Jersey Cotton – Molly Raskin

October 7, 2025

He told me all summer long how nice it would be when we could share his bed. A big bed, bigger than the ones the dorm provided. Bragged about the soft, jersey cotton sheets he would spoon and fuck me on. Leave the bedroom unfurnished, he told the school. Make room for my big bed. Make room for my soft, jersey cotton sheets.
        The bed would be too small for two adults in our thirties but was too big for a seventeen-year-old girl and a grown manboy of twenty-one years. Twenty-one-and-a-half, really; a bed and a half, really. A full-sized bed for a girl who still had sleepovers with two friends on a twin mattress.
        I am being ripped apart while iTunes casually plays indie folk music, airing Beirut’s Lon Gisland as if I weren’t being deflowered across its soundwaves. The sheets are soft against my back (as promised); he is hard against my front (another promise). I am something worse than on fire, and his MacBook paints the walls with white light.
        Is that an accordion? A fucking accordion. I am fucking him to indecipherable instruments. Virgins don’t choose the music. I wonder what makes a song sexy and not distracting. (I will never find out.)
        It’s not his fault that it hurts. There was something wrong with me that required ten tampons in a row, one finger twice, then two fingers thrice to allow this moment to occur. It will take one man four times to fuck this fleshy thatch into painless submission.
        The hymen is vestigial and purposeless, and I ponder this fact while he gently machetes mine apart. I am a prototype of a human. Hack, hack, hack. A fucking accordion. Hack. Soft, jersey cotton sheets. Thrust. Thrust.
        You don’t fuck like a virgin. (As a virgin, I wouldn’t know.) His observation is not one of accusation but amusement, a stroke of luck—my matrix surprisingly pliable, ready to cast his sexual mold.
        I wonder what a normal virgin would do. Would she not fuck back, the way I am fucking back? Am I doing virginity wrong by doing sex right? But I am not normal, and nothing I feel or do or say will ever be normal—and for once, I’m happy to think too much, because it means I can think about anything other than the feeling that is worse than being on fire.
        So on for two, three, maybe four songs. Respectable time for a man—not the three-quarters of a song a teenage boy might last. Afterward, he walks to the bathroom to clean off. They clean off? I guess he gets coated in it, like vomiting into a barf bag with your head encased. I remind myself to Perish The Thought!, a motto I endorse but can’t seem to follow.
        I’ve seen the components of his naked body before, but not their sum. When he reenters the bedroom, clean and flaccid, I contrast the sight with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. His wingspan-to-height ratio seems comparable, although this iteration is circumcised and less barrel-chested. I know that if I share these observations aloud, he won’t understand. I say them anyway and he spoons me until he is asleep.
        The next morning, I wear a white dress. He asks if it is ironic. No, the association of whiteness with purity is illogical, just like every other social rule normal people wield against me: I am being ripped apart.
        No, I just like this dress. It’s made of soft, jersey cotton. It holds me where I need to be held.