I had the best sex of my life when I was sixteen. Granted, I'm still what some most would call a young pup, a spring chicken in the sack, considering I have yet to even reach my supposed thirty-something sexual peak. While sometimes I feel like I've already passed my prime, like I've hung up my boots and they shall knock nevermore, I'm pretty sure I've got at least one or two heartfelt pelvic thrusts left in me. And when I imagine how those future moments of magic should be, complete with flattering lighting and a perfectly synchronized soundtrack, I can't help but think of my high school boyfriend.
Ah, my teen angel. He was a soft-spoken sweetie-pie prone to bouts of super sensitivity, a mama's boy with the member of a porn star, an Adonis unaware of his own beauty. He could have ravaged the hearts and hymens of almost any freshly post-pubescent girl in school, though he never would have he was that rare breed of high school boy whose conscience dictated the direction of his dick and not vice versa. The kid was golden: tanned skin stretched taut over perfectly toned muscle lined with perky veins; sun-streaked hair long enough to have that grown-out rebel-wannabe look but still short enough not to break his mother's heart; long limbs of every kind which he quickly learned to press against me and tangle with mine.
From the first time I really laid my apprehensive hands on his virgin body, the white glow from my family Christmas tree guiding our fumbling way, to the last time we were together, our pants strewn across the backseat floor of his parents' parked car the night before I left for college, nothing we did ever felt uncomfortable or forced. Everything fell in perfect sync with the universe at that time, a small suburban town in northern New Jersey as if each impulse we acted upon set us on a perfect course toward the way things were supposed to be.
Whispering over the phone at two a.m. on school nights, I would ask him to describe how and where he wanted to touch me, telling him in return how his voice would actually make me ache, his words pushing on me as if I were a warm sponge filled to capacity. We spent nights with receivers tucked between our pillows and heads, half-asleep in the sublime haze of pre-orgasmic torture that we wanted to last forever and that we made last for hours. (That is, until we discovered how the landing above my garage made for the perfect midsummer night's bridge between my front porch and bedroom window.)
He used to suck on my toes. When his eyes opened mid-job and bore into mine, neither one of us dared, even considered, cracking a grin at the completely ridiculous picture we must have made on my living room couch. Consummating our lust was serious business, keen focus absolutely necessary to fully appreciate every unexpected lick, stroke and nibble.
I remember being on the floor of his bedroom once and channeling the spirit of Linda Blair. Through clenched teeth I ordered him to "Fuck me!" over and over, harder and harder. So he did. It wasn't until after he came and collapsed on top of me that I noticed the tears of humiliation and hurt feelings on his face. In our insular world, there was no posturing, no role-playing, no safe words if I sounded cruel, then I was cruel, and he felt it, deeply.
I never understood what movies and books meant when they referred to sexual encounters as "religious experiences" until I spent one night with him in a musty motel at the Jersey Shore after the prom (of course). We had had a fight, our one and only, about something really, truly, earth-shatteringly important that I naturally can't recall now. Confusing stubbornness and a good pout for maturity, I refused to talk to him for hours at the beach. But on the verge of not only wasting the perfectly private room we had mustered up the courage to get by ourselves but also of breaking his heart, I finally gave up my little drama and went to him. I laid him out underneath me, insisting with bodily force that he be still while I performed every one-sided ritual that I knew would bind him to me for all eternity. We had sex, great make-up sex, but that was just the warm-up.
We got into the single-person stand-up shower the type with a flimsy piece of plastic for a door. Standing there still for some time, we looked each other in the eyes. His were blue, and the water that had darkened his lashes amplified them. He was absolutely radiant. And I needed to pierce that radiance with any, every piece of me. But I couldn't penetrate or envelope him deeply enough, no matter what entrance or method I used. I was on my knees drinking him in with the warm running water. Then he was on his. I was turning myself around, turning him around, giving everything up to him and taking all of him in return. And while the water slowly leaked out the shower door and eventually made half the motel room's carpeting a deeper shade of brown, coming was never the objective. These gropings and probings were not a means to an orgasmic end, but an end in themselves.
The space was old and cramped, but the clouds of steam eclipsed that ugly wood-panelled room. The overhead light encased in yellow-tainted plastic gave off a golden glow; when I looked up at him it was as if he were wearing a halo. And when he looked down at me, pushed the wet hair off my face with pruned fingers, I could see exactly what he saw, not because of my reflection in his eyes but because I was, at that moment, inside of him.
No doubt these acts were all the more thrilling because they were "forbidden," taking place in spaces that weren't solely our own (or securely private for that matter), proscribed by authority figures who could punish our disregard for house rules swiftly and harshly. But it was more than the thrill, more than the adrenaline rush of teenage rebellion, more than the brand-newness of it all that gave our comminglings their intensity. It had nothing to do with the fact that as a teenager I had an ass like a peach, branch-like limbs, impossibly clear skin and perky enough breasts (oh, those were the days). Nor was it a simple matter of youthful coordination, limberness, endurance or energy.
Instead, it was about experiencing a level of comfort that stripped us of any self-consciousness. It was about feeling the freedom to make complete asses out of ourselves because we were so sure we could never be seen as such in each other's eyes. It was about experiencing our deepest and most vulnerable emotions through our bodies without fear. It was, of course, about love true, blue and completely corny.
While the idea of young love makes for great pop culture, I haven't found much faith in its real-life existence, at least among most of the adults I know. Even though they too have experienced the reverie of getting high off another person's smell, sweat and all, for the first time in gym class, or the fatigue from sleepless school nights spent composing all-important love notes, they invariably say, "I thought I was in love," or "I was young, I didn't know any better," or "At that age I confused sex with love." To them, "first love" was an important rite of passage, but light and superficial in hindsight.
The ones who minored in psychology continue: "Your unrealistic idealization of a past is preventing you from engaging in healthy, functional, meaningful sexual relations. You're using the perfect, edited memory of him as an unfair, impossible standard by which to measure all others as a way to avoid intimacy and keep yourself from getting hurt . . . "
But I've had my fair share. I've opened myself up, figuratively and literally, to new partners and new experiences without (too many) expectations. And of course, I work at Hooksexup, where I've been exposed to the endless possibilities of sexual positions and perspectives: I've learned a lot of new tricks. Even so, it's been a hell of a long time since I've seen the face of god.
Now, approaching thirty, as I look back on the lot of my experiences, it's the high school ones that keep coming up in conversations with friends about the best sex, the best boyfriend, the best time. I recall all the I love you's, all the I want you inside of me's, all the you are my everything's we exchanged. None was for performance's sake. None was melodramatic. Everything was sincere and original even if it was cliché because we didn't know any better. We didn't know how stupid we could sound, how cruel and untrustworthy other people could be, how hurt we could end up. And now I wish I didn't know any better again.
At sixteen, love was a piece of cake, with great fucking icing. I assumed it would always be that easy, that fulfilling. But I've just been finger-licking the frosting ever since.
has written for Glamour, Men's Journal, The Guardian (U.K.), Details and the Boston Phoenix. She and her evil twin Emma Taylor write Hooksexup's weekly horoscopes and sex advice columns. They've also written Hooksexup's two original books, "The Big Bang" (out now) and "Hooksexup's Guide to Sex Etiquette" (forthcoming Winter '04). Some of Lorelei's specific qualifications for her residency at Hooksexup (since 1998) include early-'80s short stories inspired by the "good parts" of secretly-bought romance novels and an eleventh-grade English term paper on Lady Chatterly's Lover.
college, nothing we did ever felt uncomfortable or forced. Everything fell in perfect sync with the universe at that time, a small suburban town in northern New Jersey as if each impulse we acted upon set us on a perfect course toward the way things were supposed to be.
It had nothing to do with the fact that as a teenager I had an ass like a peach, branch-like limbs, impossibly clear skin and perky enough breasts (oh, those were the days). Nor was it a simple matter of youthful coordination, limberness, endurance or energy.
