I looked out of my window over the low-slung buildings, broken by the black canals that paved the city and melted into the grey sky. My hair, straight ironed out of its kinky spirals into soft, sleek brown sheets, blew backwards into the narrow room, floating on the gusts of wind that threw themselves forcefully in and then dissipated to a gentle rustle that only barely pushed the Do Not Disturb sign on the inside of the door.
Walking to the bathroom, I dropped my robe at my feet, trying not to catch my reflection in the mirror as I lifted one leg onto the upholstered stool and roughly sawed a cold washcloth over my vagina, pushing it back to my anus and prying, cleaning myself again as I had before. Bending down, I lifted the robe to the bench and turned to the closet. Pulling on a pair of the white Jockey briefs that my mother had bought for me since I was seven, I reached for the discreet knee-length black skirt that hung from a heavy wooden hanger, suspended by bright metal clips that glinted in the blackness of my wardrobe. I shuffled into a firm, slightly yellowed bra that held my breasts close to my body and flat against my ribcage, and covered myself with a ribbed black tank top. Slipping into the pointy black stilettos that I had bought for the occasion, I started to anticipate the moment: R—I didn’t even know his name—the man, the only man, the one who had comforted me through the blue and white screen of our computers as he sat six hours ahead in the early morning of Europe as I cried alone in my room through the night in New York, the man who had made me moan for touch even though I didn’t know what that was and the man who had made me hurt with wanting was finally going to step out of the abstract.
I was in Amsterdam, supposedly satisfying my wanderlust by traveling around the world for a year before beginning my time at university and entering into the predetermined life of a girl reared in the right Manhattan zip code. Meeting R wasn’t my way of rebelling against my parents; I didn’t need to fuck a relative stranger who I met through the internet, lose my virginity in a hotel room to someone fourteen years my senior—that’s what smoking up with my gay best friend in my parents’ apartment while they were away for the weekend was for. I needed to do this for me, because for the last ten years I had been obsessing over school and my future and perfection, and I was tired and dead. I had immortalized sex, seen it as a cathartic experience that would make up for the abuse and anguish that I had been put through and put myself through. The only problem was, I was terrified.
And that’s how he found me: rigid against the wall clutching a perfume bottle and shaking in my stilettos, shocked into petrification by his curt knocks and the swiftness with which he opened and closed the unlocked door, invading the space that I had been alone in for the past day in a way that seemed, at the time, more personal than anything he could do to my body.
“Darling.” His voice was husky and tinged with the hollow Northern European accent that had crackled through my cell phone in the middle of the night while I touched myself for him. He took one long stride and came close to me, his black pants and button down shirt touching my body, the dark colors of our clothes brushing together in a gothic copulation of fiber. I had time to look up and see his blond hair brush over his light blue eyes as they closed and lowered towards my eyes, his lips searching for my mouth. We kissed. “Was that the first?”
I grunted into his neck and nodded my head up and down. My lips burned and my tongue sat heavily in my mouth, still tingling from the coolness of his tongue brushing against it. My chest and stomach ached with the familiar throbbing dullness that came whenever I thought of R, and I leaned heavily against his broad chest as my legs dripped with the entirely new feeling between them.
“You have a lot to learn. But that’s okay. No one’s spoiled you.”
“I’ll do anything…” I wanted to belong to him, to feel safe because I wasn’t responsible. I slid down to my knees in front of him.
“Oh Sweety. You don’t have to. Not now.”
“I want to.” I undid his belt and pulled the zipper of his trousers, drawing them down to his knees with his deep green boxer shorts. I stared at his cock, touching it gently, velvet on the outside and flared, hardening and lengthening in front of me. I rubbed my face against it and looked up at him. “It’s…you’re so beautiful.” Clutching the base with my hand, wrapping my fingers around him but not able to completely, I took his head into my mouth and suckled gently, Drawing more and more into my mouth and swallowing him until my throat was opening and closing on his cock and my nose was nestled in his light pubic hair. One hand pushed him away from me, controlling the spastic jerking of his pelvis, the other reached between his legs, squeezing his balls as he told me to do in his emails. His breathing quickened. He groaned and my mouth was filled with warm saltiness that trickled down my throat and fell down my chin in a long string as I released his cock. Wiping him off, I pulled his shorts and pants up, redoing the belt and then standing in front of him, waiting.
He selected a CD, sliding it competently into the modern, sleek sound system that accented the otherwise classic room, and then placed both hands heavily on my shoulder. Turning me towards the full length mirror, he pulled me against him, and started to run his hands over me. His fingertips brushed over the bones in my neck, down over my shoulders, stroking the sides of my breasts that protruded slightly through the armholes of my shirt, drawing breathy sighs from my nose as my eyes slid closed; I was reveling in the unfamiliarity of human contact.
