Truth be told, my attitudes toward sex were pretty conservative in my formative years, leading me to graduate high school in 1990 as a virgin who'd only managed to finger-bang Linda, my girlfriend who'd given me a few hand jobs. (This after she remarked that she'd expected my penis to be bigger - thanks for the esteem boost, John Holmes and other stars of early VHS porn!)
Linda's hardcore Catholicism had contributed to my hang-ups about sex. She'd roped me into a Monday night Christian youth group that I attended with her mainly so we could make out and touch each other's sexy parts afterwards. She clearly enjoyed it - man, did she ever get wet! - but then she always told me about how she felt guilty afterwards. And the first time she got me to come she reacted as if I'd shot Satan's spit all over her hand and wrist! So that relationship didn't last all that long; we couldn't put the sexual genie back in the bottle once we'd started to touch each other below the equator but she didn't want to lose her virginity, either.
Beyond my own experience, I found myself repulsed by the way a lot of my peers talked about sex. Maybe it was because I was close with my mother and sister, but I just couldn't objectify women the way so many of my peers did. Like I found myself incredibly grossed out when I learned that two of my good friends lost their virginity within the space of a few weeks to the same girl, a very sad-eyed coed, at the behest of this annoying preppy dude they'd begun hanging out with who had clearly also been with her.
Then you add in the fact that I was a *huge* Smiths fan and took Morrissey's every lyric about how confusing and terrifying all things sexual were and...well, I just learned not to think with my little head. I was living under the mistakenly naïve notion that any act of sex was a crime against women and decided not to be a part of any of it, taking a very good friend to senior prom without sharing so much as a real kiss.
Flash forward to the first semester of my freshman year of college life on a coed dorm floor in 1988. Were there hookups? Oh yes. Did I have any? Hell no. Was I hoping to? Well, possibly. But my lack of "game" quickly got me pushed into the "friend zone" by most women I was interested in. I was described as cute enough, known for my sarcastic wit, appreciated for my smarts...but also shaping up to be the last virgin on the floor. (Well, except for the gamers and a few of the Christian youth group types.)
The female version of me on my dorm floor was Kris, a brunette who idolized Sandra Bernhard and a few other caustic woman comedians of the day. Kris was on the tall side, with a pretty-enough round face, brown permed hair that fell a few inches past her shoulders, big bright brown eyes, smallish breasts and a nicely rounded rear end that became a little more round each month as she fought the dreaded "freshman fifteen."
Kris and I would verbally spar whenever she was around, which she often was because she seemed to have a thing for my openly gay roommate. Looking back, I know that she and I were both insecure and tended to build walls of words around ourselves as a sort of coping or defense mechanism. At the time it just seemed the way to be in order to get by at a mediocre land-grant university.
So there I was on the weekend following Thanksgiving break, a cold and rainy Saturday night. I had a paper due in my composition class Monday morning that I was trying to get a head start on (versus kicking the whole thing out in a caffeine-and-nicotine-fueled binge on Sunday night), so I'd opted to stay in rather than walk the mile or so over to a kegger that a bunch of my floor mates had decided to hit.
I was making decent headway on my paper when I looked over at the clock and saw it was 10pm already. The two cans of Mountain Dew I'd used to jolt my brain into action were ready for their exit, so I made my way over to the men's bathroom. As I urinated I thought about how my roommate wouldn't be back from the kegger for a few more hours, so I pondered treating myself to a wank when I got back to my room.
As I walked back down the hallway I was surprised at how still things were with quiet hours not due to hit until midnight. I'd been playing music through my headphones while working on my paper to drown out the loud music and TVs that typically blared throughout the dorm on weekend nights. When I got to the room Kris shared with her roommate Erin, three doors down from my own, I saw that the door was partway open and decided to stop and see who else had decided to stay in for the evening.
I knocked twice, then popped my head in. "So, what loser beside me is staying in tonight?" I said by way of greeting before noticing Kris lying on her side on her twin bed, her face etched in sadness, listening to some female vocalist's music quietly. "Is something wrong?"
"Yes. No. I don't know."
"Well, that's clear enough," I said, walking into the room, picking up the cheap vinyl-coated chair from Erin's desk. I placed it on the ground, sat backwards in it, facing Kris. "You're not your usual chipper self. What's going on?"
"I dunno. I don't want to talk about it."
"Okay," I replied, not wanting to be a pain in the ass. "Should I go?"
Kris was silent for several seconds, then finally said "No. It's okay. Can you close the door?"
"Sure," I said, getting up and swinging it shut. I walked the four steps back to the chair and began to straddle it again.
"No. Don't sit," Kris said. "Come here and lie down with me."
"Oooooh, gross," I replied with a laugh that I quickly swallowed as she began to cry.
"Thanks, asshole. That's just what I needed to hear tonight," she choked out.
"What? No. Don't cry. I'm sorry," I replied. "Move over, make a little room."
Kris rolled over, now facing the wall, and I lay down next to her. She flinched as I placed my hand on her shoulder, and I quickly took it away. "No, it's okay. I just didn't expect you to touch me. Will you hold me?" I wrapped my left arm over her waist, slid my right beneath her, joined my hands together and held her close in a spooning position. "Thank you. This is nice." It was. As much as I'd enjoyed touching my high school girlfriend above and below the waist, close contact may have been my favorite part of being with her.
"So what's wrong?" I asked again, talking into the curly ringlets that covered the back of her neck.
"Do you know that guy Dave who lives on 2C?"
"The wanna-be surfer guy?"
