“Remember when I told you it’s been a while for me?” I ask softly. It doesn’t feel good sharing about myself, but I can’t stand the idea of her misunderstanding the situation.
“Your surgery,” she says.
“Yeah.” I exhale tightly. “I often feel like … my body isn’t right anymore. Tonight, I was hoping to, I guess, prove that I’m still—I don’t know. If you’re not with me, if you’re not feeling it, I can’t—” I make a frustrated sound. It would help if I gave her specific details, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t want her to look at me differently. I don’t want her to think I’m less. “Do you know what I’m saying? I need you to be just as into it as I am.”
She frowns at me for a long moment before she says, “Maybe?”
“Is there anything that I could have—”
She covers her face with her hands. “Can you not, please? People don’t talk about this stuff.”
“They do. I do.”
“They really don’t,” she says.
I tilt my head to the side as I try to figure this out. “How does a guy know how to touch you, then? I tried the regular stuff, and it didn’t seem to do it for you.”
She makes a miserable sound and shrinks deeper into herself.
A suspicion rises, and I ask, “Are you a virgin? Have you never …”
She drops her hands from her face and gives me an impatient look. “I’m not a virgin. I’ve had sex many, many, many times.”
“Have you ever come before, like, had an orgasm? That’s, uh, when your body—”
She claps her hands to her face again. “I know what an orgasm is.”
“Have you had one?”
She draws her knees to her chest, and after a while I hear a muffled, “Yes.”
“Do they happen on accident? Or … can you make them happen?” I feel like I’m playing a guessing game, but I keep going.
“They do happen on accident sometimes, during sex, a few times when I was sleeping,” she confesses, and I arch my eyebrows. From my perspective, that’s a clear sign that a girl isn’t getting the proper loving. “But I also”—she clears her throat—“by myself, I can—” She drops her fingers to her mouth, and her face is red, her expression painfully embarrassed.
Because I can’t stand her discomfort, I move to the couch, next to her, and she immediately curls up against me, pressing her face to my neck. I wrap my arms around her, and those same feelings from before swamp me: tenderness, protectiveness.
“I don’t really see why that’s so embarrassing. I do it all the time,” I say, and her body shakes as she laughs. “Like every day, sometimes more than once a day.”
“It’s different for guys,” she says, hitting me lightly on the chest with a small fist.
I pick up her fist and kiss her knuckles. “It shouldn’t be.”
“It still is, though.”
“I think it’s hot as fuck when chicks do it,” I tell her.
She laughs again, and I gently pull on her until she looks at me.
“I mean it,” I say, completely serious. “If you can’t tell me what you like, you could show me.”
Her lungs expand on a sharp inhalation, and her face flushes an even deeper shade of red. “I could never, ever, ever …”
“Why?”
“Quan,” she says, her tone accusing, like I should know why.
“It’s just you and me here. It’s not like anyone is watching.”
She shakes her head quickly and looks away from me.
“You’re okay with never having good sex, then?” The idea is horrifying to me. “And what about all those times you’ve had sex in the past? They were all shitty?”
She says nothing.
“Anna, it would have been so easy just to—”
Her body tenses, and she sit upright, shooting daggers at me with her eyes. “It’s not ‘easy.’ Not for me. If it was, I would have done it.”
“I’m sorry. I just think—”
“I think this is as far as we’re going to get,” she says, and there’s a finality in her voice that tells me she’s done. Her dating profile was clear that she only wanted one night, and this was our one night—since the first night didn’t count.
A sense of loss threads through me. I don’t want this to be how we part. I didn’t accomplish what I wanted, and I don’t think she did either, not if she wanted to get over her ex—whoever that dickhole is—by having rebound sex. But we really are at a standstill. We both want things the other won’t give.