Never.

He was so close, she could see the individual follicles on his unshaven cheek: a plantation of oily black holes sprouting tiny branchless trees. She thought about trying to count them, drawing an imaginary fence between the diamond stud in his earlobe and the first grey whisker on his chin. But she couldn’t concentrate. He was hurting her too much. 

She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her head back into the pillow, willing herself to soften beneath him, despite the pain. He would be done with her soon, and then she never had to see him again. 

My god, she thought. If those teenage bitches could see me now. At sixteen, heart thumping and legs shaking, she had risen to her feet in front of the whole school assembly to pledge to remain a virgin until she was married. She was the only one who had stood that day - a lone mast swaying in a sea of sniggering peers.

To remind her of her vow, the visiting speaker gave her a silver ring; her classmates gave her a label. Both spelled social suicide and took years to lose - much longer than her virginity, which she gave away shortly after her eighteenth birthday on a humid Sunday afternoon in her boyfriend’s grimy share-house bed. It was a huge disappointment - both the act itself, and the fact that she now regarded herself as soiled. Spoiled. 

From that day forward, well into her forties, every one of her sexual encounters was a ménage à trois: her partner at the time, her, and Shame. Shame arrived like clockwork, just at the point she was letting go, letting herself be in the moment, letting herself feel, instead of think. He covered her mouth with freezing hands, sucked the heat from her groins, fixed her eyes with his condemning glare, and made her sob when it was over.  

Her husband grew used to her sudden silence during and the tears afterward, and, in the years before their sex life dried up completely, would roll off her, murmur something placating, and drift into the sleep of the simple and sated, unaware that he had just shared her, once again, with an unseen Other.  

And now here she was, submitting her body to this stranger, a man she had met only half an hour before. Mercifully, Shame was, at last, a defeated foe, and nowhere to be seen. But she couldn’t shake the thought of how her kids would react if they knew what she was doing.  

Ah, her kids. Another thing she vowed that she would never do: have children. As the product of an alcoholic father and a Borderline mother, she had long declared that the odds of her raising functional, secure humans were too slim, and the cost, too great. She was convinced that no matter how well-intentioned or well-read she was, she would screw up royally, and that her unwitting offspring would have no choice but to navigate their way through the mess she had made of their upbringing.  She trotted out this response to anyone silly enough to enquire about her childless status after ten years of marriage. To drive home her point, she cited the fact that hundreds of hours (and thousands of dollars) of therapy had barely made a dent in the psychic damage her own parents had wrought, not to mention the dodgy genetic material she had inherited: a predisposition to addiction and mental illness, blotchy skin, thin hair, and an air of intellectual arrogance.  

And yet.  

And yet, they came.  

Three blond, blue-eyed wunderkinder, born in quick succession in her late thirties, each with the olive skin and thick tresses of their European father, each bringing more light into her life than she ever believed possible. There was no doubt: her children had saved her. They had taught her selflessness, humility, and playfulness. Her love for them had transformed her from a sleek, one-dimensional, global careerist into a textured, creative, full-hearted woman whose favorite place in the whole world was at home, entwined with her family on their giant feather-filled, fingerprint-marked couch.  

The man shifted position suddenly and she let out a yelp. He paid no attention, not even looking up as he continued his rhythmic back-and-forth movements. The amount of pain surprised her. She was expecting some, but not this much, not so continual. She inhaled deeply to try to stop the tears from coming. The man’s skin smelled of old cigarettes and Old Spice. It reminded her of her ex-husband.  

Ex-husband. Former husband. Previous husband. First husband. The Arsehole Narcissist. She still hadn’t settled on what to call him. It had been five years, but the end was so swift and final, and the decision so unexpected, that she still found it difficult to consider herself a divorcee. She was never going to be a divorcee. Even on the darkest days, she never considered leaving. Marriage was for life, no matter how grim. This was a non-negotiable, a solid line she would not cross. And then, somewhere around their 22nd wedding anniversary, came the note. A piece of legal pad paper folded twice and placed furtively on her desk by her bespeckled boss one Tuesday afternoon as she was getting ready to leave for the school pick-up run.  

“You are showing all the signs of a woman in an abusive relationship,” it read. “Please talk to someone.”  

At the bottom was a helpline number. She waited until she was alone that weekend to call it. That was the first domino. The rest fell quickly, forming a new solid line: tile upon tile revealing emotional, physical, and spiritual abuse, control, gaslighting, and financial irresponsibility. Sick with fear, she told her husband what she had seen and could no longer unsee. He denied and blamed, threatened and mocked, dared her to leave him “if she was brave enough”.  

A hastily-booked marriage therapist saw them for three sessions. At the end of the third hour, he sat in silence, neither inviting them to book their next appointment nor to leave. Finally, he spoke - an executioner’s voice, low and gravelly with the weight of his pronouncement. In 36 years of practice, he had said this only twice: it was clear that they were beyond the point of any possible repair. All he could offer was to assist them to “uncouple with dignity”.  They tried. They didn’t do well.  

Above her, the man paused. 

“I’m rolling you onto your side,” he said.  

She gripped the edges of the bed.  

“Why?” she asked. And more desperately: “Do you have to?”

“Yes,” he said. “This is how I finish.”

In one deft movement, she found herself staring at the wall. Obviously, she was not his first. The wall was covered with photos. As she felt the man’s hands slide down towards her hips, she trained her eyes on an image. It was a person’s limbs. The next image was, too. And the next. Limbs of all shapes and sizes, skin color, and age. Rapidly scanning, she landed, finally, on a photo of a chest. Strong. Muscular. Hairy. No hint of the dismemberment of the others. On the left pec was a tattoo of a hand holding a heart. Wow. She had always said that she would never get a tattoo, but that one was beautiful. 

Instinctively she shook her free arm to hear the tinkle of her charm bracelet, the one piece of jewelry she never took off. On it, hanging between the Eye of Horus from the backpacking trip in Egypt, and the eagle pendant from the pub in Oxford where The Inklings used to meet, there was the shape of a heart, enclosed in a pair of masculine hands.  

This memento was only a couple of years old: a gift from a man that used to be one of her closest friends. The night he gave it to her, he leaned across the table, looked deep into her eyes, and made a promise: I will hold your heart in my hands always, and I will keep you safe. Nobody will ever be able to hurt you while I am in your life. He made his declaration of love and commitment without asking for a response. He knew she would resist, he said, but he also knew what he wanted, and he would wait.  

Moved by his earnestness, and irritated by the implications for their friendship, she met his soft, chocolate-eyed vulnerability with a directness that bordered on cruelty: she would never be able to return his love. She had vowed that she would never be with a man younger than her, shorter than her, or who was a father to still-young children. He was all three.  

He smiled. “I know.”  

And then, with a surety that both irritated and intrigued her: “you’ll see”.

She held onto her protestations for months. He held onto his promise. Her girlfriends told her that she was crazy, rejecting this relationship on the basis of archaic, culture-bound numbers and a fear of what other people would think. Slowly, she arrived at the same conclusion.  She had not traveled this far to be ruled by the kind of Tinder tripe she despised. 

She let herself fall into his hands. In doing so, she fell into safety beyond anything she had ever known. She fell into love.  

“Okay, done”. The man stood up and stretched.  

As he released her, she flopped unceremoniously onto her back. "So that was it," she thought.

“Wanna see?” he asked.

“Yes please!” she said.  

The man held out his hand and helped her sit up. “Easy now," he said, guiding her to her feet. He pointed to a full-length mirror leaning up against a wall in the corner of the tattoo parlor. “Go on then.” 

Gingerly she walked towards the mirror, gathering her shirt up around her breasts as she went.  

“Oh wow!” she exclaimed as she caught her reflection. “That’s perfect! Exactly what I wanted! Thank you!”

He grinned. “Glad you like it,” he said. “It’s a cool way to mark a half-century of living. Happy birthday.”

The woman smiled and ran her fingers along the fine black serif script now curling from her ribs to her hip bone.  

"Never Say Never," the words declared.  

At last, a promise she could keep.