Looking back from 2010-03-31.
Upon waking the morning after my first pillow kiss, I felt relieved that I could now claim truthfully that I’d really been with a girl, had seen her naked, had touched her most sacred and forbidden parts, felt her touch mine, had a girl actually desire me, and experienced the rubbing of my manliness against the seat of her femininity, though we never actually made love. But this was just a minor detail. As close as we’d come to traveling that last little piece to sexual intercourse, actually dong it would have been but a small step beyond the territory we did explore. It didn’t matter that we never quite reached that final destination. In my estimation, we had come close enough to actually claim the prize.
Perhaps it was this going most of the way but not all, that kept me humble about the experience; curiously, I never felt the need to boast of it, even though the idea that I’d be able to accurately brag was a big reason I pressed so far forward that night, in spite of the absence of erotic desire. Even at eighteen years old, I suspected these boastings to have only so much meaning however. I mean, how much credit for [Dawn’s] wanting me could I fairly take? Not much, I suspected, just as I could not blame myself for the previous evening becoming a complete bust. Based on our initial, lustful feelings, we both decided to take a chance that said feelings would lead to lasting love. But through no fault of either of us, the path we walked on our first real date did not lead there. Though this lack of true love saddened me, I was nonetheless thrilled at this best-chance I’d ever been granted so far to find it. In the course of one evening, so many questions had now been answered, about girls, and girls’ bodies, and girls’ minds. But I never disclosed the experience to the bullies on the playground. Somehow, it seemed wrong to use it make myself bigger in their eyes. In fact, I only ever came close to boasting about it one time, which I’ll tell you about below. The resulting guilt stilled my tongue and forever vanquished any inclinations I had toward boasting in the future.
By this time, [Tad] and I were splitting the switchboard duty. He’d man it in the morning, and I’d take it during the second half of the lunch hour. Eager to speak of the date to a male friend, the reception desk was therefore the first place I headed upon getting showered and dressed, at 7:30 AM. Besides Parker, [Tad] was my best friend. So I wanted to discuss it with him. I’d told [Tad] previously that I’d be visiting [Dawn]. So [Tad] waited anxiously to hear from me. Indeed, as I approached, he instantly and fully awoke. He’d been dozing, as no calls were coming in for him to handle, and the day students had not yet begun checking in. At the moment, this usually-busy part of the main building was very quiet; except for the occasional clang of dishes and silverware in the nearby dining room.
When he realized it was me visiting, his chin jerked up from his chest. “So, did you score?”
“Yes,” I replied curtly. Now technically speaking, I told him a white lie here; a falsehood that riddled me with guilt for days afterward. I’ve rarely ben able to lie while retaining a strait face, and on this occasion, the fib would eventually drive me to come clean and tell [Tad] that while [Dawn] and I had come close, we never actually engaged in intercourse. But at this moment, mum was the word, and I could not resist the temptation to boast just a little. “Yes,” I said to [Tad]. “I scored, and we had lots of fun doing it.” I quickly concluded this topic, not wishing to compound my lie by providing further corroborating details.
Surprisingly, I didn’t even want to talk about the true parts of the evening with [Dawn]; the dinner, the couch, her hand in my pants, my carrying her to the bedroom, and us getting undressed. As I said, the entire date was just not boast-worthy. Not that it was so bad that it wasn’t worth discussing; although it wasn’t that great either. I suppose I felt ashamed that I’d just declined sex with perhaps the prettiest girl in school in her day, and in light of that I wondered what was wrong with me. After all, if she couldn’t excite me sexually, as alluring as she was, I feared that no lady ever would, and that my most intense and lasting sexual pleasures would forever be confined to places like the suitcase room, where the best of them was brought on by my own hand.
Too, perhaps, I was a more private person than I’d estimated when I rushed to the switchboard, eager to tell it all to [Tad], for once I got there, I changed my mind, and wished to discuss none of it. Fortunately, [Tad] didn’t pry, letting the conversation move to other, lighter subjects without objection.
I kept quiet too, because I didn’t want to shame [Dawn]. Though at the end of the night, her image had metamorphosed from a sexy school girl into something bordering on repugnant, I knew it would be wrong to speak ill of her nonetheless. It wasn’t her fault that my view of her changed, because as far as I could tell, she had not intentionally hidden any of herself from me in the weeks prior to the date. She hadn’t used makeup or clothing to meaningfully alter her appearance. So I couldn’t blame her in any way for ultimately failing to meet my standards of what makes a lady truly beautiful, once her clothes were lying in a heap on her bedroom floor. She was beautiful. But at the end of the date, I thought her ugly for reasons that either I could not understand, or that I was simply too afraid to consider.
Perhaps I was shallow. But back then, I harbored this exaggeratedly pristine image of myself; the man who would never hurt any women, who would always do right by them, and who would always fully appreciate their beauty. I aspired to be, and positioned myself as, this “perfect” man in my mind, because I believed that this attitude would go far toward convincing women to trust me, and thus, allow me to enter their intimacy more quickly, and make them less likely to break up with me. But, this date with [Dawn] gave me the first real indications that I was just a young human male with nothing super about him really. I realized that I could (and would in fact) hurt them by leaving if not fulfilled sexually, and that I probably would leave as soon as the fulfillment stopped. But these were “dark” facets of my character that heretofore, I’d never had to face until this first physical encounter with [Dawn]. This experience would leave me reeling for years.