“Being together felt like nothing we’d ever done
and not comparable to all the years we were students and saw each other.
We did things I m not going to talk about, maybe one day.”
Lauren’s Diary May 23, 1996

Still unable to write it down in her diary, Lauren decides to share her sex story, with her friend the bootleg trader Nikki. He lives in England and they have never met, but he sends her the bootlegs she needs for reviews for a fan club.
Over the course of their correspondence, Nikki has become the only person with whom Lauren shares all aspects of her sexuality. 

Sent: In an A4+ envelop, addressed to Nikki in England 

first content of the envelop:
A large photocopied page, created from two A4 photocopies, glued together and secured with adhesive tape.
It’s a page from the book SEX by Madonna and it has the text: 
Doctor: “Do you think that it is possible to experience pleasure and pain at the same time?”
Dita: “Sure! That is what ass fucking is all about. It is the most pleasurable way to get fucked and it hurts the most too. All your nerve endings are in your ass, but if you’re not excited or if you’re not doing it right, things can really go wrong.”

And Lauren’s long letter, printed double-sided on A4 with manually added page numbers.
This is what she wrote:

Friday May 28, 1996

Dear Nikki,

This letter is going to take the honesty I have with you, to a whole new level. And, truth be told, it was not my choice to do this, but I got completely stuck in something I wanted to do but can’t.
And I know that when I write it to you I can.

The thing I really want to do is write down what happened the last time Bear and me were together.

You told me multiple times I can write anything I want, but I think the truth is, there is so much within me that I m ashamed of. That I feel is not allowed to exist, sexually. 
And although Bear has never been there for me after we had sex, because we have never been in a regular relationship, it seems to have hit me hard this time, to deal with this by myself.
To make peace with who I am.
Even though I have known, and even have nourished, “her”, sexual me, by reading the book SEX from Madonna. Because I didn’t want her to die on me. In particular after Bear broke up with me. Originally.

I seem to have regained terrain as “the other woman” because we are having sex again. But in 1995 I didn’t go all the way, and I needed that year of keeping my pants on and “only” giving the occasional hand job (the word always gives me the creeps, not the act), to make up my mind.
I needed it to grow into what it was he was inviting me to become.
The other woman….. phew.
Talk about getting your pass to adulthood god dammit. 

But I needed 1995 as that transition year where I went from being only a friend, to being welcomed back in.
So when we started sleeping together again this year, I had thought things through.
It’s just that I was unprepared for what happened last time.

Because Bear and me are back at the level of sex we had in the early years. When I think there must have been other women, but I felt like the only one. Or maybe for a brief period I was the only one.
I know Bear was fascinated I took matters into my own hands and recruited him to have sex with me. But for the most part I attributed those first wonderful sexual years to the newness of it.
It’s pretty normal for two people to have such a great sex life when they start out.

However, I had not anticipated for that to happen again.
In particular because he’s with his girlfriend now. Logically it would automatically mean the intimacy would stay manageable.
Or was he single this time? 

Man, this letter is all over the place. Sorry! But I do think this is important:
I met him at a friend’s place, he was house sitting. And I got the impression he was single, I really did. Everything was so different from the way it had been for years. Even before he broke up, even just the years after the first years.
When our sex was still amazing, but not as intense as the first years.

So I met him at his friend’s place and I met a Bear I had not seen in years.
And I assumed that was because he was single, and not telling me yet.
But then afterwards nothing happened. He must be back with his girlfriend by now, but I haven’t heard from him. 
And it’s just so confusing, Nikki. I m sorry to interrupt myself the whole time, but I think this is why I feel I can’t write in my diary what happened, because every time I think of that day, I start questioning myself.
How could I have been so wrong?
How could I have made such a huge mistake in assessing what was going on?
What does that say about my people skills?
Am I a dumb person?

So that was the boring, self-pity part of the letter.
But look at it this way! If I had been totally okay with it, I would just have written the sex stories in my diaries, and you would not have gotten to read them.
So I think in the light of our correspondence, my doubt has served us well.

There were two things I really want to highlight for you.
Two things I would have written in my diary, if I had gotten over myself and actually wrote in my diary.
The first is anal sex, and the second is oral sex.

Bear and me only had anal sex in the first years we were together. 
I was a (normal) virgin when we met, so I was inexperienced with anal sex as well. From Bear, I don’t know. I remember asking him, but not getting an answer. He just brought it back to what he was doing to me, asked if I liked it. Maybe he said something like “I ll manage”.
So I always assumed I was the first one for him, but there really is no way of telling.

We always used a lubricant, even for normal sex, so we both had that. It was always present, whenever we were at his place or my place. We both still lived at home, when we started out.
But his parents were liberal, as was my mom. 
I was already used to owning condoms, even though I was a virgin. I had been single for half a year, before “recruiting” Bear. Losing my virginity had been on my agenda.
And from Bear I learned to use lubricant, which I found funny at first. What would a teen use lubricant for? But he explained that it would help the first time be less painful. And that he liked using it.

I remember that he was completely unmoved by my attempt to mock him for owning it!
And once I understood how he used it, I was embarrassed and felt immature for laughing about it. 
Because he was so nice.

What Bear started doing, right from the very beginning (we saw each other a few times before we went all the way), was finger me.
But not the hugging and touching and fingering, fingering, what I would call normal fingering.
But he would lay me down, naked or without panties (half-naked), and I would lie there and he would inspect me like a doctor.
Oh my God, I still get wet just thinking about it!

He didn’t play doctor, he just did it that way. With us detached, him sitting between my legs on the bed, the floor or next to me on the side of the bed. And he fingered me with lube. Sometimes he would talk to me, ask me how it felt. But that was only in the beginning, because I didn’t really know how to respond.
It felt awkward, to get that kind of attention. I just remember that this fingering too, was something he only did in the first years. And he didn’t do that the last time we were together either, but he did do something that was similar, the oral sex, more on that later.

But anyway, when I was a virgin the doctor like fingering sessions served a clear purpose. 
Firstly because they made me incredibly horny. I think that’s also the reason I was embarrassed by them, and didn’t quite know how to respond. Isn’t that strange? Even in bed, with a man who is clearly trying his best to make me horny, I feel so horny that I think that is no longer appropriate.
Guilty for just lying there, not having to do anything.

No doubt aided by the fingering, losing my virginity went really well. I never had any pain, and I loved feeling him inside of me so much. It was so wonderful. The closest to another human being I ever felt.
Last time too, it felt so good.
It was like his dick was bigger, I could feel him so clearly. And when I was sitting on top of him, resting, he moved his dick inside of me, and that was so special.
I m sure he has done that before, but it felt so great.

The fingering stayed on, after I was no longer a virgin. And I bought lubricant, for when we were at my place.
So lubricant was always present, and I think this was another reason why for us the step to anal sex may have been easier than for other teens.
But we did started doing it pretty early on. But it stopped after the first three years.

In hindsight I think it was the moment Bear started to realize he wanted a family, and that he didn’t want to be in what we had forever. That it was great for the college years but that he was going to look for what he wanted.
That’s when we stopped having anal sex and also when that type of fingering stopped.

I realize now that I m saying many contradictory things in this letter. I m sorry! I m just figuring it out as I go. But if I wrap up the timeline of our sex life, is that the first years were the best, and then the most intimate acts just didn’t get played anymore.
I thought it was due to the normal thing that happens when you know each other for a longer period of time. But because he broke up with me December 1994, in favor of a new girlfriend (and by then we had not had sex for 5 months), I think our sex life started waning because he was already saying goodbye.
And not because we were less excited by each other.

When I saw Bear last time, we both wanted to have anal sex again.
So we did.
And what was so cute, or very “Oh, I totally forgot about that!” was that we tried to do it more doggy style, from behind. And it hurt and I said, let’s just do it the normal way.
So in missionary but then anal sex.
And this was exactly reminiscent of the first time we had anal sex when he wanted to do/ try in what I think must be the normal way to do it, but I said I wanted it to be missionary. So missionary it was.

But this time, we tried it in doggy, but it just hurt. It was unpleasant, so I broke it off and said something like: “Just do it the normal way,” meaning our normal way, which I had forgotten was our normal way. 
So I turned around on my back and invited him on top of me.
And I pulled my legs up a bit so he could see where he was going! 
And it was absolutely magical.

The first bit was scary. You got a thousand thoughts going through in your head, and fear it’s going to hurt. It goes so slow, sometimes you think there is no progress at all. And again that word “embarrassing”. It’s very intimate, to be together in that not knowing.  
And knowing your ass is the bottleneck factor here! Oh my God I m laughing out loud as I type this. This is ridiculous, but that is how it feels. 
There is a lot at stake, and you don’t want to be the deal breaker, yet you can’t control it or do anything about it. It’s either going to work, or it isn’t.

But it did, and we could both feel it. It was like everything, all the stupid years of not doing this, faded. It was the moment we were really together. 
I smiled and he smiled to, and then he did something he had never done: He pushed it in further and started fucking me. I can’t believe he dared to do that, but it was so wonderful.
It was one of those things that if he had asked me upfront I would never have dared to agree to it, and perhaps I would have tightened up just from asking.
But he just did it. Nothing rough, and I don’t know how to say it in a way that expresses that I know I m totally safe with him and that the reason it is so good is because he would immediately feel it probably even before I did, if I was not enjoying it.
But it was so wonderful.

Fuck, it makes me cry.
What a fucked up mess, to then part afterwards. I think I m beginning to understand why I can’t make myself pick up my diary and write this down.
So we had anal sex longer, deeper and also more connected than ever.
It was a remembrance to who we were as a couple, that we did this and we did it facing each other. I know melting together as one, sounds corny and probably is corny but that’s what it was. But I felt that was when we were reborn as a couple. Corny too, I know.
You re just going to have a find a way to forgive me for the Harlequin vocabulary.

Only then it turned out he was not single and he’s back with her now.
And I look at that Madonna book, that had the job of keeping my sexuality alive through 1995, and I just know that I have to get back to that, or to something else that allows me to be sexual without him.
But I fail so often.

There was a dildo I really wanted to buy, but I just couldn’t. It was mail order, the brochure still comes in here from the man who used to live here.  Maybe that I can see his name, is adding to me feeling uncomfortable buying. Then the tenant after me will know my name from brochures that keep coming.
And it was just so disheartening that I m back to square one.

Back to denying my own sexuality, and needing him to choose me in order for it to be alright to be a sexual person.
But you know what Nikki? What makes it so sad?
That I am denying my own sexuality, in response to him denying me a relationship.

As soon as I know or realize I am still single and we are not together, I can’t claim or enjoy what happened anymore. I feel so rejected, I reject my own sexuality. 

I deliberately saved the oral sex part for last.
Because I didn’t want to end on a low, with me feeling like I have to start all over again restoring my sexuality. Even though that is how I feel. But that is not what I want this letter to be about.

We were at his friend’s place, and this was the first time we were at “his” house and he had a bedroom, because we used to be students and then you only have one room. 
So he asked me: “Do you want to go to the bedroom?” when we were kissing on the couch. 
He is such a good kisser. The boyfriend I had before him was also an amazing kisser, and I think I learned it from him. That first boyfriend was the best kisser in the world (I was also single and kissed with people then, Nikki!) And yet I prefer Bear to the first boyfriend, because Bear is much more sexual.
Or at least, sexual in a way that I understand.
Like, when I am kissing him I constantly hear the beat of drum beneath! And the drums say:
“Just say when.”
Bear is the best kisser in the world, because his kissing is part of his whole sexual availability to you. So I understand him better.

So he asked if I wanted to go to the bedroom, and I said yes, but instead of taking my hand and taking me there, which I would have found to use a German term “zum kotzen” (I actually considered taking the couch to avoid such an unerotic moment of him taking my hand) he said:
“I’ll go first, you come after. But naked. Leave your clothes outside.”
He had already gotten up and was heading to the bedroom, not making eye contact. So he didn’t ask if I agreed or anything. It was the absolute opposite of taking my hand, like a cheeseball.

I had a huge grin on my face, as I undressed, and left my clothes in the living.

I came in and he was there, also naked. And we started kissing and he said something about how he loved my body and “look at yourself, at how gorgeous you are”.
I gained a lot of weight, since I was 17! But I agree it does look great on me. But it still makes me feel a bit uneasy. It’s very strange to live in a body, that still doesn’t feel like how you remembered it to be. Maybe that’s why I want to lose the weight, because I don’t want to get used to it.
But the only place those kilos never felt out of place was in the bedroom.
There they have always been exactly right.

So he admired my body, and I his, and I gave him a blowjob but more a pre-sex blowjob. Not an all the way blowjob.  It was too soon for that anyway. 
The first time we had sex this year, I took him in my mouth so many times, my jaws started hurting. It was great to have that feeling of being used and being used up! 
But now we kept it civil. It was just a relaxing blowjob with him on his back, and me also licking the whole area around. I usually let him decide if he wants me to continue or stop, and I imagine that was this as well.
And then he went down on me.
And it was a bit like the fingering, in that he instructed me to lie down, and I just lay there. And he told me what to do which was pull my legs up.
As wide as I could.
I thought I was going to die! Figuratively, but it was so open, exposed. Like I wanted to just disappear.
And then he went down on me, and started giving me oral sex, which was so incredibly good.

It took me until typing this letter to realize why that was, and that the two were related. Because I felt so exposed and part of me (a big part!) did not want to be there in that position, that’s why the oral sex was so sweet.
It’s like what Madonna says in Erotica: Only the one that inflicts pain, can take it away.

But then I m alone again, and it’s so difficult to remember the pleasure, and the embarrassing moments or the vulnerable moments melt together with the pain of not being chosen.
And I see the Madonna book SEX, knowing that I will be needing that a lot.
That even though it is no longer 1995, and I have made up my mind that I ll count my blessings in whatever form they come, I will need some kind of outer reminder that I am a sexual being.

That I am more than just rejected by Bear.
That in the moments that count the most, I was never rejected.

And that we did it right.

.
~Lauren96
An unexamined life is not worth living