A Princely Guy, A Surprising Lapse

I was home with the sniffles and this happened, before we'd even met! I'm just really happy to know that guys like this are out there.

A second princely character in as many weeks, is this just what dating with self-esteem is like? Is it an older-lady thing? Whatever it is, it’s nice being a queen in all caps. I liked this guy almost instantly. I was swiping absentmindedly on Bumble, really just going by faces, not bios, but this dear had all the things—36, a grad student at the same university I went to, and the sweetest smile. I could feel his warmth emanating from his profile, a pretty amazing feat.

Plus, Princely Guy’s from Ghana and he promised me a great Afrobeat/Hiplife playlist. I figured he’d probably have a swoonworthy Bristishy accent. (Yesyesyes, he did bring both the playlist and the accent. Ohmy.) He promised to teach me Twi. (Ohemaa means queen!) He invited me over to WhatsApp and you know I find it very cozy there.

His texting style was sunny, effusive, and kind, and I felt a safety talking to him that I don’t usually feel with people I haven’t met in person yet. (I swear it wasn’t JUST because I like being called a queen. Guys in the apps do that fairly often.) He offered to take me to dinner in my neighborhood, so last Friday night I picked out an all-pink-including-undies outfit and met him at my favorite place. Well, my favorite place to get takeout, anyway! This was my first time dining there—they reserved us the table near the window.

His texting manner had been so perfectly tuned to my whole thing that I suspected he might be some new kind of dating app AI, but he was real, and RIGHT on time. Sometimes you can tell from someone’s picture that they’d be a whole lot of fun to have sex with, and he was even more swoony in person—an openhearted face and a carefully-but-not-too-carefully sculpted body, a little slight compared to me, but strong and full of Chi.

As we ate our dinners, I told him I was experimenting with monogamy and he said he hoped to just find one woman. It was the first time I’ve taken anyone home with a monogamous intention, maybe since Sweetie.

For the first time in my life, I’m on birth control, the IUD they put in during my surgery back in March. From what he’d told me, Princely Guy didn’t seem to be that experienced or sexually active, and I was relieved to be free of the gotta-be-safe-enough-for-the-whole-constellation (possibly for the entire world) feeling. For almost my entire adult life, I’ve been a good, good, good citizen of sex. I haven’t had a PIV sex without a condom since literal 1995.

I was in a haze of happiness and trust and music with Princely Guy when he started to enter me without a condom on. It didn’t get mad or scared like I usually would, just told him he needed to get up and get a condom from the bedside drawer. But while he was rifling around in there, I was like…

Huh.

“I’d kinda like to try it without.” I said. So we did. We played and tickled and laughed and we fucked three times without a condom.

And I liked it so much. I liked being all the way against him, being filled up in this new/old way. I liked the feeling of (definitely ill-advised at this point) trust.

The match fell apart for me while I was driving him home. (Universe, send me the guy who’ll drive me around please) not BECAUSE I was driving him home, of course, but I didn’t like the way he talked about women or about my body—just an immaturity underneath all the sweetness that I knew wouldn’t serve us longterm.

On the drive back home, I landed back in wistfulness, missing the soul-connection/body-wisdom of The Shy One and wondering if I’d ever feel that kind of connection again. But my body was HAPPY. When I woke up the next morning, my vagina was full of well being. My heart felt hurty, but my body felt whole and loved and fulfilled.

Of course I’ll get tested, of course. This was a reckless choice, especially for someone who came of age in the Nineties to make. But I feel nothing but peace about it. I feel like a once-in-27-years lapse is allowed and I wonder if I’m headed towards monogamy? Or if this was just another body adventure? We’ll see.

Animal Crossing and Chill Part Two

The Lovely Guy joined me under the covers and our bodies just fit so nicely together. He was so warm and open, I just loved being all wrapped up in him. It’s hard to access what order things happened in, the whole night (And I do mean the WHOLE night) was such a lovely, moan-y haze.

I played at trying to hold him down, pressing his wrists into the pillows behind his head. He very temporarily submitted. The power/tension between our bodies felt easy and fluid, like watercolors. He looked so beautiful beneath me, glowing and sweet but also amused and just barely letting me have the top—like there was only so long he would let me be up there. I thought I’d better make the most of it. I had to spread my legs wide to straddle him. I loved feeling his dick get harder between my still-legginged legs.

Some of these clothes had to go. I wanted him to tear them off, but I got the feeling he wanted me to show the initiative, so I stood up and stripped before I kissed first his face, then his neck, then his chest, then his tummy, his smooth obliques, his thighs. I gave him a few unselfconfident caveats about how I still need lots of blow job practice, and he PERFECTLY understood.

He gathered my hair into his big hands and gently and sweetly guided my motions. His cock, friendly and cheerful, tasted salty and delicious on my tongue. He gave directions so kindly and patiently. He knew the phrase I wanted to hear, but he would hold it back nearly the whole night, until EXACTLY the right moment.

“Is this how you want me to come?” He growled, looking into my face with an expression that was somehow hungry and indifferent. (Fucking SWOON)

“Uh-uh. I want you to fuck me.”

And because he is a very good first-date guest, he’d brought condoms.

No more initiative for me now! I sprawled out lazy and submissive underneath him, hands back, legs open and ready. He bent my legs all the way up and went in and …oh. That relief. That letting go.

He fucked me so powerfully, so expertly, so easily, generously, looking me in the face so much that it was almost startling. But it wasn’t startling. It was natural. It was (part of) how this is supposed to be. I said THANK YOU lots of times. I could NOT believe I’d gotten SO VERY lucky.

When he came inside me, it felt so absolute. I know it wasn’t a promise, or a bond, or a declaration, but those were the feelings at the center of me and in my heart. A long-awaited completion.

I know! I totally want to be chill about this guy! All signs point to FWB at this week-later point. But I can let the feelings live in these moments, can keep and take care of them, right? Let’s try that.

I forget sometimes how deprived of closeness I’ve been, so many of us have been. I’ve spent so many years, even before quarantine, being as determinedly self-sufficient, and closed-for-business as I could manage. I’ve been boarded up against the fires and the storms. Letting The Lovely Guy in felt so ordinary and also like such a dazzling revelation.

There definitely would NOT be any sleep that night.

Actual Casual Sex Part Two: A Lot to Think About

“Do you have a condom?” I asked as we started to aim for upstairs.

“No, do you have any? I mean, you said you hadn’t been fucked in a long time so I didn’t think we’d need one.”

“I mean yeah but I’m not crazy!”

(Seriously people, it’s basically legal to bounty-hunt abortion seekers in Texas these days, is there anything LESS HOT than trying to shirk safer sex? There might be one thing less hot, stay tuned.)

He admitted he *might* have a condom in the car so I smacked his ass and sent him out the door to go get it. I felt impatient and not exactly hopeful.

But yay! He had one and we went upstairs.

“Okay I want you to kneel down.” He wasn’t so much dominating as he was gently instructional.

It was nice to have a dick in my mouth again after aaaaaalllll this time. I really missed the taste (Didn’t make him have the condom on for this part, probably I should have.) and the fullness in my throat.

“Deeper now,” he said, guiding my head with his hand. The tip of his dick hit that part of my throat that makes me feel a little squirty and a little scared. I gagged in a way that I didn’t mind but that definitely shifted me away from my own room and into porn-mind.

“I want you to spit on it.” Yeah no. I ignored that request and I humbly ask that everybody look at porn just maybe slightly less.

Realizing I wasn’t going to be spitting on anything, he shifted to helping me do the best possible job, which I really appreciated. Love any time spent getting better at penises, learning about angles and rhythms and…

“Okay now I want to see how tight that pussy is. Take your pants off and get to the edge of the bed.”

Ahhhhhhhhhh he felt sooooo good. We fit together so nicely and he was both confident and competent enough that I didn’t have to worry about a single thing in the entire world for a few minutes.

“Move back onto the bed, I want to fuck you right.” And ohyes, he did. I hung onto the bars of the headboard and made all the noise and felt. Just. Relief. Welcome, hooray, thank you.

He started talking about how he was going to take the condom off and come inside me though, so I said “Wait, what?!” and wriggled out from under him until he convinced me it was fine, it was on, he was just talking shit.

(Again! So gross! Be a good citizen of sex!)

A lot of his talk was so much fun though:

“You deserve this. You said you haven’t been fucked since 2018? Tell me about 2018.”

“It was…this guy...from down the street…and we liked to watch…Gilmore Girls…afterward we…argued about the…midterm elections…”

And:

“You like this, don’t you? You watch a lot of porn, don’t you.”

“No just a little…Hentai… once in a while…I don’t…really need it…I have a good imagination…”

And:

“I love all this hair you have on your pussy. Don’t shave, do you understand me?”

(Okay points for that but I probably would shave for The Coach if he asked me nicely.)

And:

“This pussy is mine now, right?”

“Um, no. It’s actually mine.”

But then there was this moment that I can’t quite get my head around. Now, I don’t mind being objectified as a white woman, that seems totally fair, a little bit satisfying and corrective. And I should not be in the business of yucking anybody’s yum or getting protective of a grown man while he is CLEARLY having a good time.

But:

“You like that. You like that n****r dick don’t you? It’s okay, you can say it.”

After I winced and looked away, he dialed it back to “You like that big, black dick, don’t you.”

“We don’t need to make it about race.”

(Okay. I am attracted to black guys (and also, white guys are fucking terrifying) but I also spend maybe too much time worrying that they’ll think I’m fetishizing them, that I’m Allison Williams from Get Out. I should think a whole bunch about this later but first let’s finish the scene.)

After that jarring/heartbreaking moment, we got back on track.

“Okay are you ready? Can I fuck you harder now?”

“Oh yes PLEASE.”

It felt so good to wrap my arms around his big sexy strong arms, his muscular shoulders, to kiss him one more time and feel him let go inside me.

And then he was dressed so fast. He made noises about owing me cuddling another time, but I knew I wasn’t going to take him up on it. I put my pants back on the come down and lock him out.

In a warm, fuzzy, kinda-shocked-at-myself daze, there was exactly one person I wanted to talk to about this. Not super-advisable, but my guard was all the way down so I texted The Coach.

 

Daisy.

Between my condom struggle with J, newly-admitted motherhood wishes, #StandWithPP, and Catholicism smothering the infrastructure of major cities the way it sometime smothers the infrastructure of my heart, I realized this little almost-a-character from my teen years needed some love. My teen pregnancy-scare story sheds a strangely warm light on my current adventures.

The summer before my senior year of high school, my mom and siblings went away for a week to visit my grandparents, leaving me to fend for myself. My Best Friend, who lived a block away, came over every day and we drank what seemed like the entire liquor cabinet on the first day. My parents weren’t drinkers, so we did the ‘ol top off the bottles with water trick with little worry of being found out. I have very vivid memories of heaving up vodka and pink lemonade into the bathtub and then walking over to the diner for fries. We invited every male person we could think of over and played risqué-but-not-too-risqué Truth or Dare. I remember one of them chivalrously picking me up and carrying me across some gravel, apropos of nothing.

It was the year after the Bad Thing happened. I’d stopped being quite as slutty as I had been and purported to only have sex for love. Sometime in that week of shenanigans, Best Friend decided to introduce me to Dave. He was in a Misfits cover band, or maybe it was Danzig. It was the Nineties. She called him up, passed me the phone, and within ten minutes, he was telling me that he loved me, which I (think I) knew was insane, but the words had their desired affect. (I would repeat this mistake and lose a Twitter handle making the same mistake as an adult. *sheepish.*)

He was a teen version Bill, stocky and handsome, dark-haired and snarly. On the first day, we had angry, vocal sex with the windows open. Sometimes, when I was having sex back then, it was a simple “Fuck you.” to the world. Sometimes it still is.

The next day, after the sex, we went for a walk in the cemetery, the Catholic one that had all of the angel statuary and was therefore my favorite place to pose people moodily in front of for black and white photos. We took the bus to the mall and bought a tape, The Dead Milkmen’s Bucky Fellini.

But on the third day, it was off. He treated me like I was ugly and big, he called me by my first grade nickname, which had the word “barbarian” in it. I couldn’t make him see me or want me, and after that day, he was gone.

I desperately wanted him to be not gone. I looked for his parents’ pickup truck (a red one with one of those cover things on the back with windows) in every parking lot, hoping that I would run into Dave somewhere, that he would recognize me.

In a few weeks, I noticed that my period was late. (I haven’t always been the princess of safer sex that I am now, and I’m very grateful that the consequences were not worse.) Best Friend and I went down to the Birthright, the prolife clinic downtown, next to the little bakery where we sometimes got cinnamon donuts before school. It felt like a very grown up and important errand to be on.

I peed on a stick but never saw the stick. The nice Birthright lady, who in my memory is dressed all in pastels like a doll, just gave me the result: positive.

And I, almost-seventeen and pretty utterly lost in life, didn’t feel even a little bit of fear. Here’s what I felt: joy. The pressure of having my life ahead of me whooshed away and I knew what to do. Of course there was the silly teenage idea that I had made (literally made) a friend for life, someone who would love me and never leave, but there was also a real sense of calm and purpose. I didn’t have to worry what I was for anymore, because I only had to take care of this baby. I named her immediately: Daisy.

It’s seems bonkers now to think that no follow-up doctors appointments were made right away. There was no wait-until-third-trimester-to-tell-people rule back then either, I guess, because after I told my mom, she let me call up the aunts and tell them too. An amazing thing happened: For the first time in my short life, I felt valued and accepted. My mom was 100% on my side, and the wall of hatred that had lived between us for years temporarily came down. No one judged me or said I was bad, they just asked how they could help. My beach aunt gave me my (then) littlest cousin’s car seat.

That all of that happened without me even had a doctors appointment was complete madness, so I can be forgiven for calling the ambulance when my period came. (It warms my heart to think that my mom, who yelled at me for every single other thing, never gave me a hard time about that ambulance bill.) I called Dave, who had never picked up a phone after our third and last day together) from the hospital waiting room, grateful, if I’m honest, to have an excuse to call him, and left a message.

I wanted them to tell me it was okay, that I could still have Daisy, but what the doctors said was that the blood test proved that I had never been pregnant at all. There had either been a false positive or the lady at Birthright had tricked me as some kind of abstinence lesson. I always assumed it was the latter, but I just Googled the organization and it seems pretty not-evil, so most likely, it was an honest mistake. My main advice-giving aunt said to tell people I’d lost the baby, since technically that was true even though I’d only lost the idea of her. I do still love and miss her, even though she turned out to have been an imaginary friend.

That was twenty-five years ago and the closest I’ve ever come to pregnancy. The situation makes really no sense, but I have to take seriously the way motherhood settled over me like a magic blanket of hope and purpose. Though it’s unfair that only motherhood could unlock my family that way, I can still feel that time as an oasis of acceptance and love in those ugly and violent years.

I want to acknowledge that even as I rail against the coercions and injustices that come from the patriarchy, from the institution of motherhood, the actual spiritual fact of motherhood is in me. I felt it in those few teenage weeks, a white light lantern in my soul that I knew would guide me through it, to shiny and wonderful parts of myself.  It wasn’t really loss or fear that made me bury that light. It was just life and other projects. But it sure was a lovely little light, and even if I’m not blessed with a miracle baby or stepchildren, I would love to look for big and little ways to shine it.