We didn’t have the money for a honeymoon, which was fine with me. We spent the day after we got married moving his things from his storage unit into my apartment. He had been living on the ship he was stationed aboard and had accumulated quite a lot of personal items from his teen years and previous marriage. I didn’t have much so his stored items fit nicely in my apartment. Our first three weeks together were pretty nice. The sex was frequent and seemed normal. Other than a feeling that he wasn’t who I thought he was, I had no proof and so I let things progress as they did. I took him to the ship the day he left on deployment and I did, surprisingly, cry when he left.
Being a married woman, I thought I was safe from my dad. I did a very foolish thing. My husband had just left to go out to sea on his deployment. It was Christmas Eve and my parents asked me to spend the night to celebrate an early Christmas Day. That was our family tradition, to celebrate Christmas Day at 3 am. Anyhow, I thought I was safe, so I slept on the couch that night. I woke up around midnight with my dad removing my pajama bottoms and kissing the inside of my thighs. I knew he was planning on having oral sex with me. I froze up like I was a little girl again. But he sensed I was awake and stopped. He went to bed and didn’t return to my bed that night. The next day, Christmas Day, we celebrated as a family with no past, no dirty secrets. I never told my mom, but it was the last time I saw my father for several years.
During my husband’s six month deployment we wrote back and forth regularly. He called me every time he pulled into a foreign port and we would talk as long as we could. It seemed like we were growing close as a married couple instead of best friends. He even managed to have a dozen long stem red roses delivered to my job on my birthday. He was romantic and mysterious.
