I'm busy planning my fall book tour (!!!) so I'm going to be lazy this week and give you a little peek into my early sexual explorations.  Well actually my first venture into sex and also my first venture into writing the first chapter of my memoir.  So it's all kinds of raw and ridiculous but I hope you'll enjoy it. 

If you'd like to read the full and polished version of chapter one and the 29 that come after it, buy your copy of Diary of a Rope Slut here. 

If you already have a copy please consider leaving a review! Even a simple one sentence would help out enormously.  Amazon experts claim once a book gets 50 reviews it shows up in searches which I could desperately use as my book is currently hidden in the erotica naughty section.  Thanks to those that have already left reviews, they mean the world to me!

Now as promised, here's a look into my life pre-rope sluttery...

At eighteen I lost my virginity to a nerdy virgin I’d had met in a backgammon chat room. Once the subject of sex came up we waited all of a couple weeks to meet in person.  It still boggles my mind to imagine that dirty talk occurred while moving virtual white and black markers around a pixilated board, playing one of the lease erotic games in existence.

The first time we met, he drove to the small dairy farm town where I grew up from the small hog farming town he lived in. My parents were away, camping as they did most weekends during the warm season making it the perfect time to invite him over.  However, they had unexpectedly left my younger brother behind for me to baby sit.  He was a teenager himself so a video game would keep him entertained for days.  The situation would require sneaking this fellow into the house somehow without my brother--who would be sure to tattle—noticing.

“I live in the white house on the corner.  Walk through the back yard and come to the first story window closest to the back of the house.  I’ll be the red haired girl waiting for you.”  Those were my instructions to stealing him in undetected.  Unsurprisingly, he was game for stealth if that’s what it took to hook up.

 We hadn’t exchanged photos so I had no clue what to expect, sitting in my bedroom window, on edge, watching the street, expecting any unfamiliar face to be my internet sweetheart.  I was of course holding out hope that he would be attractive even though he was thirty five, a championship winner at a certain board game, and had therefore never touched a girl. So my heart dropped for a moment when a pale, doughy man with an uneven haircut and a double chin tip toed nervously to my window.  He smiled strangely as he got closer.

“Hi,” I said trying to lure him closer, lest the neighbors or my brother notice him lurking outside the house.

“Um, hi,” was his response as he slowly snuck up to the side of the house, as if the distance between us was occupied by quick sand or pudding.  “I’m going to kiss you.”  He declared leaning in my childhood bedroom. 

Suddenly I forget how unappealing he is and become thrilled by the prospect of being touched.  As a distinctly unpopular kid in high school I’d yet to date, touch, or otherwise experience physical closeness with another person.  I didn’t feel in a position to be particularly picky so I decided to offer myself to this man even though he’s not what I was expecting.

In the moment, it feels very Romeo and Juliet as he takes my face in his clammy palms for a kiss that’s more like being licked by the family dog than the romantic meeting of lips I’ve seen in movies.  Though I’ve been practicing kissing every afternoon until there’s a large unexplainable wet spot on my pillow, I don’t know what to do with my tongue.  As inexperienced as I am, it seems obvious this guy has even less of a clue. He rubs his chin against mine painfully during each kiss. By Monday I’m chaffed raw by his stubble, trying to explain away the open wound on my face as something that happened by clumsily tripping on the carpet.

I help this unathletic stranger heave himself inside my room where he stays for the next two days aside from early morning and late night trips to the bathroom when my brother is in bed.  Despite our best efforts, this man is never able to get an erection.  The more he thinks about what a disappointment he is, the less able he is to perform.  This doesn’t stop me from experimenting in all ways possible with his body, going from inexperienced to having my first kiss, giving my first hand job and oral sex in the course of ten minutes.  The remainder of the weekend we talk, play back gammon in the flesh, and I stealthily bring more food or water into my bedroom than one person would possibly need while my brother pretends to not understand what’s happening.

 The next weekend we meet again, this time I pay for a hotel room (even though he’s a grown up with a computer job, he’s worried about his parents noticing a hotel charge on his credit card) in one of the seedy hotels lining the highway. The experience lasted all of 10 seconds and involved strip go fish as foreplay.  I’d gone shopping for a sexy matching bra and panty set that he didn’t pay any attention.  He pushed my red panties to the side, squished a condom on, and shoved his half stiff penis inside me at the first hint of an erection.  He grunted and fell against me immediately, rolling over to sleep without a mind to my satisfaction, crinkling his custom go fish deck in the process. The paper towel textured sheets, musty smell, and snoring man beside me that I felt nothing for opened an emptiness inside me that was hard to identify. 

I hadn’t held out on sexual exploration out of any moral reasoning.  Living with a mother who controlled my every move left no room for a sex life.  At the same time, being surrounded by boys who smelled like manure and didn’t know Sylvia Plath from Shania Twain wasn’t much of a motivation to date.  The first time someone that wasn’t from this insular country music and Holstein cow community showed any interested, I jumped on the chance to go at it.  I had no fear of sex, it was a relief to now know what it was like, and my curiosity for more was piqued. 

The lacuna that was nagging at me as I watched this man that would become my boyfriend for a short while (until I ended things during an endless evening of him living up to his surname by Weepy-ing all over me) sleep in the jaundiced light filtering in from the ammonia-y bathroom had more to do with disappointment.  His two thrust contribution to the event couldn’t have been less satisfying.  I had so been looking forward to plunging into the world of sex that I couldn’t believe this was all there was involved. There had to be more, not with this man, but somewhere.