Why does it sound like I’m trying to convince myself?
Because it feels like I am.
I think that I’m only feeling this way because the old Maisie would never do something like this.
Then again… the old me would haveneverlost her virginity to a stranger in a grungy, dirty bathroom at a bar either. The old me wouldn’t have even stepped foot in a place like that. Or ever thought about going there in the first place.
But the new me, the one who shops for her first vibrator in the middle of a day on a Tuesday and who goes to hole-in-the-wall bars and meets handsome, broody strangers, is doing things that the old me never would.
And not feeling guilty about it.
But just because I’m embracing my new self and my new sexual journey doesn’t mean that I haven’t thought about that night, abouthim, every single day since it happened.
I haven’t been able tostopthinking about him.
It wasn’t just the way he touched me, as if he had already learned everything about my body, memorized the spots that made me whimper or the places to caress that made me melt into his touch.
It was because I felt drawn to him.
In the most physical way.
Out of everyone in the bar that night, he’s the one I felt this inexplicable magnetic pull toward. We didn’t even exchange names. It felt intoxicating and reckless, but in the best possible way.
In a way that made my heart race and my pulse pound.
Exhilarating.
It was the way that even though it was a random hookup, it still somehow just felt like… more.
A connection Istillcan’t even really explain, despite spending the last couple of weeks unable to think of much else.
I’ve spent the days since it happened simultaneously trying to both forget about it and relive every single moment of it over and over again.
Blowing out a breath, I swipe my fingers over the touchpad of my laptop, scrolling down the website page that’s cleverly titled “The Lust Lab,” which has an overwhelming number of toys and vibrators that, truthfully, I have absolutely no idea what they are or how they even work.
It’s not lost on me how sheltered a life I’ve lived until recently. Before I finally got enough courage to stop thinking about changing my life and to actually do it.
Hence, the reason I ended up at the bar that night. If I didn’t throw myself into the water, then I was never going to learn to swim.
I’m very, very well aware of how many things, even as a girl going into her junior year of college, I haven’t experienced yet.
Mostly by circumstance because my entire life, I’ve been Maisie Delacroix…PastorDelacroix’s only daughter.
My father is still the pastor of the church that I grew up in.
But in the last few months, I’ve come to the, at times, painful realization that I no longer want to be the pastor’s daughter.
The one who everyone thinks has to be straightlaced, pristine,perfect. Always held up to standards that are archaic and outdated.
Standards that are suppressive.
I no longer want to be that girl. Naive and sheltered. Who only gets to experience the world through a single lens.
I just want to be… free. Liberated.
Free to be whoeverIwant to be, not who is expected of me by my parents, society, or my daddy’s congregation.
Even if I still have to figure out who that girl is and what this newfound journey of freedom and self-discovery will be.
