Virginity Stories: It'll Be OK, We'll Get Married by Jenny Forrester
“I was almost sixteen. I wanted a boy to love me.”
Virginity Stories," a series within NAILED's “Sex Stories” in which all kinds of people write about losing their virginity. To submit to this column, email Shenyah at shenyah@nailedmagazine.com.
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Patty had a message for me – she said that Paul liked me. I liked his smooth and perfect skin, thick black hair with gray-blue-hazel eyes. He played every sport, too -- football, basketball, and track -- like most Mancos kids, but he was good at everything.
We met by the gym on the new ramp. People grumbled about the money spent on it, but it was the law that schools be accessible for everyone. We paced the hall, running our hands along the smooth, new, metal handrail.
We said hello and stood looking outside until we got the courage to turn face to face.
Paul said, “I like Chris, but I like you more.” Chris, new from California would do it with him, he said. “I’d rather be with you, but I need to know that we’ll do it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Sin. I feared it. He and I were religious, our families were church-going. We had the same God. Our services spoke the same words. The Pope and confession were the differences between him and me, but, sin, I knew, had to be the same.
“We don’t have to do it right away,” he said. “But Chris said she’ll do it soon.”
I looked out at Menefee Mesa with its rock outcropping standing sharp and heavy over the south border of the valley.
“I don’t want God to hate me,” I said.
“If we have sex, we’ll get married someday.”
I was almost sixteen. I wanted a boy to love me.
After I’d turned sixteen and he’d turned seventeen, Paul drove to the alley behind the barn where we were invisible to sin, the trailer, and my mom.
I didn’t really want to have sex, which meant the biblical definition – his penis inside my vagina – the other things we didn’t see as sex, didn’t admit to doing. Since the beginning, I’d known it was inevitable, but I’d also thought that somehow, I could get out of it. Women were supposed to save men from themselves. Women were supposed to be worthy of waiting for. A good woman was the prize of becoming a married man, and I believed all that.
We parked in the alley beside the barn where we hung deer to bleed. It was time.
He said, “We have to hurry. I have to get up early to go work with my dad.” He logged with his father sometimes.
I laid back on the seat of his mother’s Chevy 4-door sedan and he pushed his way into me.
I looked into his eyes in the small darkness between us, the gentleness I saw didn’t match the pain I felt. I fell into it, seeking relief and to be good, redeemed by Paul’s affection for me.
“Hurry. Finish. No, go slow. It hurts,” I said.
I watched the stars, the Perseids, and satellites; I willed them to take my mind off the pain and to hide me from God.
I cried when he pulled away from me, hell-bound then, for sure even though I hadn’t used birth control and so hadn’t intended to sin. Surely, God took intention into account.
“It’ll be ok,” he said. “We’ll get married.”
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Header image courtesy of Meggan Joy, to view her website go here.
Jenny Forrester has published in Seattle’s City Arts Magazine, Nailed Magazine, The Literary Kitchen, Indiana Review, Solstice Magazine, Columbia Journal and Putnam’s Listen to Your Mother. She curates the Unchaste Readers Series. Hawthorne Books is publishing Narrow River, Wide Sky: A Memoir, Spring 2017.