“I know I’m married,” she tells me. “But I haven’t snogged enough people.”
“How many people have you snogged?”
“Ten.”
“And what would be ‘enough’?”
She thinks for a bit.
“One more.”
Spin the bottle
It’s pre-Millennium. Mates of mine share a spliff made with some sort of plasticky hash concoction. I pass a bottle of cheap white cider to the girl on my right, and she instigates a game of spin the bottle.
“Fuck no!” We cry as one. “I don’t want to play!”
We play anyway, because contrary to our screeching protests, everyone really wants to. We like this game. Hinting, touching, furtively trying to work out in which order we’d like to paw lustily at our closest friends. Then hurling that order out of the window in favour of ‘whoever’s closest.’
James snogs with full tongue. Sloppy wetness and weirdly stiff jaw. Just poking it like he’s trying to push yours back in.
Ashley’s a bit softer – all gentle, tight lips and nervous hands hovering just above your arse.
Will has two techniques, depending on how stoned he is. Sober he’s like the snogs you see on telly: waggling heads and quick movements and the confidence to slip a hand up your shirt if you’ll kiss him enthusiastically back. Stoned he thinks he’s a lover, and will calm the pace until you’re not sure whether he really wants to kiss you at all.
Daz is fast. Gareth’s filthy. None of them would look twice if there wasn’t this excuse.
But here, passing joints and spinning bottles, they’re up for it because we all are.
I have never
Later, at Uni, things are harder. If you want to get laid you’ve got to hint at it. Seduce someone, albeit incompetently. Down shots and laugh at their jokes and tell them your halls is better than theirs and there’s usually a Wednesday night party. That’s your invite – your way of saying ‘fuck me’ – before you really know you can just say ‘fuck me.’
Older now, you go on dates. Eat dinner and drink beer and pretend that you care what they think about politics. You edge towards the bedroom with a cloud of irrelevant questions in your head. Will he think I’m easy? Will he call me tomorrow? Is he my boyfriend now?
And after that? After that you get it, sort of. You understand how to do this: with a wink and a smile, and no booze required. The mysterious and seductive secrets that eluded you fifteen years ago become clear, and disappointing: like a shit magician explaining a cheap trick.
You flirt, you ask, you fuck: simple.
And you watch all the couples hinting shyly over a shared plate of nachos, or the students competing to out-drink each other as if drinking will earn you a fuck more easily than asking will. You walk past the park, pushing kids in buggies and holding dogs on leads, and tut at the youngsters swigging crap lager out of tins. Their innocence looks like fun, so we pretend it’s disgusting, because we don’t want to say what we really, truly mean: I wish I could still do that.
So when my married friend tells me she wants one more kiss to top off her ten, she doesn’t mean she wants eleven. She means that ten, eleven, twenty, a hundred – no number will ever quite be enough. Love and comfort and hot sex are delicious and satisfying, but they never live up to the promise of just one more.
I want another date. Another complicated first-time fuck with a smiling stranger who can’t quite do it right. Another go at flirting. Another messy snog.
One last spin of the bottle.
I’m away at the moment with really limited access to the internet. Because I am an anxious person, I schedule things to go up while I’m away so I don’t get emails saying ‘OMG have you stopped blogging?’ but, as an anxious person, I am naturally then even more anxious in case what I’ve posted causes a massive row in the comments. That’s my way of saying that I hope this blog won’t offend any of you. Normal service will resume next week, but in the meantime if you want more hotness, check out some random archive posts, and please do come and vote on which of these pictures looks most like an orgasm. Gotn xxx
8 Comments
This.
With a couple of modifications, perhaps. I’ve never played spin the bottle. I went through university not having sex once – I was dumped by my girlfriend shortly after starting so I never had the opportunity for freshers-week sex (as I wasn’t single at the time), and for the resulting three years I wasn’t somebody to have sex with: I was the one to go for hugs and a compassionate ear when you were upset, and then go straight back to your boyfriend afterwards. That’s what you do with an ILB, apparently.
However, throughout those years (and for a short while afterwards) I used to go on camps for people aged 16 to 21, and at those camps, things were a little more rampant. It was there that I discovered the joys of playing I Have Never, drinking games that involved shots (or, in my case, swigs of lemonade), Ratchet Screwdriver (if you don’t know the rules I shall have to explain it to you) and unabashed flirting. Of course, I still didn’t get to have sex – I took condoms with me every time, just in case, but never got to do so – but then there was always this undercurrent somewhere, and I enjoyed the ride while it lasted.
I once snogged the girl I had a crush on, too; that was nice.
What I’m trying to get at, GOTN, is that I do feel like I missed out on a lot, especially during my late teens and early twenties – I was single from 18 through to 23 and, although I hovered on the edge of a lot of debauchery and risqué behaviour, I was never as deeply involved as to actually take part in any of it. People may know how to ask, deep down, but in a lot of cases, I think it’s much easier to be scared to.
But I’d love to revisit those times. I never got as far as you did vis-à-vis drunken shags and flirting that actually led somewhere. If I knew then what I know now, then how different would it be, I wonder?
There’s a danger in wanting to go back to what you didn’t have, in order to get it. My action at university was very, very slim – I had a couple of fumbles with a girl and then a boyfriend for my last two terms (with a lot of snogs in between), but since then I’ve gone a little wild and made up for it – it’s about what you do with the time you have regardless of what period in your life it falls in, I reckon.
Plus, beds in uni halls were never particularly sturdy even with ONE person in them.
Yep this is so true. I’m always looking to see if theres just one more, another who might want to kiss me, to spend time with me, to sleep with me, it’s not numbers or self esteem but the experience I want, the little thrill of knowing someone wants you, of new experiences and learning. I kind of hate it but I love it.
Wow, I can really relate. I’m awful, I tend to leave long-term boyfriends after a year or so because I desire “just one more” so badly … I’m absolutely addicted to being desired. The first stages of a relationship, the drunken one-night-stands, the excitement and the mystery, it all feels so good.
Have you considered open/poly relationships? That way you can still get that ‘new person’ kick every now and then without leaving a relationship that you’re actually perfectly happy with.
Polyamorous?
I’ve been in an open relationship with my partner (I hate the term partner. It sounds like we have a law firm together) for over eight years. Before him my longest was maybe two months. I would start planning the breakup before the second date because commitment scared the shit out of me and I really really like the thrill that can come with somebody new. There’s no way I could be content with only one sexual partner for the rest of my life. I would cheat and I would constantly be using my detective (snooping) skills to catch him fucking around. As it stands I get the best of both worlds. I have the love, support and familiarity of a relationship and I don’t have to think twice about getting naked with the next guy that makes me hard.
I’ve never played spin the bottle, but truth or dare kept me and the rest of the kids I grew up with more than our fair share of early experiences
OMG yes how the hell did I forget ‘truth or dare’?! Thanks – and thank you for sharing!