A Perverse Habit

An Uncanny Story for STSC Symposium: Habit

My friend J.R. had this thing about ‘corrupting Christian girls.’ It started junior year of high school when he dated Marie, who went to St. Augustine’s, the Catholic school across town.

When they started dating, she was firmly abstinent, no sex before marriage, keeping herself pure in the light of God for the right man sort of thing. Through the variant of teenage ‘seduction’ that involves quite a bit of pleading, cajoling, whining, a lot of attestation of deeply felt true love never experienced by another soul before, plus exhaustive debates of what really constitutes ‘sex’ and arguing whatever a horny teenager can interpret and remember of a few web articles on Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus, after about eight months of dating, J.R. wore Marie down and they had sex. Shortly after that, Marie realized she enjoyed sex so much she cheated on J.R. with the lead singer of a local rock band J.R. had turned her onto, and not much longer than that she learned she liked sex with other girls at St. Augustine far more than she did with J.R. and his friends.

If J.R. was hurt, he didn’t show it. He actually bragged about it, he talked about it like Marie’s sexual awakening was the curse of religion cured by the magic wand of his dick. He was hooked. Between the rest of high school and much of our time at University, he went after every coy Christian girl he could ferret up from whichever end of campus they were trying to avoid being ‘typical college girls’ at, and whenever there were dry spells there he’d find another high schooler and attend carefully to determining they were over the age of consent before rolling out his playbook, which of course got easier for him overtime. Usually these relationships would last until about a month or two after he achieved his desire, at which point he gleefully sent them off into the world and only kept in touch as long as they continued to exhibit sexual proclivity: those girls that then went back to their determination to avoid people exactly like J.R. he forgot pretty quickly.

“But no dude, you know what I really want to do sometime?” he told me one night. He had just broken up with Patricia, a Starbucks barrister who had attracted his attention with her huge and elaborate silver cross complete with Jesus’ human form in twisted agony set, eye-rollingly enough (for I was there for their first meet cute) gently reposed in her soft cleavage. She had cheated on him in a threesome with her store manager and his wife. So we were out getting ‘sympathy beers,’ though I knew the event was more for him to tally up additional clauses of his bragging rights.

“Two innocent Christian girls at once?” I ventured. I wasn’t even being sarcastic, just exhausted.

“Hey, that’s an idea,” he said. “But no, what I really want is to corrupt a nun.”

Sounded about right. “Where do you find nuns?”

“I don’t know. At churches?”