I stood against the wall, opposite from the dining hall doors Sunday morning waiting for the dining hall to open and a boy I never met before. It was just me, a guy with brown hair and another with blond. I opened the app on my phone to double-check who I was meeting.
The blond boy didn’t look anything like his profile picture. He was tall, bulky, and his face was oval, not circular. He looked younger in his photo, though I couldn’t say he looked better in person. My phone buzzed with a text from him and he looked up to me.
For the next half hour, we made pointless conversations mixed every couple minutes with silence. I didn’t know what to do, and he just continued to stare at me and raised his eyebrows. I felt uncomfortable as to whether that was suggestive or a nervous twitch.
When the dining hall finally opened we went in. He bumped into one of his friends but I continued walking to find a table. I sat alone, eating cereal for five minutes before he finally came back. We sat there, eating up the silence. I didn’t look towards him often because every time I did, he lifted his eyebrows again. And again. Ten minutes later, halfway through my cereal he said, “You done.”
I wasn’t but I didn’t want to stay another minute so we walked out. As I was saying the final goodbye, walking away from him forever, he grabbed my arm and shoved his tongue down my throat. I froze.
This never happened before. This doesn’t happen to me. He continued kissing me while I was paralyzed with confusion and anxiety. “Relax,” he said. “Let’s try this again,” he said. Inside I couldn’t stop panicking, my mind took over, screaming, “what the hell!” On the outside, I was bubbly and flirty. I never flirt.
“You want to go back to my dorm,” he whispered. I shivered, but not in the way he thought. I went though. I let him take me to his dorm on the opposite side of campus.
We reached his dorm and nothing happened. We made out on his bed. He asked if I wanted to take my boots off, I said, “No.” No, the boots would be the only way I could escape if I needed to.
He tried to feel me up, I told him, “No under the clothes.” So he tried a loophole and pushed my shirt up instead.
I was there or twenty minutes, ten making out with nothing going downstairs for me and ten him just lying content next to me on the bed. It was weird. When I finally told him I had to go, he tried to get me to stay by kissing me but I finally got my things and left.
The next day I went on Tinder and started swiping. I felt nothing good. No butterflies. No thoughts of “he’s cute,” just “let’s not go through that again.” I deleted Tinder from my phone.