Sexual Ickiness

When you're new to sex, you don't understand that sex can be sticky, funky, smelly, nasty and just plain icky. You think it's going to be like a 1938 black-and-white movie – all rushing waterfalls and blasts of steam and heaving bosoms and breathtaking beauty.

Not so with Number Two and me.

The first nasty icky came about two days after our first sexual encounter. I was in his tiny closet of a bathroom taking a pee and when I wiped, out slid the condom we had used on our first date.

Having an active imagination, my first thought was that toxic plastic had been trapped inside me for two days, polluting my privates with germs and carcinogens. My second thought was that I might be pregnant or AIDS-ridden. And my third thought was, why didn't he tell me the condom slipped off and why did he leave it to rot inside my body?

I never asked Number Two for an answer. I never mentioned it to him. I just flushed the condom away and left the unanswered question to rot and fester in my own mind. Because asking it would have forced me to confront the unconfrontable: that my new boyfriend, who I desperately wanted to love, didn't give a good god damn about my well-being.

Things were moving too fast and going too well for me to start asking questions or making demands. Within three days of sleeping together, I already had keys to his apartment. I was spending an inordinate amount of time with him and basking in the glow of us "going together."

Losing my virginity to Latin Muslim had been an unromantic, push-and-shove, grunt-once-and-we're-done affair that hadn't left me feeling much in the way of enjoyment. Number Two was an improvement, more playful, more experimental, more sexually arousing.

So one night, after round one, I was hungry for more and started instigating round two. Only instead of happily obliging or playfully putting me off, Number Two glared at me and declared that I was like an Eveready battery, I always wanted more.

That word, Eveready, reverberated around and around in my skull like the dirty, pus-filled accusation it was.

I was a nympho.

I drained men dry.

Something was wrong with me.

I was not normal.

I was an Eveready, and Eveready was not a compliment.

This second instance of sexual ickiness led to the third and worst one: Number Two liked the sexual position most associated with male homosexuality, and I didn't know how to just say no. So on top of being an Eveready, I was also apparently really nasty, because I was doing nasty things that nice girls just didn't do.

We didn't talk about sodomy, just like we didn't talk about the mystery of the missing condom.

It became yet another internal injury left to clot and bleed, until many months later, when I threw it up in his face in a cloud of volcanic rage.

(Number Two Diaries Part 2 of 8: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | Lessons Learned Parts 1-3: 1 2 3)