I was a wildly depressed college freshman and I was hunting dick like my life depended on it.
I’d had sex exactly one time with exactly one person in high school, a short-lived boyfriend who unceremoniously dumped me almost immediately after said encounter. Still reeling from the emotional annihilation that was the aftermath of my sexual awakening, I’d decided the best course of action would be to simply fuck as many guys as I could get my hands on the minute I got to college.
Three weeks into my freshman year, blindly throwing myself into mindless hookups had come with the advantage of providing some illusion of the social life that had so far eluded me. Sure, I may not have friends, but at least I was having sex. It had also come with the rather predictable downside of lots of regrettable twin XL fucking with lots of regrettably gross dudes.
But that certainly wasn’t going to stop me from doing it again tonight. It was the first dance of the year, and while the idea of a school-sanctioned dance may sound like an adolescent throwback to the high school memories I was desperately trying to eradicate from my brain with meaningless sex, I was excited about it for one main reason: Coasties—aka the cadets from the neighboring Coast Guard Academy I’d heard were wont to make an appearance at these events.
Their intrusion into our campus nightlife—and thus our campus dating pool—was notoriously divisive. You were either pro-Coastie or anti-Coastie, particularly if you were a woman. I’d decided pretty early on that I was going to be a Coastie Fucker for two main reasons. (1) I’ve always been a big proponent, if not always a flawless practitioner, of the golden rule: Don’t fuck where you eat, especially if you’re eating in the dining hall of a small New England college with less than 2,000 students. (2) Given the choice between a man in uniform and one who regularly rolled up to Psych 101 in sweatpants, I’d take the Puddle Pirate, thanks.
Fortunately for me and my impure intentions, the rumors proved true. When I walked into the dance that night, I was greeted by a swarm of uniformed cadets in caps. My Coastie fucking career was about to take off.
There was just one problem. As the dance was winding down, my roommates informed me that it was, in fact, not cool if I brought the Coastie I’d spent the last hour shamelessly slobbering all over on the outskirts of the dance floor back to our room that night. And while Coasties regularly found their way into our dorms, they were strictly prohibited from bringing us back to theirs because, you know, the military.
Unfortunately, this meant that if I was going to keep up my slutty streak, I was going to have to put aside my Coastie fucking ambitions for the evening and find a guy whose bed wasn’t under military control. I said goodnight to my cadet and went on the prowl.
I decided to approach Adnan* because he was alone and in civilian clothes—dark jeans and a plaid button-up—looking sort of old-school cool leaning against a stair-rail near the door.
“You look really familiar,” I said to the stranger who did not, in fact, look familiar. “Have we met?” It wasn’t the most creative opening line, but it usually did the trick. This time, however, it did not.
“I doubt it,” he said.
In my memory of this moment, he was already smoking a cigarette—because in my memory of him he is always smoking a cigarette—but he couldn’t have been. Stumped that this stranger had not taken my bait, weak as it was, I stood there staring at him in silence long enough for him to have taken an imaginary drag from his imaginary cigarette.
“Do you go here?” I tried again.
“No. Navy.”
So the civilian clothes were just a decoy. I was vaguely aware that, in addition to our Coastie neighbors down the street, there was also a Naval base just across the river. I was not, however, aware that these sailors also snuck into our dances.
This stranger could no longer be of any use to me. But, fresh out of ideas, I continued to stand there staring at him anyway for no particular reason.
Realizing he wasn’t going to get rid of me after another imaginary cigarette drag’s worth of me standing around stupidly, he looked me up and down and said, “So, where do you want to take me?”
I said something about roommates. He said it was a shame. I said nothing. He said, “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”
I followed him outside into the warm September night where he lit the real cigarette he was actually holding now. As we strolled aimlessly across campus looking for a spot secluded enough for our purposes, he offered me a drag. I accepted, and, having never smoked anything in my life, immediately started hacking up a lung—but at least I finally managed to amuse him.
“How old are you?” he laughed, taking the cigarette back from between my fingers.
“18,” I said, once I’d regained control of my lungs.
“My God,” he said. “You’re a baby.”
Some part of me that I didn’t recognize suddenly thrilled to this. Something about him made me feel young and innocent, in need of his protection, even while it occurred to me that he couldn’t have been more than a few years my senior.
I was contemplating this when he abruptly threw his cigarette to the ground and pulled me toward him, grabbing me by the top of my jeans and fitting his hand neatly between the waistband and my abdomen.
I must have kissed him a little too long, held onto him a little too tightly, because when I finally pulled away and opened my eyes, I saw that he was laughing.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I want you too.”
We made our way over the footbridge towards the school’s athletics complex on the other side of the highway, conveniently deserted at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Pausing under a street light where I kissed him like an addict, he ripped open his button-up and placed my hands on his warm, military-strong chest. As my fingers grazed the hair I found there, it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember wanting someone like this—in my bones and in my guts and in my skin, which I wanted to shed so I could slide into his instead.
Yes, I’d wanted the first guy I’d ever slept with a year ago, but I’d wanted him the way, as Joan Didion famously put it, you’re programmed to love the first person who ever touches you. Wanting him was a given, a coincidence, an inevitability. He could have been anyone, he just happened to be him. Besides, whatever desire I may have felt for him had betrayed me. The memories of it had turned sharp and potentially lethal. Best to lock them up and throw away the key. Block that number. Don’t go there.
But wanting this man, here, tonight, felt like fate. This desire felt clean and untouched, and I already knew—the way you sometimes know things before you know them—that this memory, this moment, was one I was going to want to live the rest of my life inside of if I could.
At the edge of the parking lot behind the gym, he unbuttoned my white jeans and pulled them off, leaving them on the dirty pavement to collect stains that would probably never come out, and I didn’t give a fuck. I fumbled with his belt buckle until he took over, dropping his own jeans around his ankles. As his underwear followed suit, I paused for a second to marvel at his cock, long and smooth, with a delicious upward curve that gave it an eager buoyancy. I would later tell him it was the biggest I’d ever had, though I’m not entirely sure that was true. I just assumed that if I’d wanted him that badly, surely he must have been packing. I hadn’t yet learned that big dicks don’t necessarily equal good sex, and vice versa. There were a lot of things I had yet to learn, and unlearn, about sex.
He picked me up and held me against the wall as he entered me, sliding in effortlessly. This wasn’t my first time, it wasn’t even my first after my first, but something about it felt monumental, transcendent, almost sacred. I was experiencing something I’ve experienced only a handful of times since—a kind of psychic understanding that an irrevocable shift was underway, that one version of my future and the self that would have existed in it had just evaporated and a new one was taking its place. That this person, this moment, this sex, was the beginning of one thing and the end of another.
“Sex is a very powerful thing,” is a bit of wisdom that, later on in my college career, my creative writing advisor would occasionally hand down. After all, it has the power to create life, she would say. She had a point, of course, but I don’t think her reverence for the colossal importance of sex was all about the sanctity of baby-making. I think what she was trying to convey was something I understood for the first time that night behind the gym—that sex is a very powerful thing that, in rare and gorgeous and inherently fleeting moments, can make you feel more connected to yourself or to another person or to the fucking universe than the laws of nature can ever explain.
One night of universe-clicking-into-place sex didn’t fix all that ailed me, of course. I still had countless nights of bad sex and regrettable hookups ahead of me. It would be years before I learned to seek sex for pleasure instead of validation—or at least learned the difference between the two. But as I slid into bed in my dorm room that night, for the first time since I’d moved in three weeks before, I didn’t feel sad or lonely or scared. For the first time in a long time, I felt alive.
*Name has been changed.
Kayla Kibbe (she/her) is the Associate Sex and Relationships Editor at Cosmopolitan US, where she covers all things sex, love, dating and relationships. She lives in Astoria, Queens and probably won’t stop talking about how great it is if you bring it up. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
