Sex Scene Example
Bennett Durkan
…and they did it, in the way people have sex, with all the correct mechanics, which I know even though I don’t explain them, because I’m not a teenage virgin, not some high schooler who spends his evenings at home, alone, reading book after book in a series, with cool characters who say cool things while doing cool things, and then writes his own stories about cool people who resemble him, doing those cool things while saying cool things, instead of cruising around town in an overstuffed car, passengers sitting in other passengers’s laps, bouncing and laughing, recognizing other friends on the street and then slowing to flirt, before returning to someone’s house where they engage in behavior which requires two or more people, which someone who spends nights alone, reading books and writing stories with thin veneers, never gets to experience, no matter how much I want to experience them.
Afterward, they laid on the floor, holding hands, shoulders touching, and commenced the banter couples share in still moments, which I understand even though I don’t elaborate, because I have friends and my peers don’t see me as a loser or a dweeb or a weirdo because they never dragged me, half dressed, from the boys locker room in the sixth grade, never threw me into the girls’ locker room where the girls shrieked and yelled and launched projectiles like pencils, erasers, books, bags, and shoes as I quivered, tucked into a tight ball on my side, on the floor. Half the school laughed and ridiculed me while the other half wretched when my passive vision landed on them, and even though I explained the situation and named culprits, the principal and counselor punished me because it takes two to tango.
As they gazed into the other’s eyes, a wave of contentment disguised as happiness washed over them, which, despite not explaining further, I have experienced, in similar circumstances, and don’t have to guess at because I feel overwhelming emptiness each day when I see people in relationships, with miniscule behaviors developed through relationships, such as non-literal verbal cues and physical gesture, knowing I will never get to partake in similar behavior, knowing no other person will accept me and develop a mutual understanding, because once, when I was fourteen, I brushed a shoulder in the crowded hall and, after the next class, the boyfriend of the girl whose shoulder I brushed punched me in the gut three times before blackening my eye with a direct collision of knuckles, or because, in the ninth grade, at a new school with the promise of possibilities, I confessed to my crush and she said no, insulted my appearance and intelligence and lack of friends and lack of prior romantic relationships, or because at college I thought I could begin anew but found the same unspoken rules, tacit understandings, and silent behaviors, and found myself the same as before.
Thirty minutes passed, and they rolled together, like a flower in reverse and reperformed an act that I, in all seriousness, view from a clinical standpoint as part of the human condition and don’t include as wish fulfillment or as a cry for help.
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