this is a chapter of a book i'm working on about a virgin's adventures in sex.

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I am in an airport and there is vomit creeping up my throat. The terminal is full of arrivals and departures, numbers, plenty of numbers, digits upon digits. I hate all of these figures, the sixes and ones and sevens swirling around me. The vomit is pushing at the very back of my mouth, it is like two fingers up against the tonsils.

I do not remember which city I have just left.

I stumble out into the heat of New Orleans and I can feel the south on my skin, clinging, and the sweat explodes out of my pores in rapid time. I am as dizzy as a child who has just spun around too many times, arms out. I suddenly feel as if I am wearing a wet t-shirt, a humid dampness clinging to me, it is on my legs and arms and hands and throat.

My head continues to dance erratically. My eyes pulse as I scan the parking lot for an empty place, an unpopulated area of asphalt to heave my heart onto. The pavement is shining, glittering; it is a never ending sequined dress under my feet. I push past an old black woman who is speaking with a thick accent, it sounds like Jambalaya, a dozen cultures stewed together until I can't place any of them.

My legs continue moving, I am on autopilot, pushing myself to a small black square of privacy where I fall to my knees and my mouth bursts open, spewing out the contents of my stomach onto the steaming macadam. The nerves pour out of me, bile-flavored anxiety, the contents of my stomach rushing into the hot air, the stench everywhere and moist.

I think I am in love.

My knees burn from the asphalt, indentations of the roughness embedded in the skin. I think of being young, crashing my new bike the day after my birthday, speeding down a giant hill in my neighborhood until I hit a wet patch from the neighbors' hose, and flipped over my bike. I spent weeks covered in bruises. I can almost feel them again, on my knees. There are still tiny stones buried in the skin there, little pieces of memory, reminders.

The smell is hovering, covering my mouth, it is in my nose, I know that I will taste like vomit when he kisses me and so I slip a stick of gum into my mouth and chew, replacing the taste of puke with spearmint. I light a cigarette and try to reason with myself. He will not notice that I smell like Parliaments. I will notice that he smells like Marlboros. It will make me love him more.

I make my way through the parking lot, planes taking off and landing behind me and I know that I must look like a mess, a horror in a painstakingly picked outfit; something I knew would accentuate my tits and pull him in. I know that when I vomit, my eyes go red. I maybe have blood-shot, demon eyes. This cannot be attractive.

I find him in parking lot B. From far away, he is even more beautiful; I want to touch him from eight parking spaces away, I wish that my arms were miles long so that I could feel him right now, I do not know what is wrong with me, my fingers are itching to touch his jaw, to search his eyes for this one thing that I think that he has. He is tall, so tall that when I stand in front of him, I have to look up at him, as if he is my father. He is closely tied to this memory of being four years old in the kitchen, picked up into adult hands and placed on the top of the refrigerator, legs dangling while I giggled until my face went red and I kept saying Again, again.

He is wearing cargo shorts and a t-shirt, it doesn't matter, I notice his clothes but I don't care, I am pushing my legs to meet him, everything else is just a barely noticed detail. It has been two months, and I need his lips, I am already trembling, it is disgusting. His hands are around my waist. It is not a perfect waist. I am embarrassed that he is touching it, but I am concentrating on his mouth, it is a smooth pink mouth, his lips, his tongue, he tastes like cool metal and nicotine, my hands sliding up the back of his neck to find his brown hair, a color I can feel through my fingertips, he is vibrant.

"Hello, Ming Poon" he says, softly, almost into my neck. It is my pet name, we have Kung-Fu pet names. This seems romantic at the time. It is really drug-addled foolishness.

"Hello, Pon Wong" I say. I cannot force any other words out of my mouth. I want to impress him, tell him I love him. I want to explode because he is touching me. The words are in my mouth like a traffic jam, my lips wrapped around a million honking clichés, car bumpers in my teeth. And so I do not say anything.

He hails a cab. In the taxi, there are hot and dusty leather seats and he is looking at me as if he cannot believe I am real and I imagine that all of my dirty thoughts and love-lust are written on my face, eyes like the front page of a newspaper. His hand is on my thigh and it is all I can do to contain the wetness between my legs. It has already started.

The sun is setting as we are steered through the city streets. He tugs on my wrist and palms a little white pill to me. Against my skin, the pill is powdery. On my tongue, it tastes pale and thick, like chalk. I swallow it dry. I know what to do. We always do this.

The little particles of hydrocodone begin to hitch rides on the blood cells working their way throughout my body, miniature tourists, into my empty stomach and then out into my veins, a slow, giant, white firework. The southern sky is turning purple above us. The colors are fading, they are soft, I want to reach up and touch them.

I am in a floating haze by the time we check into a hotel on the river. The room, this time, is on the second floor. We have inhabited many different floors, different cities, different hotels. I have a collection of the keys, the plastic credit-card-kind with thin black strips that make the doors beep. I have keys from Las Vegas, San Diego and Philadelphia.

In Las Vegas, I got a bloody nose in the penthouse from the cocaine. It was just the two of us standing in a Bellagio hotel room, railing lines off of flat surfaces. He leaned down and sniffed deeply in Vegas. He said that good blow tastes like bananas, not nail polish remover, and this, this tasted like bananas. He grabbed my ass while I bent down to sniff my line and made me laugh, sending the coke across the table in flurries, and he laughed into my neck, pulling me down to him, down into the snow.

Later, in Vegas, I slid him into my mouth, the city turning into a sparkling backdrop for his orgasm. I don't remember how long it took for him to come, just the feeling of his hand on the back of my head, showing me this rhythm that he liked, the taste of the skin and the sweat and the blow in the back of my throat.

I was nineteen years old then. I am twenty years old now.

Sometimes, in some cities, my love turned me shy. Some nights, he would turn hard against my leg and I would slide down his chest to find the length of him, wrapping my lips around the firmness, slipping my tongue against his skin. I would begin to think how much I loved him, become panicked at the thought of it, the nightmare of a wedding ring and children erupting in my mind violently while he was in my mouth, and the terror would make me gag, make me push him away, wipe the spit from my lips.

The best way to make a man stop loving you is to give him half of a blow job. So far, I had chalked up two failed attempts in San Diego and Philadelphia and one successful maneuver in Vegas.

In Louisiana, the hotel room is impeccably decorated. It is full of shining mirrors and clean sheets. It is like a movie here. There are perfect lawns beneath our windows and the air conditioning evaporates the sweat from our skin immediately.

He sits down on the bed and tugs me onto his lap.

We both light cigarettes.

"How was your flight?" he is asking a timid question.

"It was fine" I tell him and I am bored with my own answer. Every time we find each other again, we go through the monotonous task of reestablishing a connection. It doesn't take much for me. His eyelashes and sharp nose are enough for me, the color of his eyes are the intimacy, they are blue-grey, they are guns, steel. I can invent the rest, fill him in like a sketch. I don't need much to go on.

He runs a finger down my leg, and wraps his hand around my ankle as we both inhale, exhale. I cannot look him in the eyes, I am sure I will catch fire if I do, I am terrified again, I want him naked, inside of me, I am frightened to feel him there. I feel as if the entire life of my vagina has built up to this point, to him.

I force myself to look at him and slide my hand up to his face, there is stubble, he has not shaved for me. I am not sure if this is a sign of rejection. In retrospect, I know that no twenty-eight year old man could ever reject a twenty year old virgin. If I had known this at the time, I would have wielded it over his head until he wept. He is lucky. I am dim.

We know what we are here for. His hand works its way around my back, his fingertips sliding against me, and then he slips his palm beneath my shirt, rubbing the skin space between the fabrics. I think I am already trembling. I giggle to cover it up. This maybe feels like dying. His lips are on my throat.

I find his mouth and suck on his tongue, my hands around his neck and shoulders, pushing against him because I would devour every part of him if he would just let me, I would fill my mouth with the cloth of his t-shirt, chew on his shoulder, I am maybe a cannibal, it is horrible, each cell of my body turning into a tiny piece of lust that I cannot control. His mouth is on my earlobes, my collarbone, the curve before my breast. I am sure he will rip my shirt open, he is biting my nipple through my bra, and I am so wet that I am afraid I will slip off of his lap. I want him to touch me, I want him to know that it is like torture between my legs. I am under his hands, arching and twisting, tiny groans out of my mouth, sounds I only make with him.

The hardness is in his jeans, under my legs, I can feel it just before my breasts feel the cool air and he slides me off of his lap and under him, on the bed. My heart feels as if it is on amphetamines, twirling circles and stomping through my rib cage. Under my skin, I feel soft, pliable, covered in the white pill. The ceiling is thick with texture.

I slide off his shirt and then we are not people, we are only skin and more skin, and he is so warm, so perfect, his skin, beneath my hands, we are a combination of groans and sighs and he is sliding his mouth over my shoulders and then my breasts and then his head is down where my stomach is, and his fingers are sliding up my thighs, and I am moaning, I cannot take it, I want him to take my virginity, I want him to fuck me without asking. I do not want to be a lady. If I were a woman I would yell Fuck me Fuck me Fuck me right now, in this hotel room, and know that I meant it, but my hymen silences the lust, I am terrified of what I will turn into if he is inside of me. I know that I want the parting, the hurt. I do not want the aftermath. I am sure that I will decompose or disappear or find myself digging through his trashcans at night.

The underwear, my underwear, are brand new. I bought them from a store for him, they are intricate black satin and mesh with lace trim falling down to the place where my thighs meet my hips. He nibbles on the side of my stomach as he slides them off, he moves my body gently and I cannot help him, my muscles are sedated, I am floating somewhere by the ceiling fan again. He has not noticed the panties or the ripple. Ten dollars, wasted, that is what I think while he slides them off of me --- and then there is a pause as his fingers finally reach that place between my legs, the holy Mecca, the mouth of the fucking volcano.

Until this exact moment, until his fingers hesitate to enter me, I am unaware that my pubic hair is an unacceptable afro pussy, it is the kind of pubic hair in Playboy magazines circa 1980, the kind of pubic hair people had before I was even born. It is the pubic hair of women in platform shoes with feathered hair. It is quite possibly the same exact pubic hairstyle that my mother had when she gave birth to me.

The brunette bush, perched above constantly shaven legs, had never stopped the other boys but I could feel it disgusted him, his hands sliding back up to my breasts, his cock pressed against my upper thigh. Embarrassed flushes across my chest, hives of humiliation building upon each other until I am sure I am covered in red. He tentatively slides one finger down to my crotch, one fingertip pushing through the tangles between my legs, followed by a second finger, determined to carry out the mission. I part my legs further, the hair expanding, as he navigates his way towards the slickest part of me.

He works his hand against me, his mouth still hot on mine, but I know I will not come. I cannot stop thinking about the African jungle between my legs. The humiliation stings on me like bees, my lips and chest bruised from his teeth and lips, my heart racing. Would he leave me because of this bush? Would this man, who should fuck my brains out, walk away from deflowering me all because I reminded him of an era that celebrated The Cure and Whammy?

His hand keeps pumping against me until his fingers cramp up and I do not orgasm. He slides his arm away from me and there is a sigh, a very small one.

He stands up, his erection deflating, and kneels down to reach into his pants pocket. I sit up and roll a dollar bill into a tight tube of green. There is the sound of a razor blade scratching against the dresser.
I lean down and cover the promise of vomit in the back of my throat with the taste of cocaine. I am in love.

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