When JD proposed, I accepted. I thought why the hell not, I’ve tried every other type of lifestyle. We have a little suburban house in a liberal college town. Now I decorate the yard according to the appropriate holiday, an inflatable turkey for Thanksgiving, enough Christmas lights to blind an airplane landing in the next city. We eat at Applebee’s on Friday nights. The bills get paid and I’ve finally found a brand of kitty litter/dishwashing liquid/paper towel that suits my busy modern lifestyle.

I know I’ve settled. JD weighs over 400 lbs and he’s not very interesting, but he’s nice. After a string of disastrous relationships, he seems stable and reliable. I’m not unattracted to him. He works two jobs, so he isn’t home much, and when he is, he’s watching sitcoms. I work 50 hours in an office and work on my nursing degree at night. We get along.

The logistics of having sex with JD are not complicated. The rare times we do have sex, I’m on top. It’s all very vanilla and perfunctory, especially considering that I wanted my last partner to hold a gun to my head while we fucked. I haven’t told JD very much about my past, sex-wise. When I try to, he says I’m not that person anymore and he doesn’t need to know.

One night after too many watery Margaritas from Chi Chi’s, JD says he has a confession. He asks me to turn the light off because he can’t even look at me while he tells me this. It’s been weighing on him, not telling me this.

Taking a deep breath, he tells me when his friend Jeff had his bachelor party, they all went to a strip club somewhere around Detroit,  then they went to an Asian massage parlor. There were prostitutes there, and he didn’t know that they were going to go. He swears. But they had a few beers first, he didn’t know what he was thinking, so he went in too. He confesses he got a blow job, but she put a condom on him before she blew him.

“That’s it?” I ask. “How long ago was this?”

“Eight years,” he stammers. He sits in silence waiting for my terrible judgement.

“That’s the single most interesting thing you’ve ever told me,” I say. “Let’s fuck.”