One Night In Rome

A coming of age story.

I was 16 the first time I learned what blue balls were.

I was 16 but I had told him I was 21. A number that I gently lowered to 19, and then later, to 18 as the night wore on and we had had quite a few more drinks. I was drinking Pineapple juice and Malibu rum because it was what I had watched the other girls order, and it sounded womanly and adult. Way more so then, than when I arrived at college two years later and my friends teased me for drinking something that tasted like Coppertone. Something they called a ‘date rape drink’, before we learned that jokes like that were fucked up.

But when I was sixteen, and on a language program in Italy, I wasn’t thinking anything other than that I couldn’t believe this impossibly sexy, grown up man had chosen me; the girl who had sheepishly hiked up her below-the-knee skirt that night, the one I had packed in case we went to a The Vatican and had tonight worn out to a bar crawl in Rome. I didn’t know anything about drinking then. Or about sex. All I knew was that I had a raging desire to touch and be touched, and a nagging fear that no one would want to do either. A fear that was getting beautifully soothed by this beautiful Australian with shaggy brown hair, a pucca shell necklace and green eyes.

So, this isn’t a story about coercive behavior or statutory inappropriateness. This is a story about a sexual awakening in a foreign country. Where rules and expectations flew out the window. Where I felt adventurous and playful in new ways. His name was Ian and we met near the foot of the Coliseum at a bar crawl. We bantered. We flirted. There were no smart phones yet, so our hands were free to roam our hips, our pockets, strands of hair tucked out of eyes. Our attention at a premium. Undivided and intoxicating. This was maybe the first time that I learned that I was good at flirting. That flirting was really just joking with confidence. Joking and a slight reveal of what you wanted without asking yet. Desire meets plausible deniability.

I remember at the first bar where he finally kissed me, they were doing body shots on the bar table and he slid his arms around my waist and whispered in my ear with that dizzying, delicious Aussie accent “you would look great up there”. We were watching a woman get liquor slurped up from her navel and I shivered when he said it. It didn’t matter that I was never in a million years going to put myself on display on that bar, just that he wanted to see me up there was enough. And I slipped my arms around his neck and kissed him, deeply for the first time. I felt his tongue mingling over mine. I kissed him and I never wanted to stop feeling the hunger that I felt while he kissed me back. I miss kissing like this. Kissing where there is no promise, at least in my mind, of anything escalating further. Where kissing feels like it could be enough.

We kissed in the basements of more Italian bars, traveled across the cobblestone streets with crowds of thirsty partygoers, most all of them tourists, moving with the roving crowd from venue to venue, moving loosely in a teeming hoard of hormones, sex and hunger. The final bar was on the border of a piazza, with a neat central statue, an obelisk or fountain, I can’t remember which. What I remember is slipping out from the hot, sticky bar into the cool evening air and kissing each other with abandon, making out with our bodies pressed against the façade of hundred-year-old buildings in the city my mother grew up in.

What I remember is the moment that he gripped his hands on my hips, sliding hands and eyes across my narrow body, breasts still barely coming in, in the plain white tank top I had on and saying, in a low voice “you have a great body”, as he ran his palms up my sides. I barely felt like I had a body at that point. For years of being all-limbs, I desperately prayed to grow fuller, more womanly, desperately believing that one day my body might grow into my desires, unaware of the possibility that someone else could see it there already.

He was a good kisser, I remember that. And I know clearly that he must have thought my shyness was something born of modesty not inexperience, or maybe a kind of coyness. He wasn’t pushy, but I imagine that he couldn’t have known the dirth of experience he was really dealing with here. It couldn’t have been obvious to him that he was grinding his hard-on against a girl who had never even seen a penis. If he had, I imagine, it wouldn’t have been so obvious that he wanted to take me back to his hotel with him. To touch me more. Or maybe he knew and he didn’t care. Maybe he liked it. The point is I knew enough about myself to know that I didn’t want my first time to be with a complete stranger whom I had met that night and would never see again.

And so I kissed him for hours. I clung to him, infatuated with the discovery that someone could want me, but not needing it to go any further than that. And when he asked me to go back with him I shook my head, said “I can’t” and he nodded, huffing out a deep exhale, adjusting his groin while we sat on the cobblestones, muttering. “Right, ok. Just got a little bit of blue balls, here.” And I asked blithely “what’s that?”

In retrospect it’s easy to color this with a tinge of male entitlement and bullshit. And in fact, in my later years, I probably would have greeted it that way. But the beauty of having no understanding of what he meant was that I had no sense of pressure or guilt when he said it, only curiosity to discover yet a new sexual experience, or sensation.

He chuckled lightly and said, “Blue balls is when you think you’re gonna go, but then you don’t” That was how he explained it, not much more than that.

I don’t remember him positing it as a reason I should go home with him. And if he did, I didn’t catch it. I think of it instead as an honest statement of fact, spoken out loud just to acknowledge further, the wanting we were in. At least, that was how I took it at the time.

It was a perfect evening, that night. One that I will never forget when I think about my sexual awakening. That discovery of lust and hunger and aliveness, and someone seeing whatever version of yourself you always hoped you could be, maybe even a little bit more. Ian, the Australian in Rome.

I got a cab with my roommate, both of us drunk and bleary eyed and when we got back to our host family’s apartment I waited for her to fall into a safely snoring stupor before I masturbated hungrily, only few feer away, my whole body electric and aching with need.

If blue balls were a thing for girls, I thought, then I had them and I wondered if Ian, too, had gone back home to release himself still thinking of me.

This was before social media. Before smartphones. There was no pretense or even possibility that we would ever see each other again. And perhaps that too is what makes it so perfect in my memory. A moment nothing can touch, not even the wisdom and jadedness of age and lived experience of what it can cost you to boil yourself down to just hunger and hope for validation.

I feel nothing but compassion for that girl who went out that night in Rome, who couldn’t believe her luck when she found herself flushed and swollen with lust against a marble edifice. Compassion and even a touch of jealousy now. Wishing that I could set myself back into that state of utter wonder each and every time I let a body come in contact with my body. Awakening and re-awakening, but always leaving just a little left to still uncover.