Free The First Time (Love in No Time #1) by Bitsi Shar Page A

matters of family accompanied by a sense of obligation to them as the eldest male child that has resulted in so much angst against them. Not that he didn’t work hard to provide for them. He did but beyond bringing home the bacon he wasn’t anything else to them. Empathy was a foreign word in that family.
    I guess I am different. I am not family. With me there is possibility of intimacy that every guy at his age, or any age for that matter, desperately seeks. Do not get me wrong. I am not talking of love as in “I’d like to spend the rest of my life with you.” I am talking of love as in coming—inside someone for the first time. I am talking about the reality (not just the possibility) of having sex with a girl who is willing, familiar, and not an obligation. Willing is the operative word here.
    For a girl in this culture to be willing and available without a certificate of marriage is a rarity. It couldn’t happen which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen at all. One didn’t hear about it often enough which is the important marker of the permissible and the non-permissible in a culture. I was willing and available. The fact that I didn’t live with my family instead sharing an apartment with my friends in Delhi formalized my willingness as a sexual partner.
    To be willing and then have no space to enact that willingness kind of negates the very idea of “willing” and also of “available.” But the fact remains that I am an Indian girl but like a girl anywhere else in the world I have cultural access to stories and fables of love and sacrifice. I am brought up to believe in the notion of love but at the same time have no cultural freedom to enact this notion with someone, somewhere. So in a way I have to believe there is love but at the same time to believe love doesn’t exist.
    So in a way I can like boys but have no access to them in order to express that liking, even in the most innocent of ways.
    Boys were fabled to be bad. They wanted only one thing, I was warned. And there was only one thing that can happen from the bad things that boys wanted to do to girls—pregnancy. So to avoid becoming pregnant outside of marriage, avoid boys.
    Parents told their girls to stay away from boys as if this manner of cultural abstinence was enough to prevent a gigantic cultural shame from happening. They never thought to tell their daughters about protection as prevention. They just wanted to avoid the sex question exactly like the way they avoided having sex beyond their procreating years.
    I doubt most parents were doing it after their kids were born. Rather the one time they did it was on their marriage night and then the pussy and the penis were forgotten relics. But here we were—him and I working against cultural edicts. He was a boy I liked and I was the girl he liked. His hormonal reactions to me he had managed to couch in a language of romance that enticed me against my better judgment.
    Can boys in my culture really do romance even as a means to getting sex with a girl? I doubt it. So this begs the question—is he a player?
    If he is a player then he has cut his teeth elsewhere. He has practice. And practice makes a man perfect his art of seduction of girls seduced already by cultural notions of love. So the next question is—where is he finding surfaces to crack his teeth on?
    This is Gurgaon for god’s sake. It is a small town at the edge of Delhi. There are no receptive, willing girls here. They live a protected, ignorant life. They wouldn’t know how to be even receptive to his kind of treatment. They would instead be affronted and deem him a roadside Romeo not worth their time or attention.
    They would deny their own pleasure in his expression of his pleasure because pleasure has consequences, for it steps outside of cultural prescriptions in order to be requited. Pleasure is forbidden. Maybe that is why I was being the typical girl—reacting to his expression of pleasure in this “I am appalled