Love by James Francis Flynn


Mindy took you to your first high-school homecoming freshman year. She was older, she was more experienced, but she liked something she saw and took it from you. You slow-danced badly to R&B songs. She grabbed your butt to make you jump.

At the end of the night you asked her if you could kiss her.

“Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes. You kissed her cheek. She kissed your mouth, much to your surprise. This is how that happens.

* * *

Lindsey’s tits were huge. That’s all anyone talked about when they talked about her. The boys and the girls both: “Jesus Christ, look at that rack!” They were the first tits you ever saw without a shirt on the girl. Young and drunk on a couch, fumbling up a shirt, she just took if off.

“There you go,” she said, waiting. You didn’t know what to do next.

* * *

Then there was the neighbor. Your roommate tells you while you’re going to the grocery store that she has a crush on you, has since summer. She’s cute, with long blonde hair and a smoker’s cough that grows on you. She speaks French fluently, too.

“I’m going to fuck that girl,” you declare.

“Good for you,” your roommate says, and changes the track on the CD changer in the car.

* * *

You do. There is a party that you’re both at. She talks your ear off, fresh from too many beers. You listen to the band together, getting closer and closer, touching hands “accidentally”. You share the last beer, wondering what it would be like to kiss her.

She invites you over after. There’s a keg at her house, just some friends, no big deal. You come. You drink beer in red plastic cups in the laundry room where the keg is. You talk. She listens. She sits on the washing machine, grabs you. She looks up abruptly, says, “When do you think you’re going to kiss me?”

Now.

* * *

It was different for guys. You have to act like you know what you’re doing at all times, like you’ve been there before even when you haven’t. But you have to act confident, and you can’t mess up.

You want sex, sure. But you also want to feel wanted, to feel loved, and that doesn’t cut it when everyone is talking shit and making you feel like you can’t have feelings.

* * *

You forgot how a condom feels. You forgot having to have the girl get up off you, scrabbling limp-dicked in the dark to your jeans on the floor.

“Hold on a second,” you say. She might yawn. She might kiss your neck. She might lay there with covers half-on. It all depended on the girl.

You find the condom. You come back to bed. The girl gets back on top of you, straddles you again, waiting. You try to roll the condom on. Wrong way. You laugh a little. She doesn’t. She spreads her legs a little wider, waiting.

You turn it the other way, roll it down deep. It feels tight. The rolled up end pulls on your pubic hairs. The spermicide in the tip tickles your dick.

“Ready?” she asks, but she’s already grabbed your plastic dick with her thumb and index finger. She puts you inside her, gasps a little bit, and starts rocking back and forth. It feels good, but it feels like you’re missing something important.

You forgot all this. It has been that long.

* * *

Some guys are drinking, watching TV on a slow Sunday. Laura is there. A Victoria Secret commercial comes on TV.

“Oh fuck yeah,” one of the guys says.

“Jesus,” says another as a different model parades. “She’s fucking hot.”

“Damn dude,” you say.

“No shit, man,” says the first friend. “I’d fuck her in a second.”

Laura was leaning back in her chair, the back two legs supporting her whole weight. Suddenly she drops the front two legs down with all of her weight.

“Fucking guys,” she says. “You guys are always searching for pussy.”

You aren’t searching for pussy. You are looking for love. Who isn’t?

* * *

There was Sarah, the red-head from botany. Her hair went down to her ass. When you took off her panties her pubic hair was red, red as blood on a Tuscan roof-top.

* * *

She was a prize. Her name was Syd. Your friends talked about fucking her, but for some reason she came after you. And you let her. Who wouldn’t? She looked like a movie star, a pop star, a princess sent from a fairy tale. And all her sexual desire seemed aimed at you, and you had no idea why.

She went fast and you let her. One night kissing late she got naked for sex, legs akimbo.

“I don’t have a condom,” you told her. You cursed yourself. You want to fuck this girl, this prize.

“I don’t care,” she said, and grabbed your back.

After its over, she dressed quickly – she doesn’t wear any underwear – and left. You lie naked in bed with a wet dick, wondering what happened, wondering why fucking the most beautiful girl you’ve ever met was so unsatisfying.

* * *

There was your girlfriend your junior year who got into a car accident. You used to visit her at the hospital, late at night when you got off work at the pizza place at the mall. They only let you in because you said you were her cousin.

She had been there for a week, and she was getting better. She started at first by just asking you to kiss her. She was injured, so you did.

“Rubby my leggy,” she’d say in that lost-little-girl voice. Who can resist a girl that cute?

“Play with my things,” she said after another week. You looked lost, confused. She smiled at you from the other side of the hospital bed, pointed both her first fingers at both her boobs.

“I want you to eat me,” she said finally. You looked around like you were five again and stealing candy from the grocery. You looked at her. She looked right back at you.

“Yes,” she said. What could you do? She was beautiful and she was in pain. “It will help,” she said, so you got up slowly from the foot of the bed and closed the door that looked out to the nurse’s station.

* * *

Your girlfriend from your junior year dumped you. You grew distant after she got back from the hospital. You were growing attached to her in ways that you didn’t imagine – you worried about her, thought of her as an equal, liked talking to her and hanging out.

So you stop calling her. You brush her off in class. Her friends ask what’s up. You’re scared and you run away. Once at a party you don’t come with her and you don’t really even acknowledge her, so she throws a fit in front of everyone because you’re talking to another girl. She yells at you, dumps you in public. Then she hops her beautiful Asian ass onto the back of the quarterback’s motorcycle and speeds away.

* * *

Getting a bra off is hard. She’s on top of you, straddling you, digging her crotch into yours while you’re kissing. In between kisses you reach with one hand around and try.

You’re trying so hard that you inadvertently stop kissing. She stops too, sits up a bit, reaches her hands behind her back, takes it off and throws it across the room and there they are swinging.

* * *

“You fuck that yet?” a friend asks over his beer. You are in line for the keg at a party. Your friend is motioning across the lawn to Jill who you’ve gone on two dates with.

“Yeah,” another friend asks. “What’s up with that?”

“Yeah,” you say. You lie. They are satisfied and talk about something else while your mind wanders and the line for the keg continues up a notch at a time.

* * *

You are fumbling through. You push and push for more, but they are the ones who really control it. They are the ones with confidence. You feel like what happens in bed is happening to someone else – who would fuck you? It feels like you are living someone else’s life when you sweat through sex and wake in the morning to another breathing body beside you.

* * *

Megan told you about a dream she had about you.

“It was you and me,” she said. “And we were back in the olden days.”

“Olden days?” you asked. “Like when?”

“Like....umm...medieval times.”

“Oh, okay.”

“So anyway, we were there -- or I was -- and I was in the town center near a well or something -–“

“What were you wearing?”

“Um, one of those big fluffy poofy skirts.”

“And like a corset?”

“Um...I don’t know.”

“Okay, go on.”

“And so I was at the well, and you came by through the town on your horse. And everyone in the village closed their windows when you came and people ran back to their houses because you were coming. I guess they were scared, but I wasn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, I was just getting some water, I guess. Anyway, you came by and I looked up at you in your armor and stuff. And you didn’t say anything, you just grabbed me and put me on the back of the horse and we rode off into the forest.”

“Really?” you asked. “That’s pretty wild.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was weird.”

“Was that it? Did anything else happen?”

“Well, umm...it kinda turned into a kissing dream then...” She trailed off.

“A kissing dream?”

“Yeah.”

“Not a sex dream?” you asked, and slyly smiled at her.

“Why?” she asked. “Do you have sex dream about us? Do you fantasize about it or something?”

“Who do you think I’m thinking about when I’m jacking off?” you asked her.

“Eww!” she says. Megan blushed bright red and turned her head away.

* * *

There was the 19 year old when you were just 15. She didn’t know because you were so tall. She was in town for the summer, didn’t know you or your story. You made out in the park, at her house, in the parking lot in her car –- you told her you didn’t have one, you were “working on it.”

Once in her car you got her naked. The windows fogged with sweat, with breath, with a late summer/early autumn cold coming in through the car’s cracks. The AC was on. The radio was on. You felt her slippery body against yours, her breasts pressed against your chest.

In between making out, wet kisses on lips, necks, ears, she slides her hot crotch against the growing grown boner in your boxer shorts. She asks “Do you have anything?” You say no, scratch your head. You didn’t imagine this. She reaches into the front seat, you see the way her breasts dangle and swing. She searches in her bag, finds a condom, smiles at you. She starts to tear it open, then looks at you.

“Wait,” she says.

“What?”

She hesitates.

“What’s that look on your face? You look scared.”

She try to change your face, but you can’t seem to smile. She leans back against the car door, puts the condom down.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something: are you a virgin?”

You look away. You hesitate.

“Are you serious?” she asks, and she laughs a little.

You cry. You cry in spite of yourself, shield your eyes and your stupid face with your hands. She takes your hands away almost immediately.

She kisses you on the forehead while holding you by the hair. She wipes one tear away. She grabs the back of your neck with her right hand, leads you up to her chest and puts your head against it, stroking your hair. Your tears mix with her sweat and drips down her stomach. You put your arms around her and she starts to rock you, back and forth, forth and back, back and forth.

“Shh,” she says. “Shh. Don’t cry, my lovely little boy. Don’t cry.”

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