Page 64 of Finding His Silver Fox Daddy

I shook my head, prepared for this since Jack had asked me several times already. “Nope, not at all.”

Tris raised an eyebrow as if to say Explain, so I did.

“Our families grew up together in a conservative church, and something called ‘purity culture’ ran rampant through all the church’s teachings. Are you familiar with that?”

Tristan’s beautiful face turned down in a frown. “A little. My parents weren’t really religious, just very conservative, but I mostly tuned their homophobia out. They ignored me for the most part, so it wasn’t difficult. Fortunately, public schools and my queer friend group saved me, and almost none of that bullshit sunk in. Purity culture is sort of like abstinence, right?”

“Yes, but that was just a small part of it, and all of it is inherently intertwined with patriarchy and strict gender roles championed by the religion I grew up with. Not only did our church teach one-hundred-percent abstinence until our wedding night, but they also strongly implied if not outright stated that men were the head of the household and should be obeyed without question and that a woman’s primary goal in life was to get married and have children.”

His jaw drop was satisfying. Growing up like I did, these tenets were commonplace and weren’t questioned, but having been outside of it for several years now, I easily recognized that their ideals were pretty fucked up—not to mention misogynistic as hell. “That’s—damn. I mean, I’ve heard of that shit, but I haven’t really known any people who grew up like that. I’m so sorry, Henry.”

“Thanks, Tris.” I smiled softly at him, but it felt tinged with sadness. “So that’s the context we grew up with and were committed to. Carrie and I were in the same grade in school, so we grew up together in every sense of the word, and we went to the same small Christian college in Idaho. We ‘courted’”—I added the appropriate air quotes—“for all four years, then we both moved back home. We found jobs, lived at our respective parents’ homes, and the following summer, we were married.”

“‘Courted’?”

I clicked my teeth. “A church-approved alternative to dating where we were basically committed to each other but didn’t really date in the traditional sense. More getting to know each other with the ultimate goal of getting married. Physical intimacy, even holding hands, was limited, parental and pastoral involvement was insisted upon, and being ‘equally yoked’—basically spiritually homogeneous—was paramount.” At Tristan’s bug eyes, I let out a derisive chuckle. “Yeah, they were setting us up to fail from the beginning. The brainwashing ran deep.”

I took a breath, watching Tris study the jute rug as he processed everything I’d said. I imagined it sounded antiquated to someone who hadn’t lived it. I had, and calling it old-fashioned was being generous.

“Fast forward almost twenty years. We were best friends, but our sex life had always been pretty terrible. I struggled to stay hard when we had sex, though I could usually pull it off if I concentrated hard enough. But given my size, penetration wasn’t our go-to.”

Tris’s eyes flashed, and he wiggled his eyebrows ridiculously. “Well, she isn’t me.”

I threw my head back, resting it on the couch’s seat cushions as I laughed. “That she isn’t.” When my laughter died down, I continued. “Anyway, we tried a lot of different things. Given the way we were raised—that masturbation, toys, and porn were all ‘bad’—we struggled for a long time even knowing what to do. We were both virgins on our wedding night, after all.”

“Fuckers,” Tris uttered under his breath, and I knew he was talking about the church I grew up in. I couldn’t agree more.

“Yup. Despite staying in the church, we were desperate, so we started branching out a little. We tried toys first, and that helped. Especially her, but we also found a cock ring that helped me stay hard. Vibrators worked for us both. And though sex still wasn’t great, it wasn’t as much of a struggle, and that felt like a breath of fresh air.

“Eventually, when we were still having problems despite the toy collection we’d amassed, we turned to porn. Pornography was always viewed as one of the worst sins, but like I said, we were desperate, and we figured if we watched together, it was okay.” I shook my head with a self-deprecating smile. “As you might expect, that helped a little, too. We tried a variety of types but mostly stuck with scenes that had one woman and one man, since that seemed to turn Carrie on. We did try a woman with another woman once—I guess she figured if one woman wasn’t doing it for me, two might. For obvious reasons, it didn’t work out well. And we both felt so guilty afterward that we didn’t try it again.”

Tris tilted his head to one side. “Guilty?”

I nodded, my expression falling. I hated how homophobic I’d been raised to be. Those wounds still ran deep, though most were scars that had healed. “Yeah. The church had preached at us our entire lives that homosexuality was a sin. So we thought straight porn, even though it was porn, would be somehow better than gay porn.”

“Ohhh, now I understand the guilty part. That’s so relatable.” He blinked, shaking his head as if to clear it, but spoke again before I could. “But this is your story. Continue.”

I was curious about Tris’s experience, but I appreciated he was letting me get this all out. “Because of all that bullshit homophobia, we’d watch all types of straight porn, different kinks and positions and such, but we stayed away from any with two people of the same sex. Especially men, because, to the church, that was somehow even worse than two women. We were married during the height of the AIDS crisis, and the church’s narrative around that stuck with us.” Tris opened his mouth to ask, but I beat him to it, knowing he was too young to remember. “Basically, church leaders preached that AIDS was the consequence of the ‘sin of homosexuality.’ And gay men, as you probably know, were disproportionately affected.”

Tris narrowed his eyes at that. “I hate these guys more the longer you talk.” He chuckled darkly. “Your church sounds terrible.”

I snorted. “It really was. So one night, Carrie was putting on some lingerie she thought I’d like and asked me to find a video for us to watch together. I was poking around and accidentally clicked on a video with two men. If miracles are real, that was one. Because it changed my life in a single moment.”

Tristan’s eyes were wide as he waited for me to continue.

“Watching those two men make love—it was a sweet video, actually—made my dick harder than it had ever been. I know they were actors, but I swore I could feel their love through the screen. And in an instant, I knew, deep in the truest part of my soul, that love was love, no matter the gender. I still had hangups to work through, but my mindset changed in that moment.

“Carrie came into the bedroom then, dressed in the finest lingerie I’d ever seen, and her eyes dropped to my dick, which I’d started stroking. She realized instantly I wasn’t rock-hard because of her. Her eyes flicked to the video. She caught the cum shot—which is hilarious in hindsight—then walked back out of the room without saying a word. I finished seconds later, and I came more strongly than I’d ever come in my life.”

Tris gulped. I’d never seen him this quiet.

“I wiped up quickly and went to find her. She was pouring herself wine in the kitchen—another vice banned by the church but that we’d loosened up enough to enjoy, though we didn’t tell our church friends, of course—and turned when she heard me come in. After taking a slow sip, she set the glass down, slowly met my eyes, and asked, ‘How long has this been going on?’ Thankfully, the truth was easy, and I told her that night was the first time. She just nodded, and we didn’t talk about it until a few days later. That was when she decided we weren’t going to tell anyone, that I wasn’t ‘bringing that into our marriage bed’”—I flashed air quotes again—“and that I could deal with what she called ‘my issue’ on my own time.”

“Oh, Henry, I’m so sorry,” Tristan breathed, and I looked up to see tears in his eyes.

I reached out and squeezed his hand. “Thanks. At the time, it was devastating. She was my best friend, and I thought I could talk to her about anything. But she’d basically called who I was a mistake. That fucking hurt so badly, but I didn’t know what to do. Our church frowned upon divorce. They didn’t give us any tools to have a healthy marriage then condemned us to live our entire lives in a terrible one.”

“Fuckers!” Tris said again, louder this time.