Exposed (2 page)

There’s a lot I don’t remember about that night, but I was off to a summer job and then college, so it didn’t really matter.

Actually, that isn’t quite right. That’s the old story. I made a promise when I started writing this that I was going to be myself. Let’s try this again.

Even though that was the story I told myself and others for a long time, I really wasn’t that drunk. I was a little drunk, I was a little high. I was having fun. But I wasn’t unconscious.

After the song ended, and then another, it was time for me to get off the table. I hadn’t taken off my shoes, which were nearly platforms. I had no clue where my clothes were. While
stepping
down, I rolled my ankle. Not bad, no real pain, but I started to fall. Fortunately, there were plenty of hands there to catch me.

Lots and lots of hands. Everywhere. All over me. And I liked that. A lot. I didn’t complain, so the hands carried me into a back bedroom, and they continued to touch me. All over. And I let them. Then I let Steve Wilson get on top of me.

The room was full of boys and girls, and they were all looking. Some of the girls even had their own hands down the front of their jeans. Then I took Steve in my mouth. It was so hot, and I was so aroused. When he came all over me and I licked him clean, everybody gasped. I kind of loved that too.

I said it didn’t really matter. It
did
matter. At first there was the embarrassment. But that came from what other people said and did. How they looked at me for the next couple of weeks.
F
rom stupid Tara Baine asking, “Don’t you just want to die?” when I ran into her a couple days later, and Michelle Sampson whispering “slut” under her breath when she was serving me a cappuccino.

But it is true I wasn’t going to be around town very long, so that part didn’t matter too much. Still, every time I remembered all those hands all over my naked body, an electric shock would shoot from between my thighs to the top of my head and down again, my breathing would change, and I wanted more of that.

That’s where the shame came from. Because I liked that and wanted more of that. It was really, really confusing, wanting something I wasn’t “supposed” to want. I hid from it that summer, and if anybody got up the courage to ask, I said I was really drunk and didn’t remember, or said it was no big deal.

Oh. Remember Officer Riddle? Somehow, she got my phone number and called me, very friendly and all, and asked to meet. I was curious, and agreed.

We met at a little coffee shop in town. She came in wearing a sundress and looking like the older sister of one of my friends. “No uniform?” I asked.

“Detective, now. We don’t wear uniforms.”

We made small talk, and eventually she got to the point.

“I’ve heard there was a party a couple of weeks ago.”

“Really?” I played dumb.

“Yes, and I heard you were there.”

“Really?” I repeated.

“Jessica, is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“There’s a rumor you might have been drunk, maybe somebody put something in your drink, and you were taken advantage of,” she said, her eyes full of deep, soulful sisterhood. “I’d like to help you if I could.”

“Really? Like you did before?” I asked, my voice light and my eyes wide with innocence. She fell right into it.

“Yes, like I did before.”

“What you did before was teach me to lie, that lying was okay, even by a cop, and a nice boy died because of that,” I said.

“He got what he deserved,” Detective Deborah Riddle spit back at me so fast I was startled.

“Really?” I said yet again, in my snottiest voice. “You don’t know anything.” I pushed my chair away from the table to leave.

“Jessica, I do know what you’ve been through,” she said, suddenly calm again. “I’ve been through the same thing. I want to talk about the party.”

“I don’t,” I said, with a shrug. “I made a choice. I live with the choices I make.”

“Then you can live with your shame,” she snarled. I thought it was weird at the time, how fast she could change.

“Tout passé, tout lasse, tout casse,”
I said.

“What’s that mean?” asked Debra Riddle.

“Everything passes, everything wears out, everything breaks,” I replied as I walked away.

She may have known about shame, but not
my
shame. Maybe she heard about my dancing, and what happened right after. But she didn’t know about my feelings, how I kept thinking about and remembering all those hands, everywhere on my body. How I wanted that feeling again.

• • • •

In college I did really well academically, dated around, sometimes slept around, but not much. I did the usual college things. I smoked pot, which makes me self-conscious in ways I really don’t like. I
drank
beer, which just makes me feel full; tequila, which gives me a rotten hangover; and champagne, which I really do like if it costs enough money. Cocaine was fun, but it took all the fun out of the next day.

Generally I don’t like to get drunk; it takes too much of the edge off. There’s an irony there, for the boys and men who thought they had to get me high before I’d put out.

Or they’d use alcohol or weed to “loosen up.” Think about that for a minute. Which is more attractive: A man who turns to drugs so he can be spontaneous and sensual, or a man who is just… spontaneous and sensual?

And, of course, there is the constant risk of dosage. More than once, a date went from bound up and inhibited to loose and funny to drunk and aggressive with barely a pause between stages. Not once did he increase either my interest or his libido.

If the man was right, I’d go to bed with him and would rather be stone-cold sober, if being under the influence of erotic arousal is sobriety. I don’t think it is, but I’ll leave that discussion to others.

I graduated with a degree in psychology, and no, I don’t have a clue why — and neither do you. It was either that or history or English, but I kind of liked the fact that psychology seemed to actually be about something.

But I didn’t like it enough to get an advanced degree and had no interest in being a therapist. I’m sure there is great value in therapy, and those in the field do excellent work. But for me, trying to fix something in the past is like validating self-absorption.

Grandmama would say, “What matters is what you are going to do, not what you did or what other people did to you long ago.”

But you don’t care about my major, so let’s get to what you’re wondering about. There was one sexcapade in college that’s probably relevant. Now that I think about it, it kind of follows my pattern. It was, of course, at a frat party.

I’d gone with another girl, someone I didn’t know that well. She was one of the several short-term roommates that drifted through a house shared by six of us off-campus.

Everyone who lived there was a little disdainful of the whole sorority thing, but this woman, Becky I think her name was, came from one and had gotten an invite to the party and asked if I wanted to go.

It was spring of my junior year. None of the guys I’d been hanging around with were love interests. The cute ones were gay, a couple others were fun but not sexually appealing.

I’d been studying hard, working in the admissions office to help pay for tuition, and picking up shifts as a waitress to earn money for clothes, books, mac & cheese and ramen, so it wasn’t like I had a lot of time, either.

Most boys wanted to own my time almost as much as they wanted my body, I’d learned, and the arguments that resulted usually weren’t worth what the guys brought to the relationship. So I was single and had been. Which meant I was also, shall we say, “in the mood.”

The party was the standard go around; loud music, kegs of beer, a “bar” set up in one room, a tank of something for
filling
up balloons, joints, blow, anything and everything. After a while, things got a little heavy, with making out on the couches becoming a grope-fest, and nobody much caring.

I’d been talking to a boy I knew, and frankly, some of the sexuality around was beginning to turn me on. Then one of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen joined us. And not only was he really good looking — tall;
muscular;
thick, dark hair; and eyelashes a woman would have paid dearly to have —
but
he was also smart and funny.

“Are you on the football team?” I asked, guessing from the width of his shoulders.

“Rugby,” he said. “Football without helmets. It’s amazing any of us can still spell our own first name. In my case it only has three letters, thank God. It’s Matt. Oops, that’s four. Double ‘t.’ What’s yours, by the way?”

That was about when I decided I wanted him. That night, preferably, within the next ten minutes, if possible, and then the ten minutes after that, and the ten after that, and then we’d see if another hour would do.

When he started asking me polite questions about where I lived, what I was studying and when I would graduate, I asked if he had a room where we could talk more quietly. He got a goofy grin on his face.

“I thought I’d be the one to ask you,” he said and led me upstairs to his room, tucked into a corner
with
windows that looked out on the street and had a small balcony.

“Do you have a roommate?” I asked, not really caring about the answer.

“Yes, but he’s at a cross-country meet in Spokane for the weekend,” Matt said.

We sat on his bed. It wasn’t long before he had my shirt unbuttoned, and I unbuttoned his. I actually took his off first.

Look. Over eons, biology designed us to have desire, whether it was freezing or the temperatures were boiling, whether we had just eaten a woolly mammoth or were half-starving. It’s a pretty powerful force, designed to have a very high reward. Continuation of the species, and all that.

There’s also a lot of biology pushing women to desire men like Matt. What better way to perpetuate our own chromosomes than by hooking them up with a specimen like him? My God, he was beautiful. Men talk about the curves of women, but I’m here to tell you that men have some pretty fantastic curves as well. Speaking of gorgeous bodies, they say an Olympic Village is a hotbed of sex. Can you imagine being in the middle of the best bodies in the world, swimmers and gymnasts and runners and weight lifters and the maximum physical conditioning that requires and not wanting to have sex with them?

Couple those bodies with the willpower it takes to get to the Olympics in the first place, and is anyone surprised there’s sex? It would just be stupid to think all those young people are celibate for the entire Olympics. Maybe even through the opening ceremonies as
some
of those go on so long.

Matt had that kind of body. After he had my shirt and bra off, it wasn’t long before he had my pants off too. I was hoping my panties would slide off with my jeans to cut the wait, but no, he played me like a violin, sliding his finger under the hem just brushing my mound ever so slightly, until my hips rose involuntarily to catch his hand every time it slid by.

By the time my panties came off and I had thrown his shorts as far as I could across the room, I wanted him so badly I had wrapped my legs around one of his giant thighs just to bring myself some relief. He was kissing me and touching my breasts, and it wasn’t long before he put his right arm between my legs and up my back so my vagina was caught somewhere between his huge bicep and the tendons in the crook of his elbow.

His hand in the middle of my back pressed me to him while he kissed my throat, and I was able to push myself against him in ways that hit almost every trigger point between my legs.

I moaned. I started to come. The first time.

I don’t know when I noticed the door of his room was open, and I don’t think I ever remember it being closed. But I didn’t much care, not then and not when the room began to fill with other young men and women.

When I would open my eyes, they were standing close to the bed. He had his mouth on me, and I had my fingers knotted in his luxurious dark hair, pulling him to me. With his fingers he opened me wide, and I saw both girls and boys gasp with what I can only call envy and lust.

One couple, I’d seen them together all night, touched each other while watching us. She had his cock in her hand, he had his hand down the back of her unbuttoned jeans. Several of the girls had their hands down the front of their own jeans, or on the front of the jeans of the boy standing next to them.

There is a delicious blend of intimacy and anonymity, a pure eroticism, when you have sex with a stranger, and even more so with strangers watching. T
hat feeling
washed over me like a wave and
caused
a complete surrender of mind to my body in a way that hadn’t happened for over three years.

Eventually the room emptied, Matt had emptied more than once, and I was as fulfilled as I had been filled.

We lay there long enough for parting not to be awkward, then we pulled ourselves apart, dressed, he said he’d call, I said please do, and neither of us gave the other our number.

The next afternoon I was sitting in the kitchen of our house when Becky rolled in. She looked worse for wear, but I had seen her drinking quite a bit at the bar and huffing whatever it was from the balloons. I felt great.