Bent But Not Broken, Isla, Part Two
Our first date was set for Tuesday, June 13th, 2023, just about a month after I had texted Isla for the first time. The date formed around a plan to watch Arrival, a movie we both loved. We arranged to take a drive up a nearby canyon, find a nice spot to settle in, and watch the movie on my iPad. I drove to where she was living at the time to pick her up, at a house that her brother, Isaac, and, oddly enough, her ex-husband, Luke, rented together. Isla had told me that she and Luke hadn’t really talked for the first couple of years after they split up, but had slowly warmed back up to each other over time and eventually had become friendly again. She had just finished moving in, and was grateful to be settled after a significant period of residential uncertainty. Isla answered the door, flashed me that irresistible sly, shy smile, and invited me in. She was dressed in sleek, dark clothing that accentuated her figure, and I reflexively mouthed “Wow” to myself after she turned around. I followed as she ascended the staircase off the entryway, the moment pregnant with the thrill of danger her shadowy, furtive femininity represented to me should I advance on her too carelessly. At the top of the staircase was a common space, and Isla gestured to where Isaac and Luke were on a couch nearby watching TV. I introduced myself to Luke, who I hadn’t met yet, and the four of us chatted amiably for a few minutes before Isla and I departed.
We got in my car and began driving the winding road into the canyon, talking and just enjoying being together in the glow of a romantic ember finally given space to catch fire. As we drove, a heady mix of joy and excitement washed over me that I had this wonderful, beautiful person all to myself for that entire evening. After some searching, we found what looked like a suitable spot, a campground with only one other car parked nearby. It was early June, which is typically warm in the Salt Lake Valley, but in the mountains in the evening it can still be fairly chilly. We'd dressed appropriately and had blankets, and we towed some pads I'd stashed in the car to a nearby campsite. I had brought enough blankets and pads so that Isla wouldn't feel pressured to sit too close if she wasn’t ready for that. We constructed a comfortable spot to recline and Isla eased in next to me, our hips not quite touching. I then situated the iPad in my lap and started the movie.
Before long, Isla had inched closer, and I responded by wrapping my left arm around her shoulders, drawing her in. Giving in to the magnetism I’d felt since the first moment I saw her, my other hand reached across my lap toward her, and she grasped it hungrily. Our fingers began to dance again as they had weeks before, intertwining and unwinding, the tips of my fingers gliding up and along hers, her fingernails gently scraping my palm, up and down. So preoccupied by her touch, scent, warmth, and proximity, paying attention to the movie had become nearly impossible for me. Some mysterious, fundamental force of nature seemed to be pressing us together, urging us to surrender. Looking down, her head cradled against my chest, I found her already gazing up at me, as though she had been watching me for ages, a look of pure serenity on her face. Isla's huge, inimitable, gleaming emerald eyes now swallowed me up and became my entire universe. Flashing with the reflected light of the screen I held and the promise of a blissful energetic union, I let myself fall into them.
Kissing Isla for the first time was electric–I felt the hairs on my arms stand on end when our lips touched. Within a few minutes, we were lost in one another, our bodies separate but our spirits playing happily and freely. The movie we'd planned to watch had been exposed as nothing more than an excuse to do this instead. We spent the next hour or more kissing, touching, and whispering to each other. Isla repeatedly brushed her lips along my ears, breathing softly, “Wow, wow, wow.” It was like nothing I'd ever felt. I'm fairly sure even now it was like nothing she had ever felt. There was a moment when one of us pulled away long enough to notice a strange string of lights moving through the sky, far overhead1. Back down below, floating in the vast inner-space of new romance, Isla and I shared our feeling that this was a sign, a confirmation of the inevitability and destiny of our union, and portending the magic and ecstasy that was surely to come of it.
It was that “magic,” whatever its true nature, that sustained us for the duration of our brief relationship. When we were together it felt like time came to a stop, and there was nothing at all in the world except the two of us and the powerful energy that flowed between. We knew and understood each other as if this was only one of a hundred lifetimes we’d shared. We both individually experienced energetic memories of each other as other people with other names in other places. Isla admitted that she had, after all, wanted to come sit next to me at the breathwork class the night we met, but that she felt too awkward. She also admitted that after we danced together at Ecstatic Dance, she had gone out to her car and had, as she would put it, “a giggle fit.” It seemed the massive crush I’d had on her from the moment I first saw her was equaled only by hers on me!
Honey. That was the pet name Isla used with me, and it was the sound of adoration itself. The intimate familiarity of something as simple as, “Hi, honey,” struck a chord inside me I’d never heard before. Even now, I don’t know what it was about that word and it coming from her that felt so good. I called her “darling,” a name I’ve never used with anyone else, but did with her because it felt right, and she loved it.
Like me, Isla had been diagnosed with ADHD. Like me, Isla often had trouble with social interactions. Like me, she had struggled with debilitating anxiety. Those three things aren’t necessarily noteworthy on their own (Amy and I also have them in common), but it was the way we approached and dealt with them that felt so resonant. Isla’s tendency to withdraw and take up as little space as possible is something I related to deeply. Her struggles with self-worth mirrored many of my own–a voracious appetite for knowledge and growth hampered by a frustrating inability to stick to any one approach or modality. Her pervasive uncertainty that she was ever truly cared for by the men in her life mirrored my own feelings of unworthiness of the affection of women unless I looked a certain way and provided certain things to them. I felt like I could speak openly with her about my deepest insecurities, and no matter what she accepted me. She knew how to speak directly to the matters at the root of my heart.
“I love how deeply you feel.”
“I love listening to you, and hearing how you think.”
“You are so worthy. You are so beautiful.”
Isla knew how to speak to parts of me I didn’t even know existed until she drew them out with a look, a kiss, or a word. Without any instruction from me, she seemed to know exactly how I liked to be looked after, talked to, and touched. We played little games. She would often watch me intently, silently, her eyes darting around to take me in, her fingertips stroking my cheeks. Her head would loll, and her eyes would roll back, as if in a rush of euphoria, and she would coo “Did you know? Did you?” I would shake my head and, even though I knew the answer, through a reflexive grin I would ask “Did I know what?” She would laugh, softly, and say “That you’re so fucking hot.” Then she would pull me in to kiss me, and I would melt into her. It was so perfect it actually began to scare me, because I didn’t know what it meant. Was it even real? Was I just making it up? How could I reconcile this otherworldly, dreamlike experience with what I otherwise knew to be my reality, one in which I had a wife whom I loved more than anything in the world and a family that I would protect at any cost, including my own happiness?
As if in answer, Isla and I began flirting with trouble immediately. That very night, the night of our first date, I had told Amy I did not know exactly when I would be home, but I knew there was a limit on what was reasonable. However, instead of doing what was reasonable, I gave in to my desire to continue feeding greedily on the transcendent experience I was having with Isla, and I did not get home until almost 2:30 am (which, at 41 years old, with a demanding full-time job, and three young children, is not ideal).
The following day, I could sense Amy was feeling some apprehension. That evening was Ecstatic Dance, and Isla had asked me if I wanted to accompany her, which of course I did. When I talked to Amy about it, she was supportive, but expressed concern about my lack of sleep from the previous night, and asked when I would be home. I told her I thought I would be home soon after it ended around 10 pm so I could get to sleep early. Amy pressed gently, asking me if I really did intend to be home then, and I told her I did, but I also said that it was possible Isla and I might want to hang out for a little while afterwards but that I “planned” to be home by 10 or 10:30 pm in any case.
Instead, for the second night in a row, I was out until after midnight. Isla and I weren’t able to spend as much time together before Dance as we thought we would, so afterwards Isla suggested we might get something to eat. I texted Amy and told her what we were thinking, and asked her if that was okay. Amy responded in the affirmative, so Isla and I spent the next hour or so together. When I finally got home, I could sense something was off. Amy was distant the next morning, and, starting to anticipate trouble, my text exchanges with Isla that day included a suggestion that we start setting curfews, and sticking to them, which Isla was in full support of.
I did not see Isla again until two days later, which was a Friday. During the interval, Amy had made it clear to me she was not comfortable with how easily I seemed to be swayed into changing my plans when I was with Isla. In Amy’s view, I was beginning to display a pattern of inconsistency, which caused her to feel unsettled. She told me she was upset that I had not come home when I told her I would on Wednesday evening after Ecstatic Dance right on the heels of staying out until 3 am the night before. I struggled to understand what the problem was, since I didn’t feel I had made any strong commitments, but merely had established an intention, and the consequences of not getting to sleep at a reasonable hour were largely mine to bear. I also felt that I was allowed to have this experience, even if it made Amy uncomfortable, since I felt I had given Amy the same freedom when she first started dating Clark several months before.
This tension between me and Amy was still unresolved as of that Friday morning. Amy had taken the boys to a pool party about 45 minutes away, and I had decided it was best to stay home as I had to work and I was on-call, which required me to stay close to my laptop. Isla and I had been texting through the morning, and after some back and forth around noon we decided on a plan for her to get us coffee, bring it over, and we could take a walk around the neighborhood or just hang out for a bit.
I didn’t expect Amy home for another hour or two, but unbeknownst to me (and for an unrelated reason) she had left the pool party early and was already nearly home. As (bad) luck would have it, Amy pulled up to our house within a minute of Isla. Amy, already upset with how I’d been managing things, was not receptive to Isla’s presence at our home at that particular moment. To Amy it looked as though I had made an excuse to avoid accompanying her and the boys so that I could spend time with Isla. The fact that I hadn’t informed Amy that I had invited Isla over only served to confirm Amy’s suspicions. As I came out the front door, Amy appeared visibly upset, and Isla could only stand there in obvious discomfort and apologize helplessly. I tried, with no success, to smooth things over, but Amy dismissed both of us to go off and be together, since that’s “clearly what we wanted.” Unsure of what else to do, and knowing of nothing I could say to Amy in that moment that would reassure her, I decided the best thing to do would be to try and at least explain what was going on to Isla. We drove to a park just down the road and spent an hour or so talking. Isla mostly listened, trying to comfort me as best she could.
That evening, Amy and I had planned to take the boys to Venture Out, a weekly summer community event series that includes activities and a pop-up market. Isla and I had continued texting since our talk at the park earlier. The situation between Amy and me had not improved over the past hours, and I was growing despondent. As I worked to corral my boys at Venture Out and give Amy space, I told Isla I was sorry for what was happening, and that if she needed to walk away I would not blame her at all. I reiterated to her that Amy and I were very new to polyamory, and it was likely there would be more bumps on the road like this for a while as we worked out the kinks. I hoped that by presenting Isla with the opportunity to walk away right then, at the beginning, before we became too entangled, she might carefully consider the heartbreak that would inevitably result from forging ahead if she was not sufficiently prepared. In fact, I fully expected her to conclude this actually wasn’t in alignment with what she wanted, after all. There were tears in my eyes as I wrote these messages, already believing I could feel her slipping away from me.
Instead, surprising me once again, she told me what I hoped to hear more than anything–that she did not want to walk away from me, that she believed in us, and that I was worth fighting for. She said that she wanted to remain respectful of Amy and my marriage, but that she didn’t want to not know me, that she understood what she was getting into, and that she didn’t see why this couldn’t be an opportunity for us all to improve communication and boundaries. Isla also said something else that, at the time, I don’t think even registered for me, which was that if we needed to go back to being friends, that was okay too. I think it’s indicative of where I was at the time that I entirely forgot that part.
Over the next day or so Amy and I, as we had learned to do through hard-won experience, kept talking and trying to figure things out. We laid bare the motivations and intentions behind our actions, began to clear up the misunderstandings, and started to come back into alignment with each other. Isla and I continued our own communication, and I was floored at how mature and thoughtful she was through all of it, greatly boosting my confidence that she was in this for the long haul, that our connection mattered to her, that I mattered to her. A day or two later, with Amy’s full support, Isla and I would spend the night together for the first time. We had not had sex yet, nor did we that night, but we did engage in some intimate activities that presaged the introduction of two new complications into our fledgling relationship: first, Isla’s sexual trauma and, later, my own performance issues.
I do not wish to dwell too much on the two topics just mentioned, but they did play a part in what came next, so I feel an obligation to include them. Early on, Isla had explained to me that she had significant sexual trauma that would certainly make itself known should our relationship progress. She did not give me details on the nature of the trauma or where it originated, and I did not ask, wanting to give her space to volunteer only as much as she wanted. Isla told me that because of this sexual trauma and because of the depth of our connection, she wanted us to wait a while before we had sex. I was supportive of her wish, and we settled on a date that would land about a month after our first official date. We talked of taking a weekend away somewhere together for that first time, somewhere we could focus on creating something beautiful and new and intimate together. Isla teased the concept of a “three-hour sex date,” something she’d heard about on a podcast, which sounded like the most enjoyable way to spend three hours I’d ever heard of. Personally, I had no need to wait, but I had no intention or desire to pressure her.
That we did not plan to have sex for another few weeks or so did not, as you’d probably guess, prevent us from doing other things. During one of our first “under clothes” encounters, Isla requested that I stop what I was doing, explaining it had triggered a trauma response and we needed to slow down. This pattern repeated itself multiple times over the next couple of weeks. My hands would begin to wander, and with her encouragement I would bring her to an increasingly aroused state, then she would stop me. Sometimes, after a few minutes, we would continue, sometimes we would not.
When I look back, the physically intimate experiences I had with Isla seemed a sort of microcosm of our connection as a whole–seemingly perfect at first, but unable to stand up to the shearing forces of two people headed in very different directions. At the beginning, before we had any real experience being together, we were both awestruck at our apparent physical compatibility. The first time we held each other, we both commented on how beautifully our bodies fit together, like they were designed for each other. The sharp angles of my long, wiry frame, a frequent source of insecurity for me, seemed to perfectly encompass Isla's petite, picture-perfect figure. Her head stopped exactly under my chin, her breasts nestled perfectly in the hollow of my chest, her legs exactly the right length to wrap cozily around mine, or to allow our feet to caress one another. We both chattered excitedly to each other about how amazing the sex would be, once we got there. It seemed inevitable, like it was destined.
One encounter sticks out in my mind as illustrative of the potent but confusing course our sexual relationship would take. We were laying down in bed. She was on her back, on top of me. My left hand was between her legs, beneath her underwear, touching her, reveling in her exquisite softness and warmth and the way she rhythmically tightened and relaxed around my fingers, driving me into fits of scarcely-controlled desire. My right hand roamed around her body, down her side, over her hips, sliding to the inside of her thigh, pressing upward slowly over her belly, her ribcage, her breasts, her neck, her chin, her lips, and then back down, venturing wherever her body seemed to be asking for my touch. I kept at this for a long while, her soft moans growing louder over time, her hips beginning to buck, gently at first and then with more force as she surrendered to the weight of her longing. As her excitement grew, she seemed to become imbued with the raw force of eros, a locus of pulsating sexual energy so powerful I felt myself pulled into her ecstasy, slipping into the writhing red and black edges of a maelstrom, with her at the center. She was so magnificent, so unfathomably deep and powerful, I sensed I was worshiping the Goddess Herself. Instead of flowing through, time appeared to bend around us, and we became wrapped in a cocoon of eternity, forever, just us. All my hopes and dreams, my wants and needs, condensed down into this singular, perfect moment. In reverent awe of her, my emotions swelled in a flash flood, overflowing, and I blurted out “Oh, my God, Isla. I think I’m in love with you.”
Time began to move again, sluggishly at first, then faster. I don’t know if she heard me for the storm she’d conjured, but after several tense, implosive seconds, Isla seemed to pull herself out of her trance, her body erupting with heaving, choking sobs. With tears running down her cheeks, she reached down to seize my hand in a shaking grip, whispering desperately for me to stop. I don’t know if she climaxed or not. I don’t know if she was happy or sad. I don’t remember what happened after that, I only remember not understanding what had happened, just hoping that she was all right. She never explained, nor did she mention it again.
A few days after that encounter was my friend Michelle’s wedding. Michelle is the sister of Clark, the man Amy fell in love with, and she also happens to be the first woman I ever fell in love with over a decade before. Michelle, herself being polyamorous and apprised of my general situation, had invited me to bring a plus one, and had, unprompted, indicated that it would be perfectly all right if I wanted to bring a plus two. I took her at her word, and asked both Amy and Isla if they wanted to come with me. It seemed fraught–attending the wedding of the first woman I ever fell in love with accompanied by the two women I was presently in love with, but it’s an experience I felt like I wanted to have. Amy was wonderfully supportive about it, despite having complicated relationships with both Michelle and Isla. Isla expressed a desire to go, despite some misgivings about us all three going together, but I felt confident that it would be okay. And it was! Mostly.
The wedding itself was largely uneventful. The location was a park about 45 minutes south. It was really nice seeing Michelle with her new husband. She seemed very happy, and I was glad to be able to attend since I had not been able to attend her wedding to her first husband several years prior. Amy was able to reconnect with members of Clark (who was not present) and Michelle’s family that she hadn’t seen in a while, and Isla seemed to enjoy getting to meet Michelle and spend time with both me and Amy. I was in heaven. Two of the three most beautiful women at the wedding were there with me, wandering around a beautiful park in beautiful weather. It seemed nothing could spoil such a moment. Then Isla asked if we could go somewhere private to talk.
The two of us excused ourselves from the wedding party and made our way to a more isolated location. There were some small trailer buildings on the outskirts of the park. The grass ended there, and the sound of our footsteps on the dry dirt return to me as I recall the apprehension I was carrying. We found shade against one of the buildings, leaning against the outside wall. Isla took hold of my arms and pulled me in close. She confessed that she was feeling conflicted, her feelings about me coming into direct opposition to her consuming desire for someone to love her and only her, to be her family, to have a family with that person, all things she didn’t believe she could have with me. This took me a bit by surprise. Our communication and conversations in the days leading up to the wedding had been very positive. Isla and I both had been expressing confidence in our budding relationship, and looking to take steps to ensure its continuation and success, and I was optimistic that Isla and I could somehow, on the strength of our connection, build something lasting together. From everything she had been saying lately, I believed she had the same hope. Suddenly she didn’t seem to be hopeful at all. While I understood why she felt conflicted, I didn’t think of it as an either-or proposition, so instead of being willing to grapple with her fears honestly and directly, I looked for a way to push them out of sight. I told her that I never wanted her to feel stuck doing something she didn’t want to do. I said she could choose to keep going until she couldn’t keep going anymore, and when she reached that point, we could end things without acrimony and go our separate ways. This seemed to mollify her, at least for the time being, and we returned to the wedding party.
Part of me still regrets how I handled this conversation. Part of me also wonders if it was just a profoundly stupid idea to invite Isla to such an occasion in the first place. Even before that day, I knew Isla wanted to be happily married in a monogamous relationship to a man utterly dedicated to her and her alone. Nevertheless, I had gone ahead and invited her to be my “plus two” at a wedding alongside my wife where the bride was once the object of my own love and who still had a lot of affection for me, and me for her. It’s obvious, looking back, that I was avoiding addressing Isla’s fears because they were also my fears, and I desperately did not want to confront the possibility we were not going to last much longer. I was already, without fully appreciating it, overextended, overly-attached, and in over my head. In that moment, I was simply trying to reassure her, but in doing so I had dismissed my own fears and, worse, I had dismissed Isla’s. That was wrong of me. It was especially unfair to Isla, who was trying to communicate to me that she was struggling with the situation and needed far more from me than a trite mote of reassurance and a pat on the rear. What Isla needed from me in that moment was empathy and love unconnected to our relationship. She was asking to be seen as a whole person apart from me, to be understood fully on her own terms, not simply seen as an entertaining distraction in my life. I didn’t ask the right questions–or any questions at all, to my recollection. I didn’t put her well-being above my own. I didn’t care for her like I promised I would. I failed her, and this wouldn’t be the last time. Isla was trying to pull me back to reality, an impulse unignorable by dint of her myriad adverse experiences, but I wanted to continue living in the fantasy I had created for us. This, I believe, was a breach of the tenuous trust she was attempting to develop toward me, with repercussions to come not long hence.
Not quite a week later, Isla and I spent the night together and broke our agreement to wait to have sex. We didn’t plan for it to happen the way it did, but it was practically unavoidable when considering how few precautions we bothered taking, and how unseriously I personally was taking the commitment. I feel a need to defend myself a little bit here, though. One of the reasons Isla had given for wanting to wait to have sex was because she feared it would change our relationship. More specifically, she seemed to be concerned that once we took that step, I might pull away or even lose interest in her. I knew myself better than that, but I had no intention of trying to convince her. Any attempt to persuade her would likely be seen as even more reason to wait, and I wanted Isla to feel safe with me. When I say I didn’t take seriously the commitment to wait, it wasn’t because I wanted to rush things or pressure her, it was because I knew her fears about my feelings for her diminishing were unfounded. I was in love with her.
A couple of weeks before this, when our relationship became romantic, Isla had begun expressing some discomfort with the idea of me being sexually involved with anyone other than her. She understood well that the fact that I was married made exclusivity with her a difficult proposition, and at the outset had explicitly accepted this as the price to be paid in order for us to continue to explore our connection. However, she had brought it up at least twice more after that, which had caused me to begin to worry that if I didn’t do something to alleviate her fears, she might decide the whole thing was too much and walk away, and I really did not want that to happen. Thus, in a misguided attempt to help Isla feel more comfortable, I’d subsequently had a discussion with my wife during which I suggested that we (Amy and I) push the pause button on our own marital sexual involvement to give Isla some time to “acclimate” to this situation. In retrospect, I recognize how ridiculous of an idea this was, but at the time, with my brain awash in a potent concoction of love and lust and excitement and worry, it seemed reasonable. Amy had recently become involved with a guy she seemed to really like, and in my view temporarily “pairing off” seemed to simplify the whole situation. Amy, at the time, seemed okay with this idea, and when I relayed it to Isla it seemed to set her greatly at ease.
The evening in question we were at Isla’s house. It was only my first or second time there. She was still in the process of moving in and did not have a bed set up, but rather had been sleeping on a memory foam pad on the floor. Isla had expressed apprehension prior to my coming about the state of her room, worried I might judge her. Her room was cluttered and messy, but I had no judgments. I was simply happy to be with her, the where and how didn’t much matter to me. Over the course of the evening, we had both gotten pretty high, and been making out for a while in various places around the house before deciding to retire to her room for the night. The configuration of her sleeping area forced the two of us very close together when we laid down, which didn’t bother either of us one bit. There we began engaging in amorous activities, both of us ratcheting up the tension as if together working the pulleys on the initial incline of a towering rollercoaster.
I was on top of her when we reached the apex of the incline. Our clothes were still on, but she had pulled my pants down enough that she could hold me and stroke me. She whispered things to me that every man dreams of hearing a beautiful woman say, begging for me to enter her, to take her. Often after whispering or kissing me or licking me, she would pull back and affix those huge, heart-stopping green eyes on mine. Her gaze had a way of drilling straight down into my innermost being, and I felt as if she really saw me, and wanted me, all of me. I could not recall a moment of being more turned on. I would not be the one to break our commitment to wait, but she knew I was willing to let her. The energy between us seemed to charge the atmosphere with a primal, shared need for one another. A need to be closer, to erase any distance between us. I felt Isla moving me, a momentary sense of mild pressure, then ecstatic warmth, and a shiver of intense pleasure. I shook myself out of my reverie. Looking down, I saw that I was inside her.
I almost couldn’t comprehend what was happening. This gorgeous, sensitive, brilliant woman that just a month before had been the subject of a silly, unrealistic crush not only wanted to be with me, but wanted to be with me so much that she had thrown out her own rules in order to clear space for me in her life and, now, in her body. Somewhere in the back of my mind, though, was the voice of my rational self. He was warning me that Isla’s flattering vacillations, for the moment in my favor, weren’t actually a good sign. He was certainly insisting that what we were doing wasn’t a great idea. Amy and I had an agreement that condom use was mandatory in all sexual encounters with other people, no exceptions. Not only that, Isla was not on birth control. And if that weren’t enough–something I had not yet told her about–I had been dealing with non-orgasmic pre-ejaculation since taking medication for anxiety several months prior. I’d only been on the medication for maybe half a year before discontinuing use, but that frustrating side-effect had persisted. It was clear I’d put myself in a very compromising position. I was coherent enough to know I theoretically had a choice to stop, but at that moment it felt like trying to stop an avalanche that had already started. It was too late.
For several moments, I dared not move. I was so aroused, not to mention surprised, that I felt sure any movement on my part would cause me to climax immediately. A number of teasingly pleasurable seconds later, I had managed to gather myself. As I moved away that first time, I felt how excited she was, practically dripping off me, and it sent my animal brain into overdrive. The first few minutes were spent riding roiling swells of ecstasy, the dam holding us back exploding outwards under the force of our mutual desire for one another, all barriers between us disintegrating as we gazed into each other’s eyes, our bodies moving with rapturous euphoria. There was a moment when I broke eye contact with her, supercharged with her pulsar-strength feminine power, and just laughed, practically delirious with the reality of having her, of loving her, and finally fucking her. I drew back and smiled at her. She met my eyes, flashing a perfect, soft smile meant for me and only me, and brushed her hand along my cheek. For some reason, I said “Have you ever felt more attracted to anyone in your life?” She shook her head and said “No,” and we resumed our rhythm. We removed our remaining clothing and simply enjoyed being in this blissful moment together. Isla’s body was like a silly adolescent fantasy come to life, and experiencing it in this intimate way was pure electricity. She performed a spontaneous demonstration of the benefits of her regular kegels practice, sending goosebumps in a wave down my entire body. As we made love, we spent many long stretches of time staring into each other’s eyes with such intensity I felt literal vertigo.
So caught up in the moment, it suddenly hit me that I had gotten way too close to orgasm for comfort. I’d somehow lost track of the fact that, due to the lingering side-effects of my anxiety medication, simply pulling out before the point of no return wasn’t sufficient. In reality, there was no amount of unprotected intercourse that could be considered reasonably safe for me to engage in with a woman who was not taking birth control, even putting aside the question of STIs. When my sense of adult responsibility finally did come back to me, I knew I’d let the ship run aground, and knew I couldn’t put us at further risk.
My body sagged, and I stopped what I was doing, moving away from her. I explained what was going on. As mentioned, I had not yet had any reason to tell her about my ejaculatory dysfunction since our plan up until that evening had been to not have sex for at least a couple more weeks, plus we’d both agreed I would use a condom. Now I had to disclose that very unsexy information in less-than-ideal circumstances. Oh, and tell her that there was now a non-negligible chance that she was pregnant with my child. Oops, sorry. So, I told her. Isla handled the information with as much grace as I could have wished for. She was caught off guard, obviously, but to her immense credit, she didn’t blame me or make me feel bad, and instead gracefully accepted that she was also responsible for the situation we were in. We discussed it for several more minutes, and I told her that no matter what happened I was with her, that I supported her, and that we would figure it out together. Isla then proceeded to give me the best blowjob I’ve ever had, and we went to bed on her cozy little pad on the floor wrapped in each other’s arms.
Within a few days, Isla and I had started discussing a plan for having me help her move out of the house she had only just moved into a few weeks before. Her ex-husband, Luke, had made a habit of smoking in the house, and the owners were understandably unhappy about it, and right before Isla moved in had informed all three of them that they would be required to move out by the end of the month, which was now that very week. That, among other reasons, resulted in the week of Isla’s forced exodus being a very tumultuous week not just for her, but also for me, and for Amy.
In the days leading up to Isla’s second move in a month, Amy and I had found ourselves again embroiled in conflict. I had admitted to Amy that not only had Isla and I had sex, but that we hadn’t used a condom, and that it was possible Isla could be pregnant. Not surprisingly, this information caused Amy to become upset. Amy and I ended up having an argument about my indiscretion with Isla, and the atmosphere was not helped by Amy’s feeling of disconnection from me as a result of, at my earlier suggestion, the two of us not having sex for a while as Isla became more comfortable with the arrangement. During this argument, I apologized for my mistake, and agreed that what I did was not okay. However, I also felt that it was reasonable to point out that Amy had engaged in some very unwise and risky behavior with Clark, which I felt I had handled pretty well. While that didn’t excuse my actions, I felt it should at least afford me some understanding and empathy in this situation. Amy, despite feeling understandably unsettled as a result of my immature behavior, agreed to work on extending me some grace.
So it was in this cloudy climate that on the last day of that month that I would make another rash decision that would shortly lead to the total collapse of the entire shaky edifice that was my relationship with Isla.
In keeping with my tendency to ascribe the magical to the mundane when it came to Isla, she would later inform me these were just Starlink satellites. Mulder, meet Scully.