Thandi is lustful.
She is lustful and she is damn proud of it.
Oh, for years she had been stifled and shielded from sexuality due in part to Vitani’s machinations and in part of her mother’s near-fanatical control of her beforehand. Thandi hadn’t had a clue what desire felt like, going through puberty and seemingly skipping what many considered a rite of passage. Why, the thought of sex had made her nervous and even a touch frightened.
“It will hurt at first,” her mother always said. “But you let your man finish and you get on with your day. It is an essential part of ensuring your husband is happy.”
Thandi had never thought to ask, but what about me?
Not until something trickled through when she met Charlie. He, too, kept a distance from sexuality— but he knew so much. He had lent her books that featured passionate, romantic scenes that would make a working girl blush, and he spoke with the same coarse language a peasant prided himself on. And somehow, the two inexperienced people came to wonder, mutually, what it might be like to kiss.
Granted, the blood was unexpected, but what struck Thandi was the feeling behind it. The incredible adoration that Charlie developed that made her warm in a way she never knew. Her curse kept their lips from touching, kept them from exploring, but it didn’t keep her from nestling into his arms and holding such an intimate gesture close.
And when she reunited with him, they swallowed each other whole with pent up need.
There was not a single painful moment in her experience. There was only the worship of her body, the birth of light and burst of foliage that made them laugh between hasty kisses and plentiful declarations.
Thandi is not ashamed to enjoy her lover. She isn’t ashamed to have her body loved thoroughly by him. She isn’t ashamed to fall into the depths of the lovemaking they do, slip into the mindspace of her old self to relive her liberation over and over and over.
She hungers for the physical expression of her love, the union of their bodies, the passionate closeness that he has brought into her life.
And really… it brings more satisfaction to her than pleasing Vitani ever did.
