The Night I Lost My Virginity Before I Was Ready

I arrived at the building with my bones aching. I’m not sure if what hurt more was my legs from the double set of squats Esteban, my trainer, had made me repeat, or my head from the two exams I took before the break. Add to that Andrés calling me since noon with that “hang in there, I’m having a hard time” that was already starting to piss me off, and the drunk guys at table ten in the restaurant, the same ones who every Friday think they have the right to put their hand on my waist because they leave big tips. I told Andrés to fuck off on the phone between orders. I smiled at the restaurant regulars and brought them their beer, because that’s what you do when you’ve only been paying your own bills for six months and still have two years left before you finish college.

I had just turned nineteen. Until that night, I felt more grown-up than I really was.

Camila, my roommate, was sleeping curled up on the sofa with the TV on. I turned the volume down, threw a blanket over her, and went into my room without making a sound. The first thing I always do when I get home is take my clothes off. I don’t like sleeping with the smell of work in my hair, or with the marks from my socks on my calves.

As I was pulling off the black uniform pants, I kept thinking about the men at table ten. It annoyed me, yes, but there was something there I didn’t even dare admit to myself. I had felt wanted. Attractive. One of those women people look at and forget what they were doing before. A familiar tingle started between my legs and I cursed Andrés for not having been decent that afternoon. If he hadn’t ruined my day with his drama, we’d already be on the phone fantasizing about things neither of us had done yet.

My phone vibrated on the dresser. It was him.

—I’m downstairs. Come down for a second, please. I brought you something.

I sighed. I cared about him too much to send him home after he’d crossed half the city by bus. I told him to come up. I put on a long sweater, one of those that almost passed for a dress on me, and nothing else. My head kept repeating a mantra as I went down to open the door for him: two kisses, one caress, that’s it. Tomorrow I have to be in literature class at eight.

***

When I opened the door and saw him holding a bouquet of white freesias, all my plans fell apart at once. Andrés wasn’t the type to give flowers. The freesias were the kind my mother used to put on the table on Sundays. Something about that detail softened me completely.

I let him in. While I looked for a vase in the cupboard, he watched me from the living room as if he were seeing me for the first time. I came back with the empty jar in one hand and, before I could set it down, I was already in his arms. I wrapped my arms around his neck, jumped, and hooked my legs around his waist. He smelled like his cologne and the smoke at the bus stop.

His hands held me by the ass. The sweater had ridden all the way up in the jump, and I felt his warm palms against my skin, sliding over the elastic of my panties, trying to slip his fingers underneath. At the same time, his erection pressed against me, separated only by the denim of his jeans. I, who a moment earlier had been thinking of stopping him, started moving against him as if he were already inside me, slowly, against the hallway wall.

If I had felt wet before, now I was soaked.

—Let’s go to my room —I whispered in his ear—. Don’t make a sound. Camila’s asleep.

I led him by the hand down the hall. I closed the door carefully and turned the key. I thought we were going to stay with a long caress, with making out until we fell asleep in each other’s arms, without crossing that last line. But Andrés pulled my sweater over my head before I could react. I stood there beside the bed, barefoot, with my panties clinging to my body and the wet patch visible through the fabric.

He undressed in front of me awkwardly, getting tangled in his jeans. When he took off his boxer briefs I saw that the fabric was also stained with pre-cum. It was the first time I had seen a man like that, real, not a body from a magazine or an actor in a pirated movie. He was hard, slightly curved, and he terrified me and intrigued me in equal measure.

We were both virgins. We had talked about it so many times, even promised each other that when the time came it would be different, slow, talked through. What happened that night was nothing like any of the versions we had imagined.

***

I lay down on my back, closed my eyes, and let the weight of his body cover me. I felt his mouth on my neck, my ear, my shoulder. I also felt him searching, missing his mark, trying to get where he needed to go. He ground against my thigh, my stomach, everything except where he was supposed to go. His clumsiness softened me a little; I thought we were going to laugh about the mess and then start over.

But desire got the better of me. I took his penis in my right hand, and with my left I spread my lips and guided him to where I thought he needed to go. The glans found the entrance and pushed. Barely a centimeter. The pain was much stronger than I had expected.

—Slowly —I asked in a very low voice—. Please, Andrés. Slowly.

He didn’t listen to me. Or he listened and didn’t care. Or he felt, as he explained later, that if he stopped he was going to break. He let all his weight fall onto me and pushed until my body let him in. I screamed. I don’t know if loudly or softly, I don’t know if Camila heard me on the other side of the wall. I know I dug my fingers into his back and tears started spilling out on their own, not from the emotion I had imagined, but from the burning.

He tried to move, pulling out and pushing in, imitating what he’d seen in a thousand videos. Every movement set me on fire inside. I wanted to ask him again to stop, but my voice barely came out. A few minutes — seconds, maybe — later I felt a different kind of heat, liquid, filling me from within. Andrés collapsed on top of me, gasping, repeating in my ear that he loved me, that it had been incredible.

All I could think about was getting him off me. I pushed him gently, then harder. His cock was still semi-hard and the way he came out was almost as painful as the way he had gone in. I sat on the edge of the bed, hugging my knees, and told him to get dressed and leave.

—But, baby…

—Go. Please.

***

Camila appeared in a badly tied robe and with sleep-swollen eyes. She didn’t ask me anything. She lifted me by the elbow like I was a feverish child and took me to the bathroom. She turned on the hot shower, tested the water with her wrist, and helped me get in. She sat on the toilet lid and stayed there, in silence, while I cried under the spray.

When I came out, she had changed my bed sheets. There was a cup of linden tea on the nightstand. Camila told me only one thing before turning off the light.

—It wasn’t your fault. Don’t start thinking it was your fault.

That night I promised myself, with the ridiculous solemnity with which one promises things at nineteen, that I would never let another man into my bed again.

***

Three months later I broke the promise. With the same man.

Andrés came back to me with a patience I didn’t know he had. He invited me to walk along the waterfront four afternoons in a row without asking me for anything. He asked me what I had felt, what had hurt, what I would have wanted to happen. I, who at the restaurant had learned to send men off with a smile, didn’t know what to do with one who listened.

What came next was a long, orderly, almost methodical affair. Every encounter began with a conversation. We tried things that at the time seemed daring to me and that today make me tender. I learned to say what I wanted and ask for what I didn’t. I learned, above all, that a woman’s body does not surrender by force: it gives itself when it feels like it.

That relationship lasted a little over a year. What was born on that night of white freesias and wet panties turned into something that didn’t resemble the teenage fantasy I had carried before. It was dirtier, more talked through, more mine.

From that first time I was left with an uncomfortable certainty: the pain was not entirely Andrés’s fault, nor entirely mine. It was because two virgins tried, with their bodies, what no one had explained to them in words. Today, several years later, I still write in notebooks what I discovered that night and all the nights that came after. But that’s another story, and I’m going to tell that one too.