He smiled, turning his eyes away, as if embarrassed for me. My smile, curves, fire, beauty, and sexiness melted into a naked blob of shame. Tears filled my eyes. I held them back as best as I could, but he must have noticed. When he finally approached me, it was with sympathy.

So it was that the first time I was touched sexually was with hands of pity. He wiped my tears away and kissed my cheeks. He said I was beautiful. I kissed him back, but I could not recapture the heat of moments past. He led me into the bedroom, turned out the lights, and laid me gently on the bed before he went into the bathroom. I waited, a confused spectator to my own life, until he returned, slipping next to me in the darkness. His erection and nakedness awakened my body to move in complement to his. He stopped to reposition himself a couple of times, clumsily, as if executing a chore. Whatever had stirred in me was gone, and I resolved to do the best I could to get through the night, sure that I had done something wrong. Finally he slid inside of me, and I began a performance, determined to overcome his disappointment and make him love and want me.

Moaning the way I had seen actors do in that old porn tape, I faked pleasure through the discomfort of being penetrated for the first time. I was waiting for it to feel good, hoping nothing was wrong with me, wanting it to be over, wondering if this was what it would always be like. Thinking about having a baby. Whether my body was beautiful. And if I was doing it right. Mama had said it might hurt, and she was right. But I thought it would feel special and sweet too. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists. He was mostly quiet, sometimes instructing me to relax. He struggled, unable to keep an erection until he turned me on my stomach and entered me from behind. I had seen this in the porn video too, and tried to mimic what the actress had done. I was in pain as he began to breathe harder and moved faster inside of me. Finally he whispered, “Tamara!” and collapsed and rolled off.

I woke up a few hours later to find him naked on the balcony, crying softly to an indifferent moon, a cigarette burning between his fingers. I went back to bed quietly, knowing his tears had something to do with the name he had uttered tenderly into the air above my back. Alone in our bed, with my head under the sheets, I whispered the name to myself: “Tamara.” But sound lodged in my throat, and I swallowed it back whole, so now Tamara lived in me too.