He takes his shirt off and then pulls my face to his with both hands. Right away I start to heat up. It’s amazing and really uncomfortable at the same time, like what I want is going to overwhelm me, make me lose my grip, lose control. Part of me starts to wish he would just leave.

He puts his right hand under my shirt and cups my breast and kind of strokes my nipple with his thumb in this way that he does, with the perfect amount of pressure like some kind of nipple engineer. (Wait, what?) He starts moaning a little and I do too while we kiss, and it’s nice, like we’re singing to each other, some song only we can hear. Low and almost growly, like dinosaurs singing to each other. I don’t know what that means but that’s what it makes me think of. He’s hard now, and so am I, I guess, if that’s what you call it.

Then he steps toward the bed and I step backward, and we start taking each other’s clothes off, unfastening belts and buttons, pulling down zippers, and tugging on belt loops. As we finally collapse on the bed, instead of fumbling with the hooks on my bra, he pulls it up over my head intact. It’s uncomfortable and my boobs flop out in a super-not-glamorous way. It makes me wonder if he’s got a girl on the mainland with much smaller tits than mine. Not that I care. It’s not like I’m his girlfriend or anything. I have no right to be jealous, and I’m totally not.

I scoot further onto the bed and we both pull down our underwear. Looking into his eyes is really just a way not to have to look at his hard-on, this weird, awkward thing.

Jason’s kissing my breasts and I take the opportunity to reach into the bedside drawer and pull out a condom. I put it on him quickly and then I lean back for the moment when he . . . enters me. I read it put like that in a collection of erotic short stories a friend and I snuck down from her parents’ bookshelf when we were kids and now I can’t get it out of my head. Strange. Accurate, but too precise. Every time I have sex with some guy there’s always that moment when he enters me, like I’m a goddamn eighth-grade essay contest.