Jailbait by Rachel Christina McConnell

Virginia is for lovers, his license plate said, but I sure as hell wasn’t losing my virginity in the backseat of his car. My first time was in a Motel 6. Getting a room was my idea. I thought it was sexy. Romantic, even. He was twenty-four and I was fifteen. Forbidden love. My old man risked prison to pop my cherry.

In the passenger seat, I imagined I was a sultry young starlet on the silver screen, a glamorous Lolita, smoking. Pouting. Abducted by her lover. On the lam from the law. In his eyes, and mine, I was a seductive temptress, a come hither siren, my lips singing lullabies of destruction. The urgency in his voice jerked me out of my fantasy.

“Duck,” he said as he pulled in, his eyes scanning the parking lot.

“Why?” I asked.

“So no one sees you, that’s why,” he snapped. “There might be cameras.”

He was doing this for me. Jeopardizing his freedom for our love. I felt his terror coiling in my stomach just the same as if I was the one being lured into a trap by jailbait.

I was a good girl and did what I was told. As I slid down to the dirty floor, he parked and killed the engine. The driver’s side door slammed and the lock clicked. I heard his footsteps trampling the asphalt.

Crouched low, I sipped on the to-go cup he had given me, filled to the brim with cheap vodka that tasted like rubbing alcohol, diluted with icy orange juice. I shivered. It was March, and salty gray slush from the last snow still rimed the ground. I wished he had left the keys in the ignition so I could have heat. My eyes were level with the stale car ashtray. I lit another cigarette to warm my lungs. The menthol smoke curled in the chill air.

It felt like an hour had passed. I was getting cramped, and my mind was racing. How long did it take to pay for a room? Why was he so worried about me being seen? I thought I looked mature for my age, and he looked young for his, with his clean-shaven boyish face and dimples. I told my mother, who thought we were going to the movies, that he was seventeen. I could pass for seventeen myself. Especially wearing makeup. Did he think I looked like a prostitute, with my glossy pomegranate red lips, my Cleopatra cat eyes lined in black kohl, the lashes thick with blackest black mascara, and the violet eyeshadow that matched my skirt? I had dyed my voluminous hair a rich auburn and parted it down the side so it veiled half my face, a style inspired by my cartoon sex idol, Jessica Rabbit. Only I wasn’t busty like her, instead flat-chested and waif thin in my black hoodie, my legs caught in torn fishnets and combat boots. I thought I looked punk and sexy, but maybe the clerk had seen me, thought I was a hooker, a lady of the night, and called the police. It would all be my fault.

I heard footsteps then. The driver’s side door swung open.

“Stay down,” he hissed. Thin strands of dirty blond hair stuck to his sweaty Neanderthal forehead.

“But my legs hurt,” I said.

I laid low until he pulled the car around to the side of the building and parked again.

“Okay, you can get out now,” he said. “I don’t see anyone. Hurry.”

He opened the door to our room with a key card and smuggled me inside. The door slammed shut behind us, and he turned the lock, fastened the chain, and jiggled the handle a few times, just to be sure. After peeking out the window, he drew the heavy evergreen curtains shut.

While he placated the demon of paranoia, I hid in the bathroom to undress. A faint buzzing sound emanated from the light switch. The filthy globe hanging from the ceiling cradled dead insects and a flickering yellow lightbulb. There was a short in the electrical wiring, and the overhead light was strobing.

I was having second thoughts. There was, of course, the nagging fear that, like I had heard so many times before about all men, he was only after one thing, and once he had gotten it, he would leave me. Then I remembered Valentine’s Day, when he offered me a bouquet of flowers with a grim face, as if visiting my grave. A devil’s dozen fresh-killed roses, long-stemmed and bleeding, accented with umbels of baby’s breath. I saved one, until the scarlet petals blackened and crumbled to dust. A decaying memento of his love for me.

Don’t cast your pearls before swine, my mother was fond of saying. Save yourself until marriage.

My body, it seemed, had a will of her own. I stripped out of my hoodie and thrift store black halter top embellished with a silver-sequined oriental dragon. Disembodied hands peeled off my fishnets, my panties tangled in them, exposing the triangular bush of pussy fur that I refused to shave or even trim because my mother once shamed me for it, saying it was a mark of womanhood. I had prepared too much for this moment. The night before, I had spread a glaze of custard-colored Nair lotion on my legs so I wouldn’t have razor bumps and cuts. The chemicals tingled and burned the black bristles of my legs, attacking them at the roots. Naked, the cool air pimpled my smooth flesh like the bumpy white skin of an uncooked chicken. I knotted the ends of a stiff, stark white towel together in between my mosquito bite tits.

The bathroom doorway had transformed into that numinous threshold between girl and woman. The room beyond was the cave of initiation, where I would have to face this bear of a man, let him maul me. Best to get it over with before I lost my nerve. There was no going back.

“Don’t look,” I said, as I made my way towards the bed, my bare feet padding over the coarse nap of the carpet. All the light in the room seemed to gather around me. He was sitting on the edge of the mattress, smoking. Staring.

I peeled back the comforter and slipped under the blankets, nude. The white sheet settled over me like a shroud. I lay there, cadaverous thin, my arms crossed over my breasts, the way the dead pose in their coffins.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked me as he put out his cigarette.

I was scared, but I didn’t want to leave a virgin.

“I’m ready,” I said.

I watched him undress. With clothes on, he looked a little on the heavy side, but he carried it well, because he always wore a size up. In the raw, he was flabby. He lifted his Grateful Dead t-shirt up over his head. There were clots of deodorant gumming the kinked hairs of his armpits. Instead of pecs, he had pendulous man boobs, sprinkled with dark curly chest hairs, and his convex nipples pointed in opposite directions like pale pink googly eyes.

I knew about his binge-eating, followed by bouts of anorexia. The see-saw of weight lost and regained. Sometimes he popped yellow jackets in front of me. Energy pills. Fat burners. He was addicted to bronzing himself in tanning beds because he believed it tightened his loose skin. He envied my heroin chic body. I stayed thin by eating air.

He unbuckled his belt and shed his rumpled blue jeans. His bulging hips and bulbous belly were scarred with silvery white stretch marks, like the marbled slivers of fat in honey glazed ham. He jiggled his tire.

“These are my love handles,” he said with a chuckle, dimpling his cheeks.

The shadowy comma of his belly button indicated a pause before the grand finale of this striptease. As he pulled down his silky indigo blue boxers, the ones I had shoplifted from Walmart and given him for Valentine’s Day, his erect blushing cock bounced. Wild black pubes sprouted from his shriveled purple testicles. There was nothing heroic about his nudity. I turned my eyes to the popcorn ceiling, where his shadow crawled above me. The condom wrapper crinkled. I pinched my eyes shut.

My deflowering was clumsy and brief. I didn’t know what to do, so I just lay there, like a corpse. What I had heard the boys my age refer to as a dead fuck. I was tight and dry. It took several hard thrusts for him to shove his dick even halfway inside of me. I moaned, imitating the women in the softcore pornos I had watched on Cinemax. The strangled purring in my throat betrayed the insecure, approval-seeking drive inside of me to please despite the pain.

So this is what it feels like to make love, I thought.

After it was over, he stood up, peeled the copper condom off his cock, and winced.

“Too tight,” he mumbled.

I wrapped the towel back around my trembling body and fled to the toilet. Squatting over the porcelain bowl, my thighs were sore and it stung when I pissed. Wisps of blood swirled and spread like red smoke in the cloudy yellow water. I patted my tender, swollen pudenda dry with toilet paper.

The rebellious act of premarital sex with an older man lacked the euphoric high I had expected. The patchouli oil he wore, mingled with the musky stench of his sweat, lingered on my skin. Struck with the fear that my mother, by means of telepathy and an acute sense of smell that rivaled the sharp nose of a bloodhound, would intuit the crime which had been committed, I lathered my armpits and privates with a blue foaming crest of soap shaped like a nautilus shell, followed by a quick rinse off of sin in the shower. Refreshing myself with a little glass vial of roll-on jasmine perfume, I anointed my throat and wrists. Put my clothes back on.

When I came out of the bathroom, I had the sense that something terrible had happened while I was washing up, taking a whore’s bath, as my grandmother would have called it. His brows were furrowed. I asked him what was wrong.

“You didn’t bleed enough,” he said.

I didn’t understand. I smoothed the bleached white bed linens out with my hands. There was a bright crimson stain. Irrefutable evidence of virgin sacrifice. Was he blind? I pointed.

“Look,” I said. “Blood.”

“There should have been more than that,” he said.

I was perplexed, but I thought he knew more about these things than I did, since he had had sex before. Maybe I should have bled more. Was there something wrong with me? I wondered if my own body had somehow betrayed me.

I remembered all the times I had struggled to insert baby powder scented tampons into my vagina. Stabbing myself in the pussy with the plastic lavender applicators made me nauseous and dizzy. Between the blood loss and the pain, I almost fainted. I never could fit one all the way in and resorted to only using thick menstrual pads that felt like diapers.

“Maybe I broke my hymen with tampons,” I said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That wouldn’t do it.”

“One time,” I told him, “when I was riding my bike, I rode over a speed bump and bounced so hard it hurt to pee for a week. I bet I broke it then.”

This explanation cut no ice with him. Even to my own ears it sounded contrived.

“You weren’t really a virgin,” he said. “You lied to me.”

My eyes burned with tears.

“Take me home,” I said.

“I should have known,” he went on. “This was all your idea. No virgin would ever be so forward.”

The conviction of his belief was so strong that I doubted myself. I told him this, and he saw it as an admission of guilt.

“I want to fucking go home,” I screamed.

He dropped me off at my mother’s house and spent the rest of the night in that motel room alone.

“I’m sorry,” he said to me the next day, over the phone. “It’s like that Beatles song. I’m just a jealous guy.”

Rachel Christina McConnell holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in the City of New York. Her work has been featured in Dark Moon Lilith Press.