the first time it happened, my boyfriend Rick and I had been fooling around in the front seat of his late '80s model Toyota Camry. Imagine hub cabs meant to look like rims, self-applied window tint, and two Midwestern teenagers working enthusiastically to get each other off.
Afterward, we looked down to discover that the seat below me was wet. I mean, really wet. Soaked as if I'd spilled his extra large Mountain Dew. Since that awkward initiation, being a squirter is something I've come to own with pride. But back then, I was mortified. We thought I'd peed myself.
This was pre-Google, in 1996. There was very intentionally no Sex Ed at Bedford High in Bedford, Ohio, and the fact that we all bought into the mythical value of virginity had the unintended effect of encouraging creative experimentation. Oral sex was okay. Getting fingered. Basically anything besides s-e-x. By 16 years old, I would become one of those girls who had had anal sex and still called herself a virgin.
All this experimentation started two years earlier with a boy named Charlie. I'd thought I'd like the taste of an older boy's mouth, cigarettes and metal and Listerine. The afternoon of our first "date," Charlie had gotten his tongue pierced. He wasn't supposed to be making out, but we did it anyway, in his car in the parking lot. It felt sexy and exciting to be liked by someone more "sophisticated," 16 to my 14. He must really like me, I remember thinking, to be using his new tongue ring before it was properly healed.
For days or weeks or months—I don't know, time stands still when you're a teenage girl getting fingered—Charlie would pick me up in the afternoons after work and bring me back to his house. While his grandparents were away, we made out on the couch. I'd get naked and we'd kiss. Sometimes I'd touch him through his clothes. When I did, he felt enormous, engorged and insistent, and I'd become terribly afraid—"dick shy," the boys my age would say.
since Charlie was two years older than me, I trusted him. More and more, I became comfortable lying next to him naked. He'd kiss me everywhere, expecting nothing in return. We barely talked, always getting right to business. He touched me, gently at first. I was surprised to learn my body's responses. It was like he knew just what to do. Slow or fast, he pushed his fingers inside of me, gently, then harder.
One afternoon, as he was doing this, the living room began to spin. The ordinary day crumpled into itself and, in one perfect moment, everything centered on my body. As it was happening, Charlie told me that I was having an orgasm.
Ejaculating with Rick was different than my earlier orgasms. In both cases, prior to coming, there was the feeling of urgency. But instead of pulling in, squirting felt like everything pushing out.
"THE LIVING ROOM BEGAN TO SPIN. THE ORDINARY DAY CRUMPLED INTO ITSELF AND, IN ONE PERFECT MOMENT, EVERYTHING CENTERED ON MY BODY."
Perhaps unbelievably, it wasn't until my 30s that I masturbated for the first time—not for an audience, but for myself. With my own hand and a vibrator, I learned how to make myself squirt: not to impress a guy, but to simply get off. I learned that I didn't need someone to tell me what was happening, certainly not some boy.
When I did, it reminded me of the afternoon Rick and I broke into a house that was under construction. Out of the hot Midwestern sun, and a little like a church—there, among the fresh drywall and newly laid carpeting, we left wet spots all over. Like the animals we were.