Virgin(41)

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?