I Just Wanna Get Laid

"Hmmm..." the sound slipped into the room, soft but impossible to ignore. Quin Ashford shifted under her covers, eyes still closed; she was tired; she had just moved in today and she had gone through various administration processes. She needed sleep.

Muffled moaning sounds drifted through the air of the hostel room, a low, rhythmic sound that pulled Quin from sleep. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the gloom. The room wasn't pitch black; a faint bedside lamp was on, casting long, distorted shadows across the little space. The noise continued, a wet, slick sound accompanied by a sharp intake of breath, then a low, vibrating groan that seemed to vibrate against the metal frame of her bunk.

Quin shifted, the cheap mattress rustling beneath her. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing the sound to be something else, a dream, a stray noise from the hallway, from a phone. But the rhythm was too deliberate, too human. She lay on the top bunk, her heart hammering against her ribs, a flush of heat rising to her cheeks that had nothing to do with the stifling room temperature. She had only moved into the hostel that morning, hugging her duffel bag up three flights of stairs to meet the two girls already assigned to the other beds. They were in their second year.

They had introduced themselves as Mara Delacroix and Jade Fontaine.

They had seemed nice enough, loud, confident, everything Quin wasn't, but this was beyond her comprehension.

The metal ladder to the lower bunk creaked.

Quin froze. She stared at the ceiling, trying to think about something else or even go back to sleep, but her ears were tuned to the drama unfolding just feet away. A soft whimper floated up, followed by the distinct slap of skin against skin. It was a sound she had only heard in hushed whispers or the muffled audio of videos she quickly clicked away from. Her mind scrambled to process it, her innocence acting as a hindrance that refused to accept the reality of her roommates entwined in passionate sex just a few feet away. It was absurd.

For fuck's sake, they weren't alone; Somebody else was in the room.

They were supposed to be sleeping.

But the air grew heavy with the scent of sweat and arousal, a musky tang that permeated the small space. Curiosity, a trait she usually suppressed, began to itch under her skin. Slowly, carefully, Quin rolled onto her side and peered over the edge of the mattress, just enough to see the lower bunk.

In the dim light, the scene was a blur of pale limbs and a tangled duvet. Mara was kneeling between the spread thighs of the other. The girl on her back, Jade, had her head thrown back, her mouth open in a silent scream, her fingers gripping the metal bars of the bed frame until her knuckles turned white. Mara moved with a mix of urgency and tenderness, her head dipping low between the other's legs.

Quin watched, breath hitching in her throat. She saw Mara's tongue flick out, teasing the swollen clit of the girl beneath her while Jade arched her back, a shaky moan tearing from her throat, echoing off the walls. "Oh god, yes, just like that," she whispered, her voice ragged. "Lick that fucking cunt."

The explicit words hit Quin like a physical blow. She had never heard anyone talk like that in real life. Mara obliged, her face buried deep, eating out her roommate with a hunger that made the bed frame shudder. The wet sounds of her mouth working the other girl's hole were loud, unashamed, and filled the room. Quin saw the muscles in Mara's back flex and ripple as she gripped Jade's thighs, pulling her tighter against her face.

Jade reached down, tangling her fingers in her partner's hair, grinding her hips up to meet the tongue. "Don't stop," she gasped, her voice rising in pitch. "I'm gonna cum; I'm gonna fucking cum all over your face."

Quin felt a throb deep in her belly, a sudden, aching pulse that terrified her. She squeezed her thighs together instinctively, but the friction only sent a jolt of pleasure through her. She was wet. The realization made her face burn hotter. She shouldn't be watching this. She shouldn't be listening to the filthy, wet sounds of a tongue fucking a cunt just a few feet below her. But she couldn't look away.

Mara shifted, sliding two fingers into the other girl's cunt alongside her tongue. The girl cried out, a high-pitched whine that bordered on a sob. "Fuck! Yes! Fill me up!"

The sight of the fingers disappearing into the wet, pink flesh was graphic and mesmerizing. The roommate pumped her hand in and out, the wet noise audible even over their heavy breathing. Jade was trembling, her entire body shaking as the orgasm built. "I'm cumming!" she screamed, her voice cracking. "I'm fucking cumming!"

Her body seized, back bowing off the mattress, thighs clamping around Mara's head. Quin watched the spasms ripple through the girl's stomach, watched her toes curl until they cramped. Mara didn't stop, lapping up the juices as they flowed, prolonging the ecstasy until the girl beneath her collapsed, panting heavily, pushing gently at her head to signal sensitivity.

Quin pulled back, her head hitting the pillow with a soft thud. Her heart was racing so fast she thought it might burst out of her chest. She felt guilty, dirty, and overwhelmingly aroused. The sheets beneath her felt damp, her panties soaked through with a slickness that was unfamiliar and embarrassing. She tried to steady her breathing, to mimic the slow rhythm of sleep, but her body was betraying her.

Below, the rustling continued. Mara crawled up the length of Jade's body, kissing her deeply, sharing the taste of the orgasm. Quin could hear the wet sounds of their tongues dueling, the soft murmurs of affection that followed the intensity.

"You taste so good," Mara murmured.

"Come here," Jade replied, pulling her into a hug.

They settled into the quiet aftermath, their breathing slowly syncing. Quin lay paralyzed, staring into the darkness. The silence that followed was louder than the noise had been. Every creak of the building, every distant car horn, seemed amplified. She tried to force her mind to blank out, to think of textbooks, schedules, the awkward orientation meeting she had sat through earlier that day, but the images burned into her retinas refused to fade. The glistening sweat, the spread legs, the fingers pumping in and out.

She squeezed her eyes shut, pretending to sleep, but her mind raced with confusion and a terrifying curiosity. She felt a strange ache between her legs, a hollow need that she didn't know how to fill. She was innocent, inexperienced, and, suddenly, painfully aware of how much she didn't know.

Just as Quin's breathing began to slow and the throbbing between her thighs subsided into a dull ache, the silence was broken again. But this time, it wasn't from the bunk below. A soft, deliberate chime echoed from the nightstand beside her head, her phone lighting up the dark bunk with a ghostly blue glow. A text message from Jade flashed on the screen: I saw you watching.

She had exchanged contacts with them earlier.

She looked downwards at them; Jade winked at her.

She didn't bring it up the next morning.

That was the practical thing, the careful thing, and Quin had always been both. She made coffee with the small machine she'd packed and sat at her desk while Mara slept peacefully like she had made peace with the world. Jade's bed was not empty. At some point in the night she had returned.

She entered the password to a secret document in her laptop, then she started typing, she's yet to decide what she would do with that document, however, she has some crazy ideas in her head.

Some minutes into it, Mara turned in her bed. Quin quickly shut her laptop down.

She switched to her biology textbook and read four pages and retained absolutely none of it.

She kept thinking about last night.

She still finds it unbelievable. She was 18 and she was not naive enough to believe she'd misidentified that sound. She understood its nature in the abstract, the same way she understood most things she had not experienced: clearly, theoretically, from the outside.

The outside was the only side she had.

This was not something she examined often. It was simply a fact about herself, filed alongside other facts, as neutral as her height or her blood type. She had never had a boyfriend in Clearbrook where she came from. Had never particularly wanted one. The boys there had seemed like incomplete versions of something, and the girls had seemed like they were all performing a role in a play she hadn't auditioned for, and Quin had spent four years of high school on that sort of performance, watching with dry interest from the back row.

She had kissed someone once. Briefly, at a party in junior year. It had felt like pressing her mouth to a question she didn't care enough about to pursue.

So. That was the inventory.

Mara woke up at nine-fifteen, sat upright in bed with her hair enormous and her expression immediately cheerfully awake, no transition, no grogginess, and said:

"Tell me something true about yourself. Something you wouldn't put in your college application."

Quin looked up from her textbook.

"Good morning to you too." her eyes were judgy.

"Good morning. Now answer. It's a tradition. I do this with everyone I live with." there was no guilt in her voice at all; she didn't act like she was someone who had made out with another in her presence.

"You've lived with other people before?"

"Summer programs. Model UN. My grandmother's house, which was basically a commune. Stop stalling."

Quin considered. She could give a safe answer. She had several cataloged, the kind of answers that read as personal but weren't, a practiced vulnerability, the way her academic counselor had coached her to speak in interviews. She looked at Mara's direct, unapologetic face and decided against it.

"I've never been somewhere where I wasn't already the smartest person in the room," she said, her voice careful and even. "And I'm not sure that's going to be true here, and I don't know how I feel about it."

They started talking about other things. Mara was from New Orleans, pre-law, and had an older brother named Cole, whom she described as infuriating and brilliant in the same breath. Jade was from Los Angeles, international business and had a boyfriend named Dex who played tennis for Hargrove and who, based on the way she said his name, occupied a complicated position in her life.

"What about you?"

Mara said, twirling her fork, her gaze steady on Quin. "Where are you from? What are you studying?"

"Clearbrook, Ohio. Pre-med track, biology concentration."

"Pre-med," Jade said, her brows lifting slightly. "So you're the responsible one."

"I'm the quiet one," Quin said, keeping her voice even. "Not the same thing."

Mara pointed her fork at her. "I like her."

Jade tilted her head, studying Quin with sharper interest now, as if a previous assessment were being revised. She then left the room.

Mara got up and stretched like someone who had worked overnight, arms above her head, spine curving, completely unself-conscious, and Quin observed this with the same attention she gave everything.

She was at ease with herself.

She wanted that. She wasn't sure she'd ever have it.

Jade appeared at noon; she looked at Quin in a way she couldn't describe, but she quickly looked away, it seemed like she was feeling a bit of shame, well unlike Mara.

She showered, changed into a crisp white shirt, and sat cross-legged on her bed eating a granola bar while she scrolled her phone.

"Orientation events start at two, aren't you attending?" she asked, not looking up. "There's a mixer, a campus tour, and a financial aid seminar that you should attend even if you don't need financial aid right now, because the people who run those offices remember your face."

"Okay," Quin replied briefly; she was feeling ashamed after all; she caught her watching.

Quin went to the mixer. So did Mara. The three of them moved through the courtyard event in their distinct formations, Mara orbiting toward everyone, leaving laughter in her wake; Jade making deliberate contact with specific people, collecting them like assets; and Quin standing at the edge of clusters, listening and cataloging.

A boy named Marcus introduced himself. He was tall, had a slow smile, and looked at Quin a beat too long. She noted it. Kept it somewhere. Moved on.

A girl named Petra, a sophomore, told them about the campus's unofficial social map, where people actually went on weekends, what clubs weren't listed in the brochure, and which building had a rooftop you could access if you knew the right stairwell.

Mara and Jade already knew about the rooftop; after all, they were in their second year; they weren't new anymore.

That night the three of them ordered pizza to the dorm room and ate it on the floor because there were no chairs, and they talked until midnight.

Mara talked about her family warmly, like she had done the work of understanding it. Jade talked about Dex with respect; they had been together for a long time. Quin answered questions when asked and asked questions in return and did not volunteer more than she meant to.

She knew that that night, the three of them bonded.

Quin's first week of classes was everything she'd hoped it would be: demanding, stimulating, and structured to a schedule she'd made with a lot of thought. Biology lecture at eight. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, chemistry lab. Introduction to Academic Research, a class she'd enrolled in because the senior professor was one of the most-published researchers in her field and she expected to be in his advanced seminar by sophomore year.

She was good at all of them. This wasn't arrogance; this was the truth.

But something was different in the way she spent her days. The first night she came, she heard her roommates having sex and there was a before and after of things she noticed. She began to notice guys, even girls; she had never been attracted to girls before that night, but now she looks at girls' cleavages; she imagines what they would taste like down there out of the blue. she doesn't scroll past when she sees X-rated images. In the mornings she looked at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror a beat longer than usual.

She told herself it was an adjustment. A new city. New stimuli. Neurologically standard.

She knew it wasn't that.

On Friday evening, she came back from the library at seven to find Mara and Jade sitting on Mara's bed, passing a bottle of wine between them that Quin was fairly certain they were not supposed to have in the dorm, and laughing about something that had apparently happened in Jade's economics lecture involving a TA and a projection screen malfunction.

"Come sit down," Mara said, patting the space beside her without pausing the story.

Quin sat. Mara handed her the wine without asking. She took it without protest.

The conversation moved easily: Jade's lecture catastrophe, Mara's pre-law reading group, a guy named Leo who had apparently been tracking Jade's movements since the beginning of the session in a way that was either flattering or alarming and Jade had not yet decided which. Quin listened and occasionally contributed and felt herself, incrementally, becoming part of the shape of this room, this arrangement, these two people.

She thought about Clearbrook. About four years of being true to herself, without letting anyone in. About the way she had always stood at the edge of clusters at school parties, watching with her arms crossed, thinking, I don't understand what they're all chasing so urgently. I don't feel it.

She felt it now. Or something close to it. Something with the same urgency but a different texture.

"You're quiet tonight," Mara said, watching her.

"I'm usually quiet."

"There's your regular quiet and there's the kind where something's running in the background. This is the second kind."

Quin turned the wine bottle in her hands. "I'm just thinking."

"About?"

She looked up. She was giving her that special look of hers: warm, patient, without pressure. The sort of face that made honesty look like the easiest option.

"About the fact that I'm 18 and I've never..." She stopped.

"Never what?"

Mara asked, softer now.

Quin set the wine bottle down on the floor. She looked at the wall. "Nothing. Never mind."

Mara followed her gaze. Then looked back at Quin, and something in her expression changed, understanding arriving, quiet and complete.

She didn't push. She didn't offer advice or commentary or that cheerful, well-meaning information that Quin had been dreading since the night she'd heard them. She simply reached over and refilled Quin's cup.

"For what it's worth," Mara said, her voice easy, like they were talking about nothing in particular, "there's no right time. There's just the time when you stop waiting for a reason."

Quin looked at her.

Mara was looking at the ceiling, taking a sip of wine, entirely casual.

That night, she watched them again for the second time this week; by the time she went to sleep, her hand was in her panties.

Saturday arrived the way first Saturdays somewhere new always do, slowly, with a kind of spaciousness that weekdays never have.

Quin woke before both her roommates, made coffee, and sat at her desk with her secret document open.

She had written a lot in the past days and she has begun to wrap her head around what she would do with it.

She liked this hour. The dorm was quieter. Outside the window, the Hargrove campus caught the early light at a specific angle that made it look the way it looked in the brochure: deliberate, almost cinematic, as if the architecture knew it was being admired.

She wrote everything that has been happening since she resumed school in even letters and told herself she was not thinking too much about the conversation from the night before and wasn't thinking about their thing and wasn't thinking about Mara's voice saying there's no right time and most definitely was not thinking about the wicked plans that was forming in her head for her secret document.

She was thinking about all.

Mara woke at nine. Jade at ten. By eleven they were all three in various states of weekend morning: Mara on her phone, Jade reading something she'd printed and annotated, Quin back at her document, and the comfortable proximity of it was something Quin noted with a kind of quiet gratitude she did not express out loud.

She hadn't expected to like them this fast.

She hadn't expected to like anyone this fast. It wasn't something she'd been good at, the rapid trust, the easy opening of space for new people. She'd had friends in Clearbrook, technically speaking. Acquaintances she'd been warm toward. She'd never had this: the feeling of sitting in a room with someone and the room being better for it.

Two someones.

They talked for three hours.

They told her about how they lived together for a year before her arrival and how it was hard for them to understand themselves; she told them about her high school life and talked a bit about her family.

Mara talked about her father, who was the funniest man she'd ever known and also completely unreliable, and how those two things had coexisted in her for so long she'd stopped trying to separate them. Jade talked about her parents' marriage; she had compared it to a battlefront and how it reminded her to not ever consider marriage.

Quin talked about her mother, not about Douglas, her stepfather, and not about her father either, but about the experience of loving your mother whose happiness sometimes felt like a door closing in your face without either of you meaning for it to.

"That's very specific," Mara said, her eyes steady on Quin. "What do you mean?"

"My mom remarried when I was fourteen. He's not a bad person. He's..." She paused. Chose words. "He's exactly what she needed. And watching her be exactly that happy, with exactly that person, just made me feel like I was watching something through a window. Like happiness, like that wasn't something I was going to get to have in the same way."

Wow! She needed to include this in her document.

"Because you were excluded from it?"

"Because I understood, at fourteen, that the version of love she'd found required giving something up, which happened to be me. And I haven't found anything yet that made giving something up feel worth it," she said, something fragile slipping through her tone.

A pause. Mara and Jade exchanged a look, brief and unreadable to Quin, and then Mara nodded slowly.

"That makes sense," she said carefully, her voice cool and precise.

"Does it?"

"No, it doesn't." Mara replied to her.

Quin went still for a moment. She had not made that connection herself, not explicitly, not out loud. She sat with it.

And she would definitely write it down.

Maybe, a whole chapter dedicated towards that.

"Maybe," she said.

"Not a criticism,"

Mara said, quickly. "Just, you've been protecting something. And you probably had reasons for it. And you probably still do."

"But?"

"No but. I don't have a but. I just think,"

She stopped. Started again. "The thing you're protecting. It might be yours to keep. Or it might be something you built a wall around before you knew what you were actually building a wall around. And you won't know which until you let someone close enough to find out."

Quin looked at her. Then at Jade, who was watching quietly with her legs tucked under her, her expression unreadable but attentive.

"That is incredibly presumptuous for four days," Quin said, her voice dry.

"I know," Mara said, completely unapologetic, ...her chin lifting slightly. "That's also just who I am."

Something loosened in Quin's chest. It was minor, a single stitch, not a seam, but she felt it go.

* * *

That afternoon, alone in the room while Mara and Jade went to visit the girls next door, Nia and two others, she knew Nia because she had met her in the hallway. Quin sat on her bed and did something she had not done in years: she let herself watch porn.

She sat with her back against the wall, watched it and touched herself. It was the second time she was touching herself; the first time was very brief. This time, she put her fingers inside herself just as she had seen Mia do to Jade.

Her moan filled the room along with the moans of the actors she was watching on the screen; she felt a kind of sensation, she had never felt this way before.

Never.

She felt it first; she didn't understand it. The sensation rose too fast, too intense, an overwhelming wave that rushed through her and left her trembling. Her breath caught as her body reacted on its own, every nerve lighting up in a way that startled her. For a moment, her thoughts disappeared completely, replaced by nothing but feeling. And when it faded, she lay there, shaken, trying to make sense of something she hadn't known she was capable of.

Afterwards, she laid there quietly, thinking about home. Her father had left when she was twelve. She did not have a dramatic story about it, no scenes, no final argument she'd overheard. He had simply become, over the course of one winter, a person who called less and then called rarely and then sent cards on birthdays that arrived three days late and trailed off entirely by the time she was sixteen. Her mother had not made him a villain. Her mother had been, in all things, remarkably undramatic about pain.

And then Douglas had arrived. Good, present, reliable Douglas, with his reading glasses and his careful hands and his way of watching her mother like she was the answer to a question he'd been asking his entire life.

Quin had watched him watch her mother and felt something she'd spent years classifying as discomfort and was only now, in this dorm room in this new city, beginning to consider might have been something else.

Envy. Not of her mother. Of the certainty with which someone could want another person. The uncomplicated, open-faced want of it.

She had never wanted anything that openly.

She wasn't sure she knew how, but she wanted him to want her just as he wants her mom.

Her phone buzzed. A text from a number she didn't recognize:

Hey, Nia from 212. Mara gave me your number. We're having some people over tonight if you want to come by. Just low-key.

She stared at the text for a long time. Then at the wall. Then back at the text. And something in her chest, quiet and precise and certain as a compass needle, swung toward yes.

After all, she needed to fill her secret document.