“I know, I know.” I made the same face back. “But that’s how I was raised to think about it. If your purity was tainted—by lustful thoughts or kisses or more—then you were forever smeared by those sins. I remember one time in youth group, my pastors passed around a glass of water and had each person take turns spitting in the glass; when they were done, the pastors held up the glass and asked if anyone wanted to take a drink.”
“Gross.”
“We were told it represented what happened to a girl when she gave her purity away before she got married. We also did the same thing later by passing around a rose and plucking off all the petals—and once we did the exercise with a piece of tape until it lost its stickiness—anyway, my point is that I grew up thinking purity was this binary thing that you had or you didn’t, and once it was marred even the tiniest amount, there was no going back. You would go to your future husbandcloaked in shame, and always know that he would be the bigger person for accepting you, even though you weren’t fully pure.” I tried to remember how I’d started talking about this part. “So I was excited to get married, because the sooner I was married, then the sooner I was free from worrying about it all the time.”
I’d been so desperate for my wedding night, thinking it was the answer to everything, and then sex had hurt so much I’d snuck into the bathroom after, crying silently in the dark. Wondering if God was punishing me for some sin I couldn’t remember committing.
Kallum seemed to know which way my thoughts had gone. “But it’s not like getting married means you made it to sex Valhalla.”
“No. Sex was...” I shook my head. “I guess you already know how it was for me, given that I didn’t have my first real orgasm until a couple weeks ago.”
His arm tensed under my hand, and from the press of his mouth, I could tell he was trying very hard not to say whatever it was he was thinking.
But he didn’t need to. I’d already said it all to myself, a million times.
“I know, believe me,” I said quickly. “The orgasms just—they didn’t happen at first, and the longer they didn’t happen, then the harder and harder it got to ask for them to happen. And asking was already really hard, because godly women are supposed to automatically love sex with their husbands, and if I didn’t, maybe that meant I wasn’t godly enough. And maybethatmeant Michael would be able to see I wasn’t godly enough,and I couldn’t bear the idea of that. So I started faking it, faking feeling good, and hoping that at some point it would take. Like, maybe if the dinner was romantic enough, if I lit the right candle, if I justtriedharder, it would happen.”
I glanced down at where my hand curled over Kallum’s peacoat-covered forearm, swallowing. “And then I eventually gave up. I thought maybe I was supposed to be taking pleasure inhispleasure instead. Maybe that was the ‘joy in the marriage bed’ married women talked about, and the idea of having an orgasm at all was selfish. Michael’s joy would be in my body, and my joy would be in his... love. I guess. And that would have to be enough. That, and children.”
Children that never appeared no matter how many basal body temperatures I recorded or how many ovulation test strips I peed on. In fact, I’d been about to see a doctor when I saw a text come through on Michael’s phone. From Olivia, sent with an awkwardly angled selfie of them having sex in a Tahoe hot tub.Miss you and miss this, read the text.
So anyway. I hadn’t had to make that appointment after all.
“Winnie, you weren’t stupid,” Kallum said. “And I could punch Michael in the taint for making you feel that way.”
His fierce defense of me made my stomach jump.
“Thank you,” I said, looking over at him. We were in the middle of town now, the Christmas lights from the tree catching the gold in his hair. “Thank you for never making me feel, I don’t know, weird. Or prudish.”
His eyes when they looked at me were soft, as dark as the sky above us. “I get it, though. I didn’t have the purity stuff goingon, but I know what it’s like to be pushed out of childhood too early. Except for me, it wasn’t being pushed toward marriage, but toward this sort of ‘being nineteen forever.’ Old enough to be hot, but no older. Mature enough to know how to handle fans and their moms constantly hitting on me, but not so mature that I was allowed a steady girlfriend.” His lips quirked up, although it wasn’t really a smile. “Not that there would have been time, anyway. If we weren’t touring, we were recording. If we weren’t recording, we were doing press. If we weren’t doing press, we were rehearsing for the next tour. Every minute was filled with INK, and while we made time for getting into trouble, there wasn’t time for anything else. Much less a date like this.”
“Then I’m glad we can go on a date like this now.” I squeezed his arm as I thought of those sheltered or overworked teens who never had a chance to do something as simple as go to a movie with someone cute.
“Me too.” His dimple flashed. “This is exactly the kind of date I would have taken you on too. So long as there wasn’t an arcade in town, at least. Nothing is more romantic than getting your ass handed to you in Skee-Ball.”
We walked up to the glassed-in ticket booth at the front of the theater, and Kallum bought our tickets to the movie.
“So what happens next on our teenage movie date?” I asked as we walked inside and handed an employee our tickets.
“What’s next is I buy you some popcorn, and also fill up a little cup with butter to make sure we appropriately drizzle all the geological layers of the popcorn.”
“I do that too! Well, now, I do. Before the divorce, I only ate popcorn without butter.”
Kallum, now in the midst of paying for our snack, swiveled his head to look at me, like I’d just admitted to eating sawdust in my spare time. “What?”
“You know,” I said, waving my hand around my body. “To maintain the official Winnie Baker image and all that.” It had only been after Michael and I had separated and I’d lost my Hope Channel work that I’d learned how to feed myself—actuallyfeed myself. To enjoy food, to eat when I was hungry, to learn what feeling full felt like.
“But I have a new official Winnie Baker image now,” I said, and Kallum grinned, holding the popcorn butter cup as if to toast me with it.
“I’ll drizzle to that.”
Maybe not so surprisingly, we were the only ones seeing a twenty-year-old Christmas movie in March, and my heart gave several quick, jumpy beats when I realized that Kallum and I would be alone in here during our grown-up teenage date.
Kallum seemed to be thinking the same thing, because he shot me a wicked grin over his shoulder as he led me up the shallow ramp to the seats in the back. This was an old theater, without stadium seating, and the back was shadowed enough that if anyone did come in, they wouldn’t be able to see us.
Peeling off our coats felt like a striptease; when Kallum first put his hand palm up on the armrest of the seat and I grazed his pinkie with mine, it was on par with the buzz of the Peppermint Stick.
By the beginning of the movie, we were palm to palm, our fingers laced with each other’s, and by the time Iris and Amanda decided to switch houses, Kallum’s free hand was stroking myknee over my jeans. I felt each circle of his fingertip like it was on my breast—my pussy—and it feltgood. Not shameful, not chased with guilt.
