Insatiable

Jessica B. Sokol

Word Count 1706

It’s the Fourth of July, 1998. I’m 13. On a white sandy beach in Ogunquit, Maine, the fireworks explode above the ocean. I’m wearing a wrap skirt with pink hibiscus flowers and silver flip-flops. I’m with my best friend, Arley, and we’re escorted by Jeff and John, local boys we’ve gotten to know during our annual summer trip. They work at Barnacle Billy’s so they have their own cash and always smell slightly of fish.

After the fireworks, the four of us walk across the street to The Meadowmere Resort, where Arley and I stay with her mom. Arley steps inside, and Jeff gives John a nod to leave as well. My heart skips a beat. It’s just us now. We awkwardly hug and almost say goodnight. I’m looking into his green eyes as he leans into me. I grab onto his honey-blond hair as his lips touch mine. It’s innocent, a touch steamy, romantic. We say goodnight, both smiling. I cannot wait to gush to Arley about my own little fireworks. I learn in this first kiss how much I like men.

~

It’s the night of Brian’s high school senior prom. I’m 17. Brian lives in a neighboring town in Western Massachusetts. He’s captain of the football and hockey teams, and we’ve been together almost two years. We lost our virginity to each other around September 11, 2001. It seemed like the end of the world to high school students, so everyone was “making love.”

We share a sex-toy treasure chest of handcuffs and dildos. This seems aggressive to my friends, especially the virgins. Brian has adventurous ideas when it comes to the bedroom and I don’t say no. I’m curious, too.

For Brian’s prom, I buy a black floor-length sparkly dress with a plunging neckline at an out-of-the-way boutique, just to make sure no one else will have the same outfit. My pals come over to do my hair, make-up, and strategically double-side tape the top of my dress. (This is after J-Lo wore that infamous green number to the Grammys in 2000, and mine wasn’t even close to that low.)

Next to a flowering fuchsia tree, my parents take pictures of us exchanging my red-rose corsage and his white-rose boutonnière. In front of everyone, Brian keeps telling me how gorgeous I look, how much he adores my gown.

After we get into his car and start driving, he looks at me with this menacing stare then down at my low-cut dress. I innocently smile at him because what could possibly be wrong? “You look like a fucking whore,” he blurts out. I’m speechless, holding back tears. I have nothing to say, nowhere to go.

This isn’t Brian’s first off-the-wall comment to me, but it’s different. He’s so angry with me, and I don’t know why. He looks through sleazy men’s magazines every month, and points out women he finds attractive even though I find it insulting. He has no shame watching porn that degrades women. Yet, when I’m the one who looks too sexy for his “approval,” it’s me being a “whore.” I’m appalled by his control-freak behavior, typical of an old-school mentality of right-leaning white men.

At the prom, I sit next to him. This is before Uber, this is when you stay with people you know. Of course he’s acting so charming with everyone else, dancing the night away, and he gets voted fucking prom king. I want to vomit. I refuse to sleep with him that night. A couple months later I leave for college in South Florida, 1,500 miles away from where he goes in Boston. I couldn’t get away from his sexual hypocrisy quickly enough.

~

It’s a balmy summer Saturday afternoon at The Oregon Country Fair, 2012. I’m 28, and my girlfriends and I are enchanted by this music and arts-festival fantasyland filled with vegan food stands, breasts being painted, glittery wings, and tutus.

I spend the day eating falafel, taking off clothes, dancing to reggae, and watching my pals get utterly sunburned. During the hard-rocking last band of the evening, I see a man wearing a straw-like fedora, totally into the music, and slide up near him in my now-wrinkled lingerie dress and bright-red high heels. He notices me immediately, compliments my shoe choice, and we dance around each other. His smoldering stares excite me, so I grab him and kiss him, not knowing what I’m getting myself into. He makes this growly “I need you” sound under his breath, and I laugh.

I say, “I’m sorry, I just had a water bottle filled with vodka,” and he lets out a sexy, slightly older-man laugh. His stature makes him come off larger than life. He’s tall, about 40, with piercing blue eyes behind aviator sunglasses, perfect salt-and-pepper hair to grab onto, and every part of him is tan, available to touch. The way he kisses me the first time is intense and hard, his hands are all over me, and I want him so badly I consider fucking him in the cozy corner behind the tree where he’s stashed his guitar, but I resist. We switch hats, and since it turns out we both live in Portland, we agree to meet after the festival to get our hats back. But we’re not leaving before making out for a good 20 minutes.

I don’t expect it, but he calls as I’m walking home from work the first day back in the real world, and I tell him I’ll see him for happy hour. We plan to meet at a trendy hipster bar near my apartment in Southeast Portland, and I have that moment while walking, that What if I don’t recognize him? thought.

I walk into the bar. The first thing he says is, “I just stared at you walking in your hot pink dress and heels as I drove by you on the Hawthorne Bridge.” Apparently, he couldn’t mistake me either. We get along famously, and I want him inside me.

Over the next several months, Bill and I fuck… a lot. He can never get 10 feet past my apartment door without having his way with me on my stairs, and I love it. As soon as I come down to let him in, I’m thrown against the wall hard. He kisses me aggressively, goes down on me, then he forces me down on him. And then he picks me up and somehow I’m flat-out naked on my stairs. We fuck there, then in the living room. Eventually we make it to my bed where the same things happen again.

He writes me lengthy sexts daily about the crazy things he wants to do to me. I am willing. He’s like my very own version of that phony Mr. Grey character, but better and real.

One afternoon after a delicious romp, Bill asks, “What do you think of me?” I answer, “I don’t see you as boyfriend material, but you’re definitely one of the best fucks I’ve ever had.” I have to play it safe. Then I ask, “What do you think of me, honestly?” He makes this dangerous laughing sound as he looks at me, grabs my cheek, and says, “Being with you is unbelievable, unlike anything else, and what we have sexually is earth-shattering.” He continues, “There’s sex, there’s good sex, and then there is fucking-burning-down-the-building sex.”

We’re clearly so content with the answers we hear that we have sex in the shower, then back in my room again. Breathless and lying with our heads at the foot-end of my bed, we talk about upcoming music fests. I continue to see him often, but I never expected anything more than juicy sex.

~

It’s Father’s Day, 2021. I’m 37 and married. My husband, Joel, and I are at my parents’ house sharing a toast when out of the blue I start coughing up blood. Joel rushes me to the ER, inundated with Covid patients. I’m fully vaxxed, and we hadn’t been out in public since March 2020. (Not even to a grocery store.) The vaccine had been available for a few months at this point, but in the hospital there aren’t enough rooms or doctors, with sick unvaccinated patients flooding the floors.

I don’t have Covid, but in the ER I’m hooked up to all sorts of tubes, waiting for X-rays and tests. I need a bronchoscopy because something is seriously wrong with my right lung, but the staff is bombarded and don’t know when it can happen. The hemoptysis gets significantly worse. Days and nights pass, and there are still no available doctors to perform my overdue procedure. My body takes a dangerous turn. I start throwing up and choking on blood. I can’t lie down or breathe. That’s the last thing I remember.

When I wake up in the ICU several days later, nothing makes sense. I can’t move any part of my body. When I’m strong enough to hold my phone, there are hundreds of unread texts, dozens of missed calls. The most disconcerting thing I see, though, is the date. Joel tells me I was intubated on a ventilator in a medically induced coma for a week… on life support. There’s an unexplained cavity in my lung that became severely infected and hadn’t been treated on time. I will live with this forever now.

Joel spends as many hours as allowed with me recovering in the ICU. We go through a long, difficult journey of healing together after two weeks in the hospital. He helps me lift a fork, assists me in the bathroom, and patiently stands by my side as I relearn to walk. To this day, I’m not fully recovered. My weeks are still filled with doctor appointments, CT scans, blood tests, physical therapy, fear-ridden flashbacks, panic attacks, and nightmares.

I see it as a small miracle that Joel is still deeply attracted to me. That he still outwardly craves me, wants to make love after all he’s seen. He proves it time and again. But my body sometimes doesn’t feel like mine because it’s been through so much, and my once-ferocious sex drive is undeniably tamped down. Joel doesn’t seem to mind this either. For better and worse.

*

Jessica writes creative nonfiction focusing on travel, music, sex, and loss in our ever-changing world. Her stories have recently been featured in the Music Museum of New England, the Hosmer Gallery at Forbes Library, and selected for Valley Love Letters Project: Live on Stage at the Academy of Music, Northampton, MA. Her first book, For Better And Worse: Short Stories and Tantalizing Tales—From Coast to Coast, was published in 2016. She’s a vegan cook living in Western Massachusetts.