Writng Prompt: Fiction

by Geoff Munsterman

I took her virginity on my birthday. She took mine too, but never knew it. When I met Diedra, I was nineteen and a virgin but who the fuck would ever admit that. Unlike some, I didn’t invent a random girl or an ex who’d never warrant mentioning again. I had Elisha. She was Jewish, freckled, more outgoing and extroverted than me. Her sensitive nipples shrank from Kennedy dollars to dimes with the slightest flicker of my tongue. We’d been dating for three years after I saved her from a mosh pit at a rock festival. Before that, just friends. She took my virginity on Lundi Gras in the women’s bathroom of The Spellcaster Lounge. For prom, she bought a black single-strap dress and I rented a high-breasted three-piece charcoal tuxedo with a dark mint vest but our poetry teacher called us to go night fishing so we did that instead. I proposed in November, just after being accepted to schools up north. She’d been accepted to those good schools too, but chose the University of New Orleans because her pot dealer went there and gave her good rates. That night, inside the walk-in of the restaurant where she worked, she told me she’d been sleeping with her drug dealer. And his friends. And anyone he told her to sleep with. And there was video. She never held my grandmother’s depression-era ring—the only jewelry my mother’s family kept from then—and I didn’t speak to her until my first week of school in Ohio.



I don’t know why I told this lie. Part of me didn’t want to chase skirts. Part of me knew I could get away with it. Elisha was a good friend, but someone I could easily avoid for four years. Or a lifetime. I don’t know if this story helped make me more attractive to Diedra; it certainly allowed me to relate to women. I’d been hurt by a girl I loved—girls eat that shit up, even on a pudgy kid.


My dad died on October 7th. My first college girlfriend broke up with me on October 4th. We bonded over my sick dad and hers, two years dead. I probably could have fucked her after flying back to school from the wake. I spread my father’s ashes in the beginning of January and started dating Diedra at the end of January. Never took her out. Never cooked for her. We talked a lot, and watched Joe Versus the Volcano. She did visual art and I wrote poetry, so we collaborated on a project. The night I turned twenty, she showed up at my door in heels, a candy necklace, and a dress that fell off her body with the pulling of a string. All the girls in the dorm had massive bushes of pubic hair because the water pressure in the bathrooms were shit. I took her virginity. She took mine. I played the role of the experienced partner.


We dated eight months. I never took her out. I never cooked for her. All we did was fuck, but in a college as small as ours that constitutes a couple. I was grieving my father’s death and not being home for my mother—something my old man swore would happen. I hated all of my friends, who sat around talking about how awful they’d feel if their dad died. Everything was a blur, and to some extent still is. I wrote two books of poetry in four months, had my first real relationship, made the dean’s list, and can’t tell you a single moment from it except that I lost my virginity to a virgin who didn’t know I was a virgin. At some point, I must have said “I love you.” It didn’t even feel like a lie because, who the fuck was I? A dead man’s son? An artful and committed lover? A liar?


The last night before we left for home (she was Minnesotan and I am from Louisiana...fuck did I hate her accent—each ‘o’ was like getting hit in the face with an oar) we pushed my and my roommate’s beds together. It was a sweaty greatest hits of all the fucking we’d done that semester: tit-fucking, fingering, blowjobs, doggy-style, nipple biting, ass-licking, ball-sucking, hair-pulling, fondling, caressing, kissing. And I didn’t cum. In fact, I never came when we had sex. I’d fake orgasm when I felt her pussy drying up and hid the condoms. This last night of fucking I didn’t give up. She had twelve orgasms; and I know she had twelve because her left foot did this involuntary convulsion and the walls of her vagina tightened and pulsated. Virgins don’t know enough to fake that. Orgasm nine lasted ten minutes, and I didn’t cum. At least if I had lost my erection, we could have slept longer than the four hours we got.


There was talk of visiting each other but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t care about her enough to show her the places in New Orleans I loved. I went home, which was like visiting a cemetery. I worked at a bookstore in the French Quarter. I edited my two books, which were both messes of raw grief and harsh barbs of verbs. Diedra sent me a letter about her mom and her job. I went to Airline highway and picked up a crackhead who, for sixty dollars and a six-piece chicken tenders with french fries from a gas station, sucked my cock. I came instantly, hard. The next day, I broke up with Diedra via text message. Two weeks later I evacuated to Ohio because Hurricane Katrina was heading up the Gulf. More blur. Another year lost. Diedra invited me to a party to show me how much she enjoyed sticking her tongue down another man’s throat, but instead of feeling jealousy or pity I wondered if the nappy crackwhore in too-tight demin was alive or dead. All the while remembering that she snickered when, with her mouth around my cock, I muttered, “I love you."

Geoff Munsterman is a bitter, lonely man. This story is dedicated to everyone who has accused him of having 'a martyr complex.' He has achieved less than he'd intended, and lives on the wrong side of the Mississippi River in New Orleans. The last thing hepurchased was a super grande mocha with five shots of espresso.