“Do you want to go to a bonfire tonight?” my crush texted me. It was a late Saturday morning and I was eating leftover room-temperature pizza on the floor of my dorm room, as one does when they are a freshman in college and then hopefully never again. He didn’t have to ask twice. Adnan* was a hopelessly handsome, absolute degenerate of a Navy sailor (with whom, as you may recall, I’d hooked up outside the gym on a hot September night earlier that semester) who wanted little to nothing to do with me and I was OBSESSED with him.
It was mid-November and I’d spent the past two months acting like, well, a lovesick teenager. I savored every rare, usually brief text from him like it was a sacred declaration of love. I’d leave him deranged, long-winded voicemails when he’d ghost on plans he’d made with me and refuse to answer his phone. I’d swear off him entirely, change his contact name to things like “YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY NOT RESPOND TO THIS,” then proceed to gleefully fuck him in his car—perfectly groomed, perfumed, and hastily glammed—whenever he’d text me late on some random weeknight to let me know he was coming over.
I tell you all of this embarrassing information not just out of some apparent need to confess the sins of my youth but so you can fully grasp the magnitude of this bonfire invite. A text from him? Sent during the day?! Inviting me to actually do something with him?!! On the weekend?!!! IN FRONT OF OTHER PEOPLE?!!! (Little did I know, I would, in fact, be doing, uh, something, with him in front of other people indeed.) I felt like Cinderella getting invited to the goddamn ball. I dropped my lukewarm pizza to type what I’m sure I thought was a cool, chill, witty response but was probably completely unhinged and, without my requesting literally any additional details, cordially accepted.
When he and a friend picked me up outside my dorm a few hours later, I still had no idea where we were going and I couldn’t have given a single fuck less. At this point in my life, I was both a severely depressed and severely lovestruck 18-year-old. All I wanted to do was throw my life away, and this guy was my garbage man of choice—I would follow him into a literal dumpster fire if it meant getting to hang out with him.
Where we ended up was not a literal dumpster fire, but it was someone’s parents’ house in a rural Connecticut town about 30 miles north of campus where a bunch of locals drank in the garage and one guy eventually got wasted and smashed a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels on the concrete floor—right as whoever’s parents owned the place returned from some military benefit they’d been at that night (Eastern Connecticut is God’s country). Which is to say, yeah, you might call it something of a dumpster fire, although it occurs to me that I don’t recall there being any actual fire—i.e., a bonfire—at all, so I truly have no idea what was going on.
The only thing I knew or cared about was that at one point Adnan had pulled me close to him, slipped an arm tight around my waist in the assertive, subtly sexual way he always had of handling me and whispered, “I’ve got the best-looking girl here,” and I could’ve died happy right then and there.
Interestingly, the parents didn’t seem to care that much that their home was full of random, drunk young adults and invited us all to stay the night and sleep off whatever debauchery had gone down in their garage. This was convenient, because earlier that evening while he absentmindedly doodled something in the palm of my hand like we were in middle school and I didn’t mind because at least he was holding my hand, Adnan said, “Do you wanna have sex tonight?” and I said something to the effect of, “Yes, duh.”
This was inconvenient because the “bed” we were assigned was literally a mattress on the floor of the basement where another couple was also crashing for the night in an adjoining room just a few feet away.
Not having any exhibitionist tendencies that I was aware of, I had figured sex was off the menu that night and lied down next to him on our blanketless mattress, pulling my leather jacket on for warmth because, again, we were sleeping in an unfinished basement in November with no blankets.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m cold.”
“Here, stop that,” he said, pulling my jacket back off as well as his own shirt, draping them both over us as makeshift blankets and wrapping his strong arms around me. “I’ll keep you warm.”
As he held me tight against his half-naked body, I felt his cock harden against me, instantly cutting through the chill in the room and turning me on. Yes, I had a massive unrequited crush on this man mainly rooted in romantic obsession and adolescent insecurity. But more than that—more than I loved him or was obsessed with him or needed to bury all the fears and uncertainties and loneliness of very young adulthood in him—I wanted him. In that moment and in all the others we spent together, I wanted him in a physical, visceral, insatiable way I had never wanted any of the other men with whom I’d tried to fuck away my problems that year.
So yes, maybe I was desperate and insecure and maybe he didn’t treat me the way I would now, in my slightly older and much less vulnerable years, demand of any man worthy of my attention. But we were young and we were horny and at that time, on that freezing night on that bare mattress, just wanting someone like that—in my skin and bones and soul—was enough. Besides, how else were we supposed to keep warm?
“Can we…?” I whispered, peering through the darkness to see that the door to the room where the other couple was staying was, in fact, open.
“Shhh, yes,” he said, already unbuckling his belt. I slipped off my own pants quietly, suddenly immune to the cold in my shamelessly horny state. I stifled a gasp as he soundlessly slid into me from behind, both of us still lying on our sides in a somewhat discreet spooning position. He fucked me slowly at first, then gradually harder, burying his groans in the curve of my neck as I thrilled to the feeling of his rhythmic thrusts inside me and the intimacy of the secret we were sharing. I may not have been a full-fledged exhibitionist, but this was our second brush with semi-public sex, and the what-if-we-get-caught/doesn’t-matter-gotta-have-it-anyway of it all was clearly doing something for me. He came inside me—strong but silent style—and I fell asleep in his arms feeling supremely satisfied with both our dirty little secret and the realization that this would mark the first time we’d ever spent the whole night together.
We left early the next morning, cruising back to campus in his friend’s truck where I balanced sleepily in the backseat with my legs stretched out across the bench, half-wishing the truck would just vanish into the sky like the car at the end of Grease and I could stay in this chaotic half-reality that had provided such a weird, welcome reprieve from the college career I still hadn’t grown into.
“Oh, wait,” Adnan said as I hopped out of the truck in front of my dorm. He pulled the bracelet I’d asked him to hold onto before we went to mattress bed out of his pocket and fastened it around my wrist, which struck me as one of the most intimate things we’d ever done. (More intimate, even, than fucking in a stranger’s basement, if you can believe it.)
“This is the first time you’ve ever seen me in daylight,” I said, feeling brave as he clasped the cool silver chain against my skin, his doodles from the night before still staining my palm.
He met my gaze. “You’re cute, you know.” he said, placing a kiss on my forehead.
I drifted back into my dorm room—miraculously devoid of roommates—in a sleep-deprived, crush-fueled haze and slipped into my bed feeling warm and content. The past 12 hours, whatever they had been, were enough.
*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.
