After that first time with Adam and Andrew, I was confused and uncertain and ashamed.
On the one hand, I couldn't deny that they'd both crossed a line with me. They'd taken me without asking. I had been used.
On the other hand, on some level... I'd enjoyed being used.
After the initial shock, I had been aroused by being used by them like a convenient body for them to fuck. It had turned off my ever-humming brain and had made me into an animal. For a little while, I had been nothing but a slut. Not myself, with my history and my memories and my family, just their bitch.
I was turned on by the fact that when they had looked at me, they'd looked at my mouth and my body and my ass and they had thought: I'm going to have that.
I found myself jerking off to the memory of it when I was lying in on weekend mornings. I was so aroused by thinking about the dirty, abject pleasure of being the only one naked and the only one who was getting fucked. And then, Adam taking me again, just he and I on his bed a couple of hours later, he knowing that I wouldn't fight him off, I would only protest mutely as he conquered me.
I began to wonder if in fact I wasn't bi after all, but entirely gay. All I could think about, when I thought of sex, was Adam and Andrew taking me at each end and me blindly squirming beneath them, receiving them.
This is who I am, I thought. I'm a bottom. I'm not anything else.
Then things became a lot more complicated, because I fell in love with a girl.
I was delaying entry into university because I wanted to take a course to help me prepare for my studies. So I was spending a year at a community college.
And halfway through my first week, I saw this girl.
At first I hadn't noticed her because our paths had barely crossed. And she dressed and styled herself in such a way that I somehow missed her.
But then, one morning outside, I was just about to go in when I saw her chatting to someone on the top step. I couldn't take my eyes off her.
She was slim and not very tall, dressed in dull clothes: dark jeans, boots, multiple layers, an anorak, a scarf. Her hair was in a pixie cut with bangs that she kept having to flick out of her face. She had large round glasses, and she appeared to be not wearing makeup.
She looked like the cutest boy ever. Her face was smooth and pale but she had red cheeks.
She was talking to my friend Melissa. I paused, hovering, hoping Melissa would notice me, which she did. She greeted me and we said hello and chatted.
The boyish girl stood there, smiling. I glanced at her and nodded briefly. I noticed she had a pride flag pin on her anorak. I had one on my own coat.
"Oh," Melissa finally said, "Harriet, this is my pal Ali."
"Hi," I said.
"Hello," said Harriet. We made a little small talk and, just like that, I seemed to have become friends with Harriet.
She was friendly and sociable and laughed a lot. It probably helped that Melissa had introduced us: Melissa was a great introducer of people. She was black-haired (she was part Lebanese) and sexy and funny, although I liked her too much as a friend to want to fool around with her, and anyway she preferred big strapping guys, like... well, Adam and Andrew, in fact.
Soon, I found myself going for coffee with Harriet fairly regularly and falling for her in the most hopeless way.
I loved her delicate features, her good humour, the way she was the same with everyone.
She was doing an art course and from time to time she worked as a life model, to help pay the bills.
I wished that I was one of the artists who could see her, because although she disguised her slender body under layers of clothing, I couldn't stop myself from fantasising about what she looked like when she wore nothing.
She had a tattoo on her collarbone and another on her right wrist.
Fairly early in our friendship, she told me she was genderfluid and generally went with they/she pronouns. I told her I was bi.
"Are you," she said with a hint of amusement.
"Yes."
"Really? Or just bicurious?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Well, a lot of straight guys claim to be bi but actually they don't do anything about it."
"Oh, I'm bi," I said. "In fact, I'm..."
I paused and felt nervous. Harriet looked at me intently and smiled.
"It's okay," she said softly.
"I most recently had a thing with a couple of guys," I said, dry-mouthed.
"A couple of guys? At the same time?"
"Yeah."
She smiled encouragingly.
"In fact," I said, "both of them still claim to be straight."
"So, okay," she said thoughtfully. "That's a little disingenuous."
"Well," I said, blushing, "that's how I lost my virginity."
She nodded, looking at me askance.
"How was it?" she said.
"It was a little bit intense."
"I've never had a threesome," Harriet said. "Don't feel like you have to go into details if you don't want to."
"Well, whatever you can imagine," I said, "it was probably like that."
"Oh," she said, "okay," and laughed.
"But," I said, "I'm definitely bi," and then blushed again at how clumsy it was to say so.
"But you've never been with a girl."
"No."
"Anyone you fancy?" She sipped her coffee and grinned at me merrily.
"I plead the Fifth Amendment," I said. She smirked.
I changed the subject. I didn't want to push it.
Over the course of the next few months, I saw nothing of Adam and Andrew, but Harriet and I began to get closer.
We liked each other's company. We had similar tastes in food and TV and movies.
I could cook, which endeared me to her roommate Charlotte, a plump, friendly lesbian who wore brightly-coloured clothes and shared Harriet's taste in large round glasses.
We started to have regular movie nights, where I would cook us dinner and then we would sit on the sofa and watch terrible romance movies and laugh at them.
And then came the evening that it all changed.
Harriet rang me at 6pm and said 'Come round, quick as you can. We've had a great idea.'
'Do you want me to get any shopping?' I said.
'No no, don't worry about that. We're all going out.'
'Okay. Give me half an hour to get ready.'
'No need for that,' she said, and chuckled. 'We'll get you ready.'
She hung up.
