Talk Hard!

“It made me want to be thirteen again right now and reading it for the first time.”
-Neil Gaiman

“A rousing tale of technogeek rebellion.”
- Scott Westerfeld

Little Brother is worth reading for a lot of reasons. It’s about teens, and school, and authoritarian jerks and using cool technology hacks to get around surveillance, and to organize things like sudden rallies and rock concerts and city-spanning games. But it also has a romance angle, and it also has one of the best first time sex scenes I have ever seen written, capturing the awkwardness and the complex emotional experience it can be. And I particularly congratulate Mr. Doctorow for including condoms in the scene! With spermicide!

All authors should follow his example. At the risk of major spoilers (which I am somewhat alleviating by taking out the names), I offer Cory Doctorow’s sex scene to you now. Two virgins and an Xbox. (No, not like that. In bed.):

When we got to [her house], I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had had all the Xnet I could handle for one day. All I could think about was [her]. Living without [her]. Knowing [she] was angry with me. […] never going to talk to me again. […] never going to kiss me again.

She’d been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut the door to her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her, like you’d hunger for dinner after not eating for days. Like you’d thirst for a glass of water after playing soccer for three hours straight.

Like none of that. It was more. It was something I’d never felt before. I wanted to eat her whole, devour her.

Up until now, she’d been the sexual one in our relationship. I’d let her set and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have *her* grab *me* and take off my shirt, drag my face to hers.

But tonight I couldn’t hold back. I wouldn’t hold back.

The door clicked shut and I reached for the hem of her t-shirt and yanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over her head. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle as the stitches came loose.

Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my ears.

I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into the piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books and papers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the unmade bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves right through one another. She moaned into my mouth and I made the sound back, and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more intimate than anything I’d ever felt before.

She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open the drawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I looked inside. Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiled at her and she smiled back and I opened the box.

I’d thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times a day I’d imagined it. Some days, I’d thought of practically nothing else.

It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it were lots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterward, it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye.

Afterward, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had changed between us.

It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the room, looking away, not meeting each other’s eyes. I wrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash can.

When I came back in, [she] was sitting up in bed and playing with her Xbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to face me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly.

“Thanks,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. She turned her face to me she was grinning hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.

I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. “You’re a good man,[…]” she whispered. “Thank you.”

I didn’t know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we parted. She wasn’t crying anymore, but she was still smiling.

You can download Little Brother for free, or buy it at the usual outlets.