smiling from ear to ear

I went to undergrad at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast, and I graduated within the last 10 years. It’s a pretty obscure place, but I think that like most of those institutions, it was filled with young people who felt the tension and the urgency of the moment, who wanted to change and fix every injustice in the world right this instant, and who, by all accounts, really weren’t aware of what college was like compared to the rest of the world. Most students didn’t realize that we lived in a privileged space by pretty much every measure (I’m willing to admit, I didn’t until somewhat late in my time there), and those of us with left leaning politics were unlikely to realize how left we were until we wandered out to real jobs and realized that, for example, not everyone firmly believed that man-on-pumpkin sex is a fundamental right that should be taught to children (Thank you, Jon Stewart).

One of the great lies sold to most kids running off to college is that sex is cheap and easy to find for everyone, as long as you show up and have a few drinks. That was, generally speaking, not my experience. What was true, however, was that sexual tension was everywhere, not a lot of people knew what to do with it, and that it was much, much easier to find sex practices that exist on the tail ends of the bell curve in college than it would ever be after. Also true: a reputation was easy to come by, even if it was based entirely in conjecture and misunderstandings: I had a trashy reputation because the girl who lived in the room under mine heard the couple who lived next to me having sex pretty much constantly, and knowing that I didn’t have a boyfriend, she concluded that I was spectacularly easy. Whether or not that last part is tru, confronting this classmate about the fact that if I’m going to have an easy reputation, I’d prefer to have the sex that earns it remains one of my favorite memories.

Anyways. You’re not here to read about the things I did or didn’t love about undergrad.

Going to a small liberal arts college filled with people age 18-23 who really wanted to be having more sex with more people than they actually did always affords a certain amount of hedonism whenever that tension is allowed to be released. I left my school to study abroad for the first half of my junior year, and I came back caring considerably less about what my classmates thought of me and considerably more about getting what I wanted. This played out in my favor, especially on the night of one of the bigger parties on campus. The party was school-funded in a way that seems totally crazy now, but then it only made sense that my college would give money to a group that wanted to celebrate non-binary gender and the full spectrum of human sexuality in the form of a giant party filled with people in, at most, underwear and ridiculous accessories.

I had never gone to this party before. I was always too self-conscious; too concerned that people would judge my body the way that I had judged myself instead of realizing that when presented with a young woman in lingerie, boots, and a silly hat, most people who want to sleep with women are less judgmental and more carnal. By the time I came back from overseas, I had figured this out. I went to the party that spring wearing a deep purple-red lacy bra, purple lace boyshorts (not actually a matching set, but in the dark it was just fine), a fedora, and leather boots. I wore a long coat over this ensemble to protect myself from the mid-March east-coast weather, and stuffed a flask into my boot to warm me up.

Upon arrival, I found the basement room that was functioning as a coat check and had a beer from the free keg. There were a few nervous minutes between arrival and shedding my coat, and then a few more between feeling exposed and cold to feeling powerful. My friends and I went from tense giggles with sidelong glances to open-mouthed laughter and flirtatious words. I’d like to say that this was all due to the influence of alcohol. It wasn’t.

My friends and I wandered up to the main room. It was filled with college age kids dressed in outfits ranging from next to nothing to completely costumey: there were women striding around the dance floor in garter belts and headbands, men in head to toe leather, women dressed as devils with wings and men wearing leashes while being lead by their boyfriends. The room was hot and rank, the bass so loud my own diaphragm shook. Looking back on this now I could have been a hunter in that room and picked whoever I wanted to be my game.

I found Carl and Elise, two adventurous friends of mine who are protagonists in a story for another time, on the dance floor. We danced together, we ran our hands over each others’ bodies, we pinched sensitive parts and kissed sweaty lips. This was familiar territory. This was both tense and comfortable; it was riding a roller coaster two times in a row.

I felt someone else’s eyes observing us. I turned around. There was a man there—tall, bearded, shirtless, handsome--staring at our scene, and when I turned to face him he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me towards him while he asked me to dance. Our bodies were solid together. I put an arm around his neck and pulled my hips to his while I said yes.

“Do you go to school here?”

“Yes, you?” My lips are grazing his while I answer this question.

“No, I go to a school out west, I’m visiting a friend. What’s your name?” His hand travels firmly from the back of my waist to the fullest part of my ass.

“Margot. You?” I throw my other arm around him, and wrap it around his chest, and trace his back with the nails of my index and middle fingers.

“David.”

We are done with small talk. I may or may not have asked him his major, he may or may not have asked me mine. That part of the story is unimportant and I only vaguely remember it.

We dance to the beat. We sweat down our torsos—his naked and mine nearly so—and press ourselves together such that when we part, our skins peel away. We start to kiss and we skip the gentle steps. He is kissing me with an open mouth, I reciprocate and lick his teeth. He pulls my lip. I scratch his back. He pulls to the side and sucks my earlobe. My insides surge. I kiss and bite his neck.

He pulls me to the side and presses my body against the cold, stone wall of the room. The carved rock that the building is made of is rough and uneven, it presses into me but I don’t feel any pain. We kiss in between biting and sucking. He is rough. He gets me wet with his aggression. He pulls down the front of my panties and presses a finger into my pussy while his thumb discovers that I have a piercing through the hood of my clit. I moan deeply as he gasps in surprise.

“Is that what I think it is?”

I don’t use words when I respond: I sigh and grunt as I work my pelvis across his thick hands. This answer appears adequate as I reach down his briefs and pull out a solid, thick cock.  I run my hand from base to tip. He responds in kind.

We find the words to discover that as neither of us has a condom, certain practices are off the table. I scan the room across across his shoulder and notice that women and men stare at us, some with a look of proud disdain and some with a look of arousal. Carl and Elise return my gaze and wink. I return my attentions to David.

He rips down the cups of my bra. My exposed nipples are hard and sensitive when he takes one in his mouth, puts his left hand on the wall behind me, and bites and sucks my breast while his other hand works my snatch.

My left leg is high around his waist, my right hand feels him leaking across my palm as I run it over the length of his cock. His sweat and secretions make an excellent lube.

I am pressed into the wall, I feel it scratching against my back. I smell his saturated hair. My tiptoe is my only contact with the floor: my partner is practically holding me up by my pelvis. My nails give him red marks across his broad back. I am coming, he holds me up in suspension. His fingers are thick inside my contracting pussy. He presses his face into my chest and moans deeply when he orgasms into my hand.

We are still for a moment. He slowly pulls out of me, settling my foot on the ground. I unwrap my leg.

He takes my hand from his briefs. He licks it clean of his own semen. He kisses me. We smile. He wanders off into the crowd.

There may or may not be people staring at me, I don’t care either way. I wander down to the coat room and meet my friends for a beer. The photos taken right after this encounter, with my hair long and free and a hat perched on my head, grinning from ear to ear with my friends smiling and laughing and all of us nearly nude, are some of my favorite pictures from undergrad.

I somehow get home. I am exhausted when I flop into my twin bed. My roommate is snoring across the room.

The next morning, I awake with a wild hangover and a dry mouth. I stumble to the bathroom. I look at myself in the mirror. My nipples are purple with bruising and my back covered in scratches from the uneven wall. I wonder if my partner’s body shows similar signs. The shower I take ranks as one of the top 5 showers of my adult life.

I find Carl and Elise for breakfast and we go over the previous night’s events. We laugh about it; they congratulate me. I run back to their rooms and show them the battlescars.

One of the great lies of college is that there is sex anywhere and anytime you want it, from anyone. College was, on a romantic level, one of the loneliest times of my life, but I was able to share it with some wonderful people and punctuate it with events that are hard to find as an adult. I’m not sure if the best part of this story is my encounter with David, the marks on my body from after the fact, or experiencing it with Carl and Elise. Everything is wrapped together. Everything is one experience. I am a lucky one.