Not that I really knew what that meant, or what exactly I was agreeing to when I said yes, but I said yes just the same. He came to see me again and we spent an hour in the Motel Darlene, out by the highway. I remember he called his wife to check in while I lay sprawled in bed, and gestured at me elaborately to be quiet. The sex was not really that great, and he was much nicer to me at SCA events after we'd stopped having sex and I started acting more like a world-weary barmaid rather than eager-eyed ingenue. A year after I left home, I heard he'd been killed in a car accident: fell asleep at the wheel, rolled the truck, never woke up. His funeral was enormous, and his wife finished her reign as Queen alone, dressed in black.

After the floodgates opened, there was no stopping the rush of attentive suitors. They didn't even bother to twirl their wedding rings off fingers; it was the SCA, everybody knew who everybody was and who they were married to. I kissed them behind barns, their beards rubbing my skin raw. I flirted with a bard by email and let him bend me over the hood of a car in a parking lot when we met, even though I wasn't as attracted to him in real life as I was on our computer screens. I stayed out late around campfires, followed some long-haired man back to his tent. I went out for a walk around the lake at night, and ended up with someone awkwardly shoving their hand down my pants, or on one occasion, requesting I show my breasts to his friend because they were "perfect". I acquiesced to almost all of it. I didn't understand you could say no, or why you'd want to: where before everyone had told me I was ugly, now they said I was beautiful. If the price I had to pay to be liked was boring sex with too many men in mustaches, well...it seemed negligible.

I suppose you could link this back to my father's departure from my life at an early age, thereby cementing both my fear of abandonment and my daddy issues. You could also make connections to having been bullied in grade school, or growing up a latch-key kid. Honestly, while the daddy thing probably has something to do with it, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, it was pretty simple: I had something they wanted, and I loved the power it gave me. I didn't care about their wives, was too young to understand what that meant.

I knew the physical mechanics of sex, having read the entire For Parents shelf at the local library by the time I was nine, but I didn't know any of the intense emotional magic that went along with it. I didn't know the questions I should have been asking or the weight I should have been feeling. I didn't know what it meant to give your body like a coin to people that devalued it to almost nothing. I didn't understand that the kind of person that has sex with a teenaged girl because she doesn't know enough about the world to say no, is the kind of person that shouldn't be having sex at all.

But what do I know? Maybe they were as confused as I was, lost in a permissive world where, instead of computer programmers or carpenters or hotel desk clerks, they were Kings and Knights and Dukes, and attractive nubile young women looked at them with willing eyes. Maybe they felt terrible about what they did to their wives, their girlfriends, maybe they apologized years later for having laid me down on the backseat of the car. Maybe they realized how gross it is to bang someone half your age in a nylon tent, and wished they could apologize to me. I don't know. None of them ever spoke to me about it, and I eventually left the SCA. I went into therapy, learned a lot about my mercantile attitude towards sexuality, and moved on. Every now and then I find myself wondering if there was something about me that made them forsake their promises, something unique that they saw, something that made me shine. But if I'm honest with myself, I know they're still at it; older now and more pot-bellied, they're chasing the girls in fourteenth century gowns with the tacit approval of the rest of society and the quiet acceptance of the wives. They're not anything special, these guys, but from what they get away with, they might as well actually be King.