Take My Breath Away

Dear Diary

Last night mum took me to her work Christmas dinner. We went shopping the Saturday before, and she bought me a dress, it was shiny grey and soft, with a wrapover front – very grown up. She had a new dress as well. We spent ages doing our hair and make-up, then we had to put on our coats to walk to the restaurant.

There were lots of other work dinners going on in the same room, upstairs from the Italian restaurant that dad takes us to sometimes. First we went to the bar for a drink, and she introduced me to some of her colleagues. They were all pretty old, with yellow hair and far too much eyeshadow. Mum bought me a grapefruit juice, but she said I could have a glass of wine with the meal. One of the men at the bar gave me such a funny look when I was waiting, and I wondered if he worked with her as well. She said he worked in the warehouse. During the meal I sat next to the dad of a lad I know from school, so we talked about him most of the time. Mum asked me to swap places before we sat down, because she felt like she was being set up with this bloke. The food was turkey and the usual trimmings, and mostly cold by the time it was served. I had dry white wine, but it wasn’t very nice.

After the meal was cleared away, people started to get up from their seats and talk to each other, and there was a disco. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go and dance or not, because I’d never been to anything like this before, but one of the yellow haired women encouraged me to go with her, and soon we were dancing in a big group. There was a lot of sixties music that I don’t know very well, and someone grabbed my hips in the conga, which I didn’t like much.

The man I had seen in the bar was dancing near me, so I smiled at him, and after a few moments he came over and danced in front of me. I remember dancing with him to a Rolling Stones track, and then the DJ played a slow song, and he pulled me right up close to him and kissed me really hard. I really liked that!

After the song, we sat down with his friends and he bought me a drink. He called over to my mum that it was coke, but of course it wasn’t, I think it had bacardi in it. I didn’t really like the taste. His name was Dave, and I asked mum if I could go with him to Maxim’s, which is the proper nightclub in the town; she said yes but I had to come home by midnight; and then we went off with a group of people. We walked a bit behind them, and he held my hand. It felt like our fingers didn’t fit together very well, rather uncomfortable.

At Maxim’s, he gave me another drink, and I sipped it slowly. He wasn’t interested in dancing anymore, but we sat and talked to a man I didn’t know. Then he asked me if I wanted to go somewhere a little bit more private with him, or go home. He told me it was nowhere near midnight yet, so I went with him.

We went to his house. He told me we had to be quiet, because his mum and dad would be asleep; and we crept into the sitting room. He put the TV on, and it was showing Top Gun, which I had never seen, but I quite liked the song by Berlin. It’s been in my head all the time, since then.

He offered me a drink, and I ended up with a huge glass of Baileys, which was absolutely horrible. He didn’t have anything else I would like, either, though; and he talked about the film for a minute, before he said, has anyone ever told you that you’re really pretty? and started to kiss me. I couldn’t help thinking that it was a bit of a naff line.

He put his hands inside my dress, and he undid my bra, which proved to be a bit of a fiddly job. I didn’t know what to do with myself while he was doing that. To be perfectly honest, I was slightly bored, which probably makes me a bit abnormal. Then he tried to pull down my knickers, and I didn’t like that at all. On a rational level, I knew I wasn’t there because I was in love with this bloke, I was just there because he was paying me a kind of attention that I’d never had before; but I didn’t bargain on him wanting to do that with me. So I told him it was the wrong time of the month, because I didn’t want him to think I was rejecting him, and he muttered something about him understanding and it being alright, and did I want to go down on him instead.

I didn’t know what he meant, so I said yes.

I’ve seen my dad’s thing before, and my brother’s, when we were too young for it to matter; so I had some idea of what one looked like; but, if you’ll excuse my choice of words, to have such a strange and, frankly, odorous appendage stuffed right in my face, was a bit of a shock. It turns out that he wanted me to put it in my mouth, which is what I proceeded to do.

It neither tasted nor smelled nice; it made my jaw hurt to have my mouth wide open for so long, and my knees hurt too, because I was kneeling on the floor. He held on to my head and pushed it up and down, and his thing was in my mouth all horrible, and it just went on for so long. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t turned on by it. I talked to my friend Sarah today and she reckons it’s actually quite normal to do that, but I don’t think she’s done it herself. Why would anyone?

I was bored, uncomfortable, slightly disgusted, and still mystified by the whole process; and actually quite glad when I heard the doorbell ring. He swore, and got up and pulled his trousers up, and I pulled my dress down and licked my tongue along my arm a few times to clean it. I could hear my dad’s voice, which was kind of scary because I had never been collected from someone’s house in the middle of the night like this before, but really, I was very happy to be leaving.

Dave said he would call me, and I kind of smiled and rushed outside, and dad drove me home. I think he asked me what I had been doing, and I said we were watching Top Gun. I let myself into the house and threw up in the bathroom, before crawling up to bed and falling asleep.

He didn’t call me. Mum told me his surname, and I looked him up in the book, and called him, but his mum told me he was out so I left a message. When I called again yesterday, she said that he had told her he didn’t really know me very well, and didn’t want to speak to me. When I talked to Sarah, she asked me if doing it had made me feel dirty, and it didn’t at the time; it didn’t make me feel anything; but it does now.