Men, men, men, men, manly men, men, men...

It's not exactly easy to explain my history with partners. Before I came here I liked to sleep with men and women if I was lonely, sometimes over a period of time, sometimes only once. Until I was sixteen I could count on one hand and name every person I'd ever kissed. Now I'm not entirely sure whether that figure is in the double, triple or quadruple figures. Part of me hopes that it's under 100, but there's really no way of knowing. Clubbing was always a strange experience for me. I always felt fatter, uglier, taller than all of the other girls. Dancing felt awkward, I never new what to do with my feet or arms, I tended to drink too much too quickly and flag towards the middle of the night, not the end. To save myself the awkwardness and embarrassment I would always migrate towards the smoking area. There I could chain smoke and talk to strangers, sometimes kiss them, sometimes laugh at how chavvy they were and make my way back indoors to fight off the shivers that grew out of the nicotine rush and the cold. I would find a sofa by myself while my friends danced "ironically" to shitty chart music and sit in the most flattering position I could.
The first guy I slept with was a thorough cliché - by which I mean disappointing. He was a volunteer archaeologist with a posh accent and boobs bigger than mine. It happened in a crappy house full of fresh graduates and postcards in frames of sail boats and lighthouses. We started to kiss on a white leather sofa, and he was frustrated by my ankle-length dress and that fact that it was hard for him to get his hand under it. I didn't really want to have sex with him, but he was keen and I got tired of saying no, so I said, "Ok, but make it quick?" I never saw him after that day. There were a few irrelevant "incidents" in between who I would prefer to forget, like the one I went to school with and the guy in the back of the taxi.
I've had two meaningful sexual relationships. One was with a boyfriend who I like to think I was in love with. I certainly believed that I was at the time. We were together for 6 or so months before it all went wrong, for reasons that are still unclear to me. The sex was comforting. That's the best way to describe it. He was chubby and tall and hairy, and I guess it was kind of like fucking an erect, erotic teddy bear. We'd been together for a while and screwing longer before we first had any kind of tender emotional sex. It was pretty intense. For a while you could factor in three fucks per overnight stay. Then only the night I arrived. then the morning I left. Then we didn't see each other any more.
And then there was Ketch. There is Ketch. There will always be Ketch.
I will never understand why literature tells the lies that it tells... about love, sex, happiness... It lies about all of the "good" and "beautiful" things. And why? Describing sex isn't, and shouldn't be, like describing a unicorn. I could describe it in intricate, intimate, exacting detail but what would be the point, exactly? If you've never had sex you won't really understand it properly, and if you're not then you know how it works. Ketch and I aren't freaky in the sack. Neither of us is extraordinarily kinky. In fact, I think when it comes down it it, the sex is probably the most normal thing about us both. I'm not writing our love story and this isn't an erotic novel. There's no point or merit in explicitly writing about the way we fucked. There is, however, something very wrong with the thought of not mentioning it at all.
It is generally quite unemotional. It is almost always impersonal. More often than not we don't say anything to each other except, perhaps, "My hip, shit, my hip is cramping up," or, "Yeah, this isn't working, flip over." It is very rarely intimate. By that I mean never. Never except for once. And holy hell was that a huge mistake.
Sex, in its typical undignified way, is generally "sexier" in your head. For me, in reality, it's always felt a little strange and foreign. Not in an entirely bad way, only once have I had sex that I would actually call "bad". I can most simply liken it to travelling. It's weird and unfamiliar, slightly awkward, and sometimes stuff happens that you can't control or understand but none of this is in a way that we hate and besides, we bought the ticket in the first place so we get what we were asking for, really. A lot of people would argue that for a person so evidently obsessed with sex I'm a bit reluctant to get coarse. To them I say have some sex of your own, and you will realise why writing about it is so unerotic.
Having said all of this, the way we met, Ketch and I, was instantly sexual. It was maybe my third or fourth day on corridor pass, and I was on my way to the swimming pool. I heard someone say,
- You look bored. Come with me.
Fingers closed around my wrist so tight that they might snap and pulled me backwards into a cupboard, closing the door before I could see the perpetrator. He trapped me between his body and a shelf and he kissed me. I kissed him back. We both fumbled with our clothes and it just happened. We were sober. It was the middle of the day. We didn't know each other's names. I hadn't even seen his face. When it was over we wrestled our clothes back into place and fell back into the corridor, short of breath and damp with sweat. I saw him for the first time. He was scruffy, very skinny, though I'd felt that before when our hips ground together. He wasn't very tall, and he was pale except for a faint splatter of freckles over his shoulders.
- I'm Ketch.
- Dylan.
- I don't do that very often.
- I do.
- I'll see you around, then.
- I'll see you when I see you.
I've only slept in his bed a handful of times, when we're both too tired to move, my head on his hollow, hard chest. It’s fascinating, somehow, that I can hear the beat of a heart that I’m sure is kept in a drawer of a filing cabinet somewhere far, far away. Why is it that I am so achingly aware of the rhythm of the part of a man where I’m so unwelcome? He’ll have me in his bed, he’ll have me in his arms and he’ll have me however he wants when the mood takes him but he will not love me. He says that it’s not in his code but we both know that it’s bullshit. It is total bollocks. We don’t really talk about his life before we were here. I am not his therapy. Or maybe I am. I’m not going to be his personal therapist, though. I’m not going to ask him questions about his past or his parents or his relationship with his penis. It’s nothing to do with me. Regardless, I’d like to know what it really is that makes him turn the light off. I want to know why he never wants to look at my face or my body or let me see him once his clothes had come off. I’d never even seen the skin of his arms any further up than the bump of the bone in his wrist. I’ve owned a man’s heart before. For years it thrummed alongside mine like two beetles in a matchbox. You could ask what I didn't mention this man when I talked about my sexual partners. That's because this man cared for me so deeply, so intimately, so desperately that he refused to take my virginity for fear of hurting or damaging me. If he had known that my first sexual act had been the result of a sexual attack and that my innocence was lost on a foam mattress without sheets he might have locked me to his side. I wouldn't have minded. And I probably wouldn't be here.