Those Who Get STDs Together Stay Together?

I’ve been doing stand up and, naturally, my set leans heavily on sex and feminism. The first couple times I got onstage at open mics, I was compared to Eve Ensler—something I would usually take as a compliment, but somehow felt like an insult when the audience consisted of a bunch of dudes. The MC at one mic commented after my set, “What a nice, romantic story. Very Nicholas Sparks.” He was joking of course. I had just finished telling the crowd about my date with the self-proclaimed “female orgasm expert” with whom I had some of the most mediocre sex of my life in the back of his roommate’s van behind the Urth Cafe. I ended the story with, “Spoiler alert: I didn’t climax. But he sure did. Because, you know, he’s a man.” I guess the MC was implying that, because I think some guys are both bad and arrogant lovers, I’m not a romantic. I guess I come off as cynical. Have I become irreversibly jaded about men?

I had just started seeing someone whom I had known, as casual friends, for a long time. We had sex without a condom, so in my usual post-coital panic attack, I immediately went to get tested. The problem with me is that I’m a hypochondriac but I’m also bad at using condoms, so I get tested a lot. On Saturday afternoon, after returning home from hiking and brunching with a friend, I received in my email inbox the results of some of the previous week’s tests. It said I had tested positive for syphilis. I had been tested since my last unprotected sexual encounter and hadn’t had sex with anyone since this new guy, so I was pretty convinced he was the one who’d given it to me. 

Syphilis sounded to me like some pretty medieval shit, so I started looking up the symptoms online (mistake). What would initially start as sores and a rash on your genitals and the inside of your palms could, down the road, turn into blindness, insanity and death. I discovered that syphilis is rampant and has become a national health crisis due to budget cuts to STD prevention clinics. 

I considered not telling the guy right away, as I knew he was on his way to spend the weekend at a music festival. Part of me didn’t want to ruin his weekend, but the bigger part of me thought that if I had to suffer with this news, then so should he. He was appropriately embarrassed and apologetic when I called to tell him. He contacted the last girl he’d had unprotected sex with only to find out she had also tested positive for syphilis after they’d been together and hadn’t told him. He offered to leave the festival to come be with me, but the clinic was closed for the weekend and there was nothing for us to do but wait, so I told him it was fine, to try to forget about it and enjoy the festival. Meanwhile, I agonized, my imagination spinning so far out of control that I got online and searched, “if I have syphilis, do I have HIV,” which autofilled immediately in the Google search bar, telling me I was not alone in my irrational fear.

Finally, on Monday, we both made appointments to get treated on Wednesday. As I was leaving for my appointment, I received on my doorstep a lovely bouquet of wild flowers from the guy.

At the clinic, they took my blood again and I was called in to see the counselor. She informed me that I was the first ever cisgendered, heterosexual woman to ever test positive at their clinic. "Can I get a medal for that?" I joked. Then I got called in to see the doctor who said that syphilis infections were up 400% in Los Angeles that month. Then he told me that I didn’t have syphilis, it was a false positive. The guy also tested negative, he too didn’t have syphilis. Turned out the girl he'd fucked before me had gotten it from the next dude she'd been with after him. He was enormously relieved and immediately his whole demeanor changed. He felt understandably let off the hook, and wanted to celebrate. I was also relieved, but still felt emotionally hung over from four days of escalating fear and paranoia, and was slightly annoyed at how quickly he was able to bounce back. I was headed to The Comedy Store to see a friend perform, so we went to Saddle Ranch for (gross) burgers, and when he didn’t offer to pay the bill I became irrationally angry and disappointed. I felt emotionally raw and in that moment like I wanted to feel taken care of. It's the oldest story in the book, but I just wanted him to read my mind and know intuitively what I needed. We usually split the bill—which was fine, I’m a modern woman, whatever—but I felt like after this scare he should've at least offered to pay for dinner.

I didn’t like this version of myself. I had been single for five years, I was used to taking care of myself, codependence made me sick, and I didn’t like feeling like I was relying on someone else. My sudden unexplained grumpiness caused him to leave rather than come to the show with me. I texted him afterwards that I was upset that he hadn’t offered to pay after this whole ordeal. He said he thought I should have bought him dinner as he felt I had been really harsh with him over this syphilis scare and then I hadn’t apologized enough when it turned out he hadn’t given it to me after all. Maybe he was right, I didn't know. All I knew was that I hated this kind of lovers’ quarrel; I had successfully avoided it for so long. Was I really going to morph into this needy person when I liked myself so much more as a single woman not reliant on anybody else? On the phone the next morning, in a moment of impulsive frustration, I said that I thought this wasn’t going to work between us. I felt that my heart had hardened—did I even believe in relationships anymore?

Getting an STD with someone is traumatizing, and it can bring out the worst in people. Sometimes this makes a relationship stronger, and sometimes it tears you apart. Although it turned out we didn't have syphilis after all, I think the whole ordeal made us realize we didn't like each other that much in a crisis. Perhaps he saw it coming. When we first found out we didn’t actually have syphilis, he jokingly asked if I was disappointed that now I didn’t have a legitimate reason to break up with him. I laughed and rolled my eyes, saying that no, I was happy to not have it. But I did wonder what made him ask that—was he reading something into my behavior that even I wasn’t aware of? Was I really trying to sabotage this? Why? Was I protecting myself? From what? What I liked most about this guy was the lack of games, his openness about the fact that he liked me, that I never felt like I had to play it cool. He always texted back, he appreciated my jokes, and—perhaps most importantly—he wasn’t afraid of my angry feminism or my history of sluttery—both things I talked about with abandon on our very first date. Perhaps more than any guy I’ve dated since my ex, he seemed completely undeterred by my brashness. I didn’t have to pretend to be demure around him, I could say things like, “are you having a stroke?” when he couldn’t remember something I said, and he didn’t get offended. Throughout the syphilis scare, I realized I wasn’t just worried about my own health, I was also worried about his—and that felt like something new.

Just before I reconnected with this guy, I'd said to a couple friends in all seriousness that maybe I was just going to be single forever, and that was okay. I liked myself single, I had forged a whole identity around being an unattached woman. I didn’t know what me in a relationship looked like anymore. And I was scared of how being “coupled” might change me for the worse. I didn’t ever want to be in a codependent situation again, it was important to me that I maintained my autonomy. Was that even possible in a relationship? I didn’t know. A lot of the women I admired were single. Was that a coincidence or was there a reason? Was there something in me that wasn’t meant to be inextricably linked to another person? And was this view somehow limiting me from experiencing something potentially great? Could a relationship ever be something that actually fed me emotionally and creatively rather than distracting me from my life and my purpose? I decided that, for a relationship to be worth it, I'd have to like being with this person better than being by myself. Because being by myself was actually pretty good. 

Halloween

**Mom, don’t read this one**

I grab my phone out of the toilet and desperately suck the toilet water from its lower holes. I don’t even really think about the fact that I’m doing this in the moment, I don’t second guess my impulse to save my phone at any cost. The fact that I’ve pulled it out of a public toilet in a dive bar at 2am on Halloween night doesn’t really register.

Then I remember why I’m in the restroom in the first place and I try to mentally prepare for what’s to come. I put my phone on top of the toilet next to my purse which is still unzipped, it’s opening aimed at the water—the cause of the accident. I see that the lid to my lipstick is still floating in the bowl. I try not to think about the fact that my phone is probably dead. John the bartender enters and locks the door. He turns to me.

“I dropped my phone in the toilet,” I say, pointing to it, still wet beside my purse. As I point, I notice that my house key has landed in the no man’s land between the seat and the back of the toilet. I vow to remember to grab it later.

John doesn’t understand, or he doesn’t want to deal with this right now. He grabs my waist and pushes me up against the wall. We’re making out and his hand is up my dress and digging around inside my tights. That’s when I remember the bandages.

Earlier this morning I preemptively went to spinning class to “detox before retox,” as my instructor so eloquently put it. Not used to the incredible friction in my crotch area, I chafed something terrible and discovered later that the skin just inches from my outer labia was rubbed raw and actually peeling off in stinging sheets. I smeared on globs of Neosporin and bandaged the area. I vowed to not let any man anywhere near the region because all the bandages made it look like I had recently undergone labiaplasty. Not to mention additional rubbing would definitely hurt like hell. I decided my wounds would help me make better decisions, as I would have to weigh the man against the guaranteed pain involved in hooking up with him—would he be worth it? I didn’t consider as a real possibility that I would find myself in this dilemma with John. I just never imagined we would actually get to this point in our epic 11 month flirtation.

Earlier in the night, when I first arrive at the bar with my roommates in our matching understated yet elegant costumes of all black ensembles and masquerade masks, John greets me with a warm hug over the bar. I kiss his cheek and, when he says “Oh!” in a pleasantly surprised manner, I ask if I can have a real kiss later.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t get any more kisses,” he eyes me suggestively. I obviously know what he’s referring to—the last time I was here I went home with his brother. Why this trumps the fact that he still lives with his girlfriend, I'm not sure.

“Why?” I smile coyly.

“You know why,” says John. But he doesn’t look upset; he looks amused. I like this about him—he doesn’t seem to take it all too seriously. Underneath it all, he seems to understand that it’s just sex. Who cares that I fucked his brother and I still want to fuck him? He doesn’t slut shame me for it. He still wants me too. I find this incredibly hot.

I haven’t really been drinking lately so after a couple vodka sodas with a lemon and a lime (and a cherry that John adds without asking), I am completely hammered. I’m on the floor dirty dancing with a Jewish guy dressed as a Rasta. His dreadlocked hair keeps getting caught in my mask, so I take off my mask. I freak with the Rasta like I’m at a middle school dance, twerking my ass into his hips. He grabs my waist and tries to reach his hand into the top of my dress, grabbing at my boobs. I enjoy dancing with him—he’s fun and he can move (or at least I’m drunk enough, I think he can)—but I don’t want to fuck this guy and when he tries to kiss me, I hold my face away. When he tells me to come home with him to Pasadena, I laugh in his face and say, “Yeah, that’s not happening.”

I carry my friend’s vaporizer loaded up with weed to John at the bar and offer it to him. He takes it and puffs. I order a couple more drinks for my friends and “a shot of your choice” for John. I do this several times throughout the night but apparently he puts none of it on my tab because my bill comes out to $18 at the end of the night. When John hands me my drinks, I rub my fingers on his and we linger there for a moment. Later I make him lean in so I can tell him something and I lick his ear. Later still I suck on his fingers, which taste like lime. At some point, he declares, “You had sex with my brother.”

I say, “So? I like both you guys.”

He asks, “Was he good to you?” I think this is a classy question. Also kinky. I wonder not for the first time if these are the kind of Irish twins that would fuck the same girl in the same room at the same time. If this is a possibility, I need to do everything in my power to make it happen.

Suddenly, it’s 2am and the lights are coming on, the heavy metal designed to thin the crowd blasting out of the speakers. John comes around to sit in his usual spot at the bar to do the tip out on his computer. Naturally, I plop down next to him, and this is when things take a turn. I try to kiss him and he pushes his face into my neck and says, “I want to bury myself in you.” I try to get his number, asking if we can be friends. He says, “How am I supposed to be your friend when all I want is to fuck you?” I guess that’s a fair question. I can see that he’s struggling. He punches his number into my phone anyway.

He tells me I’m causing problems in his relationship. I tell him it’s not me. He doesn’t understand what I mean. I want to point out that if it weren’t me, it would be some other girl. He’s just not monogamous, at least not at this stage in his life. I decide not to get into it. Instead, I run my fingers down his back and along the top of his pants to the front. He grabs my hand and puts it on his fly. He’s hard. He reaches under my dress and grips my crotch.

“Now that just kills me.” He seems to be referring to the heat coming off me. He lifts his hand away from my crotch and runs it under his nose, along his lips. It's about this time that the DJ says, "This one's for you, John," and proceeds to play Britney Spears' Toxic.

John won’t kiss me but seems to want me to keep grabbing his dick. I guess because it’s under the bar and he thinks his coworkers aren’t seeing what’s going on between us. I ask, “Why can I do this but you won’t kiss me? Because it’s under the bar?” He nods. “So, do you want me to get under the bar and suck your dick?” I ask. He nods, slower this time. Wow, he actually thinks that we are being stealth enough to get away with this. I’m so drunk I actually consider it.

My friends are ready to hit the taco truck, so I bid John farewell. He looks disappointed, like he always does when I leave, and I want to say, “Make up your damn mind!”

“Do you need to go to the bathroom before you go?” He asks.

At first I don’t register what he’s really asking and I almost say no. Then I realize the meaning of this.

“Yes,” I answer and grab my purse. I march towards the restroom.

Inside, the first thing I do is put my purse down on top of the toilet, and then a couple seconds later register that I’ve dumped the entire contents into the toilet. I fish out my phone, lipstick, Altoids. Thinking at the time that all of these items are salvageable, even the mints. This is when I suck the toilet water out of my phone and immediately turn it off, remembering the advice I received the last time I dropped my phone in the toilet. That phone didn’t make it.

With John’s hand up my dress, I remember my bandages and I really don’t want to have to explain them to him. Instead, I move down and unbutton his jeans, squatting on the ground. I take his penis in my mouth. As I’m sucking on him, I reach into my tights and rip off the medical tape and gauze strips covering my outer vagina wounds. I drop these on the floor beside discarded bits of toilet paper.

Naturally, as I suck John’s dick, I can’t resist comparisons to his brother. I notice immediately that his brother was in much better physical shape and therefore (as is my experience) his dick got bigger and harder. John’s is hard but could probably be harder if he hadn’t been drinking so much. He’s been working long sweaty hours and there’s a faint smell of BO emanating from his nether regions. It’s not that bad and I don’t mind it. He’s smiling down at me in a very appreciative manner—that’s nice.

I’m not getting anywhere with his dick in my mouth, so I stand up and pull down my tights and underwear and turn away from him, putting my hands on the wall and pushing my ass into his crotch. I fumble for his penis, willing it to stay hard for just a little while longer.

“I can’t have sex with you without a condom,” he says in a moment of sudden clarity. I respect this decision, for his girlfriend’s sake. And because sex without condoms is a bad habit I need to stop. For some reason I haven’t brought one with me, probably because I really had no intention of bringing my vagina out tonight.

I lean with my back against the wall, underwear down, tit sticking out the top of my dress. John stands at the sink, staring at me and jerking off. He ravages me with his eyes. I can’t remember who decides we’re done here. Probably he says, “I should get back.” I pull up my underwear and tights but leave my tit out.

“Put that away,” he instructs before taking it in his mouth.

Then he’s gone. My roommate appears in the doorway.

“I just sucked John’s dick,” I declare. “And I dropped my phone in the toilet.”

It’s time to hit the taco truck.

After I order my nachos, I text John, “Hey John, it’s me. Let’s be friends.” With a winky face.

Him: “What”

Me: “What what”

Him: “Ok. Yes.”

Me: “Yes what?”

Him: “I don’t know”

“Our interactions are like a Pinter play,” I declare to my friends.

“What’s that?” They ask.

I tell my best friend Sadie about this experience and she asks why I want to fuck John. She thinks my story doesn’t sound very passion-driven and feels more like a challenge I’ve set for myself. She wonders if by fucking his brother, I simply upped the ante in this game of trying to fuck John—actually making it harder for myself, adding a new level to the game. I tell her I find the combination of John’s inability to have sex with me and his desire to do so incredibly hot. I wonder aloud if people who don’t know me would think my mission in life is to home wreck happy relationships. She doesn’t think so—she thinks it’s clear from my perspective on infidelity and monogamy that I don’t consider myself the cause of these men’s relationship problems. I’m a symptom.

Sadie says it sounds to her like I’m bored, that if there were anyone more exciting to come along, I wouldn’t be interested in John anymore.

“Well, of course. But isn’t that always the way it is? You mess around with people that aren’t the real thing until something more interesting comes along?”

She concedes this is probably true.

“If John said he was leaving his girlfriend and wanted to fuck you all the time, would you want that?” She asks. Probably not, but there are a thousand what ifs I could go through that have nothing to do with the actual situation.

“What will probably happen is it will turn out that John’s girlfriend is like your blog’s biggest fan.”

I laugh, “That’s what happens in the movie version of my life.”

“The brother will fall in love with you,” she goes on, “and you’ll fuck both of them and get pregnant and won’t know which one of theirs it is and you’ll all end up raising the baby together.”

I tell her about how I’ve made plans to see John’s brother over Thanksgiving when I’m up in the Bay Area visiting my parents.

“I wonder if he won’t want to see me anymore if John tells him I sucked his dick,” I muse.

She bursts out laughing.

“You are building yourself a fucking garbage fire.” Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am bored.

Childhood Crush: Part Two or How I Got My Gold Back

I see Childhood Crush once more before he heads back to San Francisco. He comes over on Sunday afternoon for a couple hours before he’s due somewhere for dinner. Again, I feel unclear about what he’s doing here. He doesn’t want any coffee; he doesn’t want to sit outside even though it’s a beautiful day; apparently he wants to hang out in my room. He seems anxious, like he’s waiting for something.

He sits on my bed and tells me about his fucked up family. He calls his mother, “the neediest woman in the world.” She is always broke and asking him for money, and she never pays him back.

“Once I had to borrow $10,000 from my dad to give to her,” he tells me. “She is not his favorite person.”

His dad is a pretty famous writer who remarried a much younger Chinese woman and now has two kids with her. I wonder how his father could hate the mother of his first born child, and also see how that could really fuck up said child.

“Me and my dad don’t get along,” says Childhood Crush, but it’s also clear that he really looks up to his father. I know from my mom (still living in the small town where we grew up) that there is also a history of neglect there.

I can’t help but draw the parallels between Childhood Crush and Gaffer Guy. Another wayward Man Child, Gaffer Guy also didn’t respect his mother and had a kind of hero worship/loathing for his rich and powerful father. This I see is a recipe for disaster with young men.

“No wonder you’re so angry,” I say, playing the therapist. I actually enjoy hearing the more personal details of his life. It’s far more interesting to me than the laundry list of his professional achievements. I realize we are both in a transitional phase of our lives, we are both bored and wanting change, and we are meeting one another at this specific moment for that very reason. Perhaps to show us both what we don’t want anymore—letting go of old habits.

He gets up and starts pacing around my room. He eventually sits down in my desk chair. He asks me to close the blinds because the sun is shining in his eyes. It’s very warm and I can feel myself getting sweaty. My face feels hot and I think it must be bright red—it gets redder as I think this. He tells me about the friend he’s staying with, who is at this very moment getting dumped by his girlfriend. He won’t tell me how his friend knew he was going over there to get dumped.

“Man, I told him he should just break up with her first.”

“Maybe you’re not the best judge right now,” I laugh. Considering he’s still reeling from getting dumped himself eight months prior.

“He’s my friend but he’s kind of a pussy.” He tells me about how his friend can’t fix anything around the house.

“Men should be able to fix shit,” he says. I have to agree.

“Just like women should be able to cook something,” he goes on. I laugh.

He says his friend is “stuck on the models.”

“You should know about that,” I say.

“Nah, I’m done with models.”

I have to say his history of dating models makes me feel weird despite myself. He seems generally obsessed with hotness and youth. He talks a lot about “hot girls.”

He opens my bedroom door.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

While he’s in the bathroom, I lie down on my bed. When he comes back, he lies down next to me. It’s almost time for him to leave for his dinner. He stares at my breasts.

“How big are your boobs? D cups?”

I laugh.

“No, C. I actually wore a 36-B most of my life and then I got fitted a couple years ago and the lady told me I was actually a 34-C. It was awesome. I gained a whole cup size that day!”

He continues to stare, unamused by my story.

“Was that uncomfortable?” I think he means being told I was a cup size larger than I had thought my entire life leading up to that point, and I start to respond when he interrupts me.

“No, I mean wearing the wrong bra size.”

“Oh, no. I don’t think so. They’re pretty similar.” I realize we often have moments like this, lost in translation—on a fundamental level, we don’t understand what the fuck the other is talking about.

“If you want, after your dinner you can come back here and we can have sex in this bed.” I smile at him.

“Fuck later. How about right now?” He chuckles.

He remains next to me and puts his arm under my shoulders. We start to kiss and he takes my breast out of the top of my dress, sucking on my nipple. The exchange feels oddly sexless, as though performed from a sense of duty rather than any real impulse. He awkwardly crawls on top with his arm still under me. It feels like a lazy choice—exerting as little energy as possible.

He gets between my legs.

“It’s pretty sweaty down there,” I warn him, half-jokingly, but actually I’m serious. I can feel the heat and moisture between my legs.

“Oh.” This seems to interest him.

I go to pull my dress over my head and he says, “No leave it on, I like the dress.” He fingers me a little bit and then takes a condom out of his pocket and starts fucking me without taking my underwear off. He buries his face in my neck and pounds into me. I try to slow him down—he keeps pounding. He kisses me, his whole weight pinning me to the bed. He doesn’t look at me. Eventually, without a sound, he comes. And it’s over. He rests his face in my breasts for a moment, and I pat his back. He gets up and takes off the condom, tying it off and dropping it in the trash. He pulls on his jeans and heads for the bathroom. I fish the condom out of the trash and wrap it in a tissue. That familiar feeling of post-coital disappointment washing over me.

“Sorry to bang and dash,” he says when he returns. I walk him downstairs and kiss him goodbye.

“I’ll give you a shout later,” he says and bounds up my steep driveway.

I don’t see him again before he leaves. When he’s back in San Francisco, he texts to ask if I used the rest of my fancy condoms yet. I realize he thinks, probably from things I’ve said, that I’m constantly fucking random guys when the truth of the matter is he probably has a lot more sex than I do. I wonder if this is the reason the sex felt like he was masturbating inside of me and also why he didn’t go down on me at all—because he thinks I’m a slut, and not necessarily in a good way. My response to his text is to send him a picture of my boobs. I can’t explain this except to say it turns me on to do so.

I’m on a hike with my forty-something friend Paula and I tell her about Childhood Crush.

“Did you get your gold back?” She asks.

I just stare at her, a quizzical expression on my face.

She explains: “When you’re young, you admire people and look up to them because you think they’re special. But it’s actually not them. It’s you. You’re projecting all your good stuff onto them because you’re not ready to hold it yet. So, I wonder if you got your gold back from him and realized what you thought was special about him was actually you.”

This idea had never occurred to me before. She explains it's from a book called Inner Gold by Robert Johnson, and offers to lend it to me.

“I wish I had known that for the last 28 years of my life.” She nods.

“And the answer is no—I didn’t get my gold back from him.”

When I was younger I remember my mom warning me about sleeping with guys too fast, not for any punitive reason but because she said, “one tends to fall in love with men when you have sex with them.” At the time I took this to be a very old-fashioned idea, and until recently I’d considered myself immune to this cliché notion of sex-induced female attachment. But I suddenly understand what she means. I think there’s something chemical that happens to a woman when she has sex with a man. Maybe because they literally put their things inside us, inevitably some remnant is left behind. A glue that binds us to them, despite ourselves. It must be biological, because it feels completely out of my control. It makes sense—in nature if a male has sex with a female, it is to impregnate her and her impulse then would be to keep him around to help provide for the baby. Right? This is the only explanation I can find for the fact that after I have sex with a guy, I can’t stop thinking about him. No matter if the sex is good or bad or whether I like him or not. I find that it takes a couple weeks for this to cool off—and often the more I don’t see him, the more obsessed I become. When I see the guy, usually it’s disappointing. By that point I’ve made up so many stories in my head, his real life presence can’t possibly live up to my expectations.

Now that I know there’s perhaps a biological reason for this cycle, I can stop being so hard on myself about it. Or perhaps, practice not having sex right away. This could be the solution to my problem—if I don’t have sex with douche bags, I won’t think about them so much. It’s too late for Childhood Crush, but a good lesson for the future. I’ve had my fair share of bad sex, and as I age, it too gets old. It’s no longer worth the emotional roller coaster it causes. I feel like at this point my expectations are so low that if I met a man who was interesting, attractive, funny, and remotely good at sex, I’d fall in love instantly. Now that’s a scary thought.

High School Lover

I conduct myself like a grown ass woman should, in most areas of my life. I haven’t asked my parents for money in over a year, I live in a nice house, I’ve got my own health insurance. Pretty adult-like I’d say. Except in my “love life” apparently I’m still in high school. Literally. I’m sleeping with a guy I had a crush on in high school. Although I consider myself a grown ass woman, apparently I’m still attracted to the same boys I was attracted to as a teenage girl.

The last time I saw High School Guy was seven years ago when I was visiting my best friend Sadie at her college in Rhode Island and we spent one night in Boston where, on a rebound from a recent breakup with my first boyfriend, I ditched her and went home with him. That night, he became the second guy I’d ever slept with, after my four year relationship that took me from high school to college finally ended. Now, seven years later, Sadie and I are home for the holidays and I run into him again, this time at the local bar that serves as an unofficial reunion spot for our high school.

The circumstances are oddly reminiscent of that first night in Boston. Again, I’m with Sadie and we’re both single and aggressively on the prowl. High School Guy shows up and we’re immediately drawn to one another and basically don’t leave each other’s side for the rest of the night. We get drunk and go outside to make out in the cold. He tells me to come back to his place. I feel like I shouldn’t ditch Sadie. I tell her we’ll be back in “five minutes,” which is an unintentional lie. Neither of us has condoms, so he has to pick some up at 7 Eleven. In Boston seven years ago we took a cab to his apartment. In Northern California seven years later, it’s an Uber back to his parents’ house. I seem to remember that seven years ago we were better about using the condoms. This time, he says he wants to come inside me and I let him (I know). Both times, he wants to have sex three times in a row, I come once, and very early the next morning he takes me to meet Sadie and we’re both exhausted and she’s vaguely angry about my ditching her.

High School Guy and I establish that we’ve both lived on the east side of Los Angeles for the past seven years. We make a plan to meet up when we’re back in the city. And we do. I hit him up the weekend after New Year’s and suggest we see a movie. He suggests watching something at his place—I’m fine with this, I’m still exhausted from New Year’s. He texts me that if I haven’t had dinner we could “make something together.” I think this sounds very sweet and date-like. But I've already eaten. I show up and parking is a nightmare in his neighborhood. It’s raining and he doesn’t have a parking pass so I have to circle the block, bypassing the restricted parking signs that are everywhere. When I finally get to his place, he opens the door wearing sweats and his eyes are incredibly bloodshot. He tells me he just smoked and is “very stoned.” I don’t have a big problem with this, I know he’s a stoner and we’ve smoked together before. But I find myself surprised as always by these guys who invite a girl over and then make no effort at all to even like put on some real pants. As a girl preparing for a sex date, of course I showered, shaved, put on sexy underwear, artfully chose an outfit the right amount relaxed and suggestive. 

He’s apparently so stoned he’s not able to function at all, so I go get glasses out of the cupboard for the wine I brought.

“So, how were you planning on making dinner,” I joke. He’s sunken into the couch.

I start to peruse the options on Netflix. We settle on Kingpin, which I’ve never seen and he loves. We both love Woody Harrelson, and when I tell him that Woody is like my number one celebrity crush, he seems surprised and encouraged. I get the sense that he likes Woody because he relates to him: stoner, “bad boy” with a good heart, unconventionally attractive but with that charismatic sex appeal. In general, I start to get the sense that High School Guy doesn’t have very high self-esteem. Like he knows he’s stuck in the past but unable to escape it. It seems most of his friends are still guys from high school and I don’t know how that works seeing as most of them don’t live in LA. One of them is his roommate. His room is also a bit of a time capsule, filled with Superman and Spiderman posters, a lava lamp, a Playboy Bunny throw pillow on his bed. Walking in there with the intention of having sex, I suddenly feel like we’re back in high school again, except without all that giddy nervousness.

He is a very intimate, sensitive lover. He doesn’t want to take me from behind or come on my ass. He constantly wants to be face to face, he buries his head in my neck, he thrusts slowly and gently, he wants to come inside me again. As I prod him about the last time he got tested, he reveals that he’s only been with four people in the past seven years. He says he doesn’t like having sex with people he doesn’t know. He doesn’t ask me for my number. Gone is the callous, indignant “bad boy” I thought I knew in high school. As his face hovers inches from mine, I experience the familiar realization that sometimes it’s in the most intimate moments with someone that you suddenly recognize you don’t really know them at all. Again, he wants to have sex three times and I come once. The orgasm is very satisfying, as it tends to be with him, probably because he likes to thrust slowly and sensually rather than the ever-familiar jackrabbit pounding.

The next morning, he shares with me that he didn’t get to walk at our high school graduation because he failed math his senior year. This obviously had a big impact on his psyche, and I feel badly for him. We talk a lot about the guys we knew in high school—most of whom are still his best friends. We talk shit about them and I wonder if he even still likes these guys, or if he’s just settled into the fact that these are his “friends for life.” He tells me about several instances in high school where he and another kid both did something bad (like drag-racing in the middle of the day on one of the residential 30 mile per hour streets of our home town) and only he got in trouble for it. It seems this is a theme for him—getting himself into shit and then feeling like the consequences of his actions are unfair. I listen and nod, understanding but also not really. I wonder, as I often do after sex with the guys I tend to have sex with, what I’m doing here. What brought me back to the bed of this person I slept with seven years ago? Has my taste in men really not evolved at all in the past seven years?

The next week I go get tested, and I spend another week paranoid that I have HIV and/or a baby growing inside me. My period is a day late which sends me into a tailspin of fear and paranoia. I’m on the pill, but I remember after having sex with High School Guy over the holidays, I had been a little late with my first pill of the new cycle, which is a bad one to miss. I finally get my period and breathe a sigh of relief. I think maybe it’s time to be more of a grown up in my sex life. To stop “playing Russian roulette with my vagina,” to paraphrase Jenny Slate’s knocked up character in Obvious Child. I’m tired of going to get tested every time I don’t enforce condom use with a partner. I’m tired of the fear of getting those results. When I was younger, I was so nonchalant about unprotected sex, but now every time I do it my imagination runs wild and that fleeting enjoyment of sex without a condom is simply not worth the stress that follows.

I might see High School Guy again. I don’t know. But I think I’m ready to attract something different. I’m ready to attract a grown ass man. Someone who enforces his own condom usage because he doesn’t want to get a girl pregnant when she has the sole responsibility of choosing to keep it or not, and therefore the power to change the course of his life forever. Someone who is not so flippant with his life decisions. So I don’t have to be the only one making the responsible choice and then feeling bad about myself when I alone fail to do that. I think a grown ass man would be good for me. I think I’m finally ready to graduate.