JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 29

29. THE DATE

They met at a Bureau Office for their first date and filled in the forms to become a designated Registered Dating Couple, category Mature Single Daters, bound by all the Dating Protocols, as ordained by the Bureau of Behavior Design and Management. They shared a weird moment over the Abstention Requirement, and then opted for an Exception to Abstention. Only Mature Single Daters were allowed this Exception, and received Three Sanctioned Sex Credits before they had to report back again. Unmarried Singles in their twenties were required to abstain from sex: if they didn’t, and were found out, they were flogged under medical attention, to ensure they suffered the most pain imaginable without being in danger of their lives. They had to live to warn their friends about the consequences of Non-sanctioned Sex.

After registering, Eve and Adam went to the ordained place for first dates: the church. They attended hers.

Adam was in the habit of letting his thoughts wander during sermons – this time around Eve, in a fantasy about sleeping with her.

The sermon was about the end days. The Beast. The Anti-Christ. The Rapture. The Left Behinds. Reverend Redburn spoke with the intensity of a blowtorch softening steel. His teeth shone, his tongue leapt, his eyes widened, he waved his arms and shook his hands as though they’d just touched red-hot coals.

Adam wondered about the color of Eve’s pubic hair. Would it be blond, too? He wondered about the noises she would make. Soft sighs? Grunts of pleasure? Shrieks, perhaps? He wondered about the look on her face. He liked it when women became so overcome there was almost a look of fear in their eyes. A terror of losing themselves in the abandonment of the moment. A terror of enjoyment, because they were not supposed to. But he never gave them this option. He tortured them with pleasure. It was some kind of revenge for the death of his love.

Women became girls when they were overcome. They lost the years. He wondered to what age Eve would regress. Some women regressed to before puberty, to as young as six or five. Little girls lost in the anguish of pleasure.

He marveled how it was that with all the might of the Bureau of Behavior Design and Management, they had still not managed to manage sex. If it were in their power, he thought, they’d outlaw sex, as soon as science made it possible to create babies in test-tubes.

One day science would save religion from the intrusion of sex. But meanwhile, sex was always there, present, accusing, girding everything like a subterranean river, continually tunneling away under the United States Under God, and making its foundations soft and wobbly. It was the core of humanity that the Men of the Gospel could not control. For example: they could not stem the barrage of pornographic websites. Every firewall turned porous. Porn found a way, no matter how hard religion tried to defend against its power.

Eve thought about sex, too. But she did not think much about Adam in particular. Instead she wondered if she would get anywhere close to overcoming her Secret Sexual Lack. Adam was a possible instrument: nothing more.

Then she did wonder about one thing concerning Adam. The size of his thing.

And then she blushed. She who, with her patients, looked at penises all day. But those were only in pictures. A representation. Nothing like the live, real, flesh-and-blood thing.