I was 18 when it happened. After high school I had scored a great summer job at my dad's big office on an internship program they had for employees' children. At least it was supposed to be great. Actually I found life under florescent lights as boring as would any 18-year-old.
I had been a shy kid all through school and, in consequence, I was still a virgin. I thought I should be out trying to "get girls" (even though I still didn't really know how) rather than being cooped up in this stupid office.
Another minor detail about my virginity: I had a secret. It was a secret I had never revealed to anyone for fear of shame, humiliation, disgust. This was back before the internet--if I'd had the web back then I quickly would have found that I was not alone. But as it was, I to this day think I have some inkling what it might be like to grow up gay and in the closet, so great was my sexual desire, trumped only by my need to keep my preference secret. My deep dark secret? I liked fat chicks.
There was a woman in my dad's office that summer in whom I took a strong prurient interest. Her name (not her real name) was Linda Concepcion. Hispanic, maybe 35 years old--not more than 40--with long black hair that was something between curly and wavy, she was about 5'5" and could not have weighed a gram less than 200 pounds. And what pounds they were! I would guess, looking back, that she had a 44" bust and something above an F-cup. Her waist was probably 38 -- 40", a big, bountiful belly and generous love handles. And she was 50'' at the hips if she was an inch, with a ponderous teardrop shaped bottom. In short, she was a triple threat: A generally pear shaped woman with acres of ass and a bulging belly, but still managing to stack a well proportioned bust on that oh-so-lovely pedestal.
When she would sit down at my desk next to me to give me instructions in the spreadsheet software it would make me absolutely insane. Her trace of Spanish accent was musical and her perfume intoxicating, and periodically, when she really had to explain a particular entry, she had a habit of physically tapping that line-item on the screen, though this meant reaching past me to the monitor. Her shoulder would graze mine and she would be close enough that I could often feel errant strands of her hair graze against my face.
"You're listening, right?" she would sometimes ask, and even that couldn't snap me out of it because all I could think of was her enchanting accent. She had the faintest hint of that dialect of Spanish--what is it? Dominican? Puerto Rican?--that seems to turn 'y' into 'j': "Jou sure jou're getting all this?" I grew up in the southwest and was no stranger to Mexican accents, but this was different; this felt foreign, faraway, exotic.
When she would leave my desk I would be faced with an awful paradox. The boner she would leave me with was mystical, full, rock hard, tingling and itching to come. It was a boner I could never seem to reproduce at home at night in my bed, eyes closed trying to recreate the moment so I could jerk off. At home I almost always got a different boner: respectable, but lacking in the painful urgency that I so desperately wanted to relieve when Linda would depart from my presence at the office. The paradox? Before I could get up and go to the restroom I would have to let enough of the moment pass that I could at least get down to half-mast. I even thought about trying to stroke one off in my pants at my desk once but got cold feet. I wasn't sure how big of a mess it would make but it didn't seem worth the risk that it might seep visibly through my pants.
Then something strange started to happen. Linda started making extremely bold sexual advances at me. Or so it seemed. I recall clearly the first time it happened. It was a spreadsheet day, therefore also a boner day, and when she had finished showing me what was wrong with my entries she didn't stand up but instead remained seated beside me making small talk, asking about school, future plans, etc. But then we got to the subject of girls.
"You mean you've never had a girlfriend?" (Jou mean jou've never had a girlfrien?)
"Not really."
"Not really, what is that 'not really'? You've been on dates." (Jou've been on daiss.)
I shook my head.
"So you've never ...?"
She let the question hang there while my mind applied Occam's Razor. It didn't seem possible that this 35-ish female full-time employee was really inquiring about a male summer intern's virginity. But then there just didn't seem to be anything else the question could mean. What little ambiguity lay in her silent trailing off did not leave me with much wiggle room. If she was talking about what I thought she was talking about and I lied, claimed to be fully fledged as it were, she might need a story, a background, a who-what-where-when-why. (Well, okay, not 'why'.) I wasn't prepared to make up a story on the spot so I shook my head no and felt my face redden.
What she said next floored me, and still does to this day when I think about it. I was half-expecting some advice on how to be confident with girls but, instead, all she said was: "Too bad. One of these days me and you should go make whoopee in the ladies room." I'm sure my eyes widened in shock as I gaped across at her, stunned speechless. There was a twinkle in her eyes and a wry, knowing smile as she enjoyed my surprised confusion. She let the overture hang in the air exactly two beats before, back to business, "Here let me show you one last thing," pointing again at the screen. In her tone it was as though she'd said "just kidding."
But, as I was thinking about it later, I realized she never actually said "just kidding." That's what was bothering me. Was she serious? Or was it so obviously a joke that she didn't even feel the need to say "just kidding" because it was implied. Over time I (sadly) became more and more convinced it was the latter. Even the word she used, "whoopee," helped confirm it was a joke. If you're reading this 100 years from now, keep in mind that no one in the early 1990s called it "whoopee." Not seriously anyway. It was a way of sanitizing it; she made a dirty joke without using a dirty word. That was all.
But then it happened again. Maybe a week or two had passed and she checked on my status. "Still nothing?"
"Still nothing," I confirmed exasperatedly.
"Don't jou worry, one day we'll do the wild thing in an empty conference room." Here she put her hand on my knee, but only fleetingly, no squeeze, no suggestive move up the thigh. It was more like a friendly tap than anything else, and it occurred just as she got up to leave me riveted by the waggle of her gigantic heart-shaped ass as she strode across the office and out of sight, helpless to relieve my adamantine boner.
But I was still perplexed. "Wild thing" was about as tame and sanitary as "whoopee," and equally rare in the vernacular. It was as though Linda was going out of her way not to use an overtly sexual term. But why? Was this some elaborate CYA mechanism to defend against a sexual harassment lawsuit? I was more confused than ever. But on the upside, my nighttime boners were getting better. I was taking home great material.
Then one Friday the boss asked me to work the Monday of the would-be three-day 4th of July weekend: The IT department was pushing some kind of software patch and they wanted a skeleton crew--"just two or three people in each department," my boss said--just in case IT needed someone on the user end to run some tests. "Hate to do it to a summer intern but that's just how it worked out," my boss said. "Ms. Concepcion will be here too." He walked away.
"Ms. Concepcion" came by my desk almost immediately and--all business, not a trace of flirt--asked me if actually I wouldn't mind coming in an hour early that day, she had some things to go over with me.
Boy did she ever.
She was dressed to kill that morning in a simple white front-buttoning blouse and nice high-waisted, thigh-hugging charcoal pinstripe skirt that flattered her faint hourglass shape. It didn't occur to me at the time how unusual it was for her to be dressed to the nines on a day the office wasn't open for business. I was too busy fantasizing. My pulse quickened as I tried to imagine what those boobs, that belly, that big butt would look like, let alone feel like against my naked skin. Again, this was before the internet: I had grown up in a sheltered environment and had been, until very recently, too young to go to a porn store, so all the porn I got consisted of the odd Playboy, Penthouse or Hustler magazine I would get from a friend who'd swiped it from an older brother or something. And in those publications all the women were skinny. I literally had no idea what a nude fat woman would look like--but I was eager to find out.
It was more of the same again, her seated beside me, more maddeningly enchanting than ever, fresh from her morning shower when the perfume is the strongest and it mingles with the fainter scent of shampoo. As usual, she was pointing at the screen, I was nodding while not hearing a thing, and my boner was in rarest form.
After she finished explaining about the software patch, she settled back in her seat and said "I hope you finally got some fireworks for the 4th." And again, the "finally," and the brief hesitation before, and euphemistic vocal inflection on, the word "fireworks" were all I had to distinguish this comment from friendly but entirely sexless office chit-chat.
"No." I said, and then, absented-mindedly, added "not that kind."