Virgin (12 page)

Two hours and way too many pints later, I felt bloated and uncharacteristically giggly. I wasn’t used to drinking beer but hadn’t wanted to come across like a girly princess who could only drink rosé or vodka and Coke. Now I was twenty-five quid down from buying a round along with my half of dinner, and he was about to get his next round.

“Wait, Jack,” I said, and put my hand on his shoulder as he stood up with his wallet in his hand. “I really can’t have another one.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll just get the one, then.”

He walked to the bar and I sunk happily into the leather sofa. It was going well. He was really funny, and he seemed to fancy me. Okay, so he loved splitting bills equally, and he hadn’t swept me off my feet the way I’d always imagined guys would on dates, but life wasn’t an eighties movie. Besides, we were having great banter and the more beers I had, the more I fancied him. His eyes were undeniably attractive and he had more stubble than usual.

I was definitely going to give him access to my untouched hymen tonight.

He came back with his beer and sank onto the sofa next to me. I turned to face him, looking up at him from my slouched-down position. I hoped my face didn’t look moon-like from the unflattering angle. He looked at me, taking in my very unsubtle
please kiss me
body language, and obligingly leaned in. I moved my face towards his, and we started snogging. Feeling tipsy, I wrapped my hands around his face, kissing him gently, whilst imagining Audrey Hepburn kissing George Peppard in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and wondering if we looked as romantic as they did. I wished we were outside in the rain.

He put his arms around me and grasped me hard. Whoa. I was getting turned on and, judging from a look down at his trousers, he was too. I couldn’t help grinning excitedly, and as a smile spread across my face, he murmured, “What are you smiling at?”

“Nothing,” I whispered, not trusting myself to say anything else, and tried to stop from smiling. We carried on kissing a bit more gently, and then he pulled away from me. “Right, I’d better finish this drink so we can get out of here before we get thrown out.”

I smiled back, suddenly very shy. He picked up his pint, and as I finished the last inch of mine, he drank the entire thing. I watched him down the full pint, my eyes glued to his face, feeling an animal attraction that made me want to rip his clothes off and shag him right there.

I grinned in anticipation. Tonight I would finally lose my virginity and act out the dirty things I’d been imagining ever since I’d watched
Basic Instinct
at the age of thirteen.

He took my hand and we walked out of the pub, ignoring the leers from a couple of old men in the corner. Outside on the street, he took my face in his hands and kissed me again. I literally swooned. It was so romantic and now, out in the cold air, I was totally Holly Golightly. Except maybe a bit more turned on than Holly was.

Jack pushed me against a wall and we leaned against the bricks, snogging like teenagers. Except I didn’t ever snog like this back when I
was
a teenager. I had
really
missed out.

“Okay, so do you want to go back to mine or yours?” he asked, eventually breaking away from me.

Oh my God, this was it. I had dreamed of this moment so many times that for a second I was so overwhelmed I didn’t know what to say. Then my brain kicked into gear, and I told him to come back to my room in Camden, which I had already prepared earlier that day, pre-wax. There was even a singular condom in my top drawer that I’d had since Freshers’ Week when the student reps gave them out for free.

We jumped on the 29 bus, and I noticed he swiped his fare card on the electronic pad even though there wasn’t a bus conductor in sight. He was so honorable. I swiped mine too and we sat near the back, kissing gently. We almost missed my stop but managed to jump off just in time.

Drunkenly, I guided him up the stairs to my room and gave him the one-second guided tour. Then I stood in the middle of my room, with my eyes flickering uncertainly between Jack and the double bed. He walked over to me and started kissing me again.

We collapsed on the bed and kissed more passionately than before. He pulled his white T-shirt off and started unbuckling his jeans. Was he going to take my clothes off too, or should I do that?

While he fiddled with his jeans I figured the most practical thing was to take my clothes off myself, so I pulled my jumper over my head. Then I started peeling my very skinny jeans over my legs, praying he wouldn’t notice the beads of perspiration appearing on my forehead as I tried to make it look as casual as possible.

When I turned around, he was lying across my bed. I stared at his body. It was very pale, and he was thin, but with broad shoulders. He looked a bit like the nineties cartoon Johnny Bravo, and was structurally very top-heavy. His pale skin was covered in moles and he had sparse, curly chest hair.

I suddenly felt self-conscious in my black bra and underpants and decided to turn the overhead lights off, after switching a lamp on. I got back onto the bed. He ran his hands all over my body as we kissed. I was so drunk I had no idea what my tongue was doing, but I decided that the fact that I wasn’t thinking about its every move was probably a good thing. Maybe this was the “natural” part of kissing that had never come to me before.

He moved his hands up to my boobs and squeezed them hard. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t yelp out in pain and hoped he would stop being so forceful with them. They weren’t used to so much human contact. He started fiddling with the clasp at the back of my bra, but after a few tries, I stepped in to save him any humiliation, undoing it myself. He whipped it off me and started kneading my breasts.

I ran my hands across his body, trying to distract myself as I explored the slightly hairy region of his lower back, where it met the top of his boxers. I realized I should probably touch him down there. I cupped my hand over the bulge poking out from under his boxers. I rubbed it gently but suddenly felt a jolt of fear run through my body as I remembered James Martell. Last time I had tried to rub a penis, I had been so clueless that I had tried to put it in my mouth and had practically bitten it off.

I couldn’t handle risking it again. I would have to miss out on the oral or hand job part, so hopefully we could skip straight to sex.

But after about fifteen minutes of hard-core making out, he hadn’t taken off his boxers or tried to remove my knickers. The Playboy wax was going to waste, and I had no idea how to progress from snogging to sex. Wasn’t this meant to be
his
job?

I was lying on my back and he was on top of me. I could feel his penis pressing into my tummy and thighs when he moved around. He started moving his body up and down, rubbing his dick against my vagina—but
with our underwear still on.

What was this? What were we doing?! A phrase popped into my head:
dry-humping
. We were dry-humping.

This carried on for a while, until his body trembled and he gasped and collapsed on top of me.

He had come. Into his boxers. Lying on top of me. Why hadn’t he done this
inside
me?!

I sighed in total confusion and he rolled off me. I lay there, trying to convince myself that maybe this was a good thing, that we hadn’t actually had sex. We had eased into it slowly and now, next time, we could do the actual deed and it would be better because we’d be familiar with each other.

After a few minutes of listening to him breathe heavily next to me, he finally spoke. “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

My mouth fell wide open and I started choking on air.

Howthefuckdidheknow?! What about me had given that away? I swallowed and forced words to come out. “Um, what makes you think that?” I asked, as neutrally as I could.

“You are, aren’t you? It’s okay if you are, honestly. You’re way younger than me, so it’s not that weird.”

Great, now he was giving me a Lolita complex. I pondered his words and then decided that maybe this was a blessing. I could admit I was a virgin and wouldn’t have to have sex with him without him knowing the truth. Now when we finally had sex, he could do it a bit more gently and hopefully it wouldn’t hurt too much.

“Um, yes,” I said eventually. “How did you know?”

“You kiss like a virgin,” he said.

I stopped moving.

There was a ten-minute silence.

Okay, maybe it was less than ten minutes, but that’s how long it felt.

I had nothing to say. I was overwhelmed by a million feelings swooping through my mind. The worst was humiliation. It was bad enough that I had to deal with the fact that I couldn’t snog properly, let alone the fact that he had figured it out too. Suddenly I thought back to every guy I’d ever kissed and realized they had probably thought the same. Because I was so shitty at using my tongue, they probably thought I’d barely kissed anyone either. Fuck, did he think he was my first kiss too?

Then he broke the silence with a laugh. “God, I can’t believe we just dry-humped. I haven’t done that since I was a kid.”

A kid? Everything he said made me feel worse. I lay there, feeling crappy and crappier, and closed my eyes, hoping it would make the situation go away.

“It was fun, though,” he added. “You have an amazing body.”

I looked doubtfully down at my slightly lumpy body but started to feel a bit better. “Seriously,” he said, “I love girls with really natural bodies. They’re so much sexier than really toned girls.”

I spent the rest of the night lying there as still as I could manage, while my mind replayed the entire evening on a loop. I lay awake, even when the sky turned bright and rays of light crept through the edges of the blinds and shone onto the man lying in my bed. I wished I could rush over to my diary and pour out my feelings.

I had no idea if our date had been a success or not. On the plus side, he now knew I was a virgin and didn’t seem to care about it. He clearly fancied me because he had come into his pants, and he liked my body. On the negative side, I kissed like a virgin, didn’t have a toned body, made him feel like I didn’t want sex—just dry-humping—and now couldn’t sleep.

I turned over so my back faced him. I was confused and this whole dating thing was so much more complicated than it looked in movies.

He was a guy, a twenty-six-year-old red-blooded male, and he hadn’t even tried to pull my underpants off. It was clearly because he’d figured out I was a virgin and didn’t want to shag me. It was James Martell all over again. The rejection washed over me and I was too tired to push it away.

The rumor about boys finding virgins sexy was a LIE. It was just some medieval bullshit that old people said to try to make their daughters keep their legs crossed and not get pregnant. The truth was that virginity was just an obstacle. Men didn’t think,
Oh yes! Here’s a virgin. Let’s shag her!
They thought,
Oh, not a virgin. She’s going to want candles and shit. Maybe I’ll just find a non-virgin instead, it’ll be so much easier
. I didn’t even want candles.

Jack woke up an hour later when the alarm on his phone went off. He turned it off and then lay back in bed, yawning. He rolled over and leaned towards me. “Hey, did you sleep okay?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said brightly. “Bit of a hangover, though . . .”

“Fuck, me too,” he said as he rubbed his head. Then he looked at me and leaned in and kissed me on the mouth. He smelled of morning breath but I couldn’t complain because I probably did too. We kissed and I felt my anxiety falling away. He still liked me. Maybe all this crap was just in my head and boys didn’t mind virgins. After all, it was just a question of a hymen being broken or not. If he didn’t care about my morning breath, surely he didn’t care about a tiny bit of physiology hidden way down in my body?

“So, last night was really fun,” he said. “I’d better go because it’s going to take me a while getting home from yours. Shall we do something next weekend, though?”

I smiled up at him. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

He got up and pulled his clothes on from the discarded pile on the floor. I lay in bed, too self-conscious in the sharp daylight to be able to get out and find my clothes. He dressed himself quickly and then came back to me. He leaned down and kissed me briefly on the lips.