Physical Education

About Physical Education

On the first day back after a long, restless summer, I was 21 and starting my junior year of college. My day opened with an advanced strength-and-conditioning lab, which meant a locker change in the athletics building, down in the lower corridor where every sound came back off the tile.

I had been counting down to that corridor since a bonfire in late July, when four women I had orbited for two years, Caitlin, Renata, Jade and Maya, all 21 like me, told me they had been talking about me. They had a game planned for the first day back: I would catch them, and then they would catch me. All I had to do was actually want it. I said yes on the spot.

So when I heard the showers running beyond the locker room door, I knew what was waiting. I held it open a crack and watched the four of them under the spray, unhurried and completely at ease, every movement tuned for the man on the other side of the gap. Then the brunette with the commanding grin looked straight at me through the steam and pushed the door open.

Their idea of punishment had been planned down to the minute. Stripped and pinned against the cool metal of the lockers, I was edged in a slow rotation of mouths and hands until my legs shook, held at the brink again and again while they decided who would go first and how long I would wait.

Then they took turns. Under the hot spray and on the tile, each woman claimed me in her own way, slow or fierce, studied or raw, while the others watched and kept me exactly where they wanted me. Renata, the patient one who had orchestrated every handoff, saved herself for last, bending me over the shower rail with a harness and a question I had already answered.

Alone on the shower floor afterward, bitten and thoroughly spent, I finally understood the message Renata had sent me at the end of summer: this is the beginning, not the end. The line had been crossed. The alarming part was how much I wanted to go further.

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