Welcome to Intimate Geographies. This year, two of our editors, Xoai Pham and Vanessa Friedman, are contributors of a book called Sex and the Single Woman. We took that opportunity to ask our readers and contributors to send in their juiciest sexcapades, and record themselves reading them. KaeLyn’s first experience with another femme was everything one could hope it would be.

This was my first time with a girl and my first time with a fellow femme and it was hot and gentle and earnest and soft, soft, soft.

Jen’s dream was to be a zoologist. A friend of a friend, I was staying at her house for college spring break. She was single and recently out as bi. I had just broken up with my boyfriend–hence being invited to and accepting my friends’ invitation to a weeklong trip to a stranger’s apartment in a random city.

Jen was a freckle-faced femme with straight red hair that she wore in a bob. She was sarcastic and self-deprecating and made everyone around her laugh. It was 2003 and we both suffered from internalized femmephobia and believed that butches were our best matches, but on the first night we met, we ended up drunkenly making out on the empty dance floor of an empty gay bar. We became a power femme team as we hopped from bar to midwestern bar, flirting with butches, with bartenders, sometimes with cishet men for free drinks, frankly mostly having fun with each other.

A few days after our drunken makeout session (which we’d laughed about–how silly!), we were out at yet another bar–Jen, our mutual friend, and me. The mutual friend ditched us for their ex that night, so Jen and I drove alone back to her apartment, in her pickup truck, screaming along to Letter to Cleo’s cover of “I Want You to Want Me” with the windows rolled down. Slightly concerned about our friend getting back safely, we set up camp on her futon and turned on Maid in Manhattan. We were sitting close the way I used to sit with my girl friends at teenage sleepovers, legs folded to the side, thighs smooshed together, shoulders turned towards each other, leaning into each other as we laughed too loudly.

I could feel her body tentatively relaxing into me and I could smell her warm vanilla sugar lotion from Bath and Body Works and all of a sudden my lipsticked lips were kissing hers. And then Jen was falling backward onto her futon and I was propped on my side next to her, sweeping her hair out of her eyes as I slipped my tongue into her mouth and my hand into her cutoff jean shorts. She pulled her white baby doll tee over her head and I rolled all the way on top of her. I put my mouth on her neck, her breasts, her belly, and paused, breathed her in. “Yeah?” I asked her as I looked up at her, my hands on her spread thighs and my words hovering near her zipper. “Mmmhmm,” she replied, then shyly looked away. Everything about her was tender, but not fragile, and as she rocked hard on my fingers and my face, I tried my best to make it appear that I was confident about what I was doing.

In truth, I was completely overwhelmed and turned on–by all of her, her smell, her salt-water taste, her breathy sighs and little rumbly moans, her clusters of freckles everywhere, her vanilla-scented skin, her purple nails lightly scraping my neck. This was my first time with a girl and my first time with a fellow femme and it was hot and gentle and earnest and soft, soft, soft. All these years later, knowing that it wasn’t my best performance and is probably my tamest sexual experience by far, and that Jen and I haven’t talked in almost two decades and I have, frankly, forgotten her whole last name, I still think about her sometimes. I think about that moment of sweet, giggly, yummy fumbling between two 20-something baby bisexual femmes, prowling together for butch babes and finding each other instead. I think about her red hair and her pink lips. I wonder if she ever became a zoologist.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!