Back story on Marie, years 2 and 3

[This entry was written and posted on Sunday, March 6, 2016.]

 

The next year was my Junior year. Marie was a sophomore. We had kept up a very friendly correspondence over the summer, so I looked forward to seeing her again. But somehow this year it wasn’t quite the same. I still felt guilty for having failed so abjectly when she had told me she found me attractive, but I didn’t know what to do about it. And somehow things just seemed more difficult. Sometimes it was just like the year before. Other times Marie would start asking me probing emotional questions – questions I didn’t know how to answer and was afraid to try. I didn’t understand my own emotions very well; what I had learned from my father the actor was less how to look inside than how to project an image. And the only image I knew how to project was the one I had been perfecting for years, the Enthusiastic Student. Also, I was skittish about being asked personal questions. Again, my father had been nosy about my personal life to the point of prurience; so my response to personal questions was to avoid them and redirect the conversation elsewhere. At the same time, I felt lonely and isolated in the persona I had created for myself; I wanted the warmth and close human contact that I assumed was part of an emotionally close relationship. So I wanted to be able to answer Marie’s questions, even as my ingrained training worked hard to steer away from them. It was an awkward time.

[For more about these troubled non-conversations, see also Hosea's Blog: Back-story on Marie, year 1½ (hoseasblog.blogspot.com).]

 

I don’t have a lot of set-piece stories from that year, not that I remember. Marie suffered from serious muscle knots in her back, and at one point I offered to give her a back rub. I desperately wanted to be able to touch her; at the same time I was terrified lest she think I was making a pass at her. (Never mind that she had made one at me the year before. I never said I was being logical.) So I told her, “Let me rub your back; I do this for my father all the time.” (No way that can be sexual!) But I still felt nervous and awkward, even though she was sitting up and fully dressed. Later on she remarked that she had not known it was possible to give a non-physical backrub, but I had managed.

 

In the fall of my Senior year (her Junior year) we were slowly able to talk a little better. And we started touching each other. Marie asked me to brush her hair. I pulled together enough courage to put an arm around her. We even started laughing over how difficult we had made things for ourselves, and for each other … though I really don’t think we had figured out why, for either of us. And one night in the dorm social room, we allowed ourselves to start kissing. We held each other and ran our hands clumsily across each other’s bodies. Marie let me run my hand up under her sweater, which meant – since she regularly went braless – caressing her breasts. And finally we decided to adjourn to my room.

 

The next step would logically have been to undress each other. But even though I had had my hand under her sweater, I wasn’t brave enough to pull her sweater off. So we undressed ourselves and then climbed into my little twin bed. Clumsily, inexpertly, guided by nothing but very theoretical knowledge, … we began to try to make love.

 

I was so nervous I couldn’t stop talking. (And I wasn’t talking about love or sex or anything like that – it was some other, totally irrelevnt chatter.) We stroked each other, and looked at each other’s bodies. I was hard – Youth is a wonderful thing, too bad it’s wasted on the young! – and I remember Marie holding my erection, feeling it, looking at it with fascination, and kissing the head. Then we held each other some more, caressed each other some more, and finally decided to try actually fucking. By this time I had gone soft, because it had been so long without my doing anything. (My penis was probably bored.) But with some stimulation I became hard again. I climbed on top of Marie, tried to figure out how to find her cunt, and worked my way inside.

 

I wasn’t there for long. By this time we were both tired, so I went soft again before I could come. But it was a really interesting feeling. It actually felt like my penis had disappeared; in retrospect this has to be because I hadn’t expected how warm it would be inside her, and all of a sudden I couldn’t feel the air on my skin. (Ironically my father once said the same thing about his first time inside a woman – a prostitute in France while he was in Europe as a GI – namely that he was surprised by how warm it was.) So before long I decompressed and slid out of her. We held each other some more and then Marie got dressed to go home, to a house off-campus that she rented with a few friends. I got dressed and walked to the nearest 7-11 for a snack. I remember thinking, as I walked through the night, Wow. So I actually lost my virginity tonight. Do I feel any different? That was very …. Wow.

 

We never got naked together again that year. For a week or two I remember feeling blissful that I actually had a girlfriend. I don’t know how Marie felt. But soon it went sour. I don’t even remember how, or what happened. Maybe we fell back into old habits? Something happened. The next thing I remember was a long, difficult emotional conversation – the kind I had gotten so used to with marie – in which I told her I wasn’t in love with her. (I was careful not to say I didn’t love her, because I realized that I didn’t actually know what love felt like; so maybe I did love her and didn’t realize it. But I was pretty sure about in love.) 

 

My first real girlfriend, and the first time I dumped somebody. (I guess the second time was when I dumped D.) I remember how free and happy I felt afterwards.

 

We weren’t hostile after that, but we weren’t as close. I no longer felt that I had to make myself available for the long, difficult conversations that Marie no longer asked for anyway. We still had a lot of friends in common, so we still found ourselves in each other’s company from time to time. We were friendly about it but no more. There were a couple of other girls [excuse me, this was college: we all understood that girls is a patriarchal term, so we always said women] I was fond of, so I spent a lot of time with them and felt kind of giddy about it. And then I graduated.