When I met my girlfriend outside her dorm the following weekend, she immediately crushed herself against me, buried her tear-streaked face in the hollow of my neck, and whispered again and again how sorry she was. We both cried, holding each other tight, commiserating over how horrible those few hours after I'd departed the previous weekend had been. I told her I'd felt broken, shattered into jagged pieces of glass too sharp to touch. She understood and was so, so sorry.
Then we drove out to and around the park until we located a more secluded, private spot than where we'd spent our previous afternoons. It seemed that we'd barely climbed into the back seat before we found ourselves staring deep into one another's eyes, my shirt unbuttoned and pulled free of my jeans, her blouse unbuttoned, her bra shoved up above her naked breasts, and each of us with a hand inside the other's jeans. It was a huge line to cross. Could we stop ourselves if we went any further? We asked this of ourselves and one another. Did we want one another too desperately to care?
She had a solid hold of my wrist to prevent me from reaching deeper or pulling away. She closed her eyes tight, then, after an intense internal emotional battle with herself, she made a definitive decision. She shoved my hand deeper into her jeans until my fingers were inside her panties, touching the silky hair between her legs. She opened her eyes again to watch my reaction as she pushed her hand deep into my underwear. I was embarrassed and apologized for the sticky mess she found there. She pushed my hand deeper into her jeans, where I discovered her panties were also soaked.
I tentatively explored the damp folds my fingers discovered there. She took a hard breath, then encouraged my hand deeper until the center of her slick, slippery folds opened, and a finger slid effortlessly between them and inside her. Her eyes closed, her head pushed back against the car's seat, her mouth opened, and a groan came from deep down within her chest. Her fingers reflexively clenched my penis in response, and electricity shot through me, triggering a storm of my own emotions. Shame - since I remained embarrassed by the mess my bodily fluids continued to create in my underwear. Guilt - since I was aware what we were doing was wrong. But I couldn't make myself stop. I had no idea what I was doing, but my fingers acted of their own volition, reacting instinctively to the tension of her body in my arms while her fluids lubricated my hand.
I asked her, "Do you want me to stop?"
"No, don't, please," she pleaded.
I slipped another finger inside her and asked, "Is that good?"
She cried out, "Yes! God, yes!"
She grabbed my wrist again when I discovered a little nub within her folds. "There! Right there!" she insisted. As I stroked and explored, the nub emerged further from its hiding place, and her grip on both my wrist and penis tightened.
"Harder! Please," she begged.
I did as she asked, and her body suddenly arched from the seat, as though she was suffering a convulsion, forcing guttural sounds from deep in her chest with each spasm. Her sounds and spasms gradually eased as she settled back against the seat and gently extracted my hand from her jeans. I felt her aftershocks continue to pass through her body, waiting for her eyes to open and let me know she was okay. But she turned away instead and hugged her knees to her chest. She wouldn't answer when I asked her what was wrong. I already knew that what I'd done was wrong, and panic began to build. When my fingers brushed her arm, she pulled away. But when my hand gently grasped her shoulder, she allowed it to remain.
I asked, "Are you okay?"
"Sorry," she whispered after a moment. "I'm not sure whether I just broke my promise to my grandmother."
"I know. I should have stopped," I told her.
She nodded in agreement, then instantly shook her head and apologized again. "No. I didn't want you to stop. It felt amazing."
I was guilty and confused about what we'd done myself and wasn't sure how to respond except to continue holding her tight to my chest. But a short time later, she turned and leaned her shoulder against me, forcing me back against the seat. Then with a look of determination, she pushed the hand she'd removed from my jeans when she'd turned away, deep inside them again. Her fingers wrapped tight around me, and the warmth and motion of her hand felt like nothing I'd ever experienced before. Of course, I'd done the same for myself more times than I could count, but it had never felt like this. She smiled and refused to stop when I begged her several times that she should until a hard gasp suddenly escaped my lungs, and my body pushed hard into the car's seat as spasm after spasm ripped through me. She wouldn't release me even once I leaned limply against her, breathing as heavily as if I'd run a race. Her hand continued stroking me slowly, softly, bringing additional softening aftershocks.
As I've confessed, I'd had quite a few orgasms since puberty. However, this orgasm was wonderfully and horribly different at the same time because it wasn't my hand for the first time but hers - a hand over which I had no control. A hand that was not mine with the associated guilt that had weakened over the years. But a hand that brought me guilt and shame that was new and undiluted along with pleasure like none I'd experienced before, that refused to stop as I begged it to do, leaving me desperate to hold back what suddenly felt so good but so wrong. Then the force of those sensations finally tore free of my restraint and rushed through my body with nearly painful intensity.
As the world around me returned, beyond the awful mess in my underwear that couldn't be ignored, I was mortified by the reek of sex filling the car. And, rather than an adult man enjoying a wonderful adult experience for the first time, I felt like a little boy caught doing something dirty and wrong. I saw her searching for something to wipe the semen from her hand and remembered a box of tissues stuffed under the front passenger seat. I told her where to find them, repeatedly apologizing, until she told me to stop. She'd been aware there'd be cleanup after.
She told me, "I thought to ask whether you had tissues in the car before we needed them, then realized that you wouldn't have let me finish if I stopped. So we'll have to plan better next time. It was a bit messier than I expected."
That seemed an understatement. No matter how I tried to wipe away the mess, there was no way I'd be at ease again without a freshly washed pair of underwear. I couldn't tolerate sitting in the car, feeling and smelling the way I did. We certainly couldn't go anywhere else where other people would be near me. But we made our way back to the front seats. I started the car and drove, initially headed in the direction of her dorm. But she insisted that she didn't want to go back to her dorm. She didn't want me to leave but to talk about what we'd done since it was apparent we both felt conflicting emotions about it.
I spotted the park toilet facilities nearly too late. I fishtailed into the gravel parking area, apologizing if I'd startled her or bounced her about too ruffly, then rushed from the car into the restroom. It was far from the cleanest I'd used, but there was a sink, running water, and paper towels. I stood barefoot and naked from the waist down, rinsing out my underwear well enough to use as a washrag, then debated what to do with them while I blotted myself dry with paper towels.
Putting them back on wet would be nearly as bad as before. And I didn't want to leave her alone in the car, wondering what was taking me so long while they dried. So I threw them in the trash and pulled on my jeans without them, which, having never gone without underwear, was a strange feeling but not nearly as uncomfortable as I'd felt a short time before.
She told me, "I know we crossed some line. But I don't think what we did was sex. So, I didn't break my promise to my grandmother."
"Oh?" I asked, unsure what lines we may have crossed, only that we had crossed more than enough to earn my mother's severest disappointment on my way to hell. "What would you call what we did?"
"I'm not sure, but we weren't mating from a strictly biological perspective. It was not an act that could result in offspring. So, by definition, I don't believe it was sex. We were only," hesitating before deciding, "messing around."
I don't think she meant that to be funny but was too embarrassed to ask. And too disgusted with the mess it had been.
A short time later, I said the words for the first time, as they tumbled out of my mouth without my intending to say them aloud, and I told her, "I love you." That was far from the moment I'd first thought them. I'd been repeating them in my mind from nearly the instant I'd first seen her. Although, I'd never thought I'd have the audacity to allow them to escape my lips.
Hearing those words, she began to cry again, throwing her arms around me and sobbing, "I love you too. I've wanted to tell you but was afraid to say it first if you didn't feel the same. And I wasn't sure how you felt after the past week and the things we just did."
It amazed me that the frightened, emotionally fragile young woman in my arms, could be the same stunning and sophisticated James Bond girl in that deadly little black dress, wearing six-inch heels that made her the tallest person present. I'd failed to comprehend since she'd first caught me flitting nervous glances in her direction what about me could ever attract her. Yet, there we were, declaring our love for one another. She had yet to tell me, a love she'd determined would last forever. She would follow this with the mantra, "Forever is a very long time."
"So, we're going strictly with Biology?" I asked as we basked in the warmth of our mutual declarations.
"No, there's logic too," she told me, laughing,
"If we acknowledge that we just had sex, then why shouldn't we do everything else, including what I think we both still want to save for marriage?"
I told her, "I think that bit of thinking is something other than logic." The word that came to mind being, 'bullshit.' "Grandma going to be okay with that?"
She laughed a little bitterly and said, "If she isn't, that's what she gets for tricking a little kid into promising something before she had any idea what she was promising. So, I'm entitled to a little 'sophistry.'" Yeah, that was a better word. "Besides, you know I don't believe Grandma is watching from anywhere except my memories. But I made the promise and want to keep it."
I told her again how mortified I was about the mess earlier. "Don't be," she told me. "Just one of the realities of life, like next weekend, when I'll likely be having my period, which you may not have cared to know. Since we've only been seeing one another once a week, we've managed to miss it to this point, or it happened before we were doing anything where it would matter. But we won't be missing it this time around. Are you sure you still want to drive up to see me?"
"Of course, I want to see you," I insisted.
We'd lived our entire lives without doing what we had a few hours earlier. We could survive two weeks without doing it again. But, surviving those next two weeks was far more of a challenge than I anticipated when she called Saturday evening to tell me she was feeling miserable and wasn't fit company, not even for me, who she loved and would miss.