When I was fourteen a blonde boy took me into a field and tried to fuck me in a hedge.

It wasn’t a a suitable hedge; there were brambles everywhere. They poked at my skin, clawed at me
like the boy who clawed his way up my legs.
I lay there, semi-exposed in an English field, at four pm on a Thursday afternoon (at least I think it was a Thursday —
time likes to blur these things), my 40 denier school tights halfway down my legs and thought:

If this is what being a teenager is about — if this is what I’m supposed to do, why does it feel
so terrible?
Why has this well opened up in my chest?

Things felt like they were falling apart when they were supposed to be falling together.
It didn’t make sense.

It didn’t occur to me then, as he planted sloppy kisses along my neck and pawed at me like some mad, starving
kitten, that maybe this wasn’t what being a teenager was about.
I laid there bored & empty, thinking of some other boy — a man, maybe
in the not-too-distant future, who’d sit and laugh about this with me and then
kiss my forehead or something — whatever men who are truly in love with you do.

Eventually the boy got bored too, when he realised I really wasn’t going to fuck him. Not here, in this field,
with four years stretched out between us.
So we got up, climbed over the hedges and the gates & passed the houses where our friends lived.
All the while I felt disgusting & awkward & dumb; I was sure that love wasn’t meant to feel like this.

He walked me halfway home and I thought:
I won’t fuck him. I will never fuck him.

I was half right.

Freyja Jones is a student in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Reading. She spends most of her spare time wandering around country lanes and dreaming of living by the ocean. @freyjalillie on instagram.