Love Me: The Manoir

Another Dodgy 'First Kiss'

I don't remember quite how Andrew came back into my life – maybe he never left it fully – but I somehow found myself meeting him in a park on a hot summer's day. And something had changed.

It didn't feel as friendly, and instead when we looked at each other there was a more mutual decision that this was something a little more than that. He told me months later that he had tried to lean in for a kiss earlier on in the date but I had moved my head away.

I had a strange phobia of people kissing me at this point in my life. I was so terrified of doing it wrong even though everyone told me that it wasn't possible to not know how to kiss. But as he sat on a log, and me standing between his legs, I knew something was going to happen.

As our foreheads pressed together, I decided that I needed to do this. I needed to kiss him, I needed to kiss someone in my life!

Look, what people don't tell you about the first time you kiss someone sober and in broad daylight is that you shouldn't go straight in with tongues. He pulled away and chuckled at me, and I vaguely remember him to tell me to 'steady on'.

He then pecked me on the lips and we left the park. I wanted to squeal in happiness despite the slight embarrassment of being a tad too forward with my tongue. The thing with Andrew was that I never felt that embarrassed to fuck up with him. I could mess up in a hundred different ways and he would laugh it off and tell me I was being silly to get so pent up about these things.

I would see him a few weeks later, the day before my 18th birthday, and I would kiss him properly. The minute I learnt how to kiss, I didn't want to stop. I couldn't believe I had ever been so scared of it. I would like to formally apologise to anyone I disgusted in Christchurch Park in Oxford in the summer of 2019 by the excessive amount of PDA they saw.

I began noticing a change in him. He would hold my hand in the centre of town and not care who saw. He would kiss me goodbye at the bus stop. He would entertain my silliness. Sometimes we would lie in the warm summer air, my head on his chest, and he would hold me tightly like he didn't want to let go.

At this point, we still told the world that we were friends with benefits. That's how I truly believed I felt about him. He was like my best friend – he knew everything about me.

We fooled around, a tentative and pretty rubbish hand job here, a fondle in the park elsewhere. We were living what I had always wanted to do, and I was with someone I could experiment these things with who I knew wouldn't judge me because he was going through the motions at the same time. We were discovering how these things that had always been a mystery to me.

I may have been doing everything that I seemed to have waited my whole life to do, but there was something that wasn't right in me. The 'cool-girl-I-don't-like-labels' act had done more than shield myself from temporary pain, it had shut off my ability to feel emotions at all. I was still petrified of being hurt, and couldn't possibly believe a single word Andrew said about the way he felt about me.

A line from my diary even read, 'he said the explicit words 'I like you' today but I don't know what that means in Andrew language'. It probably means he liked you!

I tried to find as many excuses to not like him back strongly as I could. I kept comparing my feelings for him to the only experience of love that I had known before. The way I had felt about Caitlin.

That love had been intense, painful, and I couldn't live without her. Andrew was comfortable, happy, and carefree. My view of love had become so distorted that if it didn't hurt I couldn't pin point the emotion. And I was so happy to feel like I wasn't in love, to finally be the person who was loved more than they loved them. I was tired of the old performance I had put on time and time again – in a way I liked feeling like the bad guy.

It was a weird way to have a relationship though, and there came a point when we most definitely were no longer friends anymore, but the word boyfriend didn't sit well in my mouth. He wasn't my boyfriend, he was just a boy I saw a couple times a week who kissed me and stared into my eyes like I was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Thursday 25/07/2019

VIRGIN

This is an early entry (I'll do another one later) because it is all very fresh. So a historic moment occurred – I have lost my virginity! Shocking, I know. So he came round and obviously we had the condoms ready but we chilled for a bit. Andrew gave me a necklace bless him which was sweet of him and I do really like it. Anyway, so I end up on my knees and start giving a blowjob (started with too much teeth but got better the second time later) and I did feel a sort of power rush and I wanted to make him feel good. So he was super hard and we were like fuck it but we couldn't get it in for so long. I think why I'm so happy it was with Andrew was the fact that this was all more funny than awkward and like we laughed about it before it went in. Oh it hurt man, like STUNG. When he started going deeper it hurt even more but like slowly the pain ebbed away but I was waiting for him to finish. He lasted a surprisingly long time – like 2 minutes. I bled quite a lot after like still going now which is concerning. I gave another blowjob after and I think that one was much better although it really does make your jaw hurt.

I am really glad it was with Andrew – I was completely naked and felt confident that way around him (although him looking at my vagina made me a bit self-conscious). I don't know why I bled so much after like maybe he tore a muscle. I don't feel much different. No-one can really believe it like I guess I am quite an unlikely candidate for losing my virginity compared to some people. You know the thing from today that I found interesting was that I got a real kick from seeing him get pleasure from me like it gave me such a good feeling.

- Ella