Fast turn around this time, turns out this one wrote itself.

MY FIRST LOVE

He kissed me good night before he got into the car. I walked back into the Hardee’s thoughtful. It was four in the morning and of course, my girlfriends started in immediately on how gorgeous he was when I got back to the table. It had been a fun night, and I was excited about meeting him, but I wasn’t really listening, my mind was on the booth two tables over.

I had seen him watching me at the club. It was pure fate that he had walked into the same fast food joint that we had landed at. I couldn’t believe he was here, and I couldn’t think about anything else. I think I blinked and then somehow he was just there standing at the end of the table, joking with one of my girlfriends. I just stared, struggling to not die on the spot. Then he was calling his friend over and they were sitting down with us. I didn’t die, but I wasn’t exactly breathing either.

He was six four, a sophomore, a scholarship athlete, and broke like myself. Our schools were three hours apart, neither of us owned a car, and even gas money was a challenge. We were always bartering with someone to borrow their car or hitch a ride. It became like a part time job. Then finally I got his best friend, who was a car owner, hooked up with one of my friends. This still left us with only about part of every other weekend to see each other. We actually sent each other letters in between… Yes, real snail mail letters, and yes, I am that old. I loved his handwriting. It was so much prettier than my scrawl, even when I worked every letter slowly and methodically, I always felt let down when I held the page up. I was so jealous of his long, thin, sexy loops. I used to trace my finger over the pages of his letters until it started to feel like I was actually touching him.

We never went out anywhere special… games of course, the club, the park, the movies, our rooms, campus commons, the ice cream shop, but God we used to laugh so hard. We acted like little kids half the time, silly as hell. Giddy every time we so much as held hands. I was always making up little games for us to play. I remember him smiling ear to ear while I would excitedly explain the rules. Seriously, his smile was heartstopping. Now I’ve always been tough and it is no overstatement to say, I was in incredible shape back then, but still he could lift me like I was a child, and trying to wrestle him was hopeless. So you can imagine how complicated it was to come up with competitions that were fair. I actually became very skilled at finding creative ways to handicap him 🙂

I don’t know that I can tell you what he thought when I undressed, but I remember exactly how I felt when he so much as took his shirt off. Half off me wanted to cry and worship at his feet the other half wanted to tackle him outright. There was not one inch of his body that was not astonishingly perfect, and everything we did together felt like pure magic. There was also nothing at all sophisticated about it. When we came together it was much more like two puppies with paws flying and mouths nipping at any part that could be reached than any romantic Hollywood scene. We were mad scientist just dumping every vial we had into the caldron, but somehow no matter the combination, it all felt wildly, rabidly thrilling and oh soooooo good!

Technically I was still a virgin. I was also a devout Christian, but a storm was brewing. He never pressured me. But, it was getting harder and harder to stop our bodies from doing what every cell in them was screaming for. More than that, mentally, emotionally I came to believe that it was meant for us to be together in this way… that he was meant to be my first. We didn’t say the words, ‘I love you’. What we felt for each other was so unmistakable, so conspicuous, I don’t think at the time we even realized we weren’t saying it out loud. This overarching conundrum began to weigh on me. It was not the first time my instinct, my internal voice, my personal sense of truth was directly at odds with the cultural and or religious values I was raised with. I struggled for a long time with this decision.

That spring, he invited me to go to his fraternity’s year end ball with him. For some it may not have been a big deal. But I was a girl who’d never been asked out before my freshman year in college. There had been no dances, no proms, no make-out sessions in the parking lot for me in high school. And even freshman year, nothing lasted much beyond the point at which they realized that when I said ‘no sex’ I actually really, really did mean ‘no sex’. I never dressed up outside of occasions where my mother was forcing me to, I didn’t wear make-up, my hair was cut boy short, and so for me, it WAS a big, big deal. When I was lying in bed that night unable to sleep, I decided the night of the ball would be the night. It would likely be the last time I saw him before we both went home for summer break. I knew it also might be the last time I saw him ever. There were plenty of girls right there on his own campus far more attractive and experienced than I was. He was a star athlete, I knew he was hit on constantly. Trust me, even when I was standing right there it didn’t stop some of them. He acted oblivious to it, but I was not that naive, even then. I knew our situation was unreasonable, and probably unfair to him. He was human, he would give in, it made far more sense than what we were doing, and the summer was three long months. I never wavered on that decision after that night.

I told him a week before the night of the ball, that it would be the night. I’m quite sure neither one of us learned a single damn thing in any class that week. When it FINALLY came, even Cinderella could not have claimed a single advantage over me… it literally could not have been more perfect. We met at his house. His mother gave us a lecture, then kissed us both. We ate with good friends at the fanciest restaurant we’d ever gone to. He kept staring at me like he was trying to decide if aliens had replaced me with a cyber version of myself. I think I blushed the entire evening. The party was off the hook. I have no memories of the hotel room itself other than that we broke the bathroom sink off the wall. I do remember him tying a towel around his neck and running at me like a superhero at one point, and the scream rising in my throat as he came. We never slept, and I never regretted any of it for even a second.

We wrote all summer. I still have some of those letters. We decided to return to school a week early for the fall semester. We holed up in my room and came out only when we ran out of Gatorade, beef jerky, or cereal. We tore each other’s clothes off every time one or the other tried to put something on, and fucked every way we could imagine…. we tumbled in a heap onto the floor laughing hysterically at ourselves more times than I can count, and while we laid there trying to catch our breath and re-group one or the other of us would start describing what we should try next. We played all our old games too, and they still made us laugh. I cried when he left at the end of the week, and then slept till my roommate arrived the next day.

He friended me on Facebook two years ago 🙂