Married Sex: Fact & Fiction

How Sex With a Pirate Ruined Me Forever

This is an excerpt from Married Sex: Fact & Fiction

My first lover was Brandon Birmingham, captain of The Audacious, a merchant ship set for the Orient.

He'd mistaken me for a prostitute and had his way with me before he knew the truth — that I was actually an eighteen-year-old orphan who'd run away from a cruel aunt who hated me for my beauty and Irish ancestry.

Did I forget to mention that Brandon's eyes were deep gray, which reflected not only the tempestuous seas he tried to tame, but also his tempestuous feelings for me, and the swells of my ripe, luminescent orbs of breast flesh?

How I loved Captain Birmingham, despite the fact he was a fictitious character and that I was, in fact, a flat-chested 12-year old engaged in Kathleen E. Woodiwiss' bodice-ripper The Flame and The Flower.

Bodice-rippers and the rock-hard rogues in them were my first lovers. I couldn't get enough of their steel-hewn thighs, the hard bands of muscles across their granite chests, the cruelly sensuous curve of their lips and other assorted throbbing charms.

They were dangerous — pirates, knaves and gypsies — but also had second identities as lords, marquises and noblemen with more-than-willing women trailing them like the steam from a turn-of-the-century locomotive.

Yet Lucien, Dominick, Ridge and Sinclair ended up only having eyes for the heroine, telling her secrets they'd never told anybody, becoming emotionally vulnerable in ways they'd never imagined possible and all the while turning up the sexual heat to eleven.

What I couldn't possibly comprehend was how little fact would resemble fiction.

In college, at USC, I fell in love with rugby-playing Patrick, who seemed to have all of the physical attributes and genteel-yet-roguish manners of Eduardo, the Marques of Litchfield.

After a month of skillful kissing and petting on Patrick's part, I was certain he was The One. It was time to surrender my maidenhead. And I knew exactly how it would happen.

We'd meet for our tryst in the Bridal Suite at the historic Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel on rose-strewn bedding. I'd wear the white, silk rose-embroidered nightgown that my lover's mother, the tragically deceased Marchioness of Litchfield, had worn the night she became pregnant with little Eduardo, I mean Patrick. (Okay, fine. I got the nightgown from Nordstom.)

My hair would be long and silken and Patrick wouldn't be able to get out of his breeches fast enough.

So imagine my surprise when I lost my virginity on the floor behind a couch in the living room of the cockroach-infested campus apartment my love shared with three other rugby players who, incidentally, could be heard farting like a twenty-gun salute in the next room.

I was still wearing my USC Trojans sweatshirt and my thermal socks, the popcorn strewn beneath me left little round divots in my butt flesh. And I was fairly certain my sex talk -- "Get off of me, you're crushing my ribs!" -- was a real turn-on.

I remember thinking, in that very moment, "This is what that fucking Kathleen E. Woodiwiss was talking about? What a load of crap!"

Years went by. A few more men came and went until I fell in love with my husband, Henry.

We bore two beautiful daughters and throughout those early parenting years I opened nary one bodice-ripper. I was too busy reading that damned overzealous, J.K. Rowling night after night to my progeny and nothing else.

Then the summer of 2010 rolled around. I was turning forty-five, my kids were six and eight and didn't need me to keep them alive on a moment-to-moment basis. Which meant I could, perhaps, selfishly read just for me during our one-week vacation at a rental on the sand in Newport Beach.

Coincidentally, as I picked up supplies for the trip at Costco, I noticed a rack of romance novels on the checkout stand.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed two of the trashy books based solely on which covers depicted the most provocative clinches.

I stealthily slid them to the cashier, hoping fellow shoppers wouldn't notice.

For one full week, I buried my nose in those books, with the covers removed so no one could bust me.

Despite my now age-appropriate, intellectual cynicism, the books managed to get me just as hot and bothered as they did when I was young. And then a terrible thought reared its ugly head – I worried that, just like my first encounter with my college sweetheart, real sex would suffer by comparison.

But something funny happened instead.

As a middle-aged vixen of experience, I'd learned that these books were meant to be inspirational rather than aspirational. I realized they were meant to be used, much like a sex toy, to revivify sexual desire that middle age, with its hormonal attrition, can sometimes dampen (and not in a good way).

I'm currently smitten with Midnight Rider, which features the dangerous, dark and imposing Ramon de la Guerra. What Henry doesn't know, as he toils in our outdoor office today, is that tonight, we ride.

The End

To read the rest of Married Sex: Fact & Fiction you can download from the Kindle store here: http://www.amazon.com/Married-Sex-Fiction-Shannon-Bradley-Colleary-ebook/dp/B011CKDJ2C/