The happy beginning

For the first time in quite a while, I found myself on a train this morning with no book, no mobile battery, and no filthy friend to stroke and suck my cock as the miles flew by. It was only as I was getting ready to lean my head against the window and doze off for a bit that I remembered my laptop, fully-charged and in my man-bag, complete with the Kindle software I downloaded a few months ago for exactly this sort of emergency.

Ok, that’s not quite true: I downloaded the software because a bunch of my favourite erotica writers have hot, dirty stories that they haven’t published in print form, and if I want to wank to their stuff, I have to download an electronic copy first. Still, two birds, one stone. I was horny, and the train wasn’t that busy, so I slipped my hand down inside my jeans and started to rub my cock, while flicking through my library in search of something I knew would get me off.

This isn’t a story about that though. Train wanks are fun, but unless someone catches you in the act, and either calls the police or drags you into the toilet and begs you to fuck them, they’re not generally much to write home about. At some point during the journey – you can decide for yourself whether you think it was pre-, post- or mid-wank – I read the chapter from Girl on the Net’s book about losing her virginity, and about the joys of teenage sex. Apart from being beautifully written, it made me realise that I’ve never written about my own ‘first time’, or about my early sexual experiences. This, then, is a story about those.

—

I can remember exactly how old I was when I lost my virginity. I was 21 years, 7 months, 5 days, and, if we’re being pedantic, probably about 1 hour. But don’t hold me to that. I know all of this because it happened on Valentine’s Day 2003, at the end of a spectacularly successful – and alcohol-fuelled – blind date.

We went to one of Oxford’s classier restaurants, ate food that neither of us could really afford, drank our body weight in wine, and moved on to a terrible bar, which that night was full of middle-aged couples swaying unsteadily to a succession of cheesy classics. We had the decency to collapse into a corner booth before jumping on each other, but that level of restraint didn’t last long. By the time she guided my hand under her skirt and told me to push my fingers inside her cunt, we were hovering on the edge of the dance floor, visible to anyone who happened to look our way.

Katy was far more experienced than I was, but even then we were apparently equal in our disregard for public decency. I suppose there must have been a moment when we looked at each other and paused, aware of where we were and the fact that we’d only just met, but if so, I don’t remember it. What I do remember is the DJ, who’d spotted us by that point. He was exactly the kind of DJ you’d expect to find in that kind of bar: too keen on the sound of his own voice, and desperately unimaginative in his choice of music. He clearly got a kick out of drawing attention to us, and people were watching more closely by then. When he shouted ‘is it in yet?’, we began to consider our options, and by the time he advised me to ‘take her home and fuck her properly’, she’d decided that I should do just that.

I’d already told her that I was a virgin. I’d assumed it would be a huge turn-off, but instead Katy seemed to get off on taking charge. She pointed us in the direction of her place and we walked through the cold – and suddenly very quiet – streets arm-in-arm, adrenaline still flowing from the bar. We kissed as we walked – I think I needed to keep touching her, to avoid giving myself too much thinking time – and when we reached the rather dilapidated student house she shared with her friends, we were ready to fall through the door and into each other. I was ready, anyway. Katy wanted to take things slowly. At first I thought she was trying to inject a bit of romance into what had otherwise been a pretty sloppy, frenetic encounter, but as she took my hand and led me into the bathroom, she told me that as it was my first time, she wanted to make it special. Special meant taking a bath together. Katy and I defined special in very different ways.

Actually, I have nothing against baths, and nothing against a long seduction. It’s just that slow, lingering foreplay is generally much easier and far more pleasurable when you’re not shaking with nerves. A quick, clumsy, fumbling fuck would’ve done just nicely at that point. The truth is, I was starting to panic a bit, and the longer we sat in the bath, kissing and touching each other, the worse I felt. It took me out of the moment and into the past: back to a time I definitely didn’t want to be thinking about just before trying to have sex.

—

There’s a Sliding Doors moment somewhere in the second chapter of GOTN’s book. It involves tits. She has them; I don’t. Until her tits entered the picture, I recognised a lot of my own slightly depressing teenage existence. Take this paragraph, for example:

‘I wasn’t particularly popular at school. I was the geeky kid, the one who did well in exams but badly with the boys. The ‘good’ one, for whom detentions were so unthinkable that the one time I did get one my mum reacted as if there’d been a terrible miscarriage of justice’

I could have written that. Seriously. In fact, there’s every chance I have written that at some point. You can substitute GOTN’s ‘thick glasses and depressingly lank hair’ for my terrible skin, diminutive stature…and depressingly lank hair, but otherwise I was the same awkward little ball of teenage lust, who shone academically and flunked pretty much every class on the social front. What I lacked was a certain pair of silver bullets. Over to you again, GOTN:

‘The problem with adult men is that they just don’t touch my tits enough. I’ve never met a straight man who says he doesn’t like tits. And yet as grown men they miss out on a million opportunities to touch them up. I can think of no occasion when I’ve been relaxing with a guy on the sofa that wouldn’t have been immeasurably improved if he’d had one hand idly exploring the inside of my shirt. Teenage boys were fantastic, for countless different reasons, but the most fantastic thing of all was their obsession— their pure and complete satisfaction— with touching my tits.’

Aside from doing adult men a bit of a disservice (believe me, we love touching your tits), that hits the nail on the head. As a teenage boy, I wanted nothing more than to play with a pair of tits. For a long time, my ambitions didn’t really stretch any further: I knew what was involved in sex, and I knew it would probably be pretty cool when I got round to it, but it felt like it could wait a little longer. Tits though – they couldn’t wait. They were the Holy Grail, and the more they remained just out of reach, the more frustrated and confused and unattractive I felt. I didn’t have anything of my own to offer in return – that was the fundamental problem – and I didn’t know how to go from helping a girl with her homework, or talking to her about the fantasy novel I was reading, to getting my hands on whatever she had under her school jumper. If I’d ever managed to square that circle, maybe the rest of my sexual education would’ve taken place a lot earlier.

—

Eventually, at the age of 18, I fell into a relationship with one of my best friends. I was just about to go to Oxford, she was taking a gap year before heading to Cambridge, and in the eight months we were together, we had most of our ‘first times’ together. First kiss. First grope (at last – tits!!). First “I love you”. First fingering. First hand job. First time either of us had been naked with another person…

…and that’s where we stalled. She wasn’t ready for more. She would come and stay in my tiny single bed, in my shabby college room, and we’d lie wrapped up in each other’s arms all night, my cock throbbing hard against her stomach till she decided it was time to jerk me off. That went on all autumn, then right the way up to the weekend before she flew to Hungary in January, to teach English till the summer. On the night before she left, we got up to my room and as I shut the door behind us she turned to me and, with an excited flourish, whipped a pair of condoms out of her handbag. It was time.

You’re clever people, so I’m sure you can guess what happened next. Or rather, what didn’t happen. We got naked, we kissed, I put my hand between her legs and felt how wet she was, but each time I tried to put the condom on, my erection disappeared. She tried to help, which only really made things worse, and I retreated several times to the bathroom to swear at my flagging cock and curse whichever cruel God didn’t want me to get laid that night.

I don’t often wish that I could go back and talk to my younger self, but I make an exception for that night, and for the months that followed. There was the month I dutifully flew to Hungary to visit my first love, only to get dumped. Then there was the month two of my friends got back from Budapest, and told the rest of us how they’d had to stuff pillows over their head in the youth hostel at night to drown out of the sound of my first love being fucked hard by her new boyfriend, who was presumably in possession of a fully-functional penis. Finally, there was the month she got back to the UK, and I was so nervous about seeing her at my best mate’s party that I vomited in the bathroom sink, drank all his parents’ booze, and snogged the object of his affections outside his kitchen window. That one took some explaining.

I wish I could go back and tell 18-year-old me that it wasn’t his fault. That it happens, and that just because it happens once, doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. He was a pretty rational kid, but he knew fuck all about actual sex, and I like to think he’d listen to older, wiser me. If he did, he’d have a much happier time of it at university.

—

He would also have been much more relaxed in the bath that night, with sweet, eager Katy running her hand down his stomach and over his cock.

Luckily, this is a story with a happy ending. Katy took me into her bedroom, which I can picture vividly even now, despite having been in it no more than half a dozen times. She invited me onto the bed and pushed my face between her legs, wanting my tongue there. When her mouth found my cock a little while later, I realised that this time would be different. Her mouth got me harder, not softer. The more she sucked, the more I squeezed my eyes shut and willed her to do it now. When she did finally sit up and roll a condom down onto my rigid cock, I was so relieved that I actually laughed. As she straddled my body and sank all the way down, a knot of fear unravelled inside me – the same fear that had lived inside me since that fumbling, awkward night three years earlier.

The sex itself, I would later learn, was nothing special, but to me that night was everything, and I still remember it with a tingle of excitement. I left the next morning feeling a foot taller, and far more confident in who I was, not just in bed but as a person. I carried it round with me like GOTN’s teenage tits – part weapon, part validation, and a memory guaranteed to put a spring in my step whenever I scrolled back over it.

Katy and I saw each other for a couple of months after that, and ticked off a few more of my first times together. First proper blowjob. First time fucking in a car. First time I made a woman come with my cock. In the end she ditched me for the guy she’d later marry, but there were no hard feelings. She gave me a gift so precious that even now I don’t know how I’d go about repaying her. This isn’t a story about Katy, but she’s definitely the heroine – my knight in shining armour. My happy beginning.