The V-Word

by Amber J. Keyser

  So we drink cherry brandy. We talk about whatever. But we know talking is a waste of time, so we go up to my bedroom.

  “Let’s get naked,” he says, which I think is so funny and wonderful! Because it’s so honest. When someone suggests it this way—Let’s get naked!—you can say yes or you can say no; there’s no gray area, there’s no language hiding intention.

  This is how everything looks, then: We’re both in my bed, tangled up together on top of the quilt. His jeans, T-shirt (white) and flannel shirt (blue) are tossed on the floor. His boxer shorts (white with green stripes) are pushed down a little. I’m in my bra (black satin) and my Levis are on the floor. My underwear are cotton bikinis, bought in a pack of six. My bed is a single and fits both of us, though his feet hang over the edge a bit. We’re touching each other in places we’ve already touched (under the bra and boxers and undies) but because we’re alone it feels gigantic and luxurious, like we’re just discovering America.

  Except, soon it’s 9:26 PM, according to the clock on my nightstand. He’s still sixteen and his parents expect him home by ten.

  I straighten my bra, put on my shirt, get up to go pee. When I come back he’s sitting on my bed, wearing his jeans, putting on his T-shirt. Seeing him dress is unbearably sad but I pull on my own jeans, resigned to our night together being over.

  Then, as he’s putting his flannel back on, even though he needs to get home, I kiss him again. Reach down to feel if he’s hard.

  He’s always hard. I think that’s magical.

  I push his flannel off his shoulders. Wrench his T-shirt off. Kneel down between his knees.

  We don’t say anything.

  We pull his jeans down around his ankles. He’s in his striped boxers again, his white tube socks pulled up his calves in that dorky boy way.

  My hands are on his thighs, touching the blond hairs there that I think are almost pretty, feeling how flat and strong his muscles are. There is nothing on my body like that. I am soft and smooshy despite my efforts to be fit and pretty. But he works very hard to be strong and fit and athletic. Harder than I am willing to, actually, but he thinks nothing of it. I’m almost jealous that his body is so unlike mine. But not quite jealous, because I am touching his body as if it were mine, and being together means I can have it whenever I want now, like it belongs to me.

  From where I kneel, I don’t worry what I look like. My hair covers my shoulders and chest and the workings of my face. My body folds beneath him, shadowed. I don’t look up so I don’t know if he is watching or just feeling what I’m doing.

  We pull down his boxers and a second later I feel him in my mouth. Under my palms his thighs are trembling, but what I’m doing is solid and clear. Honest. I hear the sound of him sucking in his breath, then a sighing noise from deep in his chest. Every sound he makes tells me how it feels.

  I feel everything too, and not just with my brain, which is reeling with excitement and a kind of crazed curiosity. Physically, I am right there with him. Feeling through his body how good it feels. Tasting everything, smelling everything. These aren’t tastes or smells I can name but they’re familiar. Like I should have known them. Like I’d always known them.

  Like things that are private and exclusive.

  Like being an adult: an acquired taste.

  Sweet, salty, sour, bitter. The way his body tenses. The way he breathes, soft, then hard. It’s perfect. It feels like something I’m creating, not just a thing that’s happening.

  When he comes, which is just a few minutes into it, I swallow it all—the sweet, salty, sour, bitter. All of it.

  For a little while, neither of us move. I don’t say a word, I don’t even look at him. I press my hands on his thighs like I’m going to stand up.

  That’s when he scoops me up and holds me tighter than anyone ever has before and he says, “God, you’re so great. I just love you so much.”

  Time stops in that moment. I am dizzy with victory and gratitude. The hallway light is on, the nightstand lamp is off. The bed and quilt, dark beneath us, and his thighs so strong, holding me on him, holding us both up as we press together. The words he’s said between us. I don’t say I love you back. I don’t need to because I know that this is him thanking me. Spontaneously. The most genuine and vulnerable I’ve ever known a boy to be.

  I’ve never made anyone happy like this. I’ve given him something that surprised him, and it surprised me as well: He liked it, he appreciated it, he made me feel valuable and precious. And competent, just as I am.

  I’ve created a recipe to making his body feel good on the first try and I’ve witnessed the first time he enjoyed it. I know that I get to be in his memory forever. This also feels rare and lucky. Destined. Singular. Unreplaceable.

  A blowjob. Sucking dick. Head.

  You could say that it wasn’t that noble.

  You could say that I was feasting on a banquet of crumbs.

  You could say, “Why didn’t he get you off, Carrie?”

  You could say all that and the grown woman I am now would nod along with you.

  But this memory, this first time, is the one that I always return to.

  God, you’re so great.

  The clock is ticking, he needs to get home, this is ending, this is bad timing. But I don’t regret it. I know so much lays before us.

  I’m comfortable, for once, being myself. I’m thinking about how it feels to feel good. I’m thinking about sex and God and how bodies don’t lie. How so many things I’ve believed about myself are false.

  I just love you so much.

  At this moment, sitting across his thighs, holding him tight, all I know is that I am valuable and good. And that no one, no girl before me, has ever made him feel this. And no matter what happens—the dark places we end up not visible or conceivable to me then as I perch on him full of happiness and delight—this is real, this is good. Because, here, in this moment, in this memory, I will always get to be the first one. And that is what counts.

  Sex is everywhere in American culture.

  The cover of Cosmopolitan tantalizes with “101 Tips to Satisfy Your Man in Bed.” The Sport’s Illustrated swimsuit issue bombards us with what a hot woman is supposed to look like. Pounding rap lyrics remind us that everyone is doing it—or should be. One Hollywood blockbuster after another depicts women going down and getting laid.

  All that sex sure looks like fun—as long as you’re straight.

  Young women have always been the target of mixed messages about sex. From school sex education to religious messaging to public health advisories, we’ve heard that sex is dangerous, dirty, and off-limits. And if you’re queer? The messages get worse: immoral, sinful, and illegal.

  How do we make sense of it all? Do we aspire to look like Victoria’s Secret models with come-hither smiles? Do we take so-called “purity” pledges? Do we suffocate our own desires?

  Maybe the first step forward is to claim our bodies as our own.

  In the next story, Sidney writes about surviving Catholic school and finding pleasure in sharing her own anatomy.

  3

  Sharing My Anatomy

  Sidney Joaquin-Vetromile

  Novels were my first explorations of sex. In bookstores, I would pick up titles from the romance section, wander to a different, more neutral aisle (calendars, perhaps), and surreptitiously scan for certain key words to find the scenes I wanted.

  Slick. Moan. Hands. Thrust.

  The sex was always heterosexual. I never cared much for the characters’ backstories but I liked reading about what a gentle, attentive lover might do to anatomy like mine.

  One sex scene in a long-forgotten novel lingered with me. A young man, a mechanic, coupled with a slightly older woman in the back of a car he had been repairing. He had gotten hard and penetrated his lover but, this being his first time, he had come almost immediately. Paralyzed with shame, he began to pull out but she wrapped her legs around him and told him, gently, that he wasn’t finished yet. She kept h
im inside her and then moved against him like a slow, insistent tide.

  With the claiming of her own pleasure, her increasing wetness, her warmth, and her patience, the young man’s desire and erection returned, stronger now. They came together, sweating and seizing each other in gratitude. She helped to banish his shame, replacing it with a new faith in his capacity for intimacy and the loving exchange of pleasure.

  The book was told in the third person but in this scene I imagined myself as the young man—uncertain, filled with desire, prone to mistakes but guided to orgasm by someone who knew I had no reason to be ashamed. Guided to orgasm by a woman. Someone who shared my anatomy.

  I was far too frightened to articulate this physical longing. The first time I made myself come as a teenager, with rhythmic thrusts against a pillow, I felt surprised and terrified. I prayed for forgiveness.

  As a student at a conservative, all-girls Catholic school I absorbed many awful messages about sex. When I was fifteen, Proposition 22, an antigay marriage measure in California, was overwhelmingly voted into law. I asked my favorite teacher, a gentle, good-humored nun, how she voted. She launched into a vicious monologue. “Men have to use their penises and their mouths. They place their genitals in each other’s anuses. Women have to use their fingers, or worse, other devices. It’s unspeakable. It’s morally wrong. It brings disease. I’m a Catholic sister. How do you think I voted?”

  Unspeakable. Devices. Fingers.

  The words echoed in my mind, disgusting me. Instinctively I sat on my hands, as if she had revealed me to the entire class.

  The following year, my high school invited two women from the local district attorney’s office to talk to us about sex crimes. Their main prosecuting concern was not sexual assault; it was sex among minors. The DA gave us dire warnings. Even if the participants were consenting and underage—both sixteen, for example—they could be charged as sex offenders. If one partner was eighteen and the other partner was younger, the older one would be charged as a statutory rapist. Yes, they would pursue same-sex offenders. Digital sex, they said, waggling their fingers in the air, was a crime too.

  When the school hired a police officer to talk to us about sexual assault, his advice was insane. “If you don’t want to get raped, you won’t get raped. You have to really believe in yourself. And you have to be willing to do crazy things. Poop your pants. Piss your pants. That’ll stop the rapist. He’ll be too grossed out.”

  What did we learn? That sex outside of marriage would destroy us. Criminal. Broken. Unwholesome. Alone. And what waited for me, as a closeted gay kid, was worse. Perhaps even an early death.

  Still, I felt a particular longing for intimacy and sex that grew each year. I kept to my romance novels, finding new scenes. I learned how to touch myself with my own hands, how to draw circles with my fingers where my body liked it best, how to touch my clitoris to come quickly, and how to make myself wait for a more intense, drawn-out orgasm.

  When chat rooms first came into vogue, I discovered cybersex. I would ask faceless men to imagine what they wanted to do to me, blocking the ones who wanted to be rough, clicking away from the ones who wanted to receive oral sex. I chatted with the ones who wanted to enter me with their tongues or penetrate me slowly with one hand while touching my clitoris. These conversations were strange, anonymous affirmations of my desire. At school I felt humiliated. Online I felt powerful.

  I avoided lesbian chat rooms. Participating there would mean there was something irreversibly wrong with me. I could not allow myself to imagine the sex I wanted to have. I told myself that cybersex, fantasizing, and self-pleasuring were mere misdemeanors, preventing me from the felony of partnered sex. I would never have sex with someone else. I would suppress real-life crush feelings. I would stay in the safety of novels, internet chats, and my imagination.

  Minor sins, not mortal ones.

  But I was having crushes. My body was, against my will, teaching me what I liked. Women who were more athletic than I was. Women who ran track, played soccer, and stole bases in softball. Women whose navy, uniform cardigans clung precisely to their strong chests and arms. Women who wore their battered athletic sneakers off the field and told dirty jokes. Women who made everyone laugh. I liked messy hair and quick smiles and mischief. I liked the soft mounds above flat torsos.

  I would look and then try not to look.

  I would feel and then try not to feel.

  Prohibition and pleasure and hope and self-hatred existed in the same heartbeat. There were so many voices in my head:

  You are so beautiful.

  Don’t tell her that.

  I want.

  I’m disgusting.

  God gave me up unto vile affections.

  I want to give to you.

  I want you to give to me.

  But at night, after my solitary orgasms, I could sleep more easily. My heart and my mind would go quiet, comforted by my capable body.

  I met Maureen my senior year in high school. She was goofy and awkward, with her hair always in her face. She loved the musical Rent, which I’d never heard of, and would belt out lyrics in her car, offering to teach me how to sing.

  I didn’t have a crush on Maureen immediately. Mostly she confused me, collapsing, as she did, into mumbles and laughter whenever I was near her. I remember that I could sense when she was near. Maybe it was her perfume or shampoo or perhaps I could read her presence in the air like an olfactory prediction of what would pass between us.

  In the middle of our senior year, Maureen found my chat name online. We began to talk every night. We told each other stories about school, our families, and what we wanted to do in the future. I began to sense we were skirting a subject but I couldn’t imagine what it was.

  Finally, at midnight, she said over chat that she liked me. She had a crush on me that she had been trying to suppress.

  I called her on her phone immediately.

  “I’m hiding under my desk now,” she said, by way of greeting me.

  “What? I can’t believe this!” I said happily.

  “You couldn’t tell?” Maureen asked.

  “No way! Not at all!” I said.

  I had been, in the language of my Filipina mother, torpe—so dense, so locked up in my own anxiety, that I noticed none of the cues until Maureen told me directly.

  Torpe.

  “So,” I said, all suave (as in, not suave at all). “Um. What do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” Maureen said honestly.

  Maureen and I were shy with each other at school in the following weeks. Suddenly, we were both mumbling and laughing awkwardly. Every day we broke away from our broader circle of friends to be alone together.

  She invited me to an Ani DiFranco concert. We drove an hour to the venue, far from our conservative town, and pressed shoulders together through the whole show. We saw older women kissing and pressing their bodies together. When Maureen dropped me off at home, we pressed foreheads together, and she waited for me to look at her, but I couldn’t. She told me to go inside, worried I was getting cold.

  We didn’t kiss until a week after the concert. She slept over at my house, and we locked the door as soon as my mom fell asleep. Maureen and I kissed once. Then I soon went to sleep, guilty and panicked, too scared to do more. Later, I woke up in Maureen’s arms and settled into her, welcoming her warm, new presence.

  In the morning, when we woke up next to each other, I said, “Wow, revelation! No matter what happens in the future, that will always belong to you. My first kiss.” In response, she sweetly kissed me again. I kissed her back, feeling less afraid.

  Over the next few weeks, we went slowly. She was also attracted to boys and had more experience with kissing than I did, but she didn’t rush me. I was so terrified by the district attorney’s lecture that I insisted on waiting until Maureen was eighteen before I would touch her below her waist.

  One night, when we were making out, we kissed more intensely than usual, for nearly an hour. We
shifted together on my bed, and her knee softly found the warmth between my legs. I pressed against her, enjoying the new contact. She gripped my breasts and found my rising nipples. I moaned and moved against her, like a rhythmic tide with increasing rapidity. It arrived before I knew it was happening—my orgasm. I came for the first time with another person, with someone who cared about me.

  With a woman.

  I opened my eyes and clung to her shoulders, my relief mingling with the old shame.

  “I don’t know if we should do that again,” I said.

  “Okay,” Maureen said gently.

  But I thought about it later. The moment of my orgasm, the feel of her fingertips finding my nipples, the firm heat of her knee against the part of me where I felt pleasure the most. I did not feel broken when it happened. I felt whole. I felt happy.

  We tried again a few weeks later, after Maureen’s birthday when we were finally the same age. This time, we slept over at her parents’ house.

  She started slow with her palms along my torso. My skin there shook with hope and fear, unused to the presence of another person. She asked me if I was ready, and I nodded. She touched me where I had only ever touched myself. She touched me differently, gently drawing her fingers from the wetness of my vagina to the swelling near my clitoris. I made small, involuntary sounds of gratitude and approval.

  I touched her with my hands too. She felt like me: warm at first, and then, as I slowly moved my fingers, she turned slick, damp. I traced circles near the top of her vulva where I thought her clitoris might be, the way I liked to touch myself. She moaned. It was the first time I had ever made someone moan. I felt capable, powerful.

  I felt like smiling.

  So I kissed her and I smiled while I did. I learned what it was to kiss someone and find her mouth cold from the way she had been gasping with desire.