Branded(3)

I’m not a slut, let me just remind you of that. This wasn’t some skeezy, porn-style double-penetration. One only held me, his dominant presence a soothing, calming foil to the other, a man whose touch brought me more pleasure than I’ve ever felt before. On the surface, it felt exactly how I thought it would feel, but on the inside, the experience left me feeling hollow…empty. I had more orgasms in one sitting than I’d ever had in my entire life and my body was on fire as one licked and pushed and sucked while the other’s hands roamed over my shoulders and slid through my hair. The fire was all on the outside, though. My skin was covered in sweat and flushed with pleasure, but on the inside, I was a cold block of ice that nothing could thaw, not even multiple orgasms.

I suspect my inability to let go of the past and my desire to live out one of my fantasies has something to do with my love of power. My current shrink will tell you that my need to control everything around me along with my penchant for always keeping a pack of cigarettes in my top drawer when I don’t smoke is because of my childhood. It’s always because of your childhood, isn’t it?

A quiet, pleasant teenager who helped old ladies cross the road takes a gun into his high school and blows away twenty-five of his peers. “His parents must have done something wrong.”

That nice, older man who waved to everyone and always brought chicken parmesan to the neighborhood block parties had seven mutilated corpses buried in his basement. “I bet you he was abused by his mother.”

The college student on a full scholarship who always made the dean’s list, volunteered at homeless shelters on the weekends and was the head of his youth group at church drugged and raped seventeen girls on campus. “His father probably let him play those graphic video games when he was younger.”

The sweet, beautiful girl who loved to dance and draw pretty pictures for her mother to hang on the fridge likes to brand her skin. “I bet you her mother skipped town and her father liked to take out his frustrations on her by stabbing a lit cigar into the smooth, pale skin of her eight-year-old body.”

Sometimes the shrinks are wrong, but in my case, they’re probably right. I couldn’t stop my mother from leaving, I couldn’t stop my father from using me as a punching bag and an ash tray until I was old enough to fight back and I couldn’t stop the boy I thought I was in love with from taking something from me and then running away as fast as he could. But this, this I can control. I say when, and how and why it’s going to hurt. I administer the pain myself because it’s better than letting someone else do it. If someone else hurts you, they have all the power. I refuse to give up my power.

Borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, daddy issues, mommy abandonment issues…I’ve been given all the typical labels at one point or another, but I refuse to let them define me. I’m Sicilian. I have a temper and an attitude and I like being in charge. So what if I’ve carried on my father’s discipline tradition? Who cares about a few burns here and there when I feel like life is going too well for me and I need to bring myself down to earth? My father was a genius at knowing exactly when things were looking up for me so he could knock me down a few pegs. An optimist is a fool, and I am no one’s fool. I’m a realist. Some people just aren’t meant to live happily ever after and float away on clouds full of rainbows and puppies.

I was born on October 15, 1981 to Rosa and Antonio Giordano and, for eight years, we had a nice, normal life living in the suburbs. Then my mother decided to fuck the principal of my elementary school and skip town, never to be seen again. My father used to get a cheap thrill out of telling me all about how she got remarried and had a new daughter. A better daughter. An obedient daughter. One who didn’t make her mother want to run away.

Good for her.

She was smart to run away. According to my father, I was nothing but a burden, deserving of every bad thing that happened to me and the root cause of all the bad shit that happened to him. The burns are a way for me to never forget that fact. I’m nothing if not consistent.

I slide the slim, royal blue dress up my body and run a hand through my thick, wavy red hair. The dress is a little on the tight side through the chest and hip area, but that’s exactly how I like it. My cleavage pushes up perfectly in the dress and I add a light dusting of shimmer powder to bring even more attention to that general area. After a spritz of my favorite spicy perfume, some nude lip-gloss and my four-inch blue stilettos with rhinestone straps around the ankles, I’m ready to go.