No, I’m not bitter at alllll.
Why would Ipossiblybe bitter? I have no idea about my family history. I have nothing but a small photo album that I carried with me throughout all my group and foster homes, and most of the people in the pictures are strangers to me. Only a few of the pictures had names and dates written on them. Some of them are of Mom when she was younger, but I guess she had no siblings and she was orphaned when her mom died when she was seventeen. Her father had passed away several years earlier.
The only reason I know that is because of a yellowed obituary clipping also tucked away in the photo album, but it didn’t include a full date, or any other identifying information, like what newspaper it came from.
It’s almost like I was born under a bad-luck sign to a cursed family line.
No, I never took the time as an adult to track anyone down. As far as I was concerned, it was ancient history, and maybe I didn’t want to know anything about them.
Or, perhaps, they wouldn’t give a shit about me anyway, and that extra rejection wasn’t something I felt eager to pursue.
I wonder how my life would have turned out if I hadn’t let the recruiter take me out to dinner one day after talking to him in the cafeteria at school during lunch my senior year. At that time in my life, I lived in a foster home that, while far from the worst I’d endured, certainly wasn’t a dream home. They didn’t abuse me, they made sure I had food and clothes, and that was about the extent of their involvement in my life, other than signing permission slips and report cards. If I did my assigned chores, didn’t cut school, and didn’t miss curfew, I might as well have been invisible.
Meaning a kid like me, someone who’d never known his father, and who was eager for any kind of positive attention, was a sucker for the “kindly big brother” approach the recruiter took with me. I wonder if they’re trained to recognize kids like me, and what tactics to use to reel them in and get them to sign on the line.
I also wonder if the recruiter laughed his ass off on his drive home after I signed on the line.
I bounced around various foster homes in the suburbs of St. Louis while growing up. Never went on a family vacation, because—ha, ha—you sort of need afamilyto have one of those. I thought the Army would be perfect for me, right? Travel the world, meet interesting people.
And kill some of them.
Naturally,thatpart of the equation didn’t occur to me, at the time.
Neither did the given counterpoint—that many of them would try to kill me, too.
* * * *
When I joined the Army, admittedly there were many things I didn’t know about myself, especially after a childhood spent in survival mode. Once I’d graduated from basic and was sent to Germany, I was a literal kid set loose in a candy shop when I wasn’t on duty. For the first time in my life, I had a room to myself, too. A small one, but for someone used to growing up in foster care and sharing a room with several other kids at any given time, it was like staying at an expensive hotel. Didn’t even care I had to share a bathroom.
I had a door I could lock, things that belonged to me that I didn’t have to share, and money in my pocket I could spend however I wanted to. Being eighteen and on my own in a foreign country with a little pocket change?
It’s inevitable I ended up in that German nightclub, I suppose.
My only sexual experience up to that point in my life was fucking my fist in the shower, because I never had a room to myself where I had the privacy to jerk off in bed. I thought I was supposed to like women, and I did, I guess. I didn’t date in high school because I had trouble trusting people and forming close relationships when I didn’t even know if I’d still be in that same school the following week.
Then there was the whole issue of I didn’t want anyone to know I was a foster kid, if I could avoid it. My experience had been I’d either get picked on, or pitied.
I know it’s weird, but I hated the second far worse than the first. I guess I spent so much time being pitied in my life, which meant absolutely jack shit in terms of finding me a forever family, or at least a permanent foster family who wasn’t batshit crazy, that I’m deathly allergic to pity.
Pity’s a boner-killer, too. Seriously, it is.
How does that all relate to my sex life?
We all have problems. It’s called “life sucks.” Move the fuck on, already.
That’s exactly how I survived my childhood but, looking back, I can see it’s not a healthy or solid foundation on which to build an emotionally intimate and satisfying relationship.
As an adult with some experience under my belt, I can confidently say I’m bi, although after I pushedHimaway, and in the wake of the emotional carnagethatwoman put me through, I tended to avoid liaisons with women, unless it was necessary for an assignment to keep my cover. Especially if they were the least bit dominant.
Fool me once, shame on you.
But those soul-shredding events still lay in my future that night as I eagerly make my way into the club. I’m eighteen, wide-eyed, and uncertain. Scared and thrilled, all at the same time. I’d heard about this club after visiting a couple others and seeing things that both excited and stirred feelings inside me. I knew I had to explore those things, or risk self-combusting.
Everything is new to me, and I meaneverything. Hell, I’m still a virgin. Literally, I’ve never been with anyone.
I guess huddling in a corner screams “nervous newbie” to the woman when she spots me. I’m alone, too, meaning easy pickings for her.
The long, silky black hair flowing around her bare shoulders catches my attention first. It’s so black it shifts and picks up colors from the various neon signs lining the walls of the nightclub. Piercing, ice blue eyes meet and hold my gaze without any coquettish bullshit, either. This woman knows what she wants, and my eager cock painfully presses against the zipper of my jeans in expectation.
