LOVE, AND WHAT IT MEANS
Peter Tennant
© 2000 and 2001 Peter Tennant
Amanda cried after they slept together for the first time. She didn't mean to but she couldn't prevent herself, the emotion was so overpowering, and he held her tight, on his face a look of such concern.
'What is it? What's the matter?'
She shook her head, wiped her eyes with the back of a hand.
'After all I went through with Geoff I thought I'd never enjoy making love again.'
'What...?' He stopped, unwilling to ask about what had happened in her marriage, territory she had always made clear to him was strictly off limits, but the unspoken question hovered there in the room like a dark cloud. She saw that he needed to know and if she didn't speak now then it would always lie between them. Better to get everything out in the open and exorcise its hold over her. And so she told him all about the whips and the handcuffs and the knotted silk scarves, about the golden showers and the anal sex and the beatings, all the things that had been done to her and left their imprint on her mind, scars on her soul that would take years to heal. He listened patiently, incredulIty and disgust on his face, but when she had done Amanda looked into his eyes and saw there a sick fascination that was new and yet, somehow, familiar.
'How could you let him treat you like that?' he asked, unable to keep the note of condemnation out of his voice.
'I loved him,' she said, and knew that he wouldn't understand.
He touched his lips to her forehead, the most tender of kisses, but he would not meet her eyes and there was a catch in his voice when finally, as she had known that he would, he asked her, 'Do you love me?'
[Love, And What It Means was originally published in UNHINGED #6 (September 2000)]
UNHINGED Online © 2001 Paul J. Lockey and PJL Press
This page last updated: 07 March 2001