My First Time with a Woman: Confusing, Awkward, Fascinating
The girl I left in Edinburgh
The first time I had sex with a woman, I was twenty-four.
I was inexperienced, slightly drunk, and unfortunately, I was also on my period.
It was all the things first times are: confusing, awkward, fascinating. The night actually ended with the words, “I think I might like women a little more than I thought I did,” before she laughed in her French accent, and we fell asleep on a tiny bed in cold Edinburgh.
A month later, she wrote to me, a continent away, to let me know she had just told her family she was a lesbian. A year later, I am still trying to figure out what it all meant.
But what I remember most about that night is not how hurriedly we rushed into her bunk bed at the hostel and took off our clothes. Or the way we pulled a makeshift curtain to give us some semblance of privacy. It’s not the way I kissed her body, and it suddenly all seemed to make sense. It’s not even the way we had to try and stay quiet as the rest of the hostel volunteers began to enter the room.
No. It’s the way my hand hovered over my panties, and I remembered I was indisposed.
She paused, sensing my doubt.
“What’s wrong?” She whispered, and I felt one of her hands caress my arm in the darkness.
I hesitated and leaned over to kiss her lips.
I considered not telling her. Just saying I was not feeling well and going back to my room. I then thought of all the times I had done this before, with men who didn’t seem to care about it as long as I stayed in bed. I thought about how I didn’t want to go, especially since this was the last night we would see each other before we continued our journey in separate ways the next afternoon.
“I’m on my period,” I confessed, feeling my cheeks burn with embarrassment.
A beat of silence followed.
“Oh,” she said, her accent thick. “That’s alright,” she said softer this time.
I traced her collarbone with my fingertips.
“Are you sure?” I asked, wanting nothing more than for her to say yes, she was sure, the night didn’t have to be over.
And it didn’t.
In just a couple of hours, my world became a bit more complex, a little bit better. My senses had seemed to discover a new world of textures, sounds, pleasures.
The next day when I watched her enter the shower right before me, I caught a glance of my hands and found the caked blood on my fingers, all the way down to my palms. I felt oddly satisfied and embarrassed in the same measure as I thought hers would look the same. For some reason, the image struck me as powerful. It was a reclamation of femininity and a broken taboo all at the same time.
When I wrote about that night in one of my stories, I didn’t mention the blood. I didn’t think people would understand. I didn’t want to taint the memory with any kind of shame I no longer had. So instead, I wrote:
We repeated the process until her breathing slowed. The only thing to be found from time to time was the tip of her nose against mine. That and the feeling I was met with from the tail of a small fish at the level of her navel. I looked down and felt the heat gathering on her cheeks. (…)
Then it was my turn, and I discovered, only by the touch of my index and middle fingers, sometimes only my ring finger, that she was wearing a hot air balloon in the space between her shoulder and collarbone. That place where if you get shot, nothing happens. Nothing, except that the balloon deflates, and then there’s no way to blow it up again. She also had a series of small scrolls rolled up on the inside of her right arm that she had not yet read.
When it was her turn, the first thing Olivia found was my grandmother’s watch on the side of my waist, a weight I stroke only when I’m nervous to remind myself that just a few years ago, she was with me. Behind my left ear, she found a bottle of bourbon the size of the samples they have in hotels. I don’t explain that one to her. I don’t smile at her either.
I never sent her the story, but when I think of that night I still think of the blood. And it makes me smile.
I think about the fishes, and bourbon bottles, and hot air balloons no one sees under the surface. I think about the company of feminine bodies and the unsuspected way blood became a part of sex.
