Jack, my ex-boyfriend and future co-parent

I met Jack when I was 18 and a freshman in college. He was the last boyfriend I ever had, and the only one I had sex with.

At that point in my life, I didn't yet think of myself as a lesbian, but there were clues. I still hadn't had actual sex with anyone and had never even kissed a girl, but there was no denying that I was more excited by girls' bodies than boys' bodies.

Yet the first time Jack and I had a conversation, and I looked in his eyes and heard his voice and his laugh, I was smitten, and it didn't matter to me what his gender was. Okay, yes, eventually that would matter, but those first months we were together it did not.

We met in a class, and both had the next period free. We would walk and sit at park benches, talking about the universe. He was a philosophy major (because, he said, "that's where the big money is"), and I was a "born Catholic" who no longer believed the words I sang at mass, yet who still went to mass and still took the Eucharist, and damned right I could tell you why. Our conversations blew our mutual minds, as if we were the first people discovering these profound ideas. I remember I kept asking him, "Does the world KNOW this??"

Of course, the weed helped. He always had some, and pretty soon we were spending evenings in his room. He paid extra to have a single room with no roommate, and I was impressed by his shelves of old books and a bust of Albert Einstein that he sculpted himself out of clay. We would get high and talk and listen to music and drink cheap wine and make out. When I got weed-induced munchies, he would magically produce a candy bar or cookies or some other goodie he had hidden away just for me.

We were pretty hot for each other and eventually started having sex, but for a long while, all we did was make out. He knew I was a virgin and never pressured me. But I got naked with him right from the start, and he would be shirtless as we sprawled on his bed (on top of his bed covers) and kissed for hours at a time. Jack's floor of the dorm was all single rooms, and not all of them were occupied because most students opted for the less-expensive double rooms, so the hallway was usually deserted. When I had to pee, he would go be my look-out to make sure no dudes were in the bathroom, and I would zip down the hallway naked but not wanting to be seen by anyone but him.

When we finally had sex, at my instigation, it seemed perfect to me -- though granted, I didn't have any point of comparison other than masturbation. But heck, I had an orgasm every time we did it -- sometimes two before he was done. We mainly just did intercourse, using oral only as foreplay -- and neither of us ever needed more than about nine seconds of foreplay. I didn't mind touching him down there -- it was fun feeling it grow -- but I didn't want my face in the vicinity when that thing went off. I tried it a couple times, and didn't like it -- another clue -- but the actual screwing part was wonderful because we were similarly passionate yet not in a hurry and we would lose ourselves in that long slow rhythmic experience. If I had entirely disliked sex with a male, then I probably would have figured things out earlier -- or if the man I was with wasn't someone I loved.

When I wasn't with Jack, I was back in my own dorm taking naked strolls down the hallway desperately wanting other GIRLS to get excited about me -- and some of them did flirt with me, which I loved.

I've written elsewhere about how I met Kelly this way. And I have to confess that when that happened, I did not immediately break up with Jack -- or tell him.

I was confused because I loved him and didn't want to lose him, but I also craved this other experience. Eventually, I confessed to him that I had basically been cheating on him for weeks -- crying as I did so and swamped with guilt for hurting this wonderful person that I cared so much about. But he was sweet and understanding, and we remained friends -- though in our day-to-day lives we began to drift apart.

I dropped out of college after my second year because I just was not in the right mental state to handle the minimal demands of college life. I mean, all you have to do is go to class and pay attention, and read what they tell you to, and remember stuff well enough to pass a test. I was intelligent enough to do well -- and often did -- but a semester is a long time to function with bipolar symptoms that are undiagnosed and untreated. I was doing great at my painting and managed to sit still long enough to pose for art classes, but was screwing up everything else.

I was with Kelly for a while until she slept with two other girls (no, not at the same time). While we were together, I had come out as a lesbian, and made lots of friends within the girls-who-like-girls community, whose unofficial headquarters was a particular sorority house where the lesbian jocks pledged. I became quite popular at their parties -- mostly because of my sparkling personality I am sure, but perhaps also because after a couple of drinks I could be counted on to take off all my clothes if anyone suggested that I do so. Too bad I was flunking out because I suddenly had lots of romantic opportunities to choose from.

Jack had graduated by this point -- having gotten two degrees in three years -- and I hadn't really spoken to him in a while. And then I ran into him -- literally -- when my bike collided with his van.

He was at a complete stop at an intersection, and I came barreling along on my bike and misjudged the turn and plowed into him. The impact sent me and my bike flying in separate directions, neither of us much damaged. I bounced to my feet (as I always seemed to do in those days, even when I actually was injured), and I hadn't paid enough attention to realize it was him in the van. I just tried to hurriedly get back on my bike and get out of there because it was yet another reckless thing I had done and I wanted to flee the scene so no one who knew me would know it had happened at all -- and I could pretend it didn't.

But then he got out of the van and ran up to me to help, and we were both realizing who the other person was. It was like a scene from a romantic movie, and I was overjoyed to see him. I threw my arms around him and kissed him in the middle of the street, and even though we were blocking traffic, nobody honked. Jack led me away before our audience lost its patience, and because he is always prepared for life, he had a first aid kit in his van. He patched up my skinned knee and elbow, and we ended up going to a nearby coffee house and stayed there for hours talking.

Naturally, I spilled my guts about how messed up my life was. He listened patiently and then gave me a pep talk telling me I was young and beautiful and a talented artist and had my whole life ahead of me and that I just needed to find my own path, which didn't have to be college. Jack grew up working on house construction sites with his dad, so even though he now had college degrees in both History and Philosophy, he was working as a carpenter and was learning to do high-skilled work restoring stairways and banisters in Victorian homes. But now he was taking a break from that because he had an opportunity to do writing and photography for a travel magazine. In fact, he was leaving soon on a six-week trip down the Atlantic coast to the Florida Keys.

Then he said, "want to come with me?"

That question took me completely by surprise, but I knew instantly that it was the perfect thing for me to do right at the moment. Granted, I am prone to thinking any new idea is the perfect thing for me to do that very instant, but this time was different. I even had enough introspection to doubt it.

"Are you sure you want me along?" I asked.

He laughed his easy-going laugh and said, "I wouldn't have asked you if I didn't."

We left a week later in his old VW van. We started out on the interstate heading east until we were close to the coast, but after that we stayed off the main highways as we made our meandering way down the coast. Jack had a list of places that the travel magazine wanted him to be sure to include, but in between those he explored eclectic little towns and beaches that aren't usually in the travel guides. We slept in the van and showered at campgrounds, occasionally splurging on a motel.

The first night we slept in the van, Jack tried to be gentlemanly by arranging separate sleeping spaces, but that's hard to do in a van, and I told him I was fine sleeping right next to him. So that's what we did, and I cuddled up against him, remembering how that felt when we used to sleep in his dorm room.

Jack did not try to make any sexual advances ... but I did.

It was our third night in the van, and we were parked at a campground near the beach and had been out in the surf as the sun went down. I had decided before we even left on the trip that I wanted us to be intimate again, if only for a little while. Jack was setting up our shared bed made of two unzipped sleeping bags while I hung up our wet things on a makeshift clothesline. When I got back in the van and shut the door, he was on his side of the mattress wearing a tshirt and gym shorts. I was wearing a long tshirt with nothing underneath. I pulled it off and crawled in naked beside him, snuggling up against his body.

"Something seems different," he said.

"I'm wearing a new perfume," I said (though I wasn't wearing perfume at all).

"I don't think that's it."

I started kissing his face and neck and lips, my hand now under his shirt. He kissed me back, full of the passion I remembered, and I felt his erection against my body. But then he pushed away and said, "Libby, you can't know how much I want this to happen, but maybe we shouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Well, um, for one thing, you told me you're a lesbian."

"I am," I said, having anticipated this point. "But when I signed up for lesbianism, I had you grandfathered into the contract." I kissed him again and added, "There's extra paperwork for that."

He chuckled. "I didn't know it worked that way."

"Okay, then the truth is I'm bisexual, but mostly lesbian. I can occasionally enjoy sex with a man on two conditions."

"Which are . . ."

"That it's you, and that we're going on one last trip together in your van."

"That's . . . a remarkable coincidence."

I put my hand on his erection through the thin fabric of his shorts. "Do you want to have sex with me or not?"

"Oh, I do," he sighed, his pelvis now moving against the pressure of my hand. "It's just that you can sometimes be a little ... impulsive, and I'm worried that if we do this you'll regret it in the morning. Plus, I didn't bring any condoms and I assume you're not--"

I took my hand away to reach my purse and pulled out my birth control pills to show him. "I renewed my prescription before we left, and I've been taking them for a week. So I'm not being impulsive -- I'm being planned, deliberate and premeditated. You should be proud of me."

"I am," he said, kissing me again with no need of further discussion. In between kisses, I helped him take his clothes off, and we had old-fashioned boy-girl penis-in-vagina sex. Twice.

When I woke in the morning, he was looking at me warily, no doubt wondering if I had changed my mind. I smiled and looked down his body to see that his penis did not appear quite so conflicted. I kissed my way down his body until I reached it. As I have mentioned, this is not on my list of favorite sex acts. In fact, I think one of the great selling points of lesbianism is that you never have to do this -- they should put that in the recruitment brochures. And yet, for some reason, I was determined to do it one last time with Jack.

Afterwards, I crawled up next to him and whispered in his ear, "Are you going to remember that forever?"

He sighed. "Until my dying day."

"Good, because I'm never doing it again."

That trip lasted about six weeks, during which we made it all the way to Key West, where we went snorkeling to see the coral reefs teeming with exotic colorful fish that I had only seen before in aquariums. Along the way, Jack took lots of photos and typed up his stories on a battered portable typewriter and mailed them off. A couple of times, the van broke down, but Jack always knew how to fix it, and we'd find an auto parts store to get whatever he needed. One of the many things about Jack that I love is that he always knows what to do and how to do it. He learned about cars and home-building from his father, but a lot of other things he just figures out.

We stayed a week in Key West, but then had to start for home. Although we took a leisurely pace, we both knew that we were nearing the end of our time together. I loved him, but I knew my brain just wasn't wired to be with a guy long-term -- not even a guy so great as Jack. This little moment in our lives was like a rainbow that I would stand in the rain to watch as long as it was there for me. But then it would be gone.

We also had a deadline -- or at least Jack did. He was going off to some world-class master carpentry program where he could get certified to do high-skilled work on historic houses. It was pretty far away from the college town where we had met, and to which we were now returning.

But I had no pressing plans because I was just a college dropout with no clear future. After he was gone, I stayed in that town for a while, but then various life events took place, including me moving to another city, wrecking my car and ending up in the psych ward (where at least I finally got property diagnosed and treated, so it was kind of a good thing). Along the way, I lost touch with Jack, but after Mona and I had been together for a year, I tracked him down to ask him if he would be so kind as to knock me up.

This was not the first time we ever discussed it, but back then, it had just been theoretical, and now it was real. He said yes -- on the condition that my child would know him and know he was their father, which is what I wanted to happen also.

By that point, Mona and I had moved to this property and he visited to discuss things with us. She was wary of him at first, but they bonded over their mutual love of obscure movies, plus they are similarly competitive in any sport or game. Those two could draw blood playing Scrabble. But they bonded, and it was Mona's idea that we invite him to live in the little A-frame cottage on our property.

He still has a place in another city, but he is here at least one week a month (when I am ovulating), and we have been trying the turkey baster method.