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This is where we first did it.
Did it. I grimace.
I must've been, what, eighteen? Two months before college.
If I can remember correctly, it was my short-lived girlfriend, Molly, who suggested it first. Jesus, she wanted it bad. She'd been hinting at it all through senior year. There would be suggestive looks thrown at me from across the classroom any time we had to analyse sex as a theme in A Streetcar Named Desire, or when Naomi Shelleck went into another tirade about how boring her boyfriend was at doing it. I don't remember how we ended the relationship, but we did before there was even an attempt at sex, and it had something to do with her recurring lack of boundaries, or how I was too prudish, or gay because I told her no. That was six months before college.
Then I met Marietta, the only black girl in my school, who was British and insisted that most British people don't speak like the Queen and how the hell did we know what the Queen sounded like, anyhow? It's not like we watched her Christmas speeches every year because we're Southerners and, by default, kind of don't know anything at all. Marietta was sharp, and it stung, when she got angry at you. I still get a kick out of the way those insults roll out of the tongue - wanker, you fuckingwanker, bloody arsehole cunt. And Marietta gave it that extra bite, snarling and snapping at anybody who made fun of her hair (reggae fashion and my Southern town just didn't mix). Holy hell, she was tall too. I liked that most about her.
We came close to it, the sex. I was over at her place and it was kind of awkward because I could hear her dad shuffling about downstairs and her brother had scowled at me when we'd walked past him into her room. Everything else came in quick succession after that door was locked - and there she was, on top of me, her braids brushing against my bare chest. I remember being self-conscious about that mole right below my left nipple because she'd mentioned moles freaked her out a little bit. She must've known because she was smiling down at me, her fingers tracing lines all over me, skating over that one flawed speck on pale skin. When Marietta kissed me, it was like licking butter; warm, mellow, and not at all the sensation of tongues and teeth flooding my mouth, the way it was with Molly. My hand had barely started to graze the edge of her bra when she pulled away.
"I...don't think I want to," she admitted.
"Okay," was about all I could muster.
It hurt, but in hindsight, it made sense. It wasn't a relationship between Marietta and I. Nor was it that damned mole, as much as I had convinced myself at the time. We'd known each other a solid three weeks and all we ever did, besides groping each other behind the bike sheds, was talk about math. It's hard to find something in that chasm between talking about pre-calc and going all the way. She'd told me she wasn't a virgin (her first was a 'chav from Birmingham' - I have no sense of what that's supposed to mean). But I think she might have been. I could tell, after she stopped talking to me in class and started dating Daniel Graham. They went to college together too, so I think he's really her actual first. Last I heard, they'd just paid off their mortgage and have a kid who's in third grade. I did mourn her for about a week, that much I will admit, but she was as close to a heartbreak as I would get in high school.
