Do You Remember The First Time?

Between the ages of 12 and 17 I was kissed precisely three times. First after my 12 birthday by my childhood crush (I screamed and kicked him in the legs) then aged 17 at a party where I got so drunk I passed out face down on the grass. The third time was by the person I would later lose my virginity to.

Most of my teenage years had been spent wondering why no-one wanted to kiss me. Ok so I was spotty and had bushy hair, but around age 15 I’d tamed my eyebrows and shrugged off the thick tortoiseshell glasses in favour of contact lenses, and yet offers were still thin on the ground. When I met my first boyfriend 3 weeks before my 18th birthday I realised he didn’t just want to kiss me while I was sloppy drunk. He wanted to hang out, talk rubbish, and watch telly with me. While we’d talked about lots of things on our 3 dates, but we’d not talked about whether I was virgin or not; it just hadn’t come up in conversation. For two whole weeks I thought about whether we would do it soon or not. If I told him that I’d never done it before I was worried he’d want to make it ‘special’ and there was nothing worse in my mind. Rose petals and candles might do it for some girls but even then I knew they’d just make me laugh. Though the majority of my friends weren’t doing it I wanted to. I knew it was going to be great: adults never stopped talking about sex. There was a big secret in the world and I wanted in on it.

Providence was on my side.

My parents inexplicably went to Brazil for two weeks just after I started dating the boy. I called all my friends and told them that I was home alone and having a party. On Saturday night teenagers turned up in droves, clutching corner shop bottles of vodka and Panda Pops, and we drank ourselves silly. Sometime around 2am half a dozen of us were left to sober up and clean the house. After a cursory tidy we decided to heat up a pizza from the freezer. Everybody, minus the boy and I, went to the kitchen to figure out how exactly this would happen. We looked at each other and got down to some hardcore making out. As he scrabbled at my top I suddenly thought to myself “Oh my god, we could do it right now. Here. In my front room. On the sofa.” I pushed the door shut with my foot. We had sex.

For the next few days I wandered round thinking even harder than before. So that was sex. It must get better. Maybe I would figure out what to do, or he would, or maybe something would change inside me and it’d be like all those late night movies: thrashing, hair gone wild, screaming, that sort of thing. I still didn’t tell the boy it was my first time, I didn’t really care if he knew or not. He was my boyfriend, he cared about me and we were still going out. I figured adult life was going to be pretty awesome. I think I was right.

(Picture from Radioactive Lingerie)