My eyes widened. Understanding flooded my brain at the way he stammered. “You never …”
A shy grin crossed his face, teeth clenched. A hand drifted toward the back of his neck, where it mussed his hair. “Yeah.”
“You’re a virgin.” For some reason, I needed to clarify.
“It isn’t like I haven’t had the opportunity exactly—wait, that sounds bad, doesn’t it?” he corrected. “It’s not as if I haven’t wanted to before.”
I put up a hand to place it on his arm but hesitated. “Take a breath.”
“Thanks.” He sighed, slowing down his cadence.
“You don’t have to tell me why if you don’t want to,” I said. “It’s none of my business really.”
“I know,” he said. “But I do want to. I want to share it with you. You trust me. I trust you. And we’ll keep trusting each other onward, right?”
I paused and looked at the sincerity on his face, the nerves lurking behind his expression. “Right.”
“Right. Well, yeah …”
“So …” I tried to encourage, feeling the conversation stop. “Tell me about this curse.”
“It started back in high school. Basically anyway. I had a girlfriend, and we almost …” He trailed off, gathering his next words. “We were caught by her father.”
“You’re kidding.” My jaw went slack. I tried to imagine exactly how I would feel in that moment if my father ever walked in on me, period, let alone the guy I lost my virginity to. Then again, maybe he would’ve just shut the door and walked away back to his permanent spot on the couch during that same week after my mother left us.
But the emotions would still be all there.
The shame. The fear.
“Yeah, it didn’t leave a good taste in my mouth. She was only with me at the time, it turned out, because she was a cheerleader and everything.” He winced. “I came from a very traditional sort of town. Then, I came to college, and I was far enough away from everything. That first fall, everyone seemed to be getting together with other people.”
“It’s like mating season the first few months of being a first-year.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Ryan couldn’t help the curve of a smirk on one side of his mouth at my joke, and a renewed warmth settled inside of me as I leaned back into my pillows to listen to him. “It felt a little less nerve racking. I knew, obviously, that someone wasn’t going to come out and scream at me for being depraved and sinful for touching someone, like back home.”
“Someone said that to you?” I stared at him, knowing that there was pity on my face.
After a moment, he sighed in agreement with my disgust. “They did. If they didn’t say it to me, I knew they said it to the girl I was with. That fact alone made me feel awful. It was basically my fault, I figured, though we had both been into it at the time.
“Eventually, not long after I got here, I did try going on some dates. I tried the whole dating app thing too, but I got too nervous to start conversations half the time unless one of the girls I was talking to on campus came straight up to me. I’m a sucker for a good smile.”
Yet here I was right now, without one.
“It was nice to be smiled at, so I figured, why not give it all a chance? The guys on the team encouraged me and never really assumed anything until they set me up on a sort of group date thing my second year. I had a good time. We all hung out, and then there was a party after. The girl I was with at the time and I ended up alone in her bedroom. We fooled around for a bit until …” Ryan glanced away.
“What? Do you have some sort of monster penis in your pants or something?”
“What?”
Ryan couldn’t help but laugh. I was glad. For a minute, I’d missed it.
“No. I don’t think so anyway.”
“Then, what?”
“I sort of finished without her.” Ryan’s face flushed red at the confession.
Still, I waited for something else. “And?”
