I know, it’s not even that interesting anymore. I have heard of more voluminous quartets or groups in this regard. However, today I will tell you this story.

What is it for?

Excluding illegal situations, the motto sounds a bit like this: get out of shyness.
Dare.

My friend Marco and I had a band at the time. He pulled the vocal strings, and I pulled the guitar strings. We were a well-known band in our area when we still lived in Lombardia near Milan. If there was a concert and bands attended, we were there, and the comments sounded often like: these guys can play. Sometimes that was a good thing, other times it was interpreted as a negative fact. We would open some concerts with a medley of difficult songs to play, like grouping the catchiest Dream Theater riffs and creating our own Instrumedley.

All right, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Talent aside, we lived fairly ordinary lives.
Marco worked for an estate agency; I had just graduated as a surveyor/technical designer. Some interesting things happened that summer, but for this story suffice it to say that for a short time, we were both single (more or less).

Summer. I was on holiday at my uncle’s home in a sparsely populated area near Pavia. The house had something like eight bedrooms and as many bathrooms. My favourite part, apart from the library, was the vast garden.
Marco worked near the area where I was staying, so now and then he came to visit me.
One night there was a thunderstorm and he stayed overnight.
I remember the lightning was close, and it was pouring rain.
The electricity went out.
My uncle asks us to go upstairs and get the torch.
We can’t see anything.
I ask Marco to lead the way and immediately realise that he is scared. As we climb the stairs, lightning creates glare, playing with the shadows; Marco backs away, grumbling. I, behind him, laugh out loud because I think: big and mighty as he can be, he is afraid of the dark.
I never expected that.
So, when we’re up, I pretend I can’t remember which room the torch is in. I take the opportunity to make strange noises and disappear from his view.
I giggled the whole time.
Over the next few days, knowing full well that my friend was afraid of ghosts, I did nothing but play pranks on him.

Then, a couple of days later he said to me, “What do you think if we invite Mina?”
Mina (from Mina Murray in Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel) worked with Marco. A good-looking girl. Almost as tall as me. Brown hair. Hazel eyes. Stunning.
My little smile was enough to convince him.
He sent her a message and the three of us met in Pavia.

She worked as a secretary at the agency. She was always well-dressed and coiffed. She had long legs, and that day she was wearing décolleté with low heels.
I had only met her once, so I knew that to have a chance with her I would have to expose myself a lot. I felt at a disadvantage compared to Marco because I was four years younger than them. Besides, the two colleagues were already familiar with each other.
Marco was in a difficult romantic relationship, they had decided to separate for a while, a sort of trial period.
He wanted to understand whether to continue the relationship or to move on.
I had been single for three months, and my focus was figuring out what to do after graduation.
University or work?

Pavia is an ancient, peaceful city, it has many towers and elegant buildings.

We walk and talk. We sit at a bar and continue joking and talking about travel.
It is late in the afternoon now.
We ask her if she wants to come and see the mansion where I live.
Marco tells her that there are ghosts in my uncle’s house and that on the evening of the storm, he is certain he saw one.

She agrees.
We go.
We prepare something to eat, and for an hour and a half, we stay at the table, chatting.

Until night covers the sky.
It is late.
We go to my room, which is the most secluded room in the mansion. There is a long corridor, then three steps down that is the access to an anteroom, in front of it two doors, one to the bathroom and the other to the room.
There are two beds in the room. At first, Marco and I settled on mine, which is a queen-size.
She on the other, had a double one.
For a while, we stay talking like this, far apart. Laughing.
Mina, however, soon joins us and gets in the middle.

I mean, at a certain point she turned towards me, and I saw her cleavage.
God, the hormones. At that age even if she had shown me her wrist I would have been aroused.
I tell her that I think she has three nipples.
She gasps.
Marco defends himself by telling her that he didn’t say anything to me.
I explained to her that sometimes it happens, I have like sudden intuitions, a bit like the lucid dreams I mentioned in this article (remember?).
She asks me if I want to see the third one.

Clearly, I say yes.

And here it all begins.

I lift her shirt. I move her bra, and there it is, just below her left nipple. I touch it.
The touch excites her.
I ask her if I can kiss it and she agrees.
While I am with my head sunk in her breast, Marco unhooks her bra from behind. I hear them giggling. The situation escapes us, it is as if that car can no longer stop.
I climb up to her mouth and kiss her.
We are in the dark.
All I can comprehend is the feeling of her on my body.
I no longer have any concept of what Marco is doing, but I know that he must have stripped her naked as every layer I touch of her is smooth and unveiled.

We don’t have condoms, so it can’t be done. We all agree on that, even if it’s hard to accept it. Just like it was hard to try not to break that pact as she passed her lips from my cucumber to Marco’s calling us champions.

That’s right: champions.

The next day, the memory of that statement would make us laugh.

Neither Marco nor I could have done better with her.
Mina was the real champion here.

We fell asleep a couple of hours later.

The next morning, we had breakfast and Marco took Mina home.
He was luckier, because she had condoms at home, so they could finish the job.

There was nothing else.
Our lives became mundane again, even though we shared a secret and, perhaps, had there not been other situations in the way to catch our attention, we could have done it again for the rest of the summer.

The point here is not sex.

I have the impression that we live in a world that technologically advances so much although finds new paradigms in which to freeze and condemn human nature.
That day, the three of us, had not planned what was going to happen, nor could we have imagined it. It just happened. We were driven by our hormones and curiosity. We would not have laid a finger on her if she had not wanted us to. A solid synergy had been created whereby each action fell upon the other spontaneously.

I experienced a situation where I was reprimanded for flirting with a girl.
But really?
Yes, for real.
And it happened here in the UK a few months after my arrival.
Since when is it a crime to invite a girl out?

We’re full of ideologies and prohibitions.
I wonder where spontaneity has gone.
Even dating has changed. Interacting with a girl means risking a complaint or undergoing an awkward moment.

How did it all become so ambiguous?

Sometimes, perhaps at the gym or while walking down the street, happen to meet their eyes who just reciprocate my gaze. I tell myself I should stop her, but then something halts me and forces me to consider the trouble I could get into.
What is the point of living in such a forbidding and cowardly manner?

I, parenthetically, don’t go for it.

Through sex that evening we learnt that a force is unleashed within us that is the desire to give ourselves and share love in all its forms. We learnt that connecting is a concession of wills, and wills are our desires.
Mina (or at least according to her version) never imagined that one day she would end up in bed with two boys, yet by connecting with us she felt part of an extension that goes far beyond her ego and the (often) constricting ideologies we grow up with.
Not even I, until the very end, ’til the moment we ended up in the same bed, could have imagined that it would happen. And we let it materialise because, without obligation or insistence, it was what we wanted.
At that point, shyness vanished. The barriers came down and we simply tried it without forcing it.
It’s surprising what may happen if you just connect with the humanity encapsulated within others.

These are moments that must be grasped, since once they have passed, they may never return with the same people: this is a world that moves, never static, relentless, constantly revolving in on itself.

ps.

Have you ever had a conversation with a friend about sex and realised that they are embarrassed?
How can you tell?
By the way they lower their voice to say certain words or the way they avoid being explicit.

Sex, of course, can also be detrimental and harmful, as in general, it stands upon the realm of low energy (although it appears so powerful).
However, that is not the point of this article.
The point of this article is that in certain situations we lose out because of our prejudices and/or mental constructs, and we are cut off from the possibility of experiencing connections that, truly, have something magical and unusual about them.

Sexual power can destroy and monstrify, but also create and liberate. We cannot therefore demonise something just because we see its negative side.
There is an order in the Universe, Daoism called it the Absolute (Wholeness), which by dividing gives birth to Yin and Yang since everything was created with a dual aspect.

No wonder this sort of modern prohibitionism continually wants to rule, without considering that it is building monsters, and we see the result in the massive proliferation of violence against women and children where consent and sharing are replaced by pure selfishness and power. Monstrification.

I have never seen monsters where a deep and shared connection of the world’s experiences is established.

We embrace the experience of existing by grasping the gifts received. And although it is a vast world, full of judgements and prejudices, I certainly do not aspire to decree an undeniable truth here, for I understand that even where there would seem to be a shared connection, it may hide the pitfalls of those who brood to harm and those who manipulate to satisfy ephemeral bodily sensations.

One moment comes to mind, about that night. Mina, at a certain point, embraces me, and holds my head on her chest, kissing the nape of my neck.
Two perfect strangers, who for a few moments become lovers.