“Uh-huh. Whatever. We’ll see. I haven’t decided to go yet.”

There’s silence on the other end for a few seconds, followed by Iris’s big gasp. “Oh, my gosh! He’s the guy!”

“What?” I’m silently begging her not to put things together.

“The guy you told me about before! The one you said you liked. Kenan’s in New York for the summer. You and he—”

“Ooooh, girl, you breaking up,” I reply hastily. “Gotta go.”

“Lo, I will need the details.”

“Bye, Bo. Kiss Sarai for me,” I say and disconnect.

Whatever is happening between Kenan and me is best left alone, and not poked at or simpered over by well-meaning friends. It’s our business. Not Iris’s. Not Billie’s or Yari’s. Not JP’s. That conviction goes beyond the concerns Kenan expressed to me today. It’s me just wanting whatever happens with us to be . . . different from the conquests I’ve bragged about in the past. I’m not ready to be more than friends with Kenan at this stage, but it’s already starting to feel special. None of the other guys felt special to me. Maybe because I’ve never let them.

Hearing Kenan talk about therapy yesterday, what it’s meant to him and to his family—how he endures the sessions for his daughter and how much he loves her—nudged me over the edge to do this. I’ve never had the kind of protection and commitment I heard from him for her. I had the opposite. A “parts unknown” father and a mother who never put me first the way Kenan does Simone.

I climb the stairs.

Inside, the church is modest and filled with empty pews. A makeshift paper sign on the wall reads “SUPPORT GROUP” and sports a red arrow pointing down. I follow a string of arrows leading to the basement, my heart clamoring with every step. When I reach the basement, two women walk past me, headed upstairs. One is sniffing, and the other is wiping the corners of red-rimmed eyes.

Dammit.

I finally work up the nerve to come in, and it looks like I’m too late. Maybe subconsciously that’s what I wanted.

“Can I help you?” a woman, maybe mid-thirties, with brown hair and kind eyes, asks.

“Uh, no. I . . .”

I’m what? A coward?

“I’m just, uh, lost,” I say, lying in church. “I thought the blood drive was down here.”

“It’s not until Saturday,” she points out with a slight smile.

“Yeah. I realize that now. I’m gonna—”

“I thought you might be here for the support group,” she interrupts, while packing paper plates and cups, putting away cookies.

She pauses in cleaning when I don’t respond immediately.

“I’m, well . . . like I said, I’m lost.”

We stare at each other, exchanging truth with a look, even as we skirt around it with our words.

“They were, too, when they first started coming.” She points up the steps where the two ladies exited. “Lost, I mean. It really can help to talk about it, even to strangers who have their own stuff—stuff like yours. To pull it all apart—find the pieces that don’t fit, toss them out, and get new and improved parts. Healthy parts.”

“Yeah, okay.” I turn to head back up the steps. “Well, good luck.”

“Maybe it’s good that you were late,” she goes on as if I haven’t already brushed her off and lied to her. “We could talk one-on-one your first time here.”

“Maybe another time,” I say, not even bothering to tell her she’s mistaken. “Have a good night.”

“You could tell me a little about yourself. A little bit of your story?” She pauses. “Or I could tell you a little of mine. It took me a long time to speak out, but now I do all the time. At first it was to help myself. Now it’s to help other people.”

“I’m happy for you, but I gotta get going.” I point vaguely north, the direction of my apartment, one foot on the first step leading back up and away from this conversation. “I live just a few blocks away.”

“For me it was my father,” she says softly.

I glance over my shoulder and meet her eyes. It’s not pain I see there, but the strength Iris mistakenly attributed to me earlier. This woman has it.

“It was my father who hurt me,” she says, and even though it’s not much above a whisper, it reverberates in the basement like a gong. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to say that? To admit it?”

I turn from the steps and stare at her, waiting for more. Needing to know someone got past this and could maybe give me a blueprint to do the same.

“It has taken my whole life,” she says, and I see some of the weariness in her eyes behind the strength. “For a long time, I didn’t even remember. They say God doesn’t put more on you than you can bear. Sometimes, neither does your mind. That’s self-preservation. The mind says, oh, she’s not ready for this, and hides it from us.”

She stacks the food and paper products neatly to the side on the table and sits in one of the chairs pulled into a small circle.

“But we can only hide or run for so long before the shit starts to show.” She laughs lightly. “Pardon my French in church, but somehow, I think God will excuse me. The things our minds do to protect us from unspeakable trauma may work for a long time, for years in some cases, and then one day, they just stop working. We deal or don’t. And if we don’t . . .”

Her words carry a warning—an urging to choose deal instead of don’t.

I remember huddling in Chase’s shower sobbing after perfectly good sex. I see my body curled into a ball, fetal, at the base of a hand-drawn tree in my closet. I smell the hair burning, the smoke curling around my memories. My peace of mind, up in flames.

Are you leaking, Lo?

Drip. Drip. Drip.

“I don’t know why now,” I say, sudden and without any context, but she seems to understand. “I’ve been fine. For years, I’ve been fine.”

“I was fine, too,” she says. “I’m Marsha, by the way.”

“Lotus,” I offer.

“Nice to meet you, Lotus. I’m a survivor, but also a licensed therapist. I run this support group for survivors of childhood sexual abuse,” she says. “So what brought you here tonight?”

“I‘ve been having some, uh . . . issues with sex. Things I’ve never dealt with before.”

“That’s not surprising. It’s where the injury took place, so for many of us, for most of us, our sexuality is affected. It is the thing that was deeply violated.”

“I thought I’d escaped all that. I’ve had sex for years and been okay. I mean, I put sex in a category, but I enjoyed it.”

“What was this category?” she asks, eyeing me closely. “Articulate it for me.”

“Sex was for my pleasure,” I say, swallowing hard, my mouth suddenly dry. “Do you mind if I . . .” I wave my hand at a line of water bottles on the table.

“Sure.” Marsha nods to one of the chairs in the small circle. “Have a seat, too.”

I hesitate. We’re talking, but I still feel like I could make my escape if I need to. Sitting down indicates we might be here for a while. And I’m not sure I want to be here much longer, but I grab a water and sit down. When I take the seat, Marsha smiles, but does a decent job hiding her satisfaction.

“So sex was for your pleasure,” Marsha says, picking up where I left off. “Sounds good so far.”

“It was.” I laugh, but it holds no real humor. “I know a lot of survivors have trouble with sex, but I’ve always enjoyed it.”

“Good for you, and yes. You’re right. I, for example, didn’t have my first orgasm until I was thirty-three.”

My mouth is hanging open, and I know it’s rude and insensitive, but damn. I can’t imagine. “Not even . . . touching yourself?”

“Masturbation was a big part of my recovery,” she says, her eyes never wavering while she shares such sensitive information. “I couldn’t experience pleasure with someone else’s hand. I had to feel safe with my own first.”

She tilts her head and winks. “Don’t worry. With a lot of therapy, hard work, and a very patient partner, things are much better in that department now,” she says. “A lot of relationships don’t survive the recovery process because we need so much control, and our partners can’t take it. Control related to our triggers, to the effects of our trauma. Sex requires a lot of trust. We forget how much sometimes—forget the magnitude of sharing ourselves that way.”

“I never had trouble trusting someone else with my body,” I say, frowning, wondering if something is wrong with me, with the way I processed everything. “But I could never trust them with anything else. No real . . . intimacy, I guess. I made sure they knew it was just sex. I’ve never allowed myself to feel anything else, but lately, that hasn’t been satisfying.”

“Part of healthy sexuality is knowing you are loveable and worthy even if you don’t offer yourself sexually,” Marsha says. “There can’t be real intimacy without some love or affection. If you blocked those completely, sex may have started to feel . . . transactional or purely a physical release.”

Marsha offers a one-sided grin. “If we have some time together, I’m sure we can dig around and figure out what you’ve done to survive. That’s all any of us do. We find ways to regain, or at least, to feel that we regain the control that was taken from us. We were helpless and are constantly looking for ways to make sure we’re not in that position again. Some people become hypersexual. Some can’t have sex at all.”

“I decided to take a break from sex,” I say. “and I haven’t really missed it.” Kenan’s face, his voice, his scent all invade my imagination, my memory.

“That’s common, too,” Marsha says, nodding. “It’s not unusual at all to have a season of celibacy while you sort things out. It sounds like you’ve been listening to yourself closely, and your instincts are guiding you well.”