I felt his dick growing in his pants and started hoping he was fighting a losing battle. I still didn’t look at him. I could feel his cool breath on the nape of my neck and was just glad he was holding me back. “I think about being with you all the time, Jason. I can’t concentrate on anything else.”
“I tell you what. Why don’t we go to dinner and to the prom and see what happens after that? Your mother won’t be home until morning, so it gives us plenty of time to be together.”
That’s when I looked him dead in the eyes. “You promise we’ll make love later tonight?”
Then the dreaded words escaped his lips. “We’ll see, Boo.”
I hate the wordswe’ll see:they almost always mean no. My parents spoke those words to me as a child when I asked for a new, extravagant toy or dress. They said them when I asked to do something we all knew I had no business doing. Thus, when Jason said them, they cut like a knife.
I started crying, and the tears were far from fake. My fragile and oversensitive nature, which had always beenpresent but tripled after the death of my father, came out. I let go of Jason and used my hands to gather up the bottom of my tight dress so I could run up the stairs faster in my high heels. I ran into my bedroom, slammed the door, and flung myself on the bedspread, burying my head into a pillow to catch the tears. He was right behind me. I could hear his footsteps coming down the hall.
Jason opened the door, and I could feel my mattress sink farther as he sat down on the bed beside me, seconds before he began caressing my back with his strong, warm hands. “Baby, look, if it really means that much to you and you don’t want to wait, then sure we can make love. We can make love right now. I don’t want to see you upset like this. It breaks my heart.”
I turned my head away from him, letting my lipstick smear all over my pillow when I changed positions. “Jason, you just don’t get it. I shouldn’t have to beg you to make love to me. This is supposed to be something we both want.”
He started running his fingertips through my hair. “We do both want this. I was just trying to do right by you and wait, but make no mistake about it, I do want you. I’m not even going to fake the funk about that.”
After that, we were both silent for what seemed like an eternity. He was running his hands from my hair down to the small of my back, and I was trying to control my sobs, which were eventually replaced with shallow breathing. “Zoe, are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” I turned over onto my back so I could look at him. He took the tip of his thumb and cleared the smudged mascara away from my eyes. All of my lipstick had been transferred to my pillowcase. “You ready to go to the prom?”
He didn’t answer but got up and walked over to mybookcase instead, putting on a cassette of slow jams that he’d made for me to remember him by when his parents once took him out of town for a week. He was always such a romantic—making me tapes of love songs, carving our names inside a heart on every tree in his yard and mine, calling me late at night so he could hear me breathe after falling asleep on the phone, letting me wear his varsity basketball jacket.
At six-five, he’d finally stopped growing and was the captain of the basketball team, taking them all the way to the state finals two years in a row. He had the smoothest skin for a man, and he still does to this very day. My husband has always been fine, but he’s never been finer than the night we first made love.
“Dance with me, Zoe.” He reached out his hand for me, looking so sexy and debonair, as the first song started playing. I took it and let him pull me up off the bed into his arms. We danced, our bodies swaying back and forth slowly in the moonlight invading my bedroom through the windows.
Before the first song concluded, Jason traced the contour of my lips with his fingertips, and then our kiss began. We had kissed hundreds of times before, but this one was different. It was as if there was an exchange of souls. We became one entity as our tongues intertwined in a dance of their own.
Jason scooped me up into his arms, carried me over to the bed, and laid me down gently. He climbed on top of me, and I pushed his jacket down over his shoulders and off. “I love you, Jason.”
“I love you too, Zoe.” He took my hand and kissed my palm while I turned on my side so he could easily unzip my dress and slide it over the curves of my body until it was completely removed.
The way he undressed me was so provocative. He was so gentle and took so much care with me, like I was a newborn baby. When he was done, I returned the favor. Once we were both nude, we sat on my bed face to face and placed a hand over each other’s hearts, feeling the rhythm of our heartbeats coincide. It was
the most intense, arousing experience.
We started kissing again as he laid on top of me, and for the first time our private parts brushed up against one another with no clothes in between them. The warmth of his body made my heart flutter and my skin tingle.
The anticipation of making love for hours on end was overwhelming. I had waited so long for the moment to arrive and had envisioned it thousands of times—no, make that millions of times—in my mind. I was expecting us to explore every inch of one another with our hands and tongues, make love in every position known to man, and pass out from pure exhaustion.
What happened instead was a complete catastrophe. First, Jason got nervous because we didn’t have a condom. “Zoe, what about protection?”
“It’ll be okay. Just pull out real quick when you feel like you’re about to cum.” I was tracing the curvature of his chest with my tongue, knowing my womanhood would finally be endorsed at any moment.
“Ummm, I don’t know about this, Zoe. Maybe we should wait until we have some protection.” He was trying to push me off him, but at the same time not putting up much resistance to my advances.
“Jason, do you want me to beg you? Is that it?”
“No! Hell no!” I started moving my hand up and down the shaft of his thick, long dick and rubbing the precum escaping from the head around with my thumb. “I’ll make sure I pull out in time.”
He stuck it in, and it hurt like all hell when my hymen broke. Two minutes and about thirty pumps later, he pulled it out, and I wanted to scream. I lay there, thinking to myself, “Is this all I get?”
Jason told me he loved me, and I reciprocated. Then we just laid there, in dead silence, with his head on my left breast. A whole hour passed, and neither of us mentioned the prom, or anything else for that matter. I was depressed and Jason was . . . I have no idea what Jason was. I got up and searched through my purse for a cigarette. Smoking was a habit I’d picked up when my daddy died as a method for relieving stress. I was damn sure stressed after my first sexual experience—stressed, disappointed, humiliated, and depressed.
Before he drifted off to sleep, he expressed his concern. “Geesh, Zoe, I hope I didn’t get you pregnant.”
“Don’t be silly, Jason. No way am I pregnant! Never that!”
chaptereight
What can I say? Never saynever!
Whoever said you can’t get pregnant by having sex just one time lied like all hell, ’cause my ass sure got knocked the hell up. Ain’t that a bitch?
In one sense, it really didn’t matter all that much since Jason and I were planning to get married in a few months anyway. On the other hand, all the plans Jason and I had precisely worked out for the future went out the freakin’ window. Everything, except the marriage itself, had to be reconsidered.
I just knew my mother was going to hit the roof when she found out, but much to my surprise, she informed us that she knew it was gonna happen all along. Jason’s parents had pretty much the same reaction. I guess none of them were astonished because they all assumed we had been sexing each other for years and had just been lucky I didn’t get knocked up sooner. Our friends all took it instride as well. From the looks of it, everybody in the world except Jason and I was predicting my impregnation.
Instead of having an elaborate wedding, we opted for a small ceremony in my mother’s backyard the weekend after our graduation from Central High School. I was three months and not showing yet. Brina was my maid of honor, and Cordell was Jason’s best man. That was the last time I saw the two of them together, because they broke up while Jason and I were on our honeymoon. To this day, neither one of them will discuss what happened.
It was a quaint, romantic, and intimate ceremony attended by our families and close friends. Our parents chipped in together and sent us on a week-long trip to the Bahamas as a combination wedding and graduation gift.
Our honeymoon turned out to be a culmination of fun-filled days and sexually repressed nights. After prom night, Jason and I never had sex again until after the wedding. To be honest, as much as I craved to be close to him in every way, I wasn’t looking forward to another sexual disappointment. On my honeymoon, that’s exactly what I got—a series of sexual disappointments, in fact. It is such a strange feeling to love someone more than you love your next breath and yet be appalled when they touch you. Don’t get me wrong: Jason never turned me off. He just never turned me on either. Not the way I needed to be turned on.