I reached out and touched it. It felt alien and alive. I was about to move my hand away when he moaned in pleasure and I realised I was going to have to give him a hand job. I tried to remember what the girls at school had said, and with fear settling in my throat, I slowly began to move my hand up and down.
It looked like an extra limb and had the texture of an old cucumber. I had no idea how tightly to hold it, or at what speed I should be moving my hand up and down. What if he thought it was awful? What if he didn’t come? What if he laughed at me again? I panicked. Without thinking I took my hand off his penis, broke away from the kiss and crawled down the sofa. I took it into my hands and slipped it into my mouth.
I felt my face getting hot as thoughts raced through my head. I tried to make my mouth fit around him and began moving my head backwards and forwards. The minute I started I knew it was a mistake. I had thought it would be easier than the hand job but I could not have been more wrong. I had absolutely no clue what I should be doing. I opened my mouth wider and pushed forward, when suddenly I heard a loud yelp.
I stopped what I was doing and dropped his penis in shock. I looked up and saw him try to pull his face into a smile.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, though I didn’t want to know.
‘It’s just, um, you bit me.’
I felt bile rise in my throat and wanted to throw up and cry in the corner. Feeling my skin prickling with humiliation, I laughed shrilly and said, ‘Oh, sorry.’
I wanted to leave but there was no escape. If I ran away, everyone at school would know. I took a deep breath and went back down to his penis. I tried to carry on like before but this time I wrapped my lips around my teeth. It was so uncomfortable it had to be wrong. I tried to go down deeper and then gagged. I swallowed the urge to throw up and carried on. How was I going to finish?
I pulled away from his penis. ‘James, let’s have sex.’
He laughed awkwardly. ‘Um, are you serious? I thought you were a virgin.’
I flushed fuchsia. ‘So? I’m seventeen. I’m ready.’
He looked at the floor. ‘Ellie, we’ve only kissed a few times. I can’t take your virginity.’
‘But … I want you to. Please?’
He squirmed. ‘I can’t. Not like this. Your first time shouldn’t be like this.’
Standing, I pulled on my pink dotted knickers and did my bra clasp with numb fingers. I ignored his protestations and left.
I never saw James Martell again. I avoided the parties that I knew he would attend, and I blocked him on instant messenger. He didn’t try to call me and I never did anything more than kiss someone ever again.
Once I got home from the GP surgery, I lay down on my bed and felt a familiar wave of disgust flood over me. Only this time it wasn’t just because of The Bite Job. It was mixed up with Dr E Bowers.
I always knew it was weird that I was a twenty-one-year-old virgin, but it hadn’t really hit me until I saw those green capital letters screaming at me from my medical records. I wasn’t even eligible for a chlamydia test. Dr E Bowers had given it to me either to make up a quota or because she thought I was a religious nut-job who didn’t want to go the whole way but secretly gave head to every guy around. If only.
I sat up straight in my bed. This was it. I was in my final year of university and I would never be surrounded by so many horny men again. This was my last opportunity to lose my virginity and I had to grab it now. I had to ditch my V-plates by the time I graduated in summer—which meant I had four months to finally understand what an orgasm was and to learn how to give blow jobs.
I took a sharp intake of breath and visualised my future.
In June, I would go back to Dr E Bowers, get a chlamydia test and make her swap VIRGIN on my records for SEXUALLY ACTIVE. The next time I came into contact with a condom, it would not be falling off a shelf in the doctor’s surgery; it would be on an actual penis. And this time, it wouldn’t just rub around my vagina à la James Martell; it would be going straight in there.
‘OK, OK, SO HAS everyone got some kind of alcohol? There’s some more vodka over here if you need any.’
Kara, a pretty brunette who used to wear Topshop in her hometown but had swapped it for vintage clothes and brogues when she came to London, poured generous amounts of vodka into all our glasses.
Somehow I had been invited to an end-of-term party at Luke’s house, just before we broke up for Easter—Luke being the leader of the ‘cool’ group in my English Literature course. I didn’t own any vintage clothes whatsoever so I never really felt like part of the group and didn’t fully understand why they invited me to their parties. Maybe some of them thought my general uniform of jeans and woolly jumpers was a deliberate anti-fashion statement. Obviously they were unaware that dresses and fur coats made me look like a sad transvestite trying too hard, and high-waisted things just accentuated the birthing hips I may never have a chance to use.
‘Can we just start already?’ shrieked Hannah, who was wearing the vintage white nightdress she wore day in and day out, a strand of fake flowers around her head. ‘I’ll go first. Does everyone remember the rules?’
Without giving anyone a chance to respond, she lurched on. ‘So obviously it is called Never Have I Ever, so when the person says something like, “Never have I ever shagged someone who was married,” then if you have done that, you drink. If you haven’t done that, you don’t. Even if you are the person who said it, you still have to drink if you have done it.’
‘Hannah, we get it. Just start,’ moaned Charlie. ‘And can you please start with something better than shagging someone married? That’s so boring.’
Hannah put on a deliberate pout. ‘Well, why don’t you start, Charlie?’
He grinned, rubbing his hands together. Charlie was the joker of the group, and he liked nothing more than being given the spotlight so he could make everyone groan and laugh over his filthy sense of humour. This was his prime opportunity. I gulped as I tried to mentally prepare myself for what was coming. If I managed to make my face look calm and unbothered, no one would know that I would be lying through my teeth.
‘All right, so, never have I ever fucked someone in a public place.’ Without waiting for anyone else to start drinking, Charlie raised his glass and downed it. Everyone rolled their eyes until he shot them the cheeky grin that had probably made so many girls want to shag him in public in the first place.
I hesitated over whether to drink. I needed to choose wisely. I couldn’t just develop a new personality for this game; I needed to think which sexual things I would have done if I had lost my virginity years ago like everyone else. A brief layer of sweat formed on my top lip. It was too late to drink now so I put my glass down and looked around to see who had drunk.
Eight people raised their glasses, and six of us hadn’t. I breathed out in relief. I was one of six, which made me normal, kind of, and there was always safety in numbers. With the edge of my sleeve, I wiped the beads of sweat off my top lip.
Hannah—who had drunk—started waving her arms around and said, ‘OK, my turn! So, never have I ever cheated on anyone.’
Some of the boys sighed in boredom, but even Charlie refrained from criticising this, probably because he was just as curious as everyone else to see who drank. I started to wonder if I could drink for this one. Obviously I hadn’t actually ever had a boyfriend to cheat on, but back when I was messaging James Martell during those two weeks pre–Bite Job, I once got drunk and accidentally snogged someone else at a party. I think it lasted two-point-five seconds, and I have no idea who it was, but it was definitely cheating.
Feeling confident and sexually active, I