The V-Word (4 page)

Over the next few weeks, we went slowly. She was also attracted to boys and had more experience with kissing than I did, but she didn't rush me. I was so terrified by the district attorney's lecture that I insisted on waiting until Maureen was eighteen before I would touch her below her waist.

One night, when we were making out, we kissed more intensely than usual, for nearly an hour. We shifted together on my bed, and her knee softly found the warmth between my legs. I pressed against her, enjoying the new contact. She gripped my breasts and found my rising nipples. I moaned and moved against her, like a rhythmic tide with increasing rapidity. It arrived before I knew it was happening—my orgasm. I came for the first time with another person, with someone who cared about me.

With a woman.

I opened my eyes and clung to her shoulders, my relief mingling with the old shame.

“I don't know if we should do that again,” I said.

“Okay,” Maureen said gently.

But I thought about it later. The moment of my orgasm, the feel of her fingertips finding my nipples, the firm heat of her knee against the part of me where I felt pleasure the most. I did not feel broken when it happened. I felt whole. I felt happy.

We tried again a few weeks later, after Maureen's birthday when we were finally the same age. This time, we slept over at her parents' house.

She started slow with her palms along my torso. My skin there shook with hope and fear, unused to the presence of another person. She asked me if I was ready, and I nodded. She touched me where I had only ever touched myself. She touched me differently, gently drawing her fingers from the wetness of my vagina to the swelling near my clitoris. I made small, involuntary sounds of gratitude and approval.

I touched her with my hands too. She felt like me: warm at first, and then, as I slowly moved my fingers, she turned slick, damp. I traced circles near the top of her vulva where I thought her clitoris might be, the way I liked to touch myself. She moaned. It was the first time I had ever made someone moan. I felt capable, powerful.

I felt like smiling.

So I kissed her and I smiled while I did. I learned what it was to kiss someone and find her mouth cold from the way she had been gasping with desire.

She smiled against my smiling mouth.

Years later, Maureen and I would break up and reconcile more than once. I would watch her date boys and feel a terrible, jealous sorrow. Years after that, our friendship would resume, and she would invite me to her wedding to a kind and funny man, our mutual friend. She would be open about her first relationship having been with a woman. I would always be grateful to her for helping to banish my shame and for helping me to learn my capacity for intimacy.

Over the years I would learn and relearn a different kind of revelation. I would learn to whom I really belonged. I was not owned by a church's cruel teachings. I was not owned by condemnation, isolation, or fear. It did not matter what the state, my school, a religion, or a teacher claimed. I belonged to me. My body was my own, with all of its capacity for pleasure, healing, and wholeness. I could share my body with someone who shared my anatomy. I could share my heart with a woman who would protect it.

I belonged to me.

The first time is going to be amazing—right? Sure, it might hurt a little at first but then . . . ah! We've watched romantic comedies. It's going to be all glitter and roses. We've seen porn. Sexy-hot-lusty-busty fun is there for the taking.

Besides, everyone is doing it—aren't they?

Actually, they aren't.

At age seventeen, less than 50 percent of young women have had sex. By age twenty, that increases to about 75 percent. Most of those are having sex with a steady partner.
¹

But there is lot of pressure to get down to business, and it can be tough territory to navigate—especially if you're convinced that ecstasy is only a thrust away!

M
y virginity was like an uncomfortable but fashionable little black dress.

It blistered and chafed me, and more than anything I wanted to throw it in a tin garbage bin and reduce it to smoldering ashes—but not until after everyone had gotten a good eyeful of me wearing it.

I still don't understand why I wanted it gone so badly. Why was I so ready to slough it off on the nearest passerby, like some conspicuous dandruff? Isn't virginity supposed to be treasured? Shouldn't I have grasped it tightly and carefully until only the worthiest partner came along?

But the idea of sex had been pumped up to colossal size in my head. I fantasized about how incredible my first good fuck would be, how my whole life had been leading up to that one magical (oh, and it
would
be magical) moment. All I wanted was to get that teensy little uncomfortable bit of virginity over and done with as quickly as possible and get on to the fun part.

And can anyone blame me for not having a clue? In my favorite fantasy novels, after that first awful moment, the heroine's first time is soul-crushingly fulfilling. In sex ed, it was boiled down to a diagram of a hymen that uncomfortably resembled a hagfish's mouth. My folks believed in
no sex before marriage
, so they weren't much help. And talking to older girls? One I knew said she hadn't felt anything, but her sister piped up, “Of course not. It's always easier for fat girls. Like throwing a hot dog down a wet hallway.” (Later, in tears, the first sister confessed that she'd started early with sex toys and that more likely than not she could thank a blue silicon cock for her painless first time.)

I knew, simply
knew
, based on my extensive research, the pleasure would improve after that first time. Sex would become mind-blowing. Weren't the internet porn actresses always moaning with pure glee? They'd pant and scream and eventually, after some thorough pillaging, come so hard that their bodies shook like twigs in a rainstorm. Wasn't that also waiting for me?

This obsession with sex sunk its claws into me at eleven years old. Soon it completely took over, and it would keep digging in for another five years. After all that time dreaming and fantasizing and clicking through internet ads of huge black cocks, I wanted my first time over and done. I was ready to move on with my life—my real, grown-up, adult life, where sex was as normal as weekend brunch.

But that godforsaken
dress
. I was still wearing it, and as long as I lived under my parents' roof, their hawk-eyes watching me, no one was likely to get in and peel it off me anytime soon. So I vowed to myself: get to college, rip the dress off as quickly as possible, and get on with the good stuff.

Now, as I learned it, the first rule of college is this:
no hall-cest
. (Followed closely by
cover your smoke alarm with plastic wrap if you want to smoke a joint in your room
and
never eat the cubed ham at the salad bar after 6
PM
.)
Do not—whatever you do—
do not
sleep with your hall mates. You can sleep with the guy on first floor if you're on third floor, or better yet, the shaggy fellow you sometimes spot in the dorm across the picnic area, but woe betide you if you sleep with the hunky, blond football player who lives in 303.

But it was an unofficial rule.

So when I met said hunky, blond football player living down the hall, I might as well have placed a bull's-eye on his crotch and taken out my sniper rifle. He was easy prey: horny, college-aged, and not the brightest crayon in the box. Manipulating Vince into fucking me was like covering a toddler's eyes and convincing him you were no longer there.

“Don't do it,” my roommate told me. “Hall-cest. Ten foot pole. Also, free condoms on the RA's door, but seriously—
don't do it
.”

At that point, it didn't matter. The dress was cinched so tight I couldn't breathe. I was out of high school, on my own, and there was no point wearing it where my parents couldn't see me.

So I made remarks to Vince in the coed bathroom about how much I needed to get laid. How relationships were boring, how I hated clingy girls—all that porno stuff I thought boys wanted to hear. We kissed late one night walking through the rose garden and fooled around under the flag pole. Coming home early from class one afternoon, we were the only two people in the hall. I asked him to come over and help me move my desk. In a meager minute, we were naked on my beanbag chair.

I never told him I was a virgin. He seemed happy to assume I wasn't. I was happy to let him assume.

He scrambled for the purple condom shoved in his wallet and remarked on my bush. He'd never fucked a girl with a full one before, he said, not hiding his distaste all that well.

Not once would I forget to shave after that remark. For six years I carefully manicured the topiary of my pubic hair—airstrips, arrows, boxes, triangles, all neatly trimmed, the smoothness of my lips maintained daily—until a far better man told me I should do whatever the hell I wanted with my own naturally occurring hair.

When the condom wrapper finally tore, that sudden panic one must feel right before skydiving or bungee jumping set in, and I began to wonder if maybe I should back out. Maybe I wasn't actually ready to take off the dress yet. Didn't it look good on me? Didn't it make my parents happy? Didn't I want somebody
better
?

But Vince was already shrink-wrapping himself in neon purple latex. Before the panic could worm its way into action, he pushed in. I wouldn't realize until later that even the most novice penis around will at least give you a little foreplay to lube you up and jazz your jets.

But I guess you get what you pay for.

The pain wasn't horrible, which surprised me. I'd imagined it sharp and twisting, like a knife, when it was far more like a doctor pinching the flesh of your arm and shooting you full of some nameless vaccine. Everything hurt for a moment, then faded to a dull ache as Vince pumped away. He didn't seem to notice the just-swallowed-a-warhead look on my face or seem perturbed at all that I was a prone, unenthusiastic participant—which wasn't particularly my fault, considering I couldn't feel anything besides
pump, pump, pump
and
ache, ache, ache
.

Maybe he did notice and he just didn't care.

After what felt like a minute, maybe two if I am being generous, a ghost of a tingle somewhere down inside me started creeping upward. A tangle of ivy wove its way from my uterus to my hips to my collar bones.

Oh! Was that it? Was that a shadow of the thing that made porn stars scream? It was, though, only a sad fraction of what I could do for myself on my own time.

Before it could grow into anything more than an ephemeral hint of pleasure, Vince's slippery purple cock popped free like a slug escaping a Chinese finger trap.

The condom had slipped perilously close to his tip, the cream-filled latex dangling down. I made a sad little sound and reached for him again, as if more
pump, pump, ache
could actually bring that wary tingle to the surface. But he pushed me away, peeling off the condom that smelled faintly of spoiled grapes, and said, “I'm done anyway.”

I lay sprawled on the beanbag, too shocked to move, or object, or even scowl at him. Vince climbed to his feet, pulled on his boxers and jeans, slipped his shirt over his head and said, “See you.”

Then he was gone. The moron didn't even close the door behind him.

I got up, slammed the door shut, and slumped against it. I'd burned the dress, all right. I could almost taste the acrid tang of seared polyester.

Maybe it wasn't the smell of my thrown-away virginity. Maybe it was the smell of shame. Or disappointment.

Or reality.

The little black dress had been replaced by something else but I couldn't pinpoint what. I wasn't naked and free, a peaceful hippie in a sweat lodge, like I'd expected. Like I'd hoped.

Looking around my room, nothing appeared to have changed except some new rumples in the beanbag cover. I felt like that beanbag—used, left with a few crinkles, but otherwise completely the same.

I'd been nothing but a toy for some douche bag down the hall. That was the part that struck me most, the part that made me stand there, staring at the beanbag, unwilling to move. Was I getting as good as I got for wanting to make a toy out of him too? I didn't feel any better now that the dress was gone—all I'd acquired was a throbbing ache between my legs.

I hadn't magically become a grown, adult woman. I especially had not become a moaning Barbie in a porno.

I'd been a cheap thrill. And that was it.

For weeks I hid from people on my hall, people who might guess. I told none of my friends about it, like a victim after a con, when all the money she'd put in a sure scheme vanishes in a puff of engine exhaust.