I was stupid. I wrote about liking being kissed in my diary, which I had thought was stashed in a safe hiding place. The aide found it and took it to my mother. I didn't mention the circumstances of the kiss when I wrote about it, but the very fact that I had allowed my boyfriend to kiss me was enough for my parents. They made me break up with him. He was no longer "harmless enough." Neither was I. I spent my senior year grounded. My father made me do evening prayers with him every night as if I were a child again, and he made me leave the church choir because I was no longer someone to be looked up to. I didn't understand why my being seen in church wearing choir robes and singing hymns at Mass should suddenly be a shameful thing, nor did the choir director, who had no idea what was going on behind the scenes and begged my father to let me stay in the choir, because I was still the only alto, but my father was adamant.

Actual sexual experience, due to a number of different factors, didn't happen until I was in college on a partial academic scholarship that my parents were too proud of to make me turn down (and I was glad to be several hundred miles away, on the other side of the state - by then I wanted nothing to do with my parents' rules. I think I must have been the only freshman in my dorm who didn't cry from homesickness on my first night away from home). By then I had acquired a different boyfriend, who I'd met when he sat next to me in my Rationalism and Empiricism class and struck up a conversation about Pascal's wager. And yes. By then I knew it was possible to do more with my body than just kiss.

His mouth is warm and moist against my genitals, his tongue doing insane, almost unbelievable things to me until I fall over the edge into orgasm, screaming out in pleasure and need. He's been at this for a while tonight. Months, really; we've been groping and mouthing each other for months, while I've wrestled with the demons of my childhood religious indoctrination, banging my head against the concrete wall of my boyfriend's dorm room until he begged me to stop before I hurt myself, crying myself to sleep in his arms after every make-out session, or at least trying to cry, for what passionate joy could I have if I did not pay a price in guilt afterward?

It has finally reached the point where I no longer care if I burn in hell for having sex before marriage. I've already been seen naked, all of me, including all the parts normally covered by underwear, and I've had all those parts touched, as deeply as fingers can reach inside; that means I'm not a virgin, by some definitions anyway, right? So, it's too late for me. And I want to, so badly. I want him, he wants me. I'm pretty sure I love him. He's told me he loves me. What more do I need? Maybe we'll marry later, maybe not, but we've been fumbling at each other for all the last semester and the beginning of this one, now, and I don't want to wait any longer than he does. The orgasms he's given me tonight haven't satisfied me, any more than they have before. They've only left me hungry for something more.

"Now," I moan. "Tonight. Now."

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

He gets up and takes a condom out of his drawer, one that came in a discreet brown paper bag from the campus health center. He struggles with it for a few seconds, but eventually manages to get it on his member - it's fairly goof-proof, really - and reaches for me. He's warming me with his fingers, caressing me, entering me, gently stretching me, making me burn again until I'm practically engulfed by my need. I don't know how he can be so patient. He's been waiting so long for me, an eternity of unfulfilled desire, all because of my wavering and fear.

He climbs on top of me. I open my thighs for him and guide him into me with my hand.

And instantly my world is blazing agony.

I collapse onto the floor of his dorm room into a fetal ball. Blood is gushing out of me. It's not a period. It's not that kind of blood. There's too much of it. The pain stabs me; I clutch my abdomen, keening, trying to shove everything back, to make it stop.

"Are you all right? Do I need to take you to the emergency room?"

I'm pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be like this. I know I don't want to go to the hospital, though. My parents would see the bill, get scared, and ask questions, and if they find out I'm not a virgin any longer, I don't know what they'll do to me. Nothing good. At the very least I'm pretty sure they'll pull me out of college. I don't want to leave college. This is the first place I've ever really been happy and made friends. I'm picking all my own classes, and my professors and classes are all great. I'm in a medieval reenactment club and a gaming club and a classics club and a chorus. I'm enrolling in an introduction to bagpiping class. I'm going to be initiated into a sorority soon. Oh, God, I don't want to have to give all of this up.

"No, I think this is normal," I reply, still crumpled in a fetal ball, trying not to whimper. "I've read about it in romance novels. I'll be fine. Can I have a towel?"

In retrospect, I do know that it's not normal to have an experience right out of The Bell Jar. (Even in The Bell Jar, it wasn't normal. Since that sort of profuse bleeding was supposed to be a "once in a million occurrence," I have to wonder if maybe Plath drew on her own personal experience when she wrote about the aftermath of cherry popping. Surely that was too weird for her to have just made up. Did she also think about turkey necks the whole time, too, then, the way her self-modeled protagonist did? That must have been unfortunate). Hymens are thin outer membranes, part of the labia, rather like half-open sheer curtains at windows, not internal blood bladders that sit inside the vaginal walls, acting as gate guardians that somehow allow fingers and tongues and tampons to enter, but not penises, and should some cock manage to bypass security, they perforce self-destruct to create a fatal distraction that stops coitus from happening. All my research tells me that one's first experience of sexual intercourse is not supposed to cause near-hemorrhaging, indeed, if there has been adequate foreplay and plenty of lubrication and stretching, the hymen may not bleed at all - it may just part as it is stretched. Which was certainly the case with me. I couldn't have had a gentler, more attentive first love. And yet, there it was: I experienced awful pain upon first being entered, and I bled like a stuck pig.

More proof that I am a freak.

At any rate, I survived. I even somehow recovered without getting any real medical attention. I wish I could say the same thing about the relationship, but I can't.

One reason things didn't work out was that I discovered girls soon after I discovered sex, but that was only one contributing factor. There were many, many others, foremost of which could be summed up by saying that attraction does not always coincide with compatibility. Forget the old saying. Amor, eheu, non omnia vincit.

She is so warm in my arms. We have been dancing around each other, finding excuses to sit together, so that our skin touches; to put our heads on each other's shoulders; to give each other back rubs. We hold hands, then trail our fingertips along each other's palms and forearms when we break apart...

I've never wanted anybody so badly.

"What if we're damned?" she asks me, her voice trembling. "What if the whole reason we're so attracted to each other is that our faith is being tempted?"

"Do you really think God would be that cruel?"

"No..."

We silence our words and thoughts with kisses.

She has a long-distance boyfriend who is in the army. Her boyfriend does not know about me, or about the fact that his girlfriend is starting to realize that she likes other women more than she likes men. She wants to come out of the closet and break up with him in person, rather than through a letter or over the telephone, and I wish I had the strength to wait for her until after the fact, but he won't be visiting her for many weeks, and we only have so much time before spring is over and with it, the school year, and we are tired, so tired of waiting. What if we never have each other? I have no more strength to hold out against this need, nor does she. It is done.

All the desperate love poetry we've written to each other has ended here, in this dusty storage room in the attic of the art building, while our sorority sisters play volleyball on the quad outside, heedless of what is going on in here.

I went through Rush Week for the experience, and the free food; I pledged the sorority on a whim because it had a reputation for being the straight arrow geek Hellenic organization on campus (average GPA: 3.91; during the lip synch competition last Greek Week, they lip-synched to Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah; good grief, half the sisters, including the woman in my arms, who was my sorority Big Sister, were members of the town medieval reenactment group, just like I was, having discovered the meetings that were held on our college campus; and they were also gamers, and they wanted to initiate me because I seemed open to learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons, and they needed a rogue to round out their adventuring party. Where were they, all my life? Oh, God, what if they find out about us and expel us? No, I can't think about this now) and a part of me wanted to belong to a group, just wanted to belong, and maybe being an only child made the idea of having a group of sisters seem somehow so exotic that how could it not be everything I ever wanted?

And then I met her, and it was clear to the both of us, given the passing of enough time, that we wanted to be so much more to each other than just sisters.

If her parents find out, they will disown her. If my parents find out, they will disown me. Hell. If my parents find out, it will probably destroy them.

But now we are here, stealing kisses from each other; stealing gasps and sighs. Her skin is so soft. Her breath is so sweet. She's moaning into me as I kiss her, melting her skin against mine. Trembling, I reach for one of her breasts.

I didn't know this ecstasy was even possible.

Desire shakes us like thunder.