My name is Sarah Bartowski.
When asked, this should never be a difficult question. Everyone knows their name, even if perhaps they need to pause to remember their name may have changed…either because they've gotten married or divorced. But, as with most things, that is more complicated for me.
I was born Samantha Burtman, the only child of Emma and John Burtman. I contend they never had any more children because they, in retrospect, should probably have never had even one. They were on the verge of breaking up, but somehow decided getting married was the better choice. My first memories are of them arguing. My first words were reiterations of curses they had previously tossed back and forth at one another. I also contend that what finally opened my mother's eyes was when she heard the phrase, "No good deadbeat loser" come from my own mouth to describe my own father, when I was just four years old.
But at four, I had no idea what that meant. I adored my father at that age, in my innocence. He took me to fun places, let me stay up late and watch television with him. He let me do pretty much anything I wanted, anytime I wanted. He bought me presents…things I wanted, and also things I would never have known I wanted until it was in my hands. He took me on adventures. He understood me in a way my mother did not.
She wanted a normal daughter. I say this, and I know it sounds harsh. There is no harsh intention here, only factual relaying of information. Her own life growing up had been difficult, and her hopes for me were that I could do all of the things that she had never had the opportunity to do. Her parents owned a restaurant, and it was their sole source of income. They worked night and day, and once she was old enough, so did she. They made her part of their struggles, instead of trying to shield her from that. She wanted to shield me from that. But my father would not allow that shield to stay in place. It was just one of the things they disagreed about all the time.
It took until I was seven years old before my mother had enough. I say that now, looking back with the wisdom I did not have when I was a child. The seven year old me blamed her for not loving my father enough, for not doing what she should have, for not saying what she should have, to make him stay. I later learned she actually threw him out. I grew to hate her for tearing my family apart. But, as I said before, she had merely had enough.
She had tried for eight years to stay married to someone who, truth be told, had no desire to be married to her. In his own way, my father loved her. I know that, because it was the same way he loved me. It was weak, selfish, and grossly insufficient, but it was love. My mother needed more than that. As it turns out, so did I, only, at seven, I had no idea that I did.
In an angry, screaming argument where I was crouched behind the sofa in our rented house with my hands pressed over my ears, I heard the threat. Well, then, we'll let her decide. No one in their right frame of mind–no decent, loving parent–would ask their seven year old to choose between their mother and father. But, that was exactly what they did.
So I chose my father.
Something else, unbeknownst to me until I was an adult, was that my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer about one month before that argument. She had no health insurance, considering she was a stay at home mother, and my father was a criminal. Once he was gone, she had nothing. She wanted me to go with him because she knew he at the very least could take care of me. She had actually feared the government would take me away from her and put me in foster care, if I'd stayed with her. I'm fairly certain my mother wasn't far from the truth to think that. During that time, she even dealt with a stint of homelessness.
Running with my father, assisting him in his grifter lifestyle, was the best thing for me at the time. It sounds horrible and tragic. Maybe it is, I don't know. But it was the truth. I missed my mother, but my father and I had so much fun that it rarely bothered me. We moved all over the place. Sometimes an entire school year would go by and I never set foot inside a school. What child wouldn't have thought they were living a dream?
It took years before I began to understand what exactly it was that we were doing. Oh, I always knew we were stealing. But my father had done such a good job of rationalizing it to me that it never felt like it was wrong to do what we were doing. People who had all the money had it because they did underhanded things to get it. They were greedy, uncaring people who wouldn't share. We were simply taking what was owed to us, what we deserved for being trodden down by life, for no one else caring about us. I honestly believed him.
We would rob armored cars at banks. We would trick people into donating money to causes that didn't exist, buy products that didn't exist, invest in ventures that didn't exist. All of it was winning to me, and I lived to win. My father taught me that before he taught me anything else. Once you know all the cons, you can never be a sucker. Just one of his many tidbits of wisdom he had imparted to me over the course of my childhood.
I don't remember how old I was when I started to question how we lived. Between the ages of seven and 17 we had lived in 25 different states. We had changed our first and last names almost 20 times. I only went to school rarely, usually as part of some con my father was planning that needed access to the school and/or parents of schoolchildren. But, the older I got, the more I questioned what we were doing. Not because I was learning about what was right, far from it. It was because I started to see the world as it existed outside my father's narrow view of it.
In the ten years that we moved around, I only ever really made one friend. It was the longest we ever stayed in one place…almost seven months, which was the majority of the school year in Louisiana. Her name was Julie. I was quiet and kept mostly to myself. I wasn't shy per se, but I had no desire to interact with my peers. Their lives were so different from mine it provided no basis for common ground. Schoolwork was the only common denominator. Julie and I started talking about math homework. She was chatty and friendly. I still never told her anything about me, but it never seemed to occur to her, because she just talked so much…about everyone else, about herself, about…just about anything.
Her parents were kind, decent people. She would take me over to her house after school while we studied. Her mother would bake cookies. There was nothing about Julie's parents that corroborated my father's words to me about other people. They weren't greedy or conniving. They showed genuine concern for me. They were good people. Everything that my father had told me about what everyone else was like on the inside…well, that turned out to be what he was like on the inside.
That happened when I was 14. I stayed with my father for three more years, grifting and stealing from kind people like Julie's parents. At that point, I knew it was wrong, and I would wish every day that I could find a way out. I wanted to go back to see my mother, but we had been gone so long at that point I had no idea where she was. Every day that went by I hated myself more and more for who I was, who I had become because of my father.
When I was 17, we moved to San Diego. My father actually enrolled me in the high school there. His con this time, he assured me, was the ultimate con. One that, once he completed it, we would be set for life. We needed to look like a normal family in order for that to happen. Partially brainwashed, desperate for a way out, I felt hopeful that he was right. That this would be it, and we could stop stealing, stop breaking the law. I did what he asked me to do. I became a normal high school student.
Although, if truth be told, I wasn't really normal, not like the others. I was, ironically enough, what they thought of as a nerd. I dressed funny, they said, like I was wearing my grandmother's old clothes. I was tall and awkward, skinny and underdeveloped for my age. I had no friends. I would sit alone at lunch and the popular girls would make fun of me. Despite my shy and withdrawn exterior, I was no weakling. My father taught me to defend myself. I was strong, and an expert with knives at 17 years old. They teased me, and I stayed withdrawn, secretly knowing I could take any of them, male or female, had they actually started a fight.
My name in that school was Jennifer Burton. Just one of many identities I changed like dresses. I wasn't really Jennifer Burton. Hell, I wasn't really any of those other names, any of those 20 different people. It had been so long since I'd been Samantha Burtman, I wasn't really her anymore either. I was no one. A faded, nameless nobody blended into the background of everyone else's life. My name here doesn't matter, other than to give some background. All of that story, as I'm sure you could tell, wasn't nurturing in any way for me.
I can't tell you my life story without talking about sex. Most of my life was defined by it, at least until I met my husband. It took me most of my life to understand why, but it's worth mentioning here, as I'm about to weave a very sordid tale. It sounds worse than it really was. My husband knows all of it, and he loves me anyway. He was the only person I ever told the whole story to. I trust him, more than anyone else I have ever known. My husband was only the fourth man I'd ever been with, even as I say what I just said.
I spent my entire life shutting down my own feelings. Grifting required it. The CIA–killing people–certainly required it. Even fucking was emotionless, by definition as I describe it. The throes of ecstasy that would take over during an orgasm were as close to feeling anything as I ever got. It was hedonistic pleasure and self serving, but something so intense as that blocked out the horror of life like nothing else could. My husband, in his caring and loving way, understood that, and changed what sex meant to me, once we were together.
But that is far in the future from this point. I wasn't a promiscuous teen, not even close. I know some girls with father issues, girls who needed attention or validation, girls with insecurities abounding, turned to sex, even as young as high school. But never me. I never even had a boyfriend. Like I said, I was awkward and objectively unattractive. I barely talked to anyone for friendship, let alone a romantic relationship. The boys stayed away from me, which never bothered me at the time. My knowledge of sex at 17 years old was limited to what I learned in health class. Detached, cold, clinical explanations of simple biologic functions. Male inserts penis into vagina, ejaculates semen, impregnates female. They taught us about sex, but not how to have it, or why anyone would choose to do it unless they were procreating. The thought of that was a bit frightening and intimidating. From television, it would seem that was a pleasurable thing…but I was missing something. In class, it sounded painful, at least for the girl.
It was with that cold, clinical understanding of sex, that I had my first encounter. Not myself of course, but, a real life experience nonetheless. Dick Duffy, a constant source of harassment for me at that school, had just made a very rude comment to me about being able to see what color my bra was through my shirt. He had an uncanny knack for embarrassing me in front of large groups of people. I heard a lot of individual hecklers laughing with him, and it got under my skin. I left the hallway, and ducked into the girls' locker room. When no gym class was in session, it was a quiet and safe place to hide.
Only this time, as I ensured the door closed slowly, to not make a sound, I realized I wasn't alone. I could hear voices, a boy and a girl, whispering and laughing. Did they know I was there? I suddenly thought in panic. I stayed perfectly still, not even breathing to remain silent.
It only took a few seconds for me to realize there was no way they had heard me. They were engrossed in a far more stimulating activity. They were laughing still, but with breaks in between. They were kissing. I moved to the edge of where I was standing, shaded in the dark even as I could see them under the pale fluorescent light dangling above the bench between the lockers. The boy looked like one of Dick's friends, his name not known to me. He played football and he was very popular. The girl was his girlfriend, a cheerleader, whose name I also didn't know.
"Do you have protection?" she whispered, pressed up against him. I watched her slide her hand down the front of his pants. How had I become a voyeur? I was ashamed, but I found I couldn't look away. I was too curious.
"Here? Now?" he asked, a little surprised, but lustily.
"I could either fuck up my Spanish test…or fuck you," she hummed suggestively against his ear. "Do you think I'm making the right choice?"
"Fuck, yeah," he growled against her neck. "Fuck me all you like."
He fell to a sitting position on the bench, and she immediately straddled him. He held her back while she fumbled with his belt buckle. I heard her unzip his fly. She reached in his pants and pulled him out. They were obviously old pros at this, I thought, for she opened the condom, slid it over him, then impaled herself on him so quickly I never got a close look. Was she even wearing underwear? Or just her short skirt? Either way, he had easy access.
She fucked him while I watched in the shadows, just as she had promised him she would. Seeing it happen like that was…eye-opening for me. She was bouncing on top of him with his penis deep inside her. She was moaning. She lifted herself and he thrust upward to match her.
They sweated, grunting, hammering away at each other for about three minutes before it happened. She stiffened, stopping her frantic motion, moaning but pressing her mouth against his shoulder. "Did you come?" I heard him ask her.
"Mmm," she hummed, like she had just taken a bite of a delicious dessert.
"Good," he huffed, continuing to thrust himself inside her for almost another two minutes before he groaned. "Oh, fuck, yeah," he added, out of breath.
Immediately she jumped out of his lap. It was when she stood that I saw she wore no underwear. I got a good look at his penis then, too, enrobed inside the condom, the tip creamy white and full of his seed. His penis was flaccid after the sex, but still, it looked impossibly large. She handed him a fistful of toilet paper at the same time she dabbed at herself between her legs. He pulled off the saturated condom into the nest of paper, threw it away, then wiped himself before he tucked himself back inside his pants.
She didn't touch him again, didn't even turn to smile at him as he stood. She adjusted her hair quickly in the mirror, straightened her skirt, and slid her bag over her shoulder. "There is nothing like getting off before history class," she giggled. She blew him a kiss without turning around. He acted like it was nothing, like nothing had even happened.
It was when I was alone in the locker room that I realized while I had watched the entire act, I had nearly soaked my underwear all the way through. Once I started walking again, I could feel my genitals rubbing against my jeans, in an uncomfortably tight way. I was practically swollen, with this burning, aching throb between my legs that wouldn't go away. I kept thinking about those people having sex, and it made the feeling worse. I lost all my concentration and barely made it through the rest of the day.
Was this what it felt like to be horny? I asked myself. It bothered me, both that I didn't know, and that I didn't have someone to relieve myself on, the way they had. For whatever I had seen was merely that…two people rubbing against each other until their muscles contracted in an orgasm. I was beginning to understand, at least part of it. Horny meant you were craving an orgasm, like one could crave chocolate or alcohol.
After what felt like forever, I rushed through the door of our rented house, glad I was alone, although my father was rarely home right after school. The thought of conversing with him when I felt this way was absurd, ridiculous and embarrassing. I had also learned in health class that what might offer me some relief was masturbation. Only I wasn't sure how or what I needed to do to myself to make that happen.
I went to the bathroom right away. Taking down my jeans was a relief of the pressure against my swollen vulva. Urinating felt strange, tight, and I was practically dripping with my own natural lubrication. Wiping myself with the toilet paper made me feel almost like my vulva was itching, but deep inside the lips and the knob above. Instinctually, I knew that knob was what needed to be massaged for an orgasm to happen.
I took off the rest of my clothes and jumped into the shower. The water was warm and soothing on my skin, but my entire crotch was throbbing. I grabbed the handheld shower head, twisting the dial around the edge until the stream of water was tight and fast. I directed the stream of water between my legs, between the folds of my vulva, until I felt the water pounding against my clitoris.
All in all, it only took a minute. That itch I had noted before intensified, at the same time I felt something like a rubber band stretching from behind my belly button and down to the spot where the water was hitting me. And then it let go. I had an orgasm, for the first time, at 17 years old.
It started in one point, one tiny pinpoint, and exploded like a firework. My vagina squeezed tightly, rhythmically, in time to the rest of my pelvis. I felt my clitoris vibrating, my vagina squeezing, while I felt a pull on what I guessed was my uterus, all the way back into my anus. Every inch of me tingled, and I was covered in goosebumps as I gasped for breath. It was the most incredible feeling I had ever had.
I slid down the wall of the shower, my legs shaking so badly they couldn't hold me. Oh my god, that felt so good. I thought of those teenagers again. Why not skip class, and hide in the locker room to have sex? Why do anything else, when you could feel like this?
My mind started racing. What would that have felt like, orgasming against something? If my vagina was squeezing around a penis, instead of just against itself? The thought made me shiver and ache with longing to find out. But that feeling was cut short. That meant having real sex, having sex with a boy. I knew if I had wanted to do that, theoretically I could have. Teenage boys were raging with those same hormones that were affecting me now. I was certain most of the boys in my class, if I had merely asked them, no matter how I was dressed or how unattractive I was, would have taken me into the locker room and fucked me the same way I watched that boy fuck that girl.
Fucking had nothing to do with love. I had already convinced myself of that, and now I was sure, after having seen it happen. As I had just learned, I could have very satisfying sex by myself in the shower. The next step from masturbating was what I had seen today. That girl was so disinterested in who was fucking her, just the state of being fucked. It could have been anyone. There was no connection there, just perhaps a familiarity, because they had done it before. It made me firmly believe that whatever the sensation felt like, coming with someone's cock inside me, was worth the hassle of actually having sex to feel it. It still frightened me enough that I convinced myself having sex with someone else wasn't what I wanted then.
I spread my legs again, forcing the water against my clitoris, writhing on the floor of the bathtub as I came again, less intensely but deeper inside my vagina this time. This was all I had, but it was enough, for now.
I dried off, cleaned up the bathroom, and went into my room. I had no idea when my father was coming home, or even if he was. Some nights he just stayed away, doing whatever it was he needed to do. I was used to it.
I went into my room, shut the door, and turned on my radio. I didn't eat dinner; I didn't do my homework. Instead, I spent the entire night touching myself. It's almost embarrassing to talk about it now, but in retrospect, I learned so much about myself by doing that. I took my time and explored my body like I never had before. I didn't need the stream of water, although technically it was more efficient. I could use my hand and my fingers and it felt just as good. I slid one finger, then two fingers, inside my vagina. I slid a finger inside my ass. I used the end of my hairbrush and shoved it inside me. That did it.
I found out later I had hit my G spot with the brush handle. I didn't know it then, only that it felt so incredible my vision darkened around the edges like I was about to pass out. It was amazing, and yet, coming down from that, I still found I was craving flesh, not a hard, plastic shaft inside me. Somehow, the space to get from here like this, to sitting on the locker room bench straddled over a boy with his penis inside me seemed an uncrossable chasm.
I wasn't a normal girl. I was a criminal. I had no friends, just a small group of tormentors who sometimes bothered me and sometimes left me alone.
I know there were some girls who wanted to have sex because they were in love with their boyfriend, whatever passed for love at 17 years old. Some girls wanted sex, plain and simple, without attachments. Making myself come on my own bed was one thing. Having sex with someone was different. Kissing, touching, talking…it was too much. I wasn't ready for that. I didn't want that.
So I masturbated. I was the masturbating virgin. It got to the point where I masturbated every night, needing the orgasm to lull me to sleep. I ordered a vibrator in the mail and had it delivered to the neighbors' house, just in case. Even back then, I had spy skills. I knew when the postman delivered everyday. Once the order was placed, I went straight home from school, passing their mailbox on the street, checking it every day when no one else was looking. It took four weeks to come, but I intercepted it.
It was better than the water, making me come harder and faster. The first time I inserted it and pressed on my G spot, I did black out. Eventually, I learned to slide it in and out of myself. Insertion at the second before orgasm was magnificent. I would lie naked under my covers, fucking myself with my vibrator in and out of myself until I was so sensitive it became sore. It was as close to having sex as I ever got.
Until I met Sam, when I was 19.