#19

19

Opening up to new experiences

Content note: implied sexual assault. This story is not a memoir — I’m not fifty-seven, this didn’t happen to me, and Ollie is only real enough for his type to be recognisable — but it is nevertheless true: I was nineteen once, for several years and many bad choices.

Nineteen is no age, really.

I thought it was, back then. I thought I was an adult, at the peak of my sexuality. I felt like I knew it all, I’d seen it all, and I could do as much of it as I wanted to, as often as I liked.

I knew nothing.

Nineteen years later, I’d learnt the difference between ‘sexuality’ and simply ‘being desirable’, between ‘knowing my own body’ and ‘letting other bodies explore mine’. At thirty-eight I probably was at my peak, and while I was less in demand, I was making better choices: less sex didn’t mean fewer orgasms, it meant fewer disappointments.

Now, another nineteen years on, I know my peak is behind me. That’s okay. Maybe it is all downhill from here, but if you think that’s a bad thing you’re already too old: you’ve forgotten being a little kid, climbing all those steps to stand at the top of the big slide. As long as you’re in the playground, downhill can still be fun.

I wish I knew at nineteen what I know now… and I wish I’d listened to all the women who told me I’d say that one day. But what did they know? They were old. I was nineteen, and I knew everything.

I didn’t make good choices at nineteen.

Oliver wasn’t a good choice. He was thirty-seven — a marketing manager cresting his own peak and looking greedily back down the hill at those of us starting to climb. Our first date ended in my bed; the second began in his. I suppose it began at his front door really, but we won’t count the two minute tour of his apartment, or the extra minute it took for us to get naked.

He had a bottle of lube on his bedside table. My attitude towards lube has changed over the years. At nineteen, I thought it was for dried-up old women and frigid girls. At thirty-eight, it was just another item in my toybox. At fifty-seven, I wouldn’t want to be without it, but if I ever am, I find other things to do.

I told Ollie, “We won’t need lube! You got me wetter than Jennifer Beales last time.”

He didn’t laugh. He hadn’t seen Flashdance.

He said, “It’s for anal.”

I knew what that was — I was nineteen, I knew everything — but I’d never done it, and I didn’t plan to.

I said, “You can put it away then. My bum’s an exit, not an entrance.”

He just smiled and kissed my forehead. “We’ll see.”

I let that go, because his mouth didn’t stop at my brow: it sealed my lips. Ollie kissed with a confident, urgent tenderness that none of the boys I’d had before him could match. His mouth took charge of mine, and I let it because I knew his tongue could take me where I wanted to go.

His mouth moved south. I’d learned the first time we fucked just what those tender lips and his eager tongue could do, so I closed my eyes and spread my legs in readiness.

With hindsight, all Ollie did the first time we fucked was devote a little attention to my breasts before he touched my pussy, and show a little love to my pussy before he used it, but that was more than the men — boys, really — before him ever did, and it felt special: a man choosing to centre me and my pleasure.

This time, while his tongue was lapping at my clit, the finger that had begun by tracing my folds moved lower.

I didn’t want him to stop licking me, but I didn’t want him to do that. And I said so.

“Don’t! That’s dirty.”

He stopped licking. “You showered before you came over, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but…”

“So it’s clean. You know, you’ve got thousands of nerve endings there, twice as many as there are in your pretty little clitty,” and he kissed my clit to punctuate his point, “So it can give you the same amount of pleasure. Go on, let me touch it. Just touch. I’ll be gentle, and if you hate it, I’ll stop.”

I didn’t want him to think I was a prude, so I said, “Okay.”

I’d met Ollie in a bar a week earlier, and three hours later we were lying in my bed having done what I naively thought of as ‘everything’. But I said “Okay,” because I didn’t want him to think I was a prude. Nineteen really is no age.

His fingertip teased my… there’s no good word, is there? No words I like, anyway. But I did like him touching it: the way he stroked it so softly, skin barely touching puckered skin. The result wasn’t as powerful as having his tongue circle my clit, but he was still sending tingles through me; dirty, shameful tingles, but the exciting sort of dirty, the daring kind of shameful.

Then he said, “I’ll put some lube on your rosebud.”

That wasn’t the worst word, but it wasn’t the most welcome prospect either.

I scooted up the bed with a sharp, “No!”

He said, “Oh, go on! I’m not going to put anything in you, it’ll just feel so much better if my fingertip is slicker. Better for you. Lube enhances the sensations.”

And I did love those sensations, so I said, “Okay.”

Lube did not enhance the sensations, partly because he asked me to roll over and he stopped licking me to concentrate on touching my bum, but mostly because there was something about turning my back on him that made what he was doing feel less shameful, less daring, less like an exciting taboo and more like a medical procedure.

I think he picked up on that, because he said, “You’ll enjoy it more if you play with your kitty at the same time.”

Yes, he called it my ‘kitty’. Back then, that made me — and my pussy — feel treasured. At fifty-seven, I prefer a man who calls a cunt a cunt, but nineteen-year-old me dutifully played with her treasured kitty.

I raised my hips a little and slipped a hand under myself, and what we were doing together became fun again: there was a kind of synergy to it, two sensations meeting in the middle to melt me.

I could feel myself opening up to him, that little ring of muscle relaxing. I knew what he was going to do. I knew he’d lied to me.

When his finger pressed, and penetrated — just the tip — I welcomed it. It wasn’t painful, it was like he’d found thousands more nerve endings to stimulate.

I objected anyway, because he’d lied to me. “Stop it!”

He didn’t. He challenged me instead. “Tell me it doesn’t feel good.”

I couldn’t. I wasn’t going to lie to him.

“It does feel nice.”

“Imagine how much better my cock would feel.”

I did imagine that, and I told him what I thought. “No! That’s too much. Just stop.”

He did. He pulled his finger out, and planted an apologetic kiss on my coccyx. Then he kissed his way slowly up my back, until he could nibble on my neck and I could feel an iron-hard heat pressing between my buttocks.

I sobbed into his pillow, and after he’d finished I cried my eyes dry on the toilet. I thought I had no tears left, but I wept again in the shower, as pink-tinged water swirled around my toes.

He was very apologetic. He told me he thought I’d wanted it, he thought I’d said yes. And I thought maybe I had said yes, when he bit my neck, because I did love when he bit my neck, so maybe it was all a misunderstanding, and maybe I should have been clearer, maybe I should have said no to the lube, or maybe I shouldn’t have enjoyed his finger so much, or maybe I’d led him on by grinding my bottom against that hard heat, and maybe my pain was my fault.

So I forgave him.

He told me my forgiveness was a mark of my maturity, and that was what he loved most about me, that I was so much more mature and sensible than other girls my age.

I hadn’t wanted him to think I was a prude, but the very last thing I ever wanted him to think was that I was too young, too immature.

I understand now that ‘young and immature’ was probably the first thing he thought when he met me. Or maybe the second, after ‘nice tits’ but just before ‘prey.’

At nineteen, Ollie took my anal virginity. He ended up taking a lot of other things too, like confidence, independence, and self-respect. He was a mistake, one whose consequences lingered long after I grew older and he moved on: I became a woman who made mistakes. A lot of mistakes. I was thirty-eight before I finally learned to say, “Go away,” when a man said, “Go on.”

But that’s the past. While I do look back sometimes, mostly I look forward. At fifty-seven, I know less than I did at nineteen, but these days the things I know are true, and I’m wiser for being more ignorant. When seventy-six comes, I’ll embrace it. I might not have so much fun at that age, but at least I’ll have memories. And whatever fun I have, I still won’t be doing anal, or anything at all with any man who thinks “No!” means “Persuade me.”

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