When you're 18 years old, things you've done since you were 12 have lost their meaning. The routines tick along, safe and unexceptional, until you stop for a moment and ask yourself what's really happening.
I don't remember what movie we were watching the night after my twelfth birthday, but I do remember the chill in the basement and the sharp scent of dog piss. Maxey slunk away from my sleeping bag, which sat in the closet and served as the old dog's nest.
Dad took the dog and the piss-drenched bag upstairs. "Why don't you girls open Miranda's sleeping bag and use it as a blanket?" he said.
We tried, lying on the fold-out couch with the slippery make-do blanket pulled to our chins. It didn't work. It wasn't wide enough to cover both of us, and the cold seeped through my PJs, and I could tell by Miranda's shivering that she wasn't any better off.
"We should zip it back up and both get in," I said. The cold was starting to make me hurt.
"Can we fit?" Miranda asked.
"Sure," I said.
Neither of us thought to worry about the physical intimacy required of two people, even two scrawny middle schoolers, trying to fit into the same sleeping bag. There was nothing left between us to feel awkward about. What didn't I know about Miranda, or she about me? We had seen each other pee, poop, cry, bleed. We had twisted each other's nipples after some boy explained what purple nurples were, just to see why everyone wanted to give them to each other. I had shown Miranda my first pubic hairs, and she had been jealous because she didn't have any yet, and we had tried unsuccessfully to figure out why anyone would go to the trouble of shaving them off.
Nothing we did felt particularly sexual to me. It was Miranda. Did her fingers on my nipples feel kind of nice? Yeah, I guess. But that was just my body feeling nice. It felt the same way when I touched them. My hand or hers—there wasn't much difference.
*
On the night after my eighteenth birthday, we didn't need to debate whether to use a single sleeping bag. We zipped in, both lying on our sides, my body fitting against hers as well as always. The bag quickly became toasty. She wrapped her arms around my waist, and I rested my hands on top of hers. Her face nestled into the nook where my neck sloped toward my shoulder.
Then her leg crept between mine, and I felt the same jolt I had every time for six years. I squeezed my thighs together and pushed my ass back into her, bringing the intruding limb flush against my pussy. By moving my hips forward, I could drag myself toward her knee, my underwear doing nothing to decrease the friction. I knew from experience that my labia would swell and turn bright red. Her mons slid over my cheeks, giving her the perfect angle to grind her clit into my ass when I rocked back.
We started in silence, as we always did, moving with pace and deliberation, trading pleasure with each thrust of our hips. Her arms tightened around me, giving her more leverage. I linked my hands under her thigh, pulling up to increase the pressure between my legs. Our clothes were soon soaked with sweat, especially Miranda's. She wore jeans, because denim was my favorite fabric to rub against.
Our quiet yielded to increasingly heavy breaths. Miranda panted, hot against the back of my neck. Finally, with coordination born of long practice, we peaked, legs and arms and pussies crushed together. I shook, like I always did. Miranda kept still but needed to press her mouth into my hair to muffle her yelps.
Once our bodies were under control, Miranda pulled her leg back and loosened her grip without taking her arms from around me. We almost never talked after the sleeping bag, which is how we referred to the act. We just fell asleep.
*
By the standards of 18-year-old girls in conservative Oklahoma, Miranda and I knew a decent amount about sex. We knew what orgasms were, and we both masturbated. Miranda had a handful of ex-boyfriends. She had given blowjobs to the last two, and started doing anal with the most recent one before she lost interest in him. I hadn't dated, but I had watched enough porn to figure out, more or less, the mechanics. I found myself drawn to the sweeter videos, like the ones where two women got turned on as they gave each other massages.
Now, people who haven't been paying attention will say that I was obviously a lesbian and, if the porn hadn't tipped me off, the fact that I fucked my best friend's leg on a regular basis should have. On the contrary, I thought of myself as a normal, straight high school girl, just like all Oklahoma girls are. I was physically close with my best friend, but that was nothing unusual. The sleeping bag was simply another thing we did, something we had been doing for years, the thing that happened when one of us was sleeping over and we were drifting off watching a movie. It never crossed my mind to think of it as sex, nor to think of our peaks as orgasms. It was just me and Miranda.
The change came on a scorching spring day when I got my rejection letter from the University of Oklahoma. Miranda, who had already been accepted and offered a scholarship, was set on attending. It seemed obvious that I would follow her. But sitting at the plastic table in my blue linoleum kitchen, clutching the letter in one hand and the torn envelop in the other, I learned that being with Miranda was no longer an option. My only acceptance was Oklahoma State, a school she hadn't bothered applying to. I would be in Stillwater and she would be in Norman, and there would be 80 miles between us.
She started crying before I did, but soon we were clutching each other and weeping together. I felt a completely unfamiliar kind of pain. It was like my lungs were shrinking, like a fishhook had lodged in one of my ribs and I was being yanked forward on an invisible line.
All I wanted in that moment was for her to kiss me and never stop. That's when I knew.
*
I dragged her upstairs to my room, where we flopped on the bed. I was on the right side and she the left. Like always.
I imagined looking down from the ceiling at the pair of us lying on our backs, sweating through our clothes, hair mussed, faces ugly with tears. Then I removed Miranda from the picture, leaving myself crying alone, and thought, I can't handle four years of that.
It was April, so we still had almost two months of school, plus the summer, before we were split. In my sniffling, semi-functional state, though, I became convinced this was my one chance to tell Miranda I loved her, as if my epiphany had a harsh expiry date. If I didn't roll over and say something right now, I'd become the girl crying on her bed all alone. The only way to prevent that fate was to roll over, right now, and tell Miranda that I wanted her to be my girlfriend, not in the way straight Oklahoma girls had girlfriends who painted each other's nails and gossiped about boys, but in the steamy, passionate big-city lesbian way where you came home from a day at work and kissed with tongues and ate dinner and then bent her over the kitchen counter because you needed her too urgently to make it to the bedroom.
The second I pictured myself bending Miranda over—to this day, one of the most vividly erotic moments of my life—our nights in the sleeping bag snapped into focus. We were already lovers, had been lovers for years. To the world, and even to ourselves, we were best friends, closer than most but well within the realm of the ordinary. In the sleeping bag, however, we took care of needs that best friends leave for others. We learned each other's bodies. We discovered the joy of each other's pleasure. I truly can't explain why it took six years for one of us to see the ritual for what it was, except to point out that humans have a great talent for ignoring the implications of their actions.
