At 17, getting bent over a bench in a baseball dugout by the team captain for a quickie was not something that so much as crossed my mind. But here I was at 27, muffling moans and avoiding splinters like I’d been manifesting it for the past decade.
My high school crush Garrett* was a six-foot-something, blonde, blue-eyed bashful boy who drove a little Ford pickup and spent all of his free time on the baseball mound. I was an awkward and animated freckle-face who spent her days running back and forth between student meetings and cheering in the bleachers. Neither of us was getting voted Most Likely to Get Laid. He may have been hitting home runs on the field, but, like me, he hadn’t made it past second base.
Fast-forward 10 years and we had graduated college, moved to new cities, and found ourselves in more than a few strangers’ beds. By my mid-20s, I had sharpened both my life and bedroom skills, trading in my school colors for lingerie. Garrett had grown a few more inches and his shy cuteness had developed into a reserved coolness that had me feeling 17 again when his name would pop up in my inbox every now and then.
But not even Katy Perry herself was prepared for the teenage wet dream our acquaintanceship would become. We fully reconnected a decade after graduation when Garrett struck up a conversation in my DMs. Still in the thick of the pandemic, we were forced to keep our blossoming romance to texts and phone calls for several months. As our feelings deepened, so did our carnal desires. Devoid of touch, our texts got hotter and evening phone calls lingered into late-night phone sex.
We mapped out the ways we would touch each other when the time came, coyly revealing the sexual prowess we’d acquired over the past 10 years. Night after night, I felt him aching through the phone as I teased him with my newfound tongue techniques. We starved ourselves of photos to keep what little mystery we had left alive, so my imagination ran rampant wondering what this body I hadn’t seen since high school now looked like on a man. We were teenagers again—frantically horny and stuck at home, grounded.
Cue: us climbing all over each other like jungle gyms when we finally met up for our first real dates. We would barely make it out of the driveway before pulling over, me rushing my hands up his shirt and him slipping his between my legs. I would feel up his Levi’s to try to get a sense of what 6'2" looked like below the waist. But the lingering adolescent modesty inside of us wanted to keep the illusion of respectable courting alive. So before going all the way, we’d pull back in sheepish giggles and keep the date moving along. Our first meetings were becoming edging foreplay, the restriction making every moment that much hotter.
Somewhere around date four, we found ourselves in our hometown, driving through the streets we were raised on. We shared stories and swapped memories, reminiscing like we were straight out of a Hallmark movie. That is, of course, until we drove past a baseball field we both knew well from our childhood and decided to make a pit stop down memory lane before dinner. It was dusk on a Sunday, which, in a small town, meant we were the only people around as far as we could see. Taking advantage of the solitude, we struck up an imaginary pickup game on the field.
He pitched me an invisible fastball, and I hit a pretend ground ball and ran to first. Before I got to second, he ran at me for a tagged out, chasing me through the outfield. The rules of baseball gone out the window, he tackled me into the dense spring grass. For the first time, we found ourselves horizontal together.
I finally felt the weight of his body on mine and was achingly aware that his belt buckle, cold on my thigh, had pulled my not-at-all-planned easy-access sundress up to my waist. We were frozen. We both knew that if we so much as allowed our lips to touch, it was game over. Or in this case, game on.
Within seconds, we became the teenagers we never were—impulsive and blissfully bereft of any thought of consequence. We made out frantically as I pulled at his clothing. Confidence rising as the sun went down, I grabbed at his zipper as he pushed my dress up to my chest. This would have to be quick, so nakedness wasn’t the goal—just entry.
He stuck his fingers inside of me and I moaned into his mouth, clutching the overgrown blades of grass surrounding me. Within moments, he slid himself into me, pinning me down against the earth. Every time we heard the sound of a car, he would slow his thrusts but never stop them. His right hand wrapped around the back of my neck, holding our bodies close and low to the ground, he kissed my face while whispering in my ear, “I’ve waited so long to be inside of you.”
I’d lost count of how many times we’d had phone sex, yet somehow having this once painfully innocent boy talk me through his sexual pleasures as a man left me in aroused shock. I tried to quiet my panting as he bit my lip—both so we couldn’t be heard and also in embarrassment. For the first time, I felt almost too horny. How could I be so turned on with leaves sticking out of my hair?
He finished first, then finished me. We shared a few soft kisses and jumped up to fix any damage we had done. I used what little sunlight was left to pick grass and dirt off me as he zipped up his jeans, smirking like he just won MVP. He took my hand in his and we started making our way to the parking lot.
This is where it could have ended—if we hadn’t found ourselves in the worn dugout. It was practically dark now. The only light on the whole field was one or two dim street lights off in the distance, but it was enough for us to make out each other’s outlines and the bench that ran through the encasement. Even in the low light, I could tell his blue eyes were gleaming as he pulled my wrists further into the cubbyhole of a space.
“Did you ever sit in here when we were younger?” I asked.
“I did,” his deep voice sounding even deeper now. “I was probably sitting in here thinking about you.”
The butterflies in my stomach broke out and made their way to every inch of my body. I am convinced that no matter how old you are, when you find out your crush likes you back, you become feral. I pushed my body into him as I reached for his lips. He grabbed my face with one hand, lifting my dress back up with the other. Double header.
I had him pinned against the chain-link fence until he twirled me around to have me face the back wall of the dugout. He was kissing my neck from behind and gently fingering me when I felt his hand putting pressure on the low of my back, guiding me to bend over. Just like the obedient student I always was, I did as he asked.
“Let me keep these,” he joked as he slid my underwear down my legs. Teasing me like a boy but handling my body like a man, he entered me from behind, one foot on the ground, the other on the bench for leverage. I was propped up on one hand trying to avoid splinters, with the other over my own mouth to avoid drawing out the entire neighborhood with my moans. My legs trembled beneath me as he shouldered the weight of us both, holding my body up by my waist and thighs as I quickly went limp with pleasure. This round didn’t last long, but it didn’t need to. Home run.
When we finished, we climbed onto the old bleachers and laughed about what had just happened. Back to the cautious gentleman I had always known, he asked me if it was okay and if it was all too soon. A decade seemed like long enough to me.
We sat there for a while looking out at the field, knowing we just rewrote our memories. While no one was looking, two retired goody two-shoes hung up their cleats.
*Name has been changed.
Tommie Brown is a writer and poet. She has worked with Mitu, VICE, The Feminist Food Journal, and Boshemia Magazine. If she isn't writing, you can find her gardening or doing crosswords in pen. Follow her on Instagram @Tommiethegirl or find her at TommieBrown.com.
