My Brother’s Wedding: His Marriage Didn’t Last But At Least It Got Me Laid

My first kiss was so bad that it launched me into a months-long identity crisis. If I hated kissing women, did that mean I wasn’t actually a lesbian? I wouldn't have any clarity on this front until I was 700 miles away from home and sneaking away from my family multiple nights in a row to hook up with a complete stranger.

Coming to terms with the realization I was a queer in high school was not easy. In fact, it was deeply isolating. I knew one day I would move away from my hometown and feel the freedom to truly explore this beautiful side of my identity. But it hit me during the winter of my junior year of high school that, for the time being, I had to sit in this crushing loneliness.

 A few months after my first gay kiss in 2017, my brother got married in Charleston, South Carolina. My Dad balled out and booked a fancy hotel for my family, and each of my family members got our own hotel room.. We flew in on a Wednesday from New Jersey and my family was in their rooms asleep by 9pm. I was freshly eighteen and feeling bold. I felt weird about using dating apps in my hometown. Here though, nobody knew me. I started swiping on the dating app HER (don’t laugh) and the very first person I matched with invited me over to her place. Her name was Hannah. She had a short brown pixie cut and was a certified dyke. I eagerly accepted her invitation.

You may be thinking: “Nicole, you had a hotel room all to yourself, and yet you chose to go to someone else’s place? Why?” Truthfully, I don’t know. It’s like my mind went blank and the desperation for queer connection took over. This was finally my chance and I had to jump on it. So there I was, in the backseat of a Lyft, frantically Googling “how to have lesbian sex.” There were simply so many bongs in this living room. To this day, I have never seen that many bongs in one room. I started the night off strong by taking a hit and coughing so hard I cried and almost threw up. I’d never smoked from a bong before, so it was definitely an evening of firsts. At one point, Hannah and I were sharing a sofa chair and she started rubbing my leg. No woman had ever done that to me before, and even that she did well.

This is a real line from my journal reciting the events of the night:

“Hannah sat down pressed against me and I was melting inside. Touching girls is a euphoric experience. At one point, she rubbed my inner thigh and lingered there for a little and moved her hand down my thigh as she got up to grab a drink.”

Eventually we wrapped up chatting with her friends and the two of us went into her bedroom. Let me set the scene for you… Her bed did not have any sheets. Just a raw mattress with a blanket over it. No pillowcase. Went to her bathroom–no hand soap. It was a really nice ambiance to lose my virginity in.

Sometimes I wonder how this night could have gone differently, if I didn’t fill it with little white lies.

Lie #1: I lied about my age (kind of). Not in a weird illegal way though. She knew I was 18, but I didn’t tell her I was still in high school. She thought I was a month away from turning 19. For some reason, boosting my age by about a year felt like an important thing to do at the time. I didn’t want to seem immature.

Lie #2: Since I said my birthday was the following month (in May), I obviously had to adjust my sign when she asked the anticipated astrology question. I told her I was an Aries. I’m wondering if she caught my lie in the moment and chose not to question it, since a person born in May would not be an Aries. She then started shit-talking Capricorns to me and said that they’re the worst. Funny enough, I’m a Capricorn.

Lie #3: One of the most questionable lies of the night, I pretended this wasn’t my first time having sex. Another snippet from my journal:

“She really knew what she was doing, and it made me feel a little embarrassed that I didn’t really know 100% what I was doing. I mean, being really high helped calm my nerves though.”

We made out on her raw mattress for ten minutes, and then she took off my shirt. “How do you like it?” she asked. I looked at her. “It’s good! It’s nice…” I said with a smile, completely misunderstanding the question. She then goes, “No.. ha…. How do you like it? Like, rough? Soft?”

Lie #4: I told her I like it rough.

I thought Hannah was a badass and badasses like it rough. She was a cool experienced lesbian with a nose piercing and a tattoo on the back of her neck! I thought asking for soft gentle sex was lame. I thought it would give me away as a virgin. I perceived my inexperience as a weakness. 

Even if things didn’t go exactly how I hoped and I felt disappointed that I people-pleased myself into a dynamic I wasn’t really down for, I still overall had a good time. It did almost take a very bad turn at one point though. She turned around and asked me to “hit her from the back.” I sat there thinking, was she asking me to finger her butthole? I almost fingered that girl’s butthole. I thank the voice in my head that said, no, she was not asking you to finger her butt hole. Go for the other hole. 

In the morning, I called my Lyft. She said she wanted to see me again before I left Charleston. While I was on my way back to the hotel, I got a call from my mom. She said our family was in the hotel lobby, and I needed to get dressed and meet them downstairs. I still don’t know how, but I successfully snuck past my family in the lobby and made it up to my hotel room undetected. Later that day, I was sitting at a restaurant with my family. From across the table, my brother shouted “Nicole, is that a hickey on your neck?” I glanced at my mom. Her face was white as a ghost. 

When I got back to the hotel, I wrote in my journal:

“PSA!! REALLY IMPORTANT!! I LOVE GIRLS!! WITH ALL MY HEART!! I had sex with a girl last night and oh my god. I love girls so much.”

It’s almost endearing how equally nervous and excited I was about the experience. I then went on to say:

“The one thing I was super self-conscious about was how fast my heart was beating when we were cuddling the morning after. She even commented on it. Yikes, a lot of embarrassing things happened last night, but they couldn’t have been that bad if she wants to see me again.”

It was 11:30 pm on a Friday night. Two nights earlier, I spent $16 to get from my hotel to Hannah’s house, which was 20 minutes away. But tonight, it was $73 for a one-way trip, due to surge pricing. I barely hesitated. This time, I felt a bit more confident when it came to sex". I wrote:

“Sex with her felt so right. When I’d get with boys, I would focus solely on pleasing the guy, and I felt like I was just going through the motions like I thought I was expected to. Sex with Hannah is so different. I was fully submerged in what we were doing and not focused on being performative. I can say with a decent amount of confidence that I’m gay.”

The next morning, I went back to my hotel and then I went to my brother’s wedding. It was a good wedding, but they’re divorced now, so that’s the least important part of this story. After I got back to my hotel late that night, Hannah asked me to come over again. For the third night in a row, I took a Lyft to her house. This time, I spent $92 for the one-way trip to her house. I put my hard-earned paycheck into important matters that weekend: getting myself laid!

By now, the excitement started to wear off and the draining reality kicked in: I was hiding my inexperience from Hannah, so she had no clue how significant these nights together were to me. I started feeling drained from sustaining a sexual dynamic that, despite asking for, I didn’t even want. But how do you ask for something you don’t even know you want? I spent the night and I left in the morning. I flew back to New Jersey that day and I never saw her again.

Hannah completely changed the way I viewed intimacy. I wrote in my journal after the first night:

“I don’t get that warm, comfortable, safe feeling with guys. I wanted to wrap myself around her and never let go.”

I then went on to describe our connection together as pure, natural, and easy. She showed as much interest in my own pleasure as I showed towards hers, which I seldom experienced with the guys I had previously been with.

While this experience with Hannah was exciting and (mostly) fulfilling, I can’t help but view it from a more somber lens as I enter my mid-twenties and reflect on my past. I regret not telling someone where I was going all those nights. I put myself in a potentially dangerous situation in order to feel even a hint of closeness to the queer community. It also breaks my heart that I felt like I had to fabricate so many pieces of my personhood to this stranger. I still wonder to this day, how would that first night have played out if I was honest to her that I was a virgin and I wanted to be handled softly? In the anxiety of it all, I hurried through receiving because it didn’t feel like mine to take. I wish I had the confidence at the time to show up authentically, because my 18-year-old self deserved that. 

I wish I could tell my 16-year-old self that they’d be surrounded by a surplus of queer community one day. I wish I could tell my 18-year-old self that they don’t need to bend their boundaries during sex in order to feel valuable. I wish I could tell my 21-year-old self that quantity is not better than quality when choosing sexual partners. And I wish my 24-year-old current self would be just a little bit kinder and more compassionate towards the versions of myself that were still learning hard lessons around intimacy and vulnerability.