Escorting oneself through a first heartbreak is never easy.
That is when my mind wandered back to girls. The boys were easy to leave behind when half the girls’ volleyball team happened to be in my gym class. Joining the team was a possibility until this tomboy learned that the uniform included “Daisy Duke” spandex shorts. My underwear covered more of my ass than the shorts!
Like a true queen, my extracurricular activities revolved around drama club theatrics. The summer before my senior year I auditioned for a role in my local theater’s production of The Secret Garden, fitting for the tale that follows. A decent role was assigned to me, although it wasn’t the lead. I was required to be at rehearsals nearly four days a week. The most desired role was given to the most talented, upbeat girl.
Angel was perfect for the role and had a powerhouse voice to deliver each song she performed. Hearing her sing was never tiresome. For her age, she was very roomy in the hips. The red dress she wore in one of the scenes was this flowing, see-through material, layered enough to blow endlessly in the slightest breeze. During her song she expressed emotion using hand gestures and swayed her hips to each slow word. The dress, to me, looked like a crackling fire licking gently around her legs. It was mesmerizing. She was a pretty blonde; her personality was welcoming and upbeat, but it was the dress that made me take notice of her body.
The front bodice hung low enough to show the slightest hint of cleavage beneath her first Victoria’s Secret bra. When the right light cast as she moved to the edge of the stage, her silhouette glorified the ensemble.
Being turned on by a girl of sixteen singing songs about death makes a person uneasy.
Our friendship grew with each rehearsal, and suddenly, for whatever reason, same-sex relationships came up in conversation. I pried into her sexuality in the wings of the stage and exaggerated about my own flings with women. Angel faked being comfortable as she bashfully explained her inexperience and unwillingness to do it again. I reveled in every delicious lie until our names were called for the next scene.
After my admission on such a taboo subject, things changed between us. The touches became more frequent, never excessive; the laughter became flirtatious rather than friendly. Once, Sprite nearly shot from my nose when she winked at me from across the room. Then, one evening during our break from rehearsal, she almost kissed me behind the theatre bushes until a bunch of bastard kids ran past us in the alley, killing the sexual tension.
Caught off-guard, I stepped on my own toe while turning to break free from the moment that no one was supposed to see. During my reach for the bushes to cushion my inevitable fall, my hand slid into them, scratching my arm and jabbing a twig into my upper gums. These were my pre-pimp days.
She could barely help me out of the bushes, she was laughing so hard. The stolen moment was forgotten when she pulled me to my feet and asked me to stay the night. There was a strange tingle in my veins as a heat crept through me with a sudden burst of unexplainable energy.
It was in her room when the infamous first real girl/girl kiss happened. We were seated yoga-style on her bed, facing each other when somehow, in the wee hours of the night, our teenage conversation turned sexual and we realized our hands had migrated to each other’s inner thighs under the blankets. We verbally ignored what was happening and pretended that it wasn’t, but our bodies accepted each inching reach until there was an uncomfortable silence as she stared at me in the dark. Our hands bathed in the heat of each other, inappropriately close to the cotton lining within our underwear. She was trying to read my facial features for a sign that she wasn’t the only one with desires to move forward. “Don’t you want to kiss me?” she whispered with undertones of her own wishes. Briefly, it felt as if she was in charge and that all of my shit talking about previous experience was coming to light. My reaction to her question was involuntary.
My sphincter muscle snapped tight right before our kiss actually happened. My body went through the whole gamut of physical reactions, including the most amazing twitch I endearingly refer to as the butt-hole pucker.
The butt-hole pucker is the shocking clench of the anus produced involuntarily when encountering unexpected emotions. This odd malfunction of human anatomy is stimulated by an array of experiences. There is the fear pucker brought on by horror films and death by hang gliding. There is the “Holy crap, I have to shit!” pucker, warning its human host of upcoming deposits that desperately need to be made. But, the one I experienced at the moment accompanies sexual excitement and can be the origin of physical exhilaration. I’m sure that somewhere out there it has been surveyed and documented. Note to self: find butt-hole pucker research. But I digress.
As much as I would like to write about passionate lovemaking in a poetry-perfect world, here are the facts of the clench in my sphincter muscle. When we kissed for the first time after the question was asked, it was the butt-hole pucker that caused me to heave forward, clicking our teeth together. Ah yes, pre-pimp days.
After managing to ruin the most important move in a first-time lesbian experience, things began to flow naturally. Transitions from one touch to the next seemed effortless after the initial bumbling-idiot phase. We did not make love; we simply gave our bodies to each other and trusted in the moment. Innocence was lost and freedom found as it ended with passionate kisses before we fell to sleep. We fought our internal battle against traditional Adam and Eve.
Despite the mighty triumph for me, a black cloud of confusion reared its ugly head for her, and the next morning Angel did everything she could to avoid eye contact. She made sure there was no physical touch as she sat uncomfortably in a front room chair. Straddling the footstool in front of her was my only opportunity to ask if she was okay. She secretly wanted to smack my hand away and probably felt sick to her stomach, but these were all clues I pulled from her body language.
In my head she wanted me to leave so she could shower and scrub the sin from her body. Visuals of how she gagged herself as she brushed her teeth in the mirror and cried for redemption plagued me. It would be no surprise to me now if someone told me that she was some Bible-thumping evangelist because of our unholy “sexcapade,” and it was I who turned an angel to temporary insanity and physical lust. Oh, how she would preach to her congregation on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, bearing witness to her own testimony of salvation. I would hope that, as she fans away the sweat of the Holy Spirit, the pulse in her loins reminds her of the way she licked her fingers free of my cum. In Jesus’s name she prays, Amen.
For her I was a temptress, the devil incarnate. She was only too relieved when my car drove away from her street to head home. We did not speak until the next afternoon. On my third attempt to call, she finally answered, so my first question was how she was doing. Her response was very abrupt, followed by silence. It’s unclear, but she may have been rebuking me in that moment, so, with a deep breath, I switched the handset to my other sweaty palm.
“Look,” I said with careful hesitation, “I had a lot of fun yesterday and maybe we could watch a movie or something tomorrow, you know. I’d really like to see you again.” I anxiously twitched and repeatedly rolled the cord in my fingers as my eyes frantically jolted around the room.
Every word fatigued me; the end of the sentences exhausted all of my energy. In the seconds of waiting for an answer, my ears burned while my body became stiff and motionless. My breathing paused, my heart stopped, everything froze. It’s a time warp oddity, but that was me, stuck in time, waiting with hot, throbbing ears, hoping for an equally deep response to words uttered with huge, underlying meaning.