Two weeks at Stradbroke Island was a Christmas tradition with my Dad. One that I resisted every year because none of my friends were there, leaving me feeling like the lonely older kid hanging out with my little brother’s friends.
But this year was different – I was allowed to bring Jenna.
My first time with Jenna had been nervous, tentative. In the spare bedroom of our friend whose parents were away a lot, we crossed the threshold while This Year’s Love spun on CD.
After that we started doing it whenever and wherever we could. To two teenagers who had just discovered sex, the whole world looked like a bed. It felt thrilling, illicit, each time like lightning.
Every space – public and private – was an opportunity. My bed, her bed, behind the pool shed at a party on a surprisingly cold night. The spa in the pool area of the complex where she lived. Standing up in the change rooms at Myer Queen Street.
This was how grown ups behave, we figured.
It didn’t matter that the sex itself was rushed and messy, we felt warm and excited and alive, stealing moments to press ourselves together at parties while our friends necked Smirnoff Double Blacks and fell into bushes.
As our list of secret sex locations grew, so did our ambition. We looked for somewhere to cap it all off. Somewhere thrilling and romantic and beautiful.
It was the beach. We had to have sex on the beach.
Which is how we came to be standing, at 10pm on New Year’s Eve, on a beach on Stradbroke Island, halfway through my family holiday, Havaianas in our hands and sex in our hearts.
We played it cool for a few days, then on 31 December, the most romantic night of the teenage year, we made our move.
After all that planning and anticipation, it was … fine. It was hard to make it work around our clothes, and the excitement wore off pretty quickly.
And, the sand. Who knew a beach had so much of it? Pervasive and gritty, it quickly hardened under the compacting force of repetitive motion. So once we’d had some kisses and some thrusts, we figured we had achieved our goal and decided to go back to the unit to finish up properly in private.
But sand behaves differently in different contexts. Brushed onto skin in a J.Lo music video, it’s sexy and elegant. En masse and at night, it comes to feel like cold concrete. And somewhere between those two extremes, it resembles a loosely organised, militia-like exfoliant. Seemingly everywhere, impossible to detect – until it ambushes you, in the single bed of the holiday room you share with your little brother, where you somehow swallow an entire bucket’s worth.
Luckily my little brother was out all night with his nice friends, so while Jenna raced embarrassed into the shower and I gargled 18 glasses of water, we were at least granted the mercy of suffering our humiliations in private.
Until now, I guess.
