by Jessica Love
“What you did before was teach me to lie, that lying was okay, even by a cop, and a nice boy died because of that,” I said.
“He got what he deserved,” Detective Deborah Riddle spit back at me so fast I was startled.
“Really?” I said yet again, in my snottiest voice. “You don’t know anything.” I pushed my chair away from the table to leave.
“Jessica, I do know what you’ve been through,” she said, suddenly calm again. “I’ve been through the same thing. I want to talk about the party.”
“I don’t,” I said, with a shrug. “I made a choice. I live with the choices I make.”
“Then you can live with your shame,” she snarled. I thought it was weird at the time, how fast she could change.
“Tout passé, tout lasse, tout casse,” I said.
“What’s that mean?” asked Debra Riddle.
“Everything passes, everything wears out, everything breaks,” I replied as I walked away.
She may have known about shame, but not my shame. Maybe she heard about my dancing, and what happened right after. But she didn’t know about my feelings, how I kept thinking about and remembering all those hands, everywhere on my body. How I wanted that feeling again.
• • • •
In college I did really well academically, dated around, sometimes slept around, but not much. I did the usual college things. I smoked pot, which makes me self-conscious in ways I really don’t like. I drank beer, which just makes me feel full; tequila, which gives me a rotten hangover; and champagne, which I really do like if it costs enough money. Cocaine was fun, but it took all the fun out of the next day.
Generally I don’t like to get drunk; it takes too much of the edge off. There’s an irony there, for the boys and men who thought they had to get me high before I’d put out.
Or they’d use alcohol or weed to “loosen up.” Think about that for a minute. Which is more attractive: A man who turns to drugs so he can be spontaneous and sensual, or a man who is just… spontaneous and sensual?
And, of course, there is the constant risk of dosage. More than once, a date went from bound up and inhibited to loose and funny to drunk and aggressive with barely a pause between stages. Not once did he increase either my interest or his libido.
If the man was right, I’d go to bed with him and would rather be stone-cold sober, if being under the influence of erotic arousal is sobriety. I don’t think it is, but I’ll leave that discussion to others.
I graduated with a degree in psychology, and no, I don’t have a clue why — and neither do you. It was either that or history or English, but I kind of liked the fact that psychology seemed to actually be about something.
But I didn’t like it enough to get an advanced degree and had no interest in being a therapist. I’m sure there is great value in therapy, and those in the field do excellent work. But for me, trying to fix something in the past is like validating self-absorption.
Grandmama would say, “What matters is what you are going to do, not what you did or what other people did to you long ago.”
But you don’t care about my major, so let’s get to what you’re wondering about. There was one sexcapade in college that’s probably relevant. Now that I think about it, it kind of follows my pattern. It was, of course, at a frat party.
I’d gone with another girl, someone I didn’t know that well. She was one of the several short-term roommates that drifted through a house shared by six of us off-campus.
Everyone who lived there was a little disdainful of the whole sorority thing, but this woman, Becky I think her name was, came from one and had gotten an invite to the party and asked if I wanted to go.
It was spring of my junior year. None of the guys I’d been hanging around with were love interests. The cute ones were gay, a couple others were fun but not sexually appealing.
I’d been studying hard, working in the admissions office to help pay for tuition, and picking up shifts as a waitress to earn money for clothes, books, mac & cheese and ramen, so it wasn’t like I had a lot of time, either.
Most boys wanted to own my time almost as much as they wanted my body, I’d learned, and the arguments that resulted usually weren’t worth what the guys brought to the relationship. So I was single and had been. Which meant I was also, shall we say, “in the mood.”
The party was the standard go around; loud music, kegs of beer, a “bar” set up in one room, a tank of something for filling up balloons, joints, blow, anything and everything. After a while, things got a little heavy, with making out on the couches becoming a grope-fest, and nobody much caring.
I’d been talking to a boy I knew, and frankly, some of the sexuality around was beginning to turn me on. Then one of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen joined us. And not only was he really good looking — tall; muscular; thick, dark hair; and eyelashes a woman would have paid dearly to have — but he was also smart and funny.
“Are you on the football team?” I asked, guessing from the width of his shoulders.
“Rugby,” he said. “Football without helmets. It’s amazing any of us can still spell our own first name. In my case it only has three letters, thank God. It’s Matt. Oops, that’s four. Double ‘t.’ What’s yours, by the way?”
That was about when I decided I wanted him. That night, preferably, within the next ten minutes, if possible, and then the ten minutes after that, and the ten after that, and then we’d see if another hour would do.
When he started asking me polite questions about where I lived, what I was studying and when I would graduate, I asked if he had a room where we could talk more quietly. He got a goofy grin on his face.
“I thought I’d be the one to ask you,” he said and led me upstairs to his room, tucked into a corner with windows that looked out on the street and had a small balcony.
“Do you have a roommate?” I asked, not really caring about the answer.
“Yes, but he’s at a cross-country meet in Spokane for the weekend,” Matt said.
We sat on his bed. It wasn’t long before he had my shirt unbuttoned, and I unbuttoned his. I actually took his off first.
Look. Over eons, biology designed us to have desire, whether it was freezing or the temperatures were boiling, whether we had just eaten a woolly mammoth or were half-starving. It’s a pretty powerful force, designed to have a very high reward. Continuation of the species, and all that.
There’s also a lot of biology pushing women to desire men like Matt. What better way to perpetuate our own chromosomes than by hooking them up with a specimen like him? My God, he was beautiful. Men talk about the curves of women, but I’m here to tell you that men have some pretty fantastic curves as well. Speaking of gorgeous bodies, they say an Olympic Village is a hotbed of sex. Can you imagine being in the middle of the best bodies in the world, swimmers and gymnasts and runners and weight lifters and the maximum physical conditioning that requires and not wanting to have sex with them?
Couple those bodies with the willpower it takes to get to the Olympics in the first place, and is anyone surprised there’s sex? It would just be stupid to think all those young people are celibate for the entire Olympics. Maybe even through the opening ceremonies as some of those go on so long.
Matt had that kind of body. After he had my shirt and bra off, it wasn’t long before he had my pants off too. I was hoping my panties would slide off with my jeans to cut the wait, but no, he played me like a violin, sliding his finger under the hem just brushing my mound ever so slightly, until my hips rose involuntarily to catch his hand every time it slid by.
By the time my panties came off and I had thrown his shorts as far as I could across the room, I wanted him so badly I had wrapped my legs around one of his giant thighs just to bring myself some relief. He was kissing me and touching my breasts, and it wasn’t long before he put his right arm between my legs and
up my back so my vagina was caught somewhere between his huge bicep and the tendons in the crook of his elbow.
His hand in the middle of my back pressed me to him while he kissed my throat, and I was able to push myself against him in ways that hit almost every trigger point between my legs.
I moaned. I started to come. The first time.
I don’t know when I noticed the door of his room was open, and I don’t think I ever remember it being closed. But I didn’t much care, not then and not when the room began to fill with other young men and women.
When I would open my eyes, they were standing close to the bed. He had his mouth on me, and I had my fingers knotted in his luxurious dark hair, pulling him to me. With his fingers he opened me wide, and I saw both girls and boys gasp with what I can only call envy and lust.
One couple, I’d seen them together all night, touched each other while watching us. She had his cock in her hand, he had his hand down the back of her unbuttoned jeans. Several of the girls had their hands down the front of their own jeans, or on the front of the jeans of the boy standing next to them.
There is a delicious blend of intimacy and anonymity, a pure eroticism, when you have sex with a stranger, and even more so with strangers watching. That feeling washed over me like a wave and caused a complete surrender of mind to my body in a way that hadn’t happened for over three years.
Eventually the room emptied, Matt had emptied more than once, and I was as fulfilled as I had been filled.
We lay there long enough for parting not to be awkward, then we pulled ourselves apart, dressed, he said he’d call, I said please do, and neither of us gave the other our number.
The next afternoon I was sitting in the kitchen of our house when Becky rolled in. She looked worse for wear, but I had seen her drinking quite a bit at the bar and huffing whatever it was from the balloons. I felt great.
For at least one more minute.
Becky said there was a video of my “sluttiness” being shared in the sorority house where she had just come from, and that Matt had set up a movie camera before the party and was thinking about selling the “film” or movie to a company on the Internet.
I was pretty nice to Becky as she said this, nonchalant even, but inside I began to implode. Before I left the table I got Becky to tell me the name of the girl she said had the video, then I went upstairs and screamed into my pillow, trying not to throw up.
After a half-hour, and because if I didn’t do something I would have gone crazy, I called Grandmama. I hoped and prayed this would be one of the times she heard the phone and would decide to answer.
“Allo?” came the voice in the accent I knew and loved.
“Hi, Grandmama. It’s Jessica.”
“Yes, of course, Sweet Jessi. Who else would it be?”
Dearest Grandmama. Always tied to the earth and sounding perplexed that every one else flew around inside of assumptions made of soap bubbles. She was so certain even of who might be on the phone.
“Grandmama, someone is trying to hurt me. Two someones, in fact. I don’t know what to do.”
“How long you know these someones?” she asked. “They are close to you?”
“No, I don’t really know them. I just met them.”
“How can you be hurt by someone you not know?” she asked, her question with an edge of incredulity.
“It’s a little complicated,” I said, and she knew, as she always did, that I didn’t want to go into details.
“If you don’t know them, then they don’t know you, is true?” she asked.
“No, they don’t know me, either.”
“Then it is not really you they are trying to hurt. It is something inside of them they try to give to or take from.”
“But it will hurt me,” I said.
“Then you must put ‘you’ into what they are doing. Who ‘you’ are must be put into what they think, what they feel. Perhaps, like in backgammon, is time to double their consequences?”
It took a minute for that to sink in, and we both let it. Then I said, “I love you, Grandmama.”
“In this minute you love that I give you a boat when water is cold, I think,” she said. “But I love you, Jessica. This is enough.”
She could be so dismissive at times I wanted to scream, but she was right, too, and at this moment I had a boat to row.
When I showed up at the sorority house, the girl who opened the door showed me right to the room of the girl who had the video.
Details are not really necessary, but by the time I walked out, I had left behind some memorable promises and tucked the video in my back pocket. It was given to me; I didn’t steal it.
From there I went to the frat house. The boys who had not blacked out and remembered the night before were glad to see me. I laughed and joked and went right to Matt’s room, as if invited for an encore.
I told Matt I wanted the original film and any other photos.
“You know Jess, I don’t think I can do that,” he said with a smirk I’d not seen on his face the night before. “That’s my property. It was taken in my room, and it might have some value.”
“You set me up right from the beginning, didn’t you?”
“Actually, I didn’t know it would be you. I hoped it would be somebody, and you were the prettiest girl here last night who was not attached.”
“So you intended to film whoever you could seduce, and then sell it?” He nodded. My mind began to churn. I lied and said I was a freshman, had graduated from high school early, applied for early enrollment and was only sixteen. He grunted with doubt so I reached into my jeans pocket as if to get my ID, telling him I would keep my finger over my real name so he wouldn’t know who sent him to jail.
“That’s okay,” he said waving his hands, assured by my willingness. That shook him up a little.
I asked if he knew how many years in jail he’d get for rape and abuse and furnishing alcohol to a minor and everything short of kidnapping and slavery, but I might have thrown those in there too.
“And I’ve got witnesses who can show how you pinned me down, held my hands over my head with one hand while you pawed me with the other.”
“You liked that!” he said.
“You’d need to prove it, and I don’t think what a drunk sixteen-year-old likes or doesn’t like is really relevant,” I said.
I also suggested that I came from a town where loggers beat on fishermen and fishermen beat on loggers, and they all did that just for fun. I said every one of them was a good friend of mine, he could just imagine, and they would enjoy nothing more than defending our little town’s honor.
“As strong as you are, these guys haul crab pots and set chokers for a living. They are every bit as strong as you, but none of them are as pretty as you and would love nothing more than to mess up that face of yours. Whatever time in jail they’d spend would just be part of who they are, a story for when they got out and sat down at the bar.
“By the way, as to selling the tape? I don’t know how much money you think you’d get, but I don’t remember signing a modeling contract. If a sixteen-year-old can sign a contract. And I don’t think you got one from my legal guardian, though we can ask.”
I gave him reason to be nice to me, too, and when I was done, he thought it was all his idea to give me the video before I walked out his door.
On my way home, I crushed the video cassette and the copy from Sorority Girl and tossed them into a trash bin along the running path next to the creek that ambled through the campus toward town. Once on the main avenue of town, I stopped and bought myself a chamomile tea, something Grandmama especially liked.
It wasn’t a celebration of victory. More than anything, that cup of tea was raised to the peace of mind that came from acknowledging I’m no victim. Just because we are women doesn’t mean we’re entitled to always be handled wi
th gloves made from the skin of baby lambs.
To those that think so, Grandmama would purse her lips, blow a thin stream of air between them, and shrug. She didn’t bother much with unnecessary words.
On the other hand, people attempting to demean me, or profit from me, or revile me for something even as they get off on it, at first frightened me horribly, then made me very angry, then gave me resolve.
Talk about the value of a college education.
• • • •
Everybody said I would make a good lawyer. So law school was a default choice — more of a “why not?” rather than a “why.”
Life is like that sometimes, taking us down some surprising paths. Like the reason for writing this book, for instance.
I was glad to move on. I went to law school (a rather well-known one). I enjoyed the law far more than I thought I would. Most of it, anyway. I liked breaking issues down, looking at what was real, solving the puzzles.
I enjoyed the boys who were becoming men, too. And like every pretty woman in law school, I “had” a couple of professors. But for all their brains and education, they weren’t that different from the boys in college, or other men. Only the vocabulary was different.
On more than one occasion, I had to inform them that by planting their penis, they had not planted a flag. That my sleeping with them once, or twice, or even a half-dozen times, did not mean I had conveyed property rights. There was always some sort of trauma drama until I made it clear I was no longer interested.
Until I met Mark, another student.
Yes, that’s his real name too. Mark Love. You can look him up, and you can try to find out more, but he won’t talk to you. For a lot of reasons. In fact, if you mention my name to him, he’ll probably turn and walk away.
We had fun together. Mark is very, very smart, and quite handsome. And unlike nearly all of the others, he was not only fantastic in bed, but out of bed he was able to listen. He treated me with respect. It wasn’t just that he had a presence; he was present. Ready to be serious, or ready to laugh, but always in the moment and not replaying old reactions to other places or times.We had both been athletes in high school, but Mark also played baseball in college, on scholarship, whereas I was more of a dilettante.
