have this peculiar ability to deep-throat a banana. I discovered it sometime in middle school and it kind of became my thing. Someone would present me with a banana, and I’d perform the party trick: peel the skin off, open my mouth, and slide the shaft of the banana down my throat until my eyes watered and my lips could just about close around the end of it. Voila!

I was old enough to know exactly what this ability suggested, and young enough to think that putting an actual penis in my mouth was repulsive.

The fun part was pretending I was a born cocksucker, as if my body had evolved expressly to provide male pleasure even though nobody had even kissed me yet.

“I have no gag reflex!” I’d laugh.

Turns out I do indeed have a gag reflex, and this is the story of how I discovered it.

Let’s call him Zach. He was the first boy whose body I noticed. Before him my crushes had soft round faces and doughy hands with dirty fingernails. But Zach had angles — in his face, in the lean muscles of his arms. He had a long nose and narrow eyes. He sat at the back of the bus with the older kids even in sixth grade, and from his seat he’d look around with a bored expression, like a prince surveying his kingdom and finding it lacking. I wanted to exist under his sweaty armpit, to lick his neck, to feel his tongue in my mouth, but I was invisible to him.

So imagine the thrill I felt, a few years later, crouched over him on a hot summer day with his hallowed dick in my mouth.

Record scratch. Rewind. How did we get here? At some point we went on to high school, and he must have heard, along with the rest of the entire school, that I’d given my first boyfriend a blow job. A few months after the breakup, Zach popped up in my IMs with a wut u up 2. His screen name was an unoriginal combination of his name and some random numbers.

He asked me to come over to his house for a swim. I could practically see the quotation marks around the suggestion and I knew exactly what it meant. And I hate that thing that boys do, where they assume if you’ve sucked one dick you’ll suck any dick but you have to understand: I very, very much wanted to suck this particular dick.

I pulled on my one-piece swimsuit and denim shorts and I rode my purple Huffy all the way across town to his house. I arrived sweating and breathless, my hair plastered to my face, eyeliner melted into black smears on my lower lids. True to his word, we did take a dip in his pool before he kissed me, and we moved into his air-conditioned bedroom.

This was my moment. I had trained for this. I was so eager to get it right, to show how deep I could go. To put all those years of banana-throating to good use.

‍

‍

Let us pause for a moment to discuss the uvula. Do you know about the uvula? You know it’s the thing that dangles in the back of your throat, but do you know what it does? There’s a little hole behind the uvula that connects to your sinus passage, which enables air to pass through your nose and into your lungs. When you swallow, the muscles of your throat move the uvula up to protect that hole and ensure nothing gets up in there. And when you exhale, the uvula relaxes, opening up the hole.

I gagged on his dick at the exact moment he blew his load directly at my uvula. I sat up, sputtering.

Reader, his semen came spraying out of my nose. It burned my nasal passages with its bleachy pancake batter smell. My eyes watered. I coughed. My nose ran, mucus mixing with cum and pouring down my face. He sat frozen in horror; I could feel his eyes on my face and there was nothing to say so I started laughing and then, for some reason, hiccuping.

I never bragged about my deep-throating abilities again.