Everything I Left Unsaid

“Tell me you understand that.”


“I don’t like bossy men,” I said, avoiding the question because really he was asking the impossible. I would try not to be embarrassed. I would work really hard at that, but he couldn’t make the feeling go away just by demanding it.

“No?”

“No,” I answered because I did like this. Because I was contrary and full of opposing forces. And he seemed impervious to these swipes I took at him. Seemed in fact to like it.

He chuckled, proving that he appreciated my claws, and it was just too much. I curled over onto my side, tucking my knees up, holding the thrill between my legs.

“You liked me the other night. You called me when you wanted to come, Layla. I think you like me fine.”

“I don’t want to be…controlled.”

“You can hang up whenever you want. Say the word and this is over. But if you want to keep going, it’s my rules.”

I clutched the phone in my hand.

“Yes or no, Layla?”

“Yes.”

“Good girl. Now, you won’t call me again until you eat dessert for breakfast and go skinny-dipping.”

“Are you joking?” Skinny-dipping and dessert for breakfast? What the hell was this?

“Do those things,” he said. “And then call me. And Layla?”

“What?” I sounded extra angry with him and I was rewarded with that half-groan of his that reverberated down low into my belly, sending all this desire and itchy, angry lust into hyperdrive.

“Hurry.”

And then he hung up.



I put the phone back in the drawer and like I was testing the waters, waiting for some kind of protest, or someone to tell me to stop, I eased my hand under my tank top and spread out my fingers over my belly, making the heat coil under my skin.

I wanted to wrench everything out of me that was left over from my old life. The voices, the fear, the guilt and shame—I wanted it all gone. Like the garbage I was clearing out of the campground.

Feeling defiant—rebellious, more like Layla than I had the other night—I jumped off the bed and made sure my door was locked and all my curtains and blinds were shut. In the bedroom I kept the windows open for air.

I took off my shirt and then my shorts, but I left on my underwear. The last of my clean ones. They were a little too small. A pair—blue, with little white flowers on them—that I’d had forever, since I was sixteen, maybe? The elastic bit into the skin of my butt and the front dipped real low, to the point that some of the hair between my legs peeked out. Slipping my hand down low, I felt the wide patch of moisture from my body, and as I traced its edges, it got wider. Wetter.

I slipped one finger past the sharp elastic, pulling the other side harder against my skin, which made me gasp and pull it tighter, until the elastic brushed up against my clit.

“Oh my God,” I breathed and then, experimenting, I pulled both sides of my underwear down between my lips and I nearly shot off the bed. Carefully, I used the pressure, slow and driving, sharp and fast, to find out what I liked better.

And the truth was—I liked it all. Even the touches that didn’t add to the stone-rolling-downhill of orgasm, I liked. The side trip of my fingers against the skin of my leg. The act of pushing my hair—sweaty and damp—off my face. The lift of one arm up and over my head.

It was as if my body—which had seemed my entire life to be stupid and heavy, an entity to be pushed and smacked, a blind and dumb creature made only for work, its only skill a certain kind of stillness, a trick of getting smaller so as not to be seen—had been transformed.

No, not transformed. Not really.

It was as if I’d found buried beneath the skin a secret wisdom. A dark knowledge.

Like it had just been waiting for me to find it.

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