I don’t think the insurance company is paying for tea. I know I need to tell her; I know the only way to move on, to accept that Jack is never coming back to me, to deal with my father and Jerry and what they did, is to tell someone everything. I’ve never told anyone. Jack is my closest friend, and we have a wall of secrets between us. In the time that I dated Dave, I told him some things, but a lot has happened since, and he also had his own walls. Even in therapy, I have consistently left things out, avoided the things that make me look bad. It’s easy to blame my father and my stepdad, but I’ve made plenty of mistakes as well. And the after-Prom party was one of the worst.

“I’d started dating Dave.”

“We’re going out of order then,” she says.

“Yeah, but I’m not ready to talk about him yet,” I remind her.

“Okay, so things had not worked out with Jack and you had chosen Dave.”

“Sort of, but that’s another story for another time. Anyway, I was dating Dave. He really wanted to go to Prom. It was, for whatever reason, something normal, and he wanted to do something normal. We didn’t belong there. Everyone at school hated the three of us, but he felt this sense of entitlement. Not in a bad way, but like… he didn’t give a fuck about them. He wanted
us
– me, him, and Jack – to go anyway. To show them that we could and that they couldn’t stop us.”

“How did you feel?”
she asks.

“I didn’t care either way. I wanted him to be happy, but Jack was adamant. He told me we wouldn’t be friends anymore if I went, that I was becoming a sheep like the rest of them. Which is kind of ironic, because Jack always needed their approval far more than Dave or I did.”

“Did you know that then?”

I shake my head. “No. I was sixteen. I didn’t know shit.”

Melinda laughs. “No one does, Alana.”

I smile. “I don’t know shit
now
.”

“I repeat, no one does,” she says.

“Well, anyway, I decided to go. I couldn’t afford a dress so Dave and I went to the Salvation Army and picked something out. The dress was actually really pretty, and no one would have known, except they knew that I was poor.”

“What about Jack?”

“Another story for another time, but he was true to his word. He stopped talking to us. For a while, actually.”

She nods. “Go on.”

“All right, so we went to Prom, which was, well, Prom. It was an overpriced dance with shitty music and shittier food. But we went and Dave was happy and then a bunch of kids came over to our table and invited us to a party afterwards.”

“Was it malicious?”

“Of course,” I say. “But I didn’t know that at the time.”

“What happened?”

“Well, a group of guys were the ones who invited us, but I didn’t think anything of it. I just figured their girlfriends were in the bathroom. I didn’t know that their girlfriends didn’t want me there.”

“Why not?” she asks.

“For the exact thing I ended up doing.”

“What did you do, Alana? And how could they predict it?”

I shrug. “Because. They knew. They knew I’m nothing but a stupid slut.”