I knew a girl in college who could get herself off during class.

She called them her orgasm jeans, and they fit her just right. I tried to sit next to her on the days the jeans appeared, and she’d smile at me and wink. I hardly paid attention to anything else, and my notes from those days were as useful as I was.

One morning in anthropology 101 we were discussing sexual customs that felt far more interesting than our own. Aunts took nephews to the woods to teach them how to please a woman in one tribe, and in another men would swallow one another’s semen in order to build strength.

I don’t remember whose values we were dissecting from our ivory tower, but in the middle of the discussion she put her hand on my arm and closed her eyes. Her fingers tightened around me, and I could see the muscles in her neck tense ever so slightly.

Her smile never wavered and she held her pen perfectly still with her other hand. The classroom dissolved around us, and we could have been anywhere.

She let go almost too quickly and immediately went back to her notes. The conversation had moved on to a group of young women who had the right to bring home any boy they chose for one night at a time.

It wasn’t until class was almost over that she looked at me. Her lips moved, but she didn’t make a sound.

“Thank you.”

Guy New York