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The other reason being guys like Toby, who thought sticking his tongue in a girl’s mouth was enough preamble to sticking his dick into her, too. Forget romance or anything approaching tenderness.
Susan moaned, “Wow, bummer! If you’d waited just a few weeks, you could have done it for the first time on your birthday, too. That would have been cool, having something like that in common.”
Her birthday would be perfect, Dinah thought. One of the things she’d wondered was whether Will thought she was too young, but on her birthday she was turning seventeen, and he was still eighteen for a few more months. Officially, only one year older than her until summer.
Immediately scheming, she realized she would never be able to tell her best friends when she did finally have sex with Will, now that she’d lied. No, maybe someday she could, when they were old, like maybe thirty, and still best friends and could laugh about her being totally humiliated to still be a virgin when she was ready to turn seventeen.
Her birthday was on Thursday, but her party was planned for Friday night. Thursday would be for family, and for Will.
Mom invited Will to dinner—by this time, he practically was family—and he was there when Dinah blew out seventeen candles on her cake. Then she opened her presents. Mom and Dad gave her a shirt that was actually okay, and a promise that Mom would take her shopping for a dress to wear to Will’s senior prom.
Stephen was disgusted. “I can’t believe you’re going to the prom. Nobody goes but the cheerleaders and jocks.”
Will didn’t act insulted. “I guess I’m a jock.”
Dinah stuck out her tongue at her brother. “It’ll be fun. You’re just skipping yours because nobody’ll go with you.”
Stephen was a senior at Half Moon Bay High School. It was a little bit irritating, following him through school. Teachers always remembered Stephen, because he had a big mouth. Fortunately, after a couple of weeks they’d forget she was Stephen Gallagher’s little sister, because she was an A student and always good. Nauseatingly good, according to him.
He gave her the new Grateful Dead album she’d been wanting. Will’s present was a paring knife, which brought puzzled looks from her family.
“Will knows I like to cook,” she said. “Chefs have their own sets.”
“Oh.” Her mother smiled. “How thoughtful.”
Her father scowled. Of course, he wouldn’t approve of anyone “encouraging” her in such an unsuitable ambition.
Stephen, of course, looked disgusted. He probably thought Will should have given her some really high-quality LSD, right in front of Mom and Dad.
“Smothers Brothers is on,” Mom said. “If you two would like to watch with us.”
But they were okay with it when Dinah said they thought they’d go out. “I did my algebra problems right after school,” she said, anticipating any objections.
Once they were in Will’s car, she suggested they just go to his house. “Your parents will be bowling, right?”
“Yeah, they won’t be home until nine.” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “We can do anything we want.”
She wriggled over to snuggle against him. “I know what I want to do.”
They kissed, right there in front of her house even though it wasn’t dark yet. Then Will drove faster than usual, slowing down only along Devil’s Slide, the stretch between Montara and Pacifica where Highway 101 had been carved out of a cliff high above the ocean. The sharpest curves always scared Dinah. The guardrail wouldn’t keep a car from plunging over the cliff and onto the rocks where the surf crashed dizzyingly far below.
Will lived in a development where all the houses looked alike, stucco-sided and two stories on small lots mostly landscaped with palm trees, red or shiny white gravel and swaths of ice plant in bloom. Will’s mother had planted bougainvillea in their yard that climbed up to the second-story balcony and smothered the railing with purple flowers. Without that vine, if Will had parked in the driveway of the houses on either side, Dinah would have headed for the front door without noticing they were at the wrong place.
They left his bedroom door ajar so they could hear in case his parents came home early for some reason. Will flopped on the bed and drew her down atop him. They made out, his hands roving up and down her back and even squeezing her butt. But the moment came, as it always did, when he turned his mouth from hers and rolled to one side, so she no longer lay astride him.
“Um, maybe we should…”
She took a deep breath for courage. “Why do you always stop?”
He froze for what had to be ten seconds. Then, voice hoarse, he said, “You don’t want me to?”
Suddenly shy, Dinah shook her head, her hair falling over her face to shield the heat in her cheeks. “Not anymore,” she whispered.
His hand on her upper arm tightened. “You’re sure?”
She nodded. “I am seventeen now.”
“Yeah. Wow.” He sounded dazed. “Have you ever…you know?”
She shook her head again and buried her face against his shoulder. “Have you?”
“Um…yeah. A few times.”
He still hadn’t made a move. Dinah mumbled, “If you don’t want to right now, that’s okay. I mean, I just thought I’d tell you…”
“Not want to? Are you kidding?” He rolled abruptly so that, this time, his upper body pinned her down and she couldn’t avoid looking at him. “I just thought…I mean, you seemed shy. I didn’t want to, like, scare you away.” He tucked her hair behind her ears, his fingers lingering. “I have some condoms down in my car. In the glove compartment. Will you wait here?”
Emboldened, she lifted her head and kissed his jaw. “I’m on the pill.”
“Really?”
“After I met you, I started complaining every month about my cramps. So Mom was okay with it.”
Will was still laughing when his mouth claimed hers. Almost immediately he began to tug at her clothes. She tried to help, and they whacked their noses against each other, both of them laughing again even though they had tears in their eyes, too.
Then he spotted his bedside clock and exclaimed, “Damn! We need to kind of hurry. It’s not that long until my parents get home.”
So they did, shedding clothes and eyeing each other shyly but with rapt interest, kissing deeply, Will thrusting his thickened penis against her. Even after she parted her legs, it took some fumbling on his part to find her opening.
When he pushed, Dinah felt first pressure, then pain. When she stiffened, he went still.
“Are you okay?” He was breathless.
She managed a nod, although her teeth were clenched.
“Because I can stop.”
“Do you want to?”
“No!”
“Then…then just do it!”
So he did, and she felt as if her innards were being ripped open. She panted while he pumped a couple of times, then jerked and collapsed on her. Even when his penis shrank and slipped out of her, she kept hurting.
Wounded and indignant, she thought, Why didn’t anybody tell me it was so bad the first time? Christina and Susan had giggled about losing their virginity! And “J,” the author of The Sensuous Woman—which they’d all passed around and Dinah, at least, had read with a flashlight under the bedcovers so her mother wouldn’t see the book—didn’t say anything about how you had to just lie there rigid the first time and hope sex wasn’t always like that. Because if it was, who’d want to do it again?
“I’m sorry,” Will said. “I didn’t know it would be so hard to push through your, um…”
“What?” she snapped. “Or you wouldn’t have done it?” She rolled away to hide her tears.
He was quiet for a minute. Then, voice low, he said, “I wanted you so much. But maybe you weren’t ready.”
“I was!” she cried, turning back to him, her face wet. “I just didn’t know it would hurt so much!”
His eyes were a rich, dark blue, and so kind she cried harder. “It’s not supposed to hurt ever again.” Then he said, “Oh, crap!” and jackknifed to a sitting position.
Dinah heard it, too, the sound of the garage door being opened. “Oh, God, I’m a mess!”
She jumped up, grabbed her clothes and raced down the hall for the bathroom. There she cleaned herself up, got dressed and washed her face over and over. While using a brush she found in a drawer to smooth her hair, she stared at herself in the mirror in despair. Her face was still blotchy, her nose red and her eyes puffy. But she couldn’t stay in here forever!
Finally she just walked out. Will was already in the living room, talking to his parents like nothing was any different. Glancing over his shoulder at her as she came down the hall, he said, “I’d better take Dinah home.”
At the sight of him, lanky and reassuring and, oh, just Will, her eyes welled with tears again.
“I’m sorry,” she said to his mom and dad. Inspiration came to her. “I just…I heard this guy I knew in school was hurt really badly in Vietnam. And I was telling Will, and…” She fled back to the bathroom for a tissue.
When she came back out, they were really nice. That made her feel guilty for lying to them, so she cried again once she and Will were in his car driving away from the house.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” She mopped her tears.
“Do you wish we hadn’t made love?”
“No! That’s not it.”
But it was why she couldn’t seem to stop crying, Dinah realized. She had this huge iron cauldron of emotions bubbling inside her, and it was hard to separate one from another. She closed her eyes and imagined herself cooking a stew, skimming one emotion after another from the top. Disillusionment, because the experience had been pretty awful. And mixed in like pepper, stinging, was some fear that it had been such a comedown for Will, he wouldn’t want to be with her anymore.
In her mind, she kept skimming, trying to identify fleeting whiffs of emotion. Despite the tears, she felt exhilaration because she’d done it and she wasn’t a virgin anymore. Guilt because she had to hide the fact that she was a woman from her mother, who was living in the fifties or maybe even the forties and really, really thought her daughter might wait until her wedding night. And sadness, because Dinah couldn’t talk to anyone, not her mom and not her two best friends. She felt grief, too, as if she’d lost something meaningful although she didn’t know what that was.
“I’m a mess,” she said aloud.
Will took his hand off the steering wheel to clasp hers. “Yeah, but I love you anyway.”
“Do you?” She searched his face. “I mean, really? You’re not disappointed in me?”
He gave her a smile of such sweetness, it pierced her heart. “That’s insane! Why would I be disappointed? You chose me to be the first guy ever. That’s, like, the most amazing gift.”
“Oh.” Something eased inside. “Next time will be different.”
“Yeah.” He grinned at her. “You’ll see.”
She pictured his body, even skinnier than he looked in clothes, but also the jut of his erection, not skinny at all, and actually felt a buttery-soft melting low in her belly.
He pulled up in front of her house. She scooted over, kissed him quickly and whispered, “I can hardly wait to find out,” then jumped from the car, slammed the door and raced up her driveway.
Chapter 2
As Will put away the last plates and hung up the wet dishtowel, his mother let the water drain out of the sink and turned to him with an especially bright smile he knew was fake.
“So, do you and Dinah have plans tonight?”
Wary, he shrugged. “We’ll probably just hang out. Maybe go over to Miguel’s. Some guys are jamming tonight.”
She gave a delicate shudder. “It’ll be a wonder if any of you have any hearing left by the time you’re thirty.”
Will rolled his eyes. Like anybody worried about what would happen when they were thirty!
“Didn’t you see Dinah last night?” his mother asked. “You two seem to get together every day.”
“So?” He stared back at her, not giving an inch. “It’s summer.”
“But you have to get up so early for work. You look tired, honey. Why don’t you stay home tonight and get a good night’s sleep?”
Aching to escape, he repeated, “It’s summer. I’m supposed to be having fun.”
“You’re supposed to be working and saving up for college.”
“I am working, and saving. Does that mean I can’t do anything else?”
“I’m not saying that.” She came to him and smiled, patting his cheek, oblivious to how he stiffened. “But you have other friends. It doesn’t seem like you ever see them anymore. What about Alan? What’s he up to these days?”
“Hanging out with his girlfriend.”
“Now, don’t sound so testy,” she admonished. “You know your father and I think the world of Dinah—she’s such a nice girl. But we worry that you’re getting too serious about each other, considering you’re only nineteen and still have college ahead of you before you can even consider getting married.”
Frustration buffeted him. He took a step back from her. “College?” His voice was too loud, and he saw her eyes widen. “What about the draft? Have you forgotten that? They’re saying they might get rid of the student deferment. You know, I might have to go to Vietnam. I might come home in a body bag. So excuse me if I want to live a little first, okay?”
He walked out, his stomach churning. His parents lived in some pretend world where nice boys and girls followed the life plan laid out for them and didn’t have to worry about shit like getting sent involuntarily overseas to shoot women and babies in little villages carved out of the jungle. They needed to get a clue.
With it being August now, the late afternoon was warm. Most days, fog massed offshore, ready to roll in by four o’clock, but today the sky stayed clear. When he picked Dinah up, he said, “Do you really want to go to Miguel’s? My mom was hassling me, and I don’t feel like a party.”
Dinah smiled at him, her eyes soft, and shook her head. Her hair, almost reaching her waist now, shimmered like a length of satin. She had the prettiest hair he’d ever seen, the color between moonlight-blond and pale peach. She had a redhead’s freckles, too, but like her hair they were pale, scattered across her nose and cheeks, and on her chest. In contrast her stomach and breasts were creamy white, and the freckles she said she had on her shoulders and legs were lost in the tan she’d acquired from lifeguarding all summer at the high school swimming pool.
“Let’s go over to the Point,” she suggested. “We can just walk on the beach.”
The Point was a finger of land that jutted at an angle, forming a natural bay that had been further enclosed with a stone breakwater to shelter fishing boats. A military radar dish dominated the high wedge of land, but a rutted dirt road allowed local access to the wild stretch of beach on the other side.
“Why don’t you grab a blanket and some matches,” he suggested. “Maybe we can have a fire later.”
Will’s was the only car when they reached the top and were able to see the Pacific Ocean stretching onto the curve of the horizon and farther. They had to hike down a switchbacking trail to reach the beach below, where driftwood flung ashore by winter storms nestled against the cliff. The waves surged in a rhythm that felt eternal.
Not talking much, Will and Dinah walked along the pebbly beach until they found a spot between the water-worn stump of a giant tree and a crisscross of silver-gray logs. He spread the blanket there, and they lay quietly, her head on his shoulder, watching the sun sink toward the horizon.
It was no more than a fiery orange half circle when Dinah asked, “What was your mother hassling you about?”
“College. Filling out applications. Saving money to pay tuition.” He was silent for a moment. “She thinks we’re seeing too much of each other. She doesn’t understand.”
Her hand found his and squeezed. “That our generation knows we may not have forever, the way they thought they did.”
