As you know I’ve taken a few days to figure out what to write here. Before I write it, I need to establish a few facts that some readers might know and some might not.

1. I was a virgin when I met C and had basically never been touched by a man before. Kisses during spin the bottle in middle school were more or less the extent of it.

2. Because of this, I have changed a lot sexually in the time that I’ve been with C (3 and a half years now).

3. He and I have decided that our relationship doesn’t need to be monogamous to be lasting as long as we communicate. At this point it doesn’t seem like he is that interested in other partners (my libido is *way* stronger than his).

Okay, with that exposition out of the way, I can tell my news.

I met an amazing man and between Monday and Wednesday we spent an awful lot of time together and it was completely delicious. I’m having a lot of trouble deciding which facts to tell you about J and what details to relay because so much seems significant. So, I’ll start at the beginning of our first date and go from there.

J and I had planned to meet up at a dessert place as we had both already eaten dinner at home. To be quite honest, the first bit of time together felt awkward. But it felt awkward in a very good way. The nervous tension didn’t seem to come from having nothing to say to eachother but rather way too much and struggling with which words should make it out of our mouths. So, I did what I usually do in a situation like that. I put my mouth on auto-pilot in order to thrust the conversation forward. Of course my voicec gets high and nervous and I speak too quickly but given a mundane subject (“all about my cats”, “specific details of a meal I ate in Turkey”, “why people in my library science classes are idiots”, etc.) I can craft a nearly endless stream of speech to fill any conversational lull. Doesn’t it sound charming?

Amazingly, J thought it was charming and mistook my anxious verbal diarhea for intelligence. When the restaurant closed up, we didn’t want to part for the night and moved onto a bar and then another bar which we managed to close out. I want to make it clear at this point that alcohol had no impact on our evening. I had one drink in 2 hours at the first bar and sipped a drink at the second but forgot about it and left it more or less full. I was just too engaged in the conversation to pay attention to my cocktail.

After closing time at the bar, the night should have been over. Isn’t 6 hours plenty of time for a first date? No, it isn’t. We walked around the area for a moment, sitting down by a fountain and talking about where we could go next. Despite being January, it was incredibly warm outside, probably in the low fifties. So, I grabbed his hand and declared that I would take him on a walking tour of campus. J is relatively new to the area and hadn’t seen the campus before – I’ve been a student here for over 5 years and know the stories about all of the pretty 200-year-old buildings. We walked around holding hands forestalling the inevitable. I felt like there was electricity running through my body and my voice was audibly catching as I ran through the campus facts that I could conjure.

As we stood on the steps of built-in-the 1960s totalitarian monstrosity of a classroom building, I gestured to the dorm I lived in my freshman year. He was holding my hand and standing very near to me and I don’t know if he was looking at me or the building as I pointed out the illuminated roof and the revolving restaurant on top. My words ran out of steam as he began tracing his fingertips across the palm of my hand. I could feel my heart beating in my chest and was sure that it was so loud he could hear it as well. Just when the moment became too nervously delicious and unbearable to go on, he pulled me to him and kissed me.

I’d like to say there were immediate sparks and it was perfect and wonderful but I’m not quite there yet. As much as I had been waiting for that kiss, it sent my brain into a spin. My mind was going crazy for the first two minutes as I processed my reality, “Oh god,” I thought, “I’m kissing someone and it isn’t C. This isn’t how things are supposed to go! Shit, it feels sort of numb like kissing does in dreams. Why isn’t my body reacting to this? What is wrong? Maybe there isn’t chemistry between us after all! J’s lips feel different. Should I stop kissing him?”

It is no wonder that I couldn’t enjoy the kiss at first with all of these thoughts swirling through my head. And then the tension cracked. I don’t know what happened to cause it. Perhaps J pulled me closer or caressed my hair. He did something that pulled me out of my solipsistic internal monologue and reminded me to my body again. And here my body was, standing in the moonlight in the arms of an incredibly sexy and charming man and his mouth was on my mouth and it felt wonderful. I told my thoughts to shut up, I moaned into his lips and I melted.