“How will we see what’s happening?” Marxy asked, and I told him maybe for the first part we should only keep one of the smaller lights on, to make things more romantic.
I had looked at Marxy’s list of ORDER OF THINGS TO DO WHEN HAVING SEX before coming into the hotel room. Marxy had it on the bedside table and kept looking at it.
“We take off our clothes,” Marxy said. “That’s what comes next.”
“Okay,” I said. “Can we stop saying what we’re going to do before we do it?”
Marxy tried to unbutton his shirt. His fingers were having trouble with the buttons, which were small. My shirt was easy to take off, and I did it myself, even though in the movies the man takes off the woman’s shirt almost every time.
Marxy’s breathing was getting faster. He was stuck on one button.
I started to take off my pants. “No,” Marxy said. “My shirt still has to come off.”
“Do you want me to help you?”
He shook his head and held out his hand for me to stop. “The man takes off his shirt and then his own pants. Okay?”
It was taking a long time for him to get the buttons undone. I remembered what Pearl said and to have patience. I sat down on the bed and bounced a few times. The wallpaper had flowers on it, and someone had stuck chewing gum to the bottom of the bedside table.
“Gross,” I said.
Marxy looked at me and I told him it was the gum, not him, that was gross. “You’re very sexy, Marxy,” I told him. “Are you sure you don’t need help?”
“I said I can do it,” he shouted. “Stop asking.”
Finally he undid the buttons and put his shirt over the chair by the window. Marxy had lines where his arms stopped being tanned. He had small brown birthmarks on his stomach and tiny brown hairs around his nipples.
Next he started taking off his pants, which he had even more trouble with than his shirt. He got one leg out and had to put his hand on the wall to stop himself from falling over. It was very unsexy, because he forgot to take off his shoes first and the pant leg got stuck.
“You have to take off your shoes first,” I said.
“I know that,” he said. “You can start taking off your pants now too.”
I tried to take off my pants slowly, so that our pants could be off at the same time, but ended up taking them off faster. I sat down and waited. I wanted to continue looking sexy, but it takes a lot of effort to hold sexy poses, so I decided I would wait until he had his pants off before getting into the sexy pose again.
Finally Marxy had to sit down on the ground so that he could get his one leg out of his pants. Then he stood up and I could smell that his deodorant wasn’t working very well.
I was wearing the fancy underwear that I had bought. Then I stood and stepped with one leg and turned and showed him the pose I had been practicing in my room, after my push-ups, in front of the mirror. The porno women did this in pictures to look sexy, and so did models who wore underwear.
“Hello, stud,” I said.
Marxy raised his eyebrows. “We already said hello. And why are you standing like that?”
“Do you like what you see?”
“I like you, Zelda.”
“What about these?”
Trying to keep the sexy pose, I pulled the underwear and they made a snapping sound.
Marxy’s eyebrows wiggled. “They are okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Can we kiss? We should kiss. We should kiss before we do anything else.”
I felt crappy that he did not like the underwear so much, and that the sexy pose made his eyebrows go up. But this was one of the things about Marxy that AK47 told me would happen: he would not be like the men in the movies. I would have to accept that about Marxy. I started to wonder about Hendo, and then felt bad thinking about someone who was not Marxy, while kissing Marxy.
“Okay,” I said, taking his hand.
We kissed again. Marxy put his tongue in my mouth and moved it around. I told him to not be so angry with it and to move it around less.
“Go slower,” I said.
He kept doing things that made it hard for us to move in the same way. When I went to put my arms around his neck, he moved his head away from me, and when he moved forward toward me so I could put my arms around his neck, he moved too much and we hit our teeth.
“Ouch,” he said, putting his hand to his mouth.
“I think I bit my lip,” I said. Marxy did not look very happy. I told him to not panic. “Let’s try to kiss again,” I said, and this time the kiss went much better.
The bed bounced underneath us. He put his hand on my leg and I touched his cheek, very gently. His cheek was smooth and warm. His hand on my leg made me shiver, even though it was hot instead of cold.
“Okay,” he said. “I think it’s time to have sex. We need to take off our underwear now.”
He was wearing loose boxer shorts and pulled them off his legs and put them beside the bed. I took off my underwear in a slow sexy way until we were naked on the bed.
It was the first time I had seen Marxy naked. He had some hair on his stomach, near his belly button, and his ribs poked out and moved up and down when he breathed.
“You are very handsome,” I said, since I knew that people liked to be complimented when they have sex. I told him I could help him put the condom on.
“No. Let me do it,” he said.
“Make sure you don’t break it,” I said.
I thought of practicing with AK47 and saw that Marxy wasn’t holding it correctly. He did not pinch the condom on the edge and was trying to rip it right down the middle. Then he went to use his teeth.
“Stop!” I said. “You don’t use your teeth. Ever.” I asked him to give me the condom to open, since I didn’t want him to open it the wrong way.
He didn’t want to.
“I know how to do it,” he said.
Finally he got the wrapper off and then he tried to put it on. It was a Trojan condom, with a warrior’s helmet on the front. He started trying to put it on and had it upside down, and then did not pinch it properly. He had said he practiced with condoms, so I didn’t know why he was so bad at it.
“Did you use a carrot to practice?” I said. “Because you have to hold it up and see where the ring part is before putting it on.”
“Can you please stop talking, Zelda?” Marxy yelled.
“A cucumber works too, for practice,” I said. “But a cucumber is bigger than a penis usually is, and bigger than your penis too.”
I sat on the bed and watched him. The condom wasn’t going on at first, and I wasn’t feeling like I wanted to have sex anymore. I didn’t like being yelled at.
“Okay,” he said, putting the condom on. “I’m ready.”
“I didn’t like when you yelled at me,” I said, “and got angry about the condom. And I don’t like that we are saying what we do and going through steps. Sex is where we make our own rules.”
He shook his head and held it in his hands and said, “This is going bad,” and when I tried to tell him it was okay, he said it wasn’t okay.
I tried to kiss his face but he was turning to the side, so that his ear was by my eyes and his hair was in my face.
“Okay,” he said, and we went onto the bed and he put himself on top of me.