I was going to college and I had only had sex with one person.
To be fair, Kelly and I had fucked, sucked, and blown each other’s minds a thousand times in the three months we were sleeping together. Okay, if I’m honest, I think she was most likely blowing my mind, and not just because we were young and I wanted her. In fact, I had spent the previous summer not fucking D because… Well, because I didn’t know how to bring up the idea of a condom.
I wasn’t a kid that was ready for sex at an early age. Sure, I was fascinated by it, interested in every dirty pictures, movie, or magazine I could get my hands on, but it wasn’t the same thing as being ready for it. I’m not really sure how I knew, but I waited and waited, never asking and turning it down when the opportunity presented itself. To be fair, D and I got naked almost every day that summer, and we got each other off in a hundred other ways but never once did I actually put my cock inside her. From my seat here in the present, it’s easy to say if you’re not ready to talk about condoms then don’t have sex, and I suppose I’m lucky I at least partially understood that then too.
But Kelly was my first, and I was hers, and most of what I remember is the sex. Which is maybe why it didn’t work out, and maybe why it lasted as long as it did. At the time I would have told you I was in love and I would have meant it. And let’s just say that I was because Kelly was the smartest, prettiest, sexiest manic pixie dream girl you could ever imagine. She makes every movie dream girl look like a parody, and yet for some reason, she wanted me. After the first time, which was more challenging and painful than anything else, we settled into a routine of sorts, if you can call constant sex a routine at all.
We fucked after school on my bed while my mother worked outside one floor below the open window, we fucked in cars–front seat and back–and we fucked on her couch, my father’s bed, and in the shower. And maybe we learned something, and maybe we didn’t, other than that we both loved sex. We both loved the excitement that came from being unable to wait, and we both thrived on the need to open our mouths against skin and part thighs and lips all the same.
But it’s a rare young love that has a joyful ending, and while ours went with more of a fizzle than an explosion, it ended all the same. It ended with a suspicious lack of phone calls and an overwhelming desire for everyone else. And maybe that’s how young love goes and maybe it was simply that I waited until it was already too late. Once I had a taste of sex and love and love and sex, I needed more of both, and I wasn’t present enough, or smart enough, to articulate it.
But those long spring afternoons of fucking and kissing Kelly, her jet black hair in my face as I braced myself on elbows, still come to mind on warm days in June. Her mischievous grin, her raised skirt, and her warm lips still bring me back in an instant to the end of whatever innocence we shared, and for that I’m grateful.
I was going to college, and I had only had sex with one person. But of course, summer was only beginning and there were so many mistakes left to make…