Good Girl Gone

Up until this point, every post on this blog has been non-fiction.  Every story told here has been truth.  This post, however, has been written as part of a flash fiction competition with the them "it takes two."  To celebrate the third year of their literary anthology Precipice, Write on Edge and Bannerwing Books will be including the winning post in said collection.  Please read, enjoy, comment, and share! You guys are great!



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“It takes two to make an accident.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

I should have known immediately that there was something evil about him; the way I craved him was so unnatural and new to me.  I grew up a good Christian girl, honoring my mother and father, and believing strongly in the sanctimony of marriage.  When I accepted communion on Sunday morning, I also believed that I was consuming the true body and blood of Christ.  I never hungered for that wafer, though, or thirsted for that wine the way I hungered for his body and thirsted for his kisses.  

 

I had watched my father struggle with addiction.  I never would have shamed him before by spilling this secret, but all my old pretenses about that which was right and good were abandoned once I first knew longing and felt alive.  I knew then that my father never felt fully alive until the first drink every day.  That trembling in his hands as he precariously poured the bottle of whiskey over a glass of ice each afternoon was indicative of his own unhealthy desire.  It was the way my own thighs now quivered in anticipation whenever I thought of that devil’s body hovering over me, hammering inside of me.  I felt I couldn’t survive without his flesh against mine.  I knew now what need was, and I forgave my father the slurring of words and the slamming of doors.  

 

That new devil fascinated me.  Although a part of me acknowledged he was broken, he still made me feel whole.  I never knew kisses like that before.  Kisses had been sweet with other boys, but they always seemed somehow obligatory.  They were merely a token of appreciation for the evening out.  His kisses tasted like sin.  There is no better way to describe the soft, wet meeting of our mouths than as pure sin -- that knowing that something is so wrong, but the wickedness makes it all the more delicious.  It never ended with a kiss either, unlike the others who were merely a peck before parting from the ever obedient, polite girl I was.  When his lips first met mine, and his hands traced every inch of my skin, that good girl was gone.

 

It felt like release to let her go; it was a wonderful release as literal and physically felt as the first time his fingers found their way below my waist and entered the pink, supple insides of me.  The former good girl never could have imagined her body feeling so alive and astounding. The wetness was overwhelming as I moaned in delighted disbelief.  I wanted this; I wanted him.  Nothing else mattered.  Reputation, morals, and obligations were immediately forgotten and I was slave to the mastery of his touch. 

 

I never imagined then how much I would forget myself; my entire identity became intertwined in him.  Lips and limbs lustfully entangled one another, and my soul and mind so, too, became ensnared. I believed every word that came from his lips, never once questioning his intentions.   I was ready to be his everything because I didn’t want to let him down as the others had.  His father left him at four years old to live alone with an alcoholic, manic-depressive mother who too left at age fifteen, finally succumbing to her illness with an overdose of prescription medication.  Guilt-ridden after being found in the arms of another man, his first girlfriend drank herself to death.  I imagined his soul must be riddled with sorrow, although he never seemed to show it.  Despite being a magnet for all things tragic, he had a cool confidence that also pulled me magnetically toward him. 

 

So entrenched in my deep desire, I couldn’t read all the passages of foreshadowing that were told through his unreliable narration.  I blinded myself completely to any arcane mysteries of his character, and saw only that which I coveted.  I craved the way the tip of his tongue tickled my chest, my stomach, my inner thighs, teasing me before entering me – the dripping discharge of liberation felt again and again. Sightless to his faults, I also ignored all feasible miscalculations of my addiction.  I failed to predict the pregnancy as foolishly as I forsook this final outcome.

 

            The warmth of his touch was drastically altered once he learned of our error.  In the way his eyes narrowed viciously upon me, I knew he deposited all the blame upon me.    I suddenly felt that he saw me as the enemy – the enemy I should have seen him for all along.  I was the good girl and he was the one who tempted me with his forbidden fruit, yet he now beheld himself as a god ready to banish me from our Eden.  Banish me he did indeed, and I became just another tragedy.  I wasn’t just exiled from his touch, his thrust, his tenderness.  He went far further to extents only a man with a devil inside would ever dare.

            Everyone who heard the fatal report believed it was an accident.  No one ever questioned him.  They mourned my death, but sympathized far more with his loss.  “How tragic,” they all whispered in the church pews.  They would then drop their voices even lower to pass their judgment, “Did you know she was with child?”  It would have been a son.  A son had been sent to us, but the child couldn’t save him from his life of lies.  The child couldn’t save me; I was already too far gone. The accident all started with that first compulsory, criminal kiss.  I was utterly amiss in my desire, and now this good girl is genuinely gone.