First Times: Amber by Natalie Deschain

I lost my virginity while I was hitchhiking.
    It was kind of a rough time in my life, as you can imagine, since, well, I was hitchhiking. I had maybe fifty dollars worth of stuff to my name and I needed to get out of town. I was stupid, but I was young, just turned nineteen. I should have gone to somebody for help. A shelter, maybe even the cops. My mother threw me out the year before, right when I enrolled in community college. She said I wasn’t her problem anymore now that I was grown. To be brutally honest, she’d never been much of a mother. I wore hand-me-downs and second hand clothes while she wore designer fashions, drove a sleek German luxury car and strutted around town like she was queen shit of fuck mountain. Me? I had to make due with what I had. So I ended up with the bad kids in school. It kinda happens naturally when you’re poor. When you’re broke all the time, even the goths don’t want you to sit at their table. I had a job, but it didn’t matter. I don’t know, maybe it’s different in big cities or something, but in the little one stoplight town I came from, there was a clear social structure and I didn’t fit in the good parts of it, even if I spent my whole paycheck on clothes, trying to fit in.
    It makes me tear up a little thinking about it.
    The worst part was, I didn’t even like boys. In those days, that wasn’t a thing you said. Maybe it was watching my mother primp herself up to hit the town with one of her boyfriends (read: johns), or maybe it’s just something about me, but I never really liked being a girl. That was a major source of friction between us. I thought dolls were stupid. I wanted a guitar. I wanted to go hunting. I do like to sew, but how is that girly? Is taking care of yourself girly? I digress.
    So, I was living with my boyfriend. It wasn’t so bad at first. He was the type, you’d know him if you saw him. Lanky greasy hair, a little pudgy, but with that certain something in him that just clicks in a vulnerable, beaten down person like me and makes it easy to manipulate. I paid most of the bills, believe it or not. My job at the pharmacy in town kept me flush with cash, in a town where a studio rents for four-fifty a month. Yeah, we had a one room place, with a little galley kitchen and a bathroom barely big enough to turn around in. It was really my apartment, since half the time he lived there he didn’t have a job. His name was Brad, and Brad wanted one thing out of me. I think he believed it was just a matter of time, because he put a lot of time into it- over seven months.
    Might as well get it right out in the open. I blew him. If that counts as losing my virginity I guess I lost it to him, but I hated it. I almost threw up. It became a weekly thing. He got off on the look of disgust on my face, the way I would only gingerly hold his cock in my mouth, my lips wrapped around the shaft until he pulled my hair and started fucking my face. It was enough to stay in ‘his’ apartment and keep him from pushing me any further, so I agreed. I never swallowed it, though. No matter how many times he tried to talk me into it, he never tried that.
    My last night living there, he tried for more. I wouldn’t have it. There was an… altercation. I think I came out better. I just got a black eye. He got a kick to the balls with steel-toed boots that left him gibbering on the floor while I packed my shit into my old backpack and rushed out of there with all my worldly goods in a straining cheap bag and my entire savings, less than a hundred bucks, stuffed down my pockets. If I wasn’t so luck I’d have been leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire. It was August, pretty warm, not so cold at night. I started walking. I was out of town by midnight, and by the time the sun came up in the distance and made the highway shimmer, it was far enough behind me to grow small when I looked back over my shoulder. Like I said, not much of a plan.
    It was about the point I