By:  Serena Abel

The only time I have ever been fucked was the night I lost my virginity. I realize this now as I am listen to Kid Rock’s lyrics “You’re so hot, I want to fuck you like I’m never going to see you again.” Every person I’ve had sex with was someone I WAS going to see again. Not that it was meaningful and loving all the time. But there were no red-hot looks and no silent sex in seedy bar bathrooms...and I always knew the person’s name.

Keith—that was the name of the guy I lost my virginity to. It was my sophomore year in college and I had been brought up to be a “good girl” - in an almost obsessive way by my very old-fashioned, and very strict, mother.  She lectured me OVER and OVER again always insisting that I must wait until I was married to have sex. That was what God expected and, more importantly, that was what my mother expected.

For some reason, I didn’t care about sex while in high school. I grew into adolescence during the late 80s and and hung with a group of girls, mainly athletes, who didn’t really think about sex that much. Sure, we fooled around with guys and had boyfriends who took us to dances; and if one of the boys happened to want sex, say, on senior prom night, we might have done it. But the media back then was still more innocent than it is now.  Our favorite movies featured Molly Ringwald kissing Andrew McCarthy chastely on the lips with only longing in her eyes. We never witnessed where that longing took them.

But then I was in college. On my own. And like all freshmen, I had the chance to shed my somewhat geeky/intellectual/overly-ambitious skin and become everyone’s favorite: The Party Girl. I loved being away from my authoritative mother. I loved the utter lack of rules and that only my roommate knew if I was skipping classes. And I loved to go to parties and to  meet boys on the weekends. But I was still a virgin.

In retrospect, I am glad I was still a virgin during my freshman year. If I had not been, I think I quickly would have transitioned from the “good girl” into the “slut.”  But because I was still a virgin, and still ingrained with my mother's "good girl" lectures, I just couldn't give in fully to my desire to give it up - not to some random guy on some random night of my freshman year.  I actually made a pact with myself—no sex with anyone during my freshman year. But once I made it through freshman year, all bets were off.

Flash forward to sophomore year. It was September. I was still a virgin. I didn’t have a boyfriend, although there was a guy that I had been hooking up with that I would have LIKED to sleep with. But for some reason, I just didn’t want him to know I was a virgin, so I didn’t sleep with him.  Oh no. I saved THAT for this guy Keith. There was nothing incredibly remarkable about him. He was about six feet tall, moderately good body.  He lived off-campus and kind of kept to himself. He did have sensual lips and this shy way of flipping his dangerously close to skateboarder hair out of his eyes, and maybe that was what got me.

Or possibly it was that he had really good dope.

Regardless, I found myself at his house with a male friend of mine (who I am sure wanted to sleep with me) and we were smoking up and drinking beers, and listening to music in the living room.

One thing lead to another—my friend left and I found myself upstairs with Keith, where he pulled a bong out from behind his futon and started filling it with Absolut vodka. And just like that, I knew this guy was going to be my first and that tonight was the night.

Was it the absolute dismissal of wasting an expensive bottle of vodka (or what I thought was an expensive bottle of vodka at the time as I was smack dab in the middle of my plastic-bottled liquor days) just to enhance the high? Was it that as soon as he calmly filled the bong, loaded it, and handed it to me, he turned on The Cure? To this day, I don’t know if this was all an act, or if he was nervous.

I really didn’t care. It worked.

We got high - the best high I have had, to this day - and we started messing around - and messing around some more. And then I felt in my Absolute-vodka, Cure-induced high, I needed to tell him my big virgin secret.  He calmly stopped what he was doing and laid beside me, thinking for a minute. And then he turned to me and said,

“Are you sure you want to do this? Maybe we should wait for another time when we are in a better frame of mind?”

My deal was sealed. Although I was not in love with this guy’s body or spirit or mind, I loved the practical maturity it took to stop what we were doing and to give me a chance to think this out. I also appreciated that he was not shocked or turned on or really anything by the fact that I was a virgin. He just wanted to make sure that in the end, I would not regret my decision.

And I didn’t. There was no special hotel room or silly romantic dinner or ridiculously long looks into one another’s eyes. It was simply just fun and relaxed as I highly lost my virginity listening to yes, “High” by The Cure. Afterwards we floated off into that post-coital, slightly high, definitely Cure-induced dreamy state.

When I woke up, there was no regret or pain. And now eighteen years later, when I am knee-deep in the harried life of a working wife and mother, I can turn on The Cure and be taken back to one night when I was free.