Page 38 of Off the Pitch

As soon as the words left my mouth, I realised the mistake I’d made. It was, quite possibly, one of the stupidest things I’d ever said. The ceiling suddenly became the most interesting thing in the room, but I could feel Lily’s eyes boring into me like some sort of Eye of Sauron. I was screwed.

“Christian Adam King, are you telling me you two haven’t fucked yet?”

“Maybe?” I said, but even to my ears I could tell that it was a bald-faced lie.

“Why the hell not? He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. How could you not climb that?” Lily’s voice was disbelieving, and I assumed her face looked the same.

“I… I just, well… I—I mean we…” Nothing I said was going to make this any better, so perhaps it was better to say nothing. That was good logic, right? David and I had agreed to take it slowly, at my pace. Although we’d gone as far as that amazing hand job in his bedroom after Winter Wonderland, we’d mostly just stuck to kissing and the odd bit of groping.

I’ll admit that I’d thought about taking it further, but I hadn’t quite worked out how to bring that up in casual conversation without dying of embarrassment.

“Babe.” Lily’s voice was soft, but there was a firm edge which told me I was not going to be able to escape this. “Talk to me. Are you not sexually attracted to him? Do you not want to have sex with him?”

“No—I mean, yes. I am sexually attracted to him,” I mumbled. That wasn’t a problem at all, if my awkward erections every time he touched me were anything to go by. “We’re just taking it slowly.”

“Uh-huh. Why? It’s not like you don’t know him.”

“Because that’s what we decided on.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Chrissie.”

“I’m not. It’s the truth.”

“Omitting things is lying,” Lily fired back, fixing me with a hard stare that I couldn’t avoid. “Is there a problem? Talk to me.”

“It’s because I’m a virgin,” I snapped, wishing the earth would open up and swallow me whole.

The was a pause, my words echoing in the silence. “Oh.”

“Yes, ‘oh’. Are you happy now?”

“But I thought… when you were younger?” Lily’s voice now had an edge of incredulity, and honestly, I wasn’t sure what was worse.

“Nope… just, umm… just kisses and a few blow jobs,” I said, my face burning.

“But after you broke up? Didn’t you ever find anyone else?”

“No! If I wasn’t going to do it with David, I wasn’t going to find some randomer! What if they told someone I was gay? I could lose everything.”

Lily sighed, snuggling up to me under the blanket and pulling me into a tight hug. “Putting aside your horrible gay-panic issues, you’ve really never had sex?”

“Nope.”

“Have you told him?”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “That’s why we’re taking it slowly. David wants me to be comfortable with everything.”

“Well, that’s something.” Lily sounded happier about that, but I could hear her gearing up for another round of questions. “Why—”

“Can we please just drop this?”

“Fine, but we’re not done talking about this.” I highly suspected that was true, but that was a problem for future Christian to deal with. Present-moment Christian was quite happy to forget this entire conversation had ever happened. At least I could pretend I still had some of my dignity intact.

“Just one more question,” Lily said. My stomach sank faster than a lead balloon. “How much do you know about anal sex?”

Apparently, whatever I’d thought I’d known about gay sex was a teeny tiny drop in the ocean of lube.

I was currently looking at the long list of ‘helpful articles’ Lily had sent me overnight. I wondered whether she’d actually slept while I stared, with a growing feeling of horror, at an article about how to give yourself a thorough anal cleaning in less than thirty minutes.

---