He wants to use my body, to take advantage, and I want to let him. I want to be someone’s one night stand, some blithe slut... I want to allow myself to be like all those women I pretended to look down upon all my life, but whom I secretly envied for having the guts to have their legs spread by strange men in smoky bars.

More than that, the thought rattled uncomfortably in my child brain that I would one day become one of them. My body then was sexless. Though I had seen the curves of adults, I couldn’t fathom the chrysalis that would turn my featureless body into something with heft and gravity, curves and the inclination to use them.

In retrospect, I didn’t really want to be a slut. What I wanted and needed was a therapist who would consent to fucking me, but I doubted my parents’ insurance would have covered that. I had a lot to figure out for myself and I did that by making poor decisions that summer. If some wise, authoritative adult could simply have explained why I wanted to do these things and then done some with me, I think I would have refrained from most of my sexual misadventures...

If you aren’t ready, you spend your whole life perseverating on that one situation, getting it wrong time and again. I like to think I am a woman who learns her lesson, but the trick is that you can only ever understand your life backwards, but you live it forward.

Conspicuous lesbians abounded—it's hard to miss teenage queers who have yet to figure out subtlety—and, though I can’t deny that I like my girls a little rough, most leaned so heavily on the dyke archetype that they looked like a Timberland truck crashed into Lilith Fair.

I know my father blamed himself, since he is the one who discovered me pawing through his pornography in the basement as a child. Even then, I marveled at the strangeness of the women in the magazines, their hair feathered in a style I struggled to believe was ever in fashion.

People were dumped all the time and their tears did not swallow dry land.

He smells of secondhand cigar smoke and a brew of perfumes from his bachelor party, but it would be enticing foreplay to shower him fresh before sullying him anew.

Good and safe" are all I have been during my romantic career, keeping myself virtuous outside of relationships never putting out before I had a commitment and a half dozen dates under my belt.

As though I had displeased the gods with my erotic hubris, I managed to be the only bisexual girl in the history of colleges who failed to arouse the interest of the campus queers immediately upon setting foot in the dorms.