The breaking of the hymen part 1 - condoms

I had bought the condoms.

He made me buy the condoms.

"You are the one who wants to have sex," he told me, "you buy the condoms". Which seemed only fair until I was standing at the counter at the chemist with a packet of condoms in my hand. I thought that they could smell my hymen. I had that whiff of virginity about me. I wanted it to be the woman who served me, but of course it was the man and I handed him the packed, making sure I met his gaze, staring directly into his eyes as if my heart wasn't thudding out my panic. I didn't even know what condoms looked like really. I didn't even know what a penis would look like.

I had already felt his penis through his trousers. I had felt it in the cinema, my hand sneaking over the armrest, spilling popcorn into my own lap, shivery fingers into his. I touched it and learned that it was made of impossible dimensions. Even my longest fattest candle at home didn't seem quite so long and thick. I had never anticipated putting something so volumous inside my body, but the hymen must be broken somehow. The virginity must be dispensed with. I made him pay half the money because surely that was fair and I stood at the counter and eyeballed the middle-aged man and silently dared him to ask me anything about my purchase of those condoms.

"I bought the condoms" I told him. He was a tall boy, six foot five, and I was a midget beside him. He played basketball and hung around a group of boys who also played basketball. He had a voice that was strangely hoarse as if he had been shouting for a long time, and yet he always spoke in an almost whisper. Sometimes I wondered if he had developed polyps on his throat from singing in the musicals. We sang together.

On stage we had to kiss and with the lights and the excitement of the audience watching, I opened my mouth to the stage-kiss and let his tongue settle against my soft palate and kept him kissing me until the music started for the next song. I was forced to drag myself away to let him sing.

I discovered that I liked to kiss. It was my first kiss, that open-mouthed one in front of a packed audience of mums and dads. The kiss dissolved the artifice between the play and life and later, at the after party, I walked straight towards him and I kissed him again. We had barely said a word to each other outside rehearsals. He liked to play sport. I liked to play the oboe and Dungeons & Dragons, and backgammon. There was no possible subject for a conversation between us, and yet here we were, kissing, and the heat of that kiss traveled down into my stomach and settled there, butting against my hymen like a demon child desperate to be released from it's imprisonment.