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Towards the Light…
Although swinging had not been mentioned except by my cybersquib-firing
one-night stand, Ned’s advice too found an echo in me. I dared
to consider that what had always seemed unquestionably right might
in fact be wrong and vice versa.
Eventually, inevitably, there came an evening when Tony and I were
sober and neither angry nor anxious to play consoling roles, just
exhausted and concerned each for the other.
I still had not confronted the monstrous spectre of failure and
permanent rift, but I suggested, as have so many other girls that
I know, that we ‘take a break’. I needed to ‘take
time out’ – maybe a year - travel on my own, ‘find
out who I was’ and what I wanted, then return. The vague cliches
of the me-generation gushed from me that night. |
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Bemused and embarrassed but determined to seize the opportunity,
I also confessed that I had strong sexual desires. I had not indulged
these, not because I had any sense that they were morally wrong in
themselves, but because I had not wanted to hurt Tony. They were,
for all that, overwhelming.
It was not, as I have said, that I had been deprived of sexual experience
in youth, nor that Tony was an indifferent lover. He wanted skill
and imagination, perhaps - or, at least, he did not share my wild
fantasies and was too inhibited to indulge or reveal many of his
own – but he was loving and considerate and, until we reached
the stage where our very voices caused us to flinch and wither from
remembered hurt, well enough equipped, physically and spiritually,
to take me where I sought to go.
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