The First Time

The first time a boy touched me, it was after midnight on the beach below T Street. He’d parked his little truck, and we’d walked a half mile south from the pier where Del Mar ends. I was fourteen. We talked about a band I liked, one he wasn’t so crazy about. The ocean and everything else was black, all except for the white thumb-curves of foam that almost wet us as they reached up the sand. I still had my bikini on under my clothes. I wore my bikini under everything then.

It wasn’t touching like the hand on your ass in junior high when the corridor is so full, and everyone’s jostling, and you’d never have time to grab the hand before it left you, and you’d never know who did it if you had to wait to turn around. Then we were sitting down on the sand and he talked about the grandfather who once took him fishing up at Mammoth Lakes. It was the best summer trip of his life, he said. He caught five brownies, as he called them, and he got to know his grandfather better, the one who was sick then and probably wouldn’t make it to the next month.

It was darker than ever, even with a handful of street lights, just their tops, visible on the bluffs above us. Even with the white curves coming our way from Asia or the south Pacific. He’d been holding my hand since we got out of the car. A rough hand, like all the hands of boys who could change their own spark plugs or make the butcher block cutting board in wood shop for their mother’s birthday. I knew something was going to happen shortly after we sat down on the beach below T Street. Cropley’s had closed hours ago. No one really came here at night unless they were walking from the pier to the steps at Riviera. I just didn’t know what was going to happen, or how we were going to get from A to B.

He kissed me. A couple of long, slow kisses—delicate, really, like our lips were so close but not really in contact, floating just close enough to each other to create a little force field, which is what we really kissed. Then without saying anything, we leaned back together until we lay together on the sand. Then his hand was over one of my breasts. His whole hand covered it. Then we kissed a little harder, and I could feel his penis under his shorts against my thigh.

He reached under my shirt and put his hand back on the same breast, moving his cupped palm just a little in the tightest circles you could imagine. This had enough force behind it after a while to push my bikini top up and off my breast, so that he was touching me then, slowly and softly now, and running the tip of his fifth finger across my nipple. When we stopped kissing for a few moments, he kept his finger there, part of a hand that could cover a whole part of me. We kissed some more.

Neither of us needed to talk about not going any further. Pretty soon it was clear it was time to go, and we sat up to the position we had been 20 minutes or two hours before—we couldn’t tell—and he looked away politely as I adjusted the bikini top under my shirt and pressed out some wrinkles. We both stood up then. Standing several feet apart and leaning over, we tried to shake the sand out of our hair.