“After you lost your virginity, how did your relationship with Lo change?”
I squirm a little in my chair before I say, “I mean…we’ve always been friends.” I’m about to say nothing changed. But I can’t muster the lie. After I started having sex, everything changed.
“So take me through your sexual experiences between the day you became sexually active and now. How did things progress? Especially with Lo.”
My mind spins as I think about eighth grade and feeling like utter trash for losing my virginity so young. I didn’t tell anyone for months, and even though I was hooked to the feeling—I refused to do it again for a while. Too scared of the obliterating guilt that haunted me like a shadow. The second time happened at a graduation party. A public school kid threw it. Lo and I barely knew them, so it had the right requisites to attend. We both liked the anonymity. As years passed in prep school, people often grouped us together because of our friendship and status. We were Fizzle and Hale Co., and the more they wiped our identities away, the more we clung to each other.
The party was like any other, except for bedrooms upstairs. They were open and available, and so was the fifteen-year-old soccer player I met. It felt better than the first time, and I devised this theory that it would just keep getting better and better the more I tried.
I remember leaving the party with Lo braced on my shoulder. We couldn’t hide the fact that he’d been drinking from Nola, but she kept her opinions to herself and dropped me off at the Hale house. It was that night, with Lo sprawled half-asleep in his bed, that I asked him if he was a virgin.
I wanted him to tell me no. To ease my shame.
“I’m waiting,” he mumbled sleepily.
My eyebrows furrowed. “For marriage?” But he fell asleep before he could answer, but I think I knew it anyway.
He was waiting for me.
I began having sex every few months, nothing serious. Mostly I spent my time with porn and self-love. The day Lo found out I lost my virginity wasn’t even a monumental one. We were reading comics together during a rainy afternoon, and I complained that Havok and Polaris needed to just fuck and get it over with. Their sexual tension was killing me.
Lo looked up at me, and out of nowhere asked, “Have you had sex?”
It was like someone vacuumed the air right from my lungs. “What?” I squeaked.
He pulled his knees up and shrugged, like it was nothing. Maybe he was just trying to make me comfortable. “When we go to parties, you disappear. And when we leave, you’re always a little different.”
I didn’t know how he’d react. If he’d call me a slut, kick me out for being dirty. But I had never lied to him before, and I couldn’t bear the thought of starting. So I spilled everything in the briefest way possible. I didn’t want him to think I had been taken advantage of, so I made sure to emphasize that I’ve been seeking out most of the guys lately. That I liked sex.
His first question was, “Does Rose know?”
I shook my head, told him that I didn’t want to tell anyone else.
“I can keep a secret,” he said, but his words didn’t ease the panic in my chest.
He knows, I kept thinking over and over.
He sensed my alarm and gave me a reassuring nudge in the side. His warm amber eyes met mine, a little concerned but more understanding. I let out a small breath of relief.
“Just…can you let me know if you’re going to do it at the parties? If someone hurts you—”
“I’m careful.”
His eyes darkened. “Still. We look out for each other. Okay?”
“Okay.”
So I did. We reveled in our acts and hid our secrets from other people. To everyone else we were Fizzle and Hale Co. To each other, we were safety, love, and free from judgment and scorn. At fourteen, Lo finally lost his virginity.
To me.
One sloppy night that we buried with our hedonism.
We moved on like always, and by sixteen I was having sex at least once a month. Senior year, we became a fake couple and everything changed yet again. He kissed me. I kissed back. And I believed all along that we were pretending. But there were times where I questioned it. Where our “practicing” and the teasing turned to sinful touching. More than we probably should have.
When I left for college, I couldn’t last more than a week without some kind of release, and I wasted hours to porn. Having a place away from my parents became my bane. Everything escalated; my rituals began at dawn and ended at dusk. An obsession that cut into my sleep, my dreams, my everything. It consumed me whole like some sort of rabid beast.