Sex Stories: Unfinished by Paul Crenshaw
“we held our story up against the one we had been taught about marriage and virginity and sin”
"Sex Stories" is a regular NAILED column in which all kinds of people write about sex.
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There were no doors hung on the house and the walls were unfinished and only a bare bulb swung on a short chain. Our shadows in the swinging light were like monsters and though some might consider us so for seeking sex at such a young age, I’m telling you now we only held the same desires built into all of us, to seek the mysteries of skin, the touch of flesh. We’d been circling our little town endlessly and had grown bored with seeing the same cars and the same buildings and the same long lives strung out before us, so we had come here, to an unfinished house on a deserted road in the late hours of the night and now our shadows hung on the wall like darker selves.
In the unfinished kitchen, I checked the taps for water to chase the whisky. The girl, whom I’ll call Joanna, waited in the front room on an old mattress, sipping from a fifth and watching the bulb swing slightly back and forth. I looked out the window at the darkness, wondering what I was doing with a girl I hardly knew, what she was doing with a boy she was sure wouldn’t speak to her tomorrow.
When I went in the other room I sat beside her. She passed the bottle and began to undress and after a drink I did too. She lay back and pulled her skirt up. I knelt at the altar. Neither of us spoke. There are things we do that we later look back on and wonder what we were thinking and of course I am not talking about the girl, whose name I’ll say was Joanna even though it wasn’t, just as I wish I could write this under a pseudonym and be done with it.
She closed her eyes as I slipped the condom on and when I went inside her she began to rock with me. A car passed on the highway somewhere in the distance. I took a drink from the bottle, perhaps to forget, for it is a thing she and I will never discuss, a night to sweep from all memory, yet twenty-something years later I am writing about it on a rainy morning in June while my wife and daughters are still asleep, though I promise myself I will delete these words when I have gotten them in the right order, when I have made some sense of them.
Our shadows hung on the walls but to focus only on the shadows would be to disregard desire and the great power it holds, whether for drunkenness or debauchery or only to escape for a few hours some small town where the cars circle on Saturday nights like the old familiar spin of the Earth. We had turned off the light, as if we did not want to see ourselves, as if we tend toward darkness when dealing with how we are designed. We were sixteen or seventeen then, seminal fluids surging through our shifting bodies as we sought sex in the small hours, and though we would struggle with our actions, thinking that we shouldn’t be doing this as we held our story up against the one we had been taught about marriage and virginity and sin, our bodies told us another story, so overcome with desire as to drive any rational decisions from our delirious heads.
Which is, of course, what often happens. All good intentions abandoned. All thought thrown out. It is what happened here. We sweated together until our desires were spent and then we sat in the bare light of the bulb passing the bottle around and not looking at one another but occasionally laughing a little. After a while we shut off the light and went out to stand under the stars. The dark roads were deserted. And I could have driven anywhere, but instead circled our little town until the desire came on me again, and we both laughed when she asked where we were going, when she told me this wasn’t the way home.
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Read the previous "Sex Stories," here.
Header image courtesy of Shawn Huckins. View an Artist Feature of his work: here.
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Paul Crenshaw’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review, and Brevity, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University.