Delilah's Diary #1: A Sexy Journey (2 page)

I made it an hour and half before the first tear dripped off my nose and onto my yoga pants. The only other passengers were near the front, several rows up, asleep or wearing earbuds. I let a sniffle out, and then another tear.

The storm swept over me, then, and I collapsed across the other seat, the armrest hard and biting into my side. I didn't care. I let the tears rip free from me, sobbing until I was exhausted.

When the storm passed, I levered myself into a sitting position again, and found an older black woman sitting in the seat across from me, eyes wide and brown and kind, gray-shot black hair tied back in a bun.

"Caught your man cheatin' didn'tcha?" Her voice was a gentle rasp.

I nodded, dabbing at my eyes with the hem of my triple-XL Disneyworld T-Shirt.

"It ain't the end of the world, you know. Just the end of what you knew." She sidled across the aisle and sat next to me, took my clammy hand in her dry, papery one.

"What I knew
was
my world. He was my first, and my only. I saved myself for marriage, till I was twenty-one. I've never even kissed another man." The old woman just nodded and squeezed my hand, so I kept going. "We went to the same high school, the same college. I've known him my whole life. We dated for five years before he proposed, and in that time I never even
looked
at another man. I've been with Harry for thirteen years. Since I was sixteen. We barely kissed. On our wedding night, he—he got drunk, and so did I. I don't even remember...doing it. I remember it hurting a little, and then he fell asleep."

The old woman laughed. "Well, sweetheart, I hate to say it, but that may have been for the best. First times ain't what they're cracked up to be. My first time was damned awful. Course, he wasn't gentle, none."

"Harry was always gentle with me. Treated me right. Took care of me. But...it was always the same, with him. We'd get in bed, and he'd move up behind me and start touching my boobs. I'd...roll to my back, and he'd put it in, and then he'd finish, and that's it." I sniffled and looked out the window. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm telling you this. I don't even know your name."

"Susan," she said, giving my hand another squeeze. "You go ahead and tell me. You gotta tell someone, don't you? I been where you are."

"My name is Delilah," I said.

"Delilah. A pretty name for a pretty girl." Susan brushed a lock of my waist-length mouse-brown hair out of my eye. It was a grandmother's gesture, and it made me feel better.

"I spilled coffee on myself on the way to work this morning. Just a few hours ago. I went home to change, and I found him in our bed with the pastor's wife. She looked like she was enjoying it more than I ever did." My cell phone rang, and I shut it off.

"I found my husband just the same way. There was an accident at work, everyone got sent home. Came in to find him with my best friend. 'Course, he wasn't just doin' her. He was in her butthole. He tried to do that with me, once, but I wasn't havin' none of that." Susan shook her head. "He was my first, too, my husband. Wasn't my last though, and I came to find out what I'd been missin'. That's what you should do."

I looked at her in surprise. "In her...he was putting it in her butt?" I made a grimace of disgust. "Yuck. What do you mean, you found out what you'd been missing?"

Susan laughed. "Well, it sounds gross, but it's pretty nice, if he does it right." She gave me a serious, searching look. "You've had your world turned upside down, Delilah. You've left your home, and that's a good start. My advice? Just live life. Do things. Have an adventure. Meet a man and don't hold back. It doesn't have to be love, you know. It can just feel good, too."

Her words hit me hard. I wasn't sure if I wanted to believe her or not. What she was telling me went against everything I'd been brought up to believe in, all my life. I was a Bible-reading, church-going Christian. Sex was part of marriage, and an expression of love. Nothing else. Anything else was a sin, and an abomination before God.

Then her first admission filtered through. "Wait, you've done it...back there, with a man?"

Susan laughed uproariously, then leaned close. "Delilah, you just ain't got any idea what you're missing. There's a whole world waiting for you out there. Start with the simple stuff. Kiss a man, first. If you've never done anything but with your cheatin' ex-husband, then you gotta start simple. Go somewhere far away and figure out who you are. Just you start there. Find out who you are."

I talked with Susan all the rest of the way to Chicago. The last thing she said to me, before we parted ways on the platform, was life-changing.

"Delilah? Get a makeover. Change how you look. Go wild, girl. Who you used to be is gone. Be someone new."

She kissed my cheek, squeezed my hand, and walked away. I took my braid in my hand, my waist-length braid that had never been cut, and then looked down at my yoga pants and my tattered T-shirt, and realized Susan was right.

It was late afternoon by then, and I was alone in Chicago. I hadn't eaten anything that day, and I was getting shaky from hunger, so I took a taxi to a little restaurant I'd visited when I was here on my business trip, then found a room at the same hotel.

I stood in the bathroom of my hotel room after a shower, naked in front of the mirror, examining myself. My hair was nut-brown, loose, past my waist when unbraided. My eyes were a vivid cerulean, like sun-lit sapphires. Five-foot-seven, one-eighty on a good day. I touched my thirty-eight DD breasts, still perky but definitely heavy, with dark areolas the size of half-dollars, thick nipples. Wide hips, and a round but tight ass, always a little bigger than I'd like, no matter how hard I tried to make it shrink.

I ran my hands through my hair, which had never been truly cut in all my life, only trimmed an inch or two here and there. If I was going to get a makeover, it would start with my hair. Cutting it would be brutally difficult.

My skin was one of my best features, I'd always thought. Creamy and fair and flawless, soft as silk and white as porcelain. I ran my hands over my breasts, feeling a faint twinge of something electric deep in my belly as my palms whisked across my nipples. I'd heard women could pleasure themselves, but I'd never been brave enough to try. I mean, sure, I'd touched myself, learning my body as a little girl. But I knew without having to be outright told that to touch one's self like
that
was a sin, a dirty, worldly sin as bad as lying or stealing or using cuss words. As a young woman I'd hoped my boyfriend and then husband would provide the pleasure I wanted, and then when that didn't happen, I started to feel like to touch myself sexually would be cheating on my husband, and of course, there was the lingering stigma surrounding masturbation from childhood. I started a few times, when Harry was gone and I was desperate for any kind of pleasure in life, but I could never summon the courage to keep going.

Now, I slipped my hands down my sides and to my waist, running them down my full hips, and around to my thighs.

Should I? The idea of touching myself to feel sexual pleasure still made something deep in my psyche twitch with disapproval. Reason enough to try it. I was on a mission, I realized; I had to leave behind everything I used to be.

What better place to start than this?

I touched my breasts again, lifted them, then let them down and took a nipple between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and squeezed, gently at first. Oh my...the electric current shot through me as I pinched myself, rippling down through my belly and into my knees, to my thighs and to my...

What should I call it?

I couldn't think of a word I liked. Vagina? No. I dismissed that one as too clinical. I thought of all the words I'd heard in movies, from the lips of the vulgar, read in my secret erotica novels—my one dirty little secret. Twat? Too foreign-sounding, too insulting. Cunt?
Hell
no; too filthy. Pussy? That was the word used in the erotica books the most.

I ran my hands down my belly and pushed my fingers into the triangular thicket of curly hairs. I liked that word.

"Pussy," I said the word out loud. It echoed in the small bathroom, an accusing sound. I said it again, pushing past the feelings of guilt and stigma.

"Pussy. I'm going to touch my pussy." I giggled. "Pussy, pussy, pussy."

I giggled again. Saying it so many times in a row made it sound like I was calling a cat.

I tried a sentence I'd read in my latest book: "I'm going to finger my pussy."

That sounded better.

I was blushing, though.

I put one hand on my breast...I adjusted my thought: my
tit
—and rolled the nipple between my fingers again, and then, just for variety, flicked it, quite hard. I gasped, and felt something dampen between my legs. It felt good. Very good.

I traced a finger along the crease of my pussy, still feeling a twinge of guilt at the nasty word. I wondered what it would feel like to put my finger inside. Would it feel like when Harry put his penis in it?

I felt nauseous thinking of Harry, so I pushed his name from my mind, resolving to never think about him again, unless I had no other choice.

Watching myself in the mirror, I put my hand over my pussy and dipped my middle finger into my entrance, a slow, hesitating, exploratory swipe. I felt wet, very wet, and warm, and—even to my small finger—tight. An unwilling image of Harry's penis flashed into my head, and I marveled that he'd fit in there at all, without it hurting. I remembered Marge's statement that Harry was small. What on earth would a bigger man feel like? Would it hurt? The times with Harry that I felt any pleasure at all was when he took his time, went slow, rather than just hump, grunt, and pass out. He would move inside me, and the slippery sliding, the feeling of being full...it was delightful, but it was always over too soon, just as I began to feel something building up inside my belly.

That pressure built now, way down deep, as I toyed with my nipple. I slipped my middle finger in again, as far as I could go, up to the knuckle. Oh, that was nice. Very nice. It wasn't enough though. Summoning my courage, I slipped my index finger in with the middle one. Even better. Both fingers dipped in, stroked the entrance and feathered around the boundaries, touched the walls, and then out and up to the keyhole-like area near the very top. I found a little nub, a button. It was stiff, almost like...like a penis in miniature. I touched it with a tentative finger, and immediately my knees buckled with a rush of intense sensation the likes of which I'd never felt before, mind-blowing pleasure that had me reeling. With my knees trembling, I gripped the edge of the sink, slipping in the water puddled beneath my feet and nearly fell.

Regaining my balance, I glanced over my shoulder at the bed, still made. I would be so much more comfortable doing this on by back, in bed. I laid down on the bed, still naked, and spread my knees apart, feeling wanton and sinful.

One touch to the little button had made me dizzy...what would it feel like to touch it until I simply couldn't bear it any longer? Time to find out. I knew what the fold of skin was, incidentally: my clitoris. I knew my anatomy, after all. I was hopelessly sheltered, not a complete moron. But knowing anatomy, or reading about the hero of an erotica novel "laving her aching clit with his tireless tongue" was a whole different story than masturbating for the first time at the age of twenty-nine.

I quested inward with my two brave fingers, touched my clitoris...my clit...again, and couldn't help gasping a little, just a quick intake of breath at the intensity of the feeling. More movement, then, a slow circle...oh god...why have I never done this before? The circle sped up, and then a wild pressure built up in the pit of my stomach, in the muscles of my legs and the small of my back. My hips began to flutter on their own, writhing me on the bed and lifting my spine clear of the mattress in an arch.

I heard myself gasping, nearly hysterical little whimpers escaping my lips as I began to move my fingers around my clit in a blur, and now fire was raging through my body and the pressure was expanding in an uncontainable whirlwind and I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming because my body was coming apart at the seams. I was frenzied, thrashing on the bed, hyperventilating, waves of pure intensity bursting through me, centered on the nexus of my pussy.

The waves became unbearable and my body turned hypersensitive, and I had to let myself go limp on the bed, panting raggedly. "Oh...my god...that was incredible." I was talking to the empty room, but I didn't care. If that was what I could do to myself, without really knowing what to do or how, then what could a man who knew how to give pleasure do to me?

The thought made me shiver, a shudder of anticipatory excitement, and not a little fear.

* * *

I fell asleep after that, exhausted from the day's events. I woke up in the late evening. I left the hotel, unsure where I was going or what I was going to do, but determined to do
something
. I wanted to start my life, and myself over. I was on a journey of self-discovery.

The thought struck me as cliché but true. My first inclination was to record the events as they happened. I'd kept a journal all the way through high school and college, and while I'd abandoned the habit in the wake of marriage and my career as a small-town journalist-turned-editor, I still found myself composing diary entries on my way to work, even though I never wrote them down.

I was a writer by trade. I'd majored in journalism because it had seemed a more viable way to make a living writing than with some nebulous dream of "being a writer." Now, with everything I knew gone and my future waiting to be written anew, I found myself not just wanting, but
needing
to start journaling again.

So I found the nearest place that sold electronics and bought a netbook. It's small, cheap, and portable, underpowered and low on memory but all I need for typing journal entries as I travel.

At some point between leaving home—or what had been home—and waking up that evening I'd decided I was going to travel, see the world. I had money, essentially stolen from my husband...soon-to-be
ex
-husband...and I was determined to make use of it.