That is bullshit. You’re wrong. Prove it.
I was done sucking up to men. Fluffing their egos. Folding their tightie whities. I was going to smash my bottles against the wall, and someone could clean up after me, goddammit. I stopped leaning over makeup mirrors and blow-drying my hair. I wore clothes that stank of hamper and Marlboro Lights, and it seemed to me that men got off on this new uncorseted persona. That’s what they said: We like strong women. That’s what they said: Be yourself. So, death to the girl of the nervous fidgets, behold the woman with a beer in her hand and one endless cigarette. No more hearts doodled in spiral notebooks. No more falling in love with every boy who looks your way in biology class. But falling into bed—now, this was another topic entirely.
That’s what Mateo and I did that night. We slinked off into my bedroom while the party rambled on, and we ripped off each other’s clothes in a blind, snarling rage. For so long, I wondered how it would feel to sleep with someone other than Miles. To run the tip of my nose along the powdery skin of his stomach, soft as a puppy’s belly, and into the feral thicket of short, wiry hair leading down below. But I couldn’t tell you what sex with Mateo was like, because all I had the next day was a flash of a memory, five seconds of a frame: me, on top of him, my hands digging into his chest and my hair swishing around madly. I am told that I screamed. The kind of excitement that travels through flimsy apartment walls.
“I guess I don’t need to ask if you enjoyed yourself,” my roommate Tara said the next day over coffee.
But that seemed like a very good question. Honestly, I had no idea.
I LIKED THE idea of being “experienced.” I was 16 when Miles and I had sex. I saw no explosion of glitter, no doves released into the air. Actually, it felt more like a bowling ball being shoved up my vagina (but a very sweet and loving bowling ball). I adored Miles. But our sex drives were set at different volumes. Mine was the medium hum of a transistor radio. His went to 11.
This is how teenage boys are, right? They’ll hump anything. Hump the furniture. Hump the floorboards. Their dicks are like divining rods forever finding gold inside someone else’s pants. And me? I was a cuddle bunny. I liked soft stroking and delicate kisses, and those nights could be a little heavy on the saliva and the grabbing for me.
I wasn’t a prude or anything. That was a slur in high school. Don’t be a prude. Guys would joke about girls so frigid their knees were sewn together and their tongues sat in their mouths like lazy slugs when you kissed them. I wasn’t going to be that way. My tongue had a graceful twirl. My knees opened without a creak. My bra fell to the floor with a swoosh. I would pull a man in close, let him glide all over me, and my body parts went electric in his mouth. But then.
Then what?
I’m not going to say I faked orgasms. That sounds intentional. As if I knew what an orgasm felt like, and I purposefully pretended to be having one. It was more like: Orgasms happen when you’re with men. You’re with a man now. Are you having an orgasm? Probably so! I leaned in to those swells of pleasure with loud gasps and moans as if, by moving my arms and legs frantically enough, I might somehow learn to surf.
“Did you come?” Miles would ask, looking at me with those eager blue eyes.
And I would smile. “Yes.” It was wish fulfillment, performance anxiety, and sexual ignorance wrapped up into one.
I wanted to be good in bed. Who doesn’t want this? Are there women out there, hoping to be bad in bed? And I understood from NC-17 movies starring Mickey Rourke that being good in bed was a matter of arched backs and open mouths and frantic, animal fucking that ended in a double-orgasm thunderclap. It wasn’t the hardest posture to imitate. Suck in your stomach, find the proper lighting, go nuts.