Chapter Text
The pain first makes itself known when Lexi is 14-and-a-half years old.
She’s 13 when she gets her first period, and her mother and Cassie make a way bigger deal out of it than she does. “You’re a woman now!” Suze cheers, kissing her youngest daughter on the cheek. “My littlest girl. She’s all grown up.”
Lexi, however, does not feel like the grown up image of a woman her mother and sister insist that she is. In fact, she feels like a smaller version of herself, shrunken and shriveled up like a prune, locked inside the ever-changing body of a teenage girl. She’s on the later end of the spectrum amongst her friends when getting her period—little Lexi Howard, always the quiet late bloomer.
But when she finally does, she can’t help but secretly love the little moments of bonding it brings between her and the girls. Lexi, Maddy, Cassie, and Kat all giggling in the bathroom at school about their “baby’s first period” horror stories: tying sweaters around their waists to hide accidental leakage and indulging on as much chocolate and ice cream as their little hearts desired when it felt like their uteruses were being stabbed with icepicks. Rue even gives her the rundown of what to expect and how to manage her Aunt Flo, being the self-proclaimed “expert with 8 months ahead of you, Lexi” that she is. It’s a strange, messy, wild, and ultimately sweet time of girlhood for all of them, like holding hands and running through a sprinkler together.
But then, Lexi decides she wants to graduate from pads and attempts to use a tampon for the first time in the middle of her fourteenth year, and everything changes. Because no one had warned her about just how much it would fucking hurt.
She doesn’t understand. All of her friends use tampons with no problems. She’s never heard of any of them struggling, and she can’t recall any lessons from her middle school health class on what to do when you can’t insert a tampon in your vagina. Lexi stands, sits, and paces around her bathroom for what feels like literal hours with no pants on, trying her hardest to get her body to accept the plastic applicator.
Every time she tries, the same thing happens—pain, razor sharp and borderline burning, shoots up her flesh. She gets the tampon in about halfway each attempt before her muscles tense and the ache becomes too unbearable that she’s forced to retract it. She washes her bloody hands in the sink repeatedly, pain and frustration contorting her face.
“Are you making sure you’re angling it properly?” Maddy asks one day after Lexi brings it up in the cafeteria at school. “Make sure you’re like, holding it at an angle and not straight upwards when you put it in,” says Maddy. She grabs a pencil off of the table and demonstrates how to hold and position it.
“And put one foot up on the toilet next time,” she adds. “It’s supposed to open up your hips more or whatever. I was doing that when I first learned to use tampons. It can be fucking tricky at first.”
Lexi is thankful for her friend, who miraculously seems to have been born into the world already knowing the feminine secrets of the universe. But despite following Maddy’s instructions the next time she’s on her period, that same sharp, sharp pain returns full force.
Lexi discards the tampon in the trash bin and drops to her knees. It’s then that she discovers she’s able to violently cry without making a single sound.
After that, she has a few more last ditch efforts with tampons before she throws in the towel and sticks to pads. She lies to Maddy when she asks her if she was able to do it, plastering on a fake smile as her friend gives her a celebratory pat on the shoulder.
Lexi does not tell a single soul. How could she, when all of her beautiful friends are growing up, and all she’s left with is pain?
Tucker Blake is not the world’s greatest second kiss.
Rue is miles better, even if it had just been for practice, because Rue doesn’t gape her mouth open like a fish. But Lexi is 16 and at a school dance with a date for the first time, so of course she’s going to grin and bear it for the sake of a kiss. This is what teenagers do, and so this is what Lexi must do.
She’s seen the movies. Boy and girl meet. Boy and girl go on a date. Boy and girl kiss and reach all the bases until their clothes come off and penis goes in vagina. It’s simple and formulaic.
It’s also terrifying, and Lexi does her absolute best to anchor her nerves as she follows Tucker behind the football bleachers.
Tucker is cute enough, nice enough, whatever enough for Lexi to do this. He’s not repulsive by any means, and clearly he’s interested in her in some capacity, or else he wouldn’t have asked her to the dance. His mouth on hers as he backs her against the bleachers isn’t fantastic by any means, but it’s fine. It’s serviceable, and she’s going to finally hook up with someone for the first time in her life, and it’s literally fine.
Except when Tucker’s hand lifts the hem of her dress and dips below the waistband of her underwear, she freezes, and the pain comes back to haunt her like an old nemesis.
“Ow,” Lexi winces as he begins to press inside of her.
“Oh, sorry.” He pulls back, a confused expression on his face. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Lexi replies in a small voice. “Um, I just haven’t done this before. Can you go a little slower?”
“Sure.”
He does. The pain is still there, striking and pinching at her insides.
They readjust and try again for an embarrassingly long time when Tucker asks, “uh, is it something I’m doing wrong? I’ve only hooked up with one other girl, but she wasn’t like this at all.”
And Jesus, does that fucking slap Lexi right across the face.
“I-I’m not sure,” Lexi mutters. “Sorry. I guess I’m just not used to it.”
“Oh, okay. You wanna stop?”
“I think I have to.”
“Alright.” Tucker pauses, and an awkward silence settles between them. “You want to like, suck me off or something?”
Lexi does not suck him off. She goes home in tears that night, smudging trails of mascara down her cheeks, ruining the masterpiece Cassie had spent so long helping her create in front of the bathroom mirror.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
Everyone goes through adolescence, and Lexi watches from the sidelines as all her friends get into relationships, start having sex (lots and lots of it), and spill about their crazy, raunchy hook ups.
It’s like she’s standing at the bottom of a well, looking up at her friends and watching them through a narrow passage, always too far away for her to reach out and join them.
Like most teenage girls, Lexi’s body becomes her worst enemy, a separate entity composed of all of her worst fears and insecurities. It peers over her shoulder menacingly as she observes herself naked in front of the bathroom mirror.
“No one’s going to want you if you can’t let a guy finger you, let alone finger yourself properly,” it taunts, circling around her head like a pack of vultures ready to swoop in on their prey.
“You can’t even use a tampon. Every person with a vagina can do that. But not you. You’re pathetic. You’ll never have a relationship if you can’t even have sex, and you’re not a real woman. You’re just a baby who can’t do things for herself. You’re nothing.”
There is a word for this darkness, this feeling she cannot shake—shame.
It’s the kind of shame that chokes her, body slams her with its full, dead weight, drags her to the bottom of the ocean and keeps her there. Because this is the kind of shame that is born from within, attaching itself to her like a parasite. Lexi’s body is not entirely hers. It belongs to this creature, this separate entity that follows her around and whispers self-loathing truths into her ear.
Lexi keeps her face buried in books and tries her best to drown out the noise with music. Her sexual desires remain locked up in a box inside of her brain, determined to never let it be opened by anyone.
When Lexi is 17, she discovers the show Sex Education.
Besides Maeve, the standoffish punk girl with a knack for English literature, Lexi’s other favourite character is Lily. She loves her dorky pastel coloured costumes and the deadpan delivery of her lines. Most of all, though, Lexi appreciates how the archetypal nerdy virgin girl is written to actually want to have sex—and like, a lot of sex, too. Unabashedly so.
Lexi is sprawled across her bed on her stomach with her laptop open in front of her, binging the show. The last episode of season one begins with Lily finally about to achieve her space alien sex roleplay fantasy, wearing her best sexy alien getup with a boy who’s into the exact same kinks as she is.
But then, he tries to insert his penis in her, and Lily cries out in pain.
“Oh, retreat!” she exclaims.
The guy pulls away with a look of concern and confusion. “Why won’t it go in?”
“I don’t know,” Lily groans, and the show’s title font flashes across the screen.
Lexi’s index finger flies to the space bar to hit pause.
Her heart pounds furiously in her chest. She’s almost scared to watch the rest of the episode.
But she does, and her breath wavers every time Lily’s scenes appear on screen. “I couldn’t even get my finger in there. It’s like my vag has lockjaw,” Lily tells Otis in the abandoned school bathroom.
“Maybe it’s a way of staying in control,” Otis tells her. “In your fantasy, you’re in charge. And reality can be quite different.”
Lexi is about to chew through her bottom lip.
Further into the episode, she gets to the scene where Lily and Otis ride their bikes down a giant hill. “I think you have something called vaginismus,” Otis tells her, “which is the body’s automatic reaction to a fear of vaginal penetration.”
Lily is confused, because she’s extremely horny and wants to have sex—once again, lots of it. But Otis explains that it’s not about the fear of sex itself, necessarily. It’s about the fear of letting go, the fear of living up to the perfect fantasy you’ve made in your head and being let down when it doesn’t execute as flawlessly as you’d hoped.
It’s a sweet and silly scene that ends with Lily and Otis having a heart to heart after they make it to the bottom of the hill. But Lexi is trembling so hard that she has to pause the episode again and stare blankly at her wall for several long, agonizing minutes.
The next day, Lexi spends the whole afternoon and evening doing what she does best—researching and absorbing information.
Vaginismus can occur within all types of people with vaginas, whether you’ve had successful, pleasurable sex in the past, or if you’ve never had a penis, a sex toy, or anything else up there before. It happens involuntarily, a spasming of the muscles that makes penetration uncomfortable and painful. Lexi learns that there are a myriad of reasons that cause vaginismus—complications from childbirth, trauma from sexual assault, anxiety and other mental illnesses, or even just a general, intense fear surrounding the idea of penetrative sex.
She’s completely floored. Could she finally be able to put a name to this thing that’s been hanging over her head for her entire adolescence? Has she, in fact, not actually been slowly losing her mind over the past few years?
For the first time in maybe forever, a fraction of pressure is lifted from her shoulders. Still, she knows this is not a TV show. There are no bows that get wrapped up in the span of an hour, no quick and easy solutions she can apply to her own life. Even in Sex Education , Lily eventually finds a sexual partner who loves her and is willing to work with her needs. Lily is also way too goddamn nonchalant about the fact that she has vaginismus, and she never spirals into a storm of turmoil and self-hatred the way Lexi does.
She doesn’t believe for a second that she’ll be as lucky as Lily. Lexi stores what she’s learned into the shelves of her brain and keeps it hidden from the world, just as she does with the rest of herself.
She doesn’t bother researching the different types of treatments for vaginismus, because why would she? It’s not like anyone is going to want to have sex with her anytime soon—maybe ever. Poor little Lexi Howard, with her anxious mind and broken body.
Fezco makes her body feel electric whenever she’s near him.
Her heart and soul is set aflame when Fezco looks at her. He ignites something burning and passionate within her just by talking to her about God, tucked away in their own little world at a seedy New Year’s Eve party. He tells her he likes her name, her boring, average, unexciting name, and calls her fearless—a word she would never pick to describe herself in a million years.
That night, she crawls under her blankets and pictures Fezco’s crystal blue eyes, his freckles that dust across his face so delicately, his deep and slow drawl suddenly grunting with rage as he proceeds to beat the shit out of Nate Jacobs moments after giving her his number.
Lexi buzzes with desire. She feels it from the crown of her head all the way down to her toes. She yearns to be near him, to talk to him for hours and hours until both of their voices start to give out. To touch him, and be touched by him.
After they move past the messy miscommunication and the scary Cal Jacobs standoff at Fez’s store, she begins texting and talking to him pretty much every single day. She quickly learns that Fez is gentler, kinder, more passionate, and much, much smarter than people give him credit for—although really, she already kind of knows this. He had told her so much that first night, even through the blue windows of his eyes.
“Don’t think I’ve ever talked so much to someone all at once before, to be honest,” he tells her over the phone one night, laughing sheepishly. “'M not really used to it.”
“Me too. It feels like it’s always a matter of time before I start annoying people,” Lexi replies. “But for the record—I like hearing you talk.”
“Yeah?” he muses. “Well, that’s good, 'cause I like hearin' you talk too. Tell me all the cool, smart shit you know."
This is not how she had planned things.
Lexi’s blueprint for her life does not involve catching feelings for anyone for the rest of her time in high school. She’d always expected to graduate from this hell hole of a town unscathed, moving on to her next big adventure and finally growing into the person she was always supposed to be.
She isn’t supposed to fall harder and harder each passing day with East Highland’s local drug dealer. She isn’t supposed to want him so badly that it keeps her up at night, tossing and turning with a sheen of sweat atop her skin and heat between her legs. She isn’t supposed to want to drop everything, from her academics to her friends, just for the chance to talk to him for even a few fleeting seconds.
A wrench has been tossed into her plans, and now she cannot see past the hazy fog of desire in front of her, where she makes out the outline of Fezco in the near distance.
“You wanna come do shots with us?”
Jules has to shout over the booming SoundCloud rap coming from the speakers in the house party they’re currently situated in. Kat stands at her side, clearly already a little tipsy. Lexi waves her hand through the stream of vape smoke that drifts in the air.
“No thanks, I’m good!” Lexi replies. “I think Bobbi said she could give me a ride home, so I might do that soon.”
“Aww, why?” Jules pouts. “Not having fun?”
Lexi shrugs. “Ehh, all these parties start to feel the same after a while. I’m a grandma, I like to be in bed by 11.”
Jules laughs. “Totally understandable. See you later, then! Text me when you get home, okay?”
“I will. Thanks Jules.”
And with that, Jules and Kat each give her a wave goodbye before parting into the crowd. The blasting music and shuffling bodies all around her are becoming too much for her to handle, so she darts towards the door and breathes a sigh of relief when her skin meets the cool California night air.
The front lawn is surprisingly vacant for such a large, noisy party. Lexi can hear the muffled music and conversations coming from around the house in the backyard. It’s kind of nice, truthfully—being immersed in complete silence with her anxious thoughts isn’t always the best thing for her.
“Party’s inside, Howard. You lost?”
The voice startles her at first, but she’s instantly put at ease when she turns around and sees who it’s coming from. Fez is sitting on the cushioned loveseat bench, twirling a half-finished blunt between his fingers. Even in the semi-darkness, his closed-mouth grin shines brightly at her. She notes the way he sits with his knees spread apart, something that would surely annoy her if done by any other guy, but is impossibly irresistible coming from him.
“Hi,” she smiles. “Yeah, I’m trying to get away from the party, believe it or not.”
“Not havin’ a good time?”
“Not really.” She glances down at her platform Mary Jane’s and smoothes down the pleats of her skirt. “I just needed some fresh air so I didn’t choke to death on vape smoke.”
His nose crinkles in disgust. “Vapes suck ass. I dunno if you wanna be around me right now,” he gestures to his blunt, “but I get why you’d wanna jump ship.”
“No, you’re okay,” Lexi says, holding back her tongue from admitting that she always wants to be around him. “Weed smoke can be kind of…nice.”
He chuckles. “You not the best liar.”
She’s about to retort with a witty remark when he adds, “you can, uh, sit here if you want.”
Fez pats the empty spot next to him on the cramped bench, and Lexi hopes it isn’t too noticeable when she nervously swallows down a bundle of happy nerves. She crosses the short distance of the porch and sits down. She’s nearly thigh to thigh with him, and her bare knee brushes the denim of his jeans.
“Thanks,” she mutters. “Um, what are you doing here? Working?”
“Kinda. I was earlier, but I needed a break. Too many people askin' me for discounts and freebies.”
“Kids these days.”
He smirks. “You get it, kid.”
“Oh, so I’m a kid now?”
“Nah, Lexi.” Fez places the blunt between his lips, and it bobs up and down as he speaks. “You way cooler than anybody here.”
He takes a long pull and exhales the smoke away from her face. It’s stupid how much it has an effect on her, the simple, courteous act of blowing weed smoke out of her way—but the way it dances above both of their heads and evaporates around him makes her need to clear her throat and press her knees closer together.
“Funny how we keep meeting here,” she says to break the silence. “Like, on couches.”
“Technically a bench."
“Whatever. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know Lexi,” he drawls. He says her name slowly, like it’s something worth savoring, a delectable sip of the finest wine. “Maybe couches are like, our hot spot. It’s the fuckin’ place to be, you know?”
It’s oddly sweet to think of them having their own private spot in a sea of drunk and high teenagers, always finding each other through it like ships in the night meeting at a lighthouse. Lexi nods and averts her stare as he takes another hit.
“My bad, you want any?” He offers the blunt to her.
Lexi shakes her head. “Not tonight. I still get kind of paranoid when it comes to weed. Kind of lame.”
“Right, I remember that time you came over with Rue all those years ago.”
“Thanks again for the Sharpie beard.”
He bites his lip to suppress a grin. “My apologies. But hey, it ain't lame. It’s okay if it’s not your thing.”
“I guess. I just feel like I’m the only person my age who doesn’t do it. I feel that way about a lot of things, actually.”
“Still,” he says. “Shouldn’t force yourself to do something if you ain’t into it. Do your thing. I like you either way.”
She flushes, hiding her face behind a veil of wavy honey brown hair. “Thank you.”
“Ain’t gotta thank me,” he replies. She watches in her peripheral vision as he stamps the blunt out. He clears his throat before speaking again, and his voice comes out hoarse and quiet. “I’m uh, glad I got to see you at this thing. I wasn’t sure if you were gon' show up.”
She turns to face him now, nearly knocked out by the soft flutter of his long black eyelashes. “Really?”
“Yeah. Wish you texted me, I would’ve come to find you. Would’ve made the night a lot less boring.”
Something warm and tingly flows through her bloodstream and heats the nape of her neck. “I’m sorry. It was kind of a last minute thing. Cassie wanted me to come with her, but she took off as soon as we got here, as usual.”
“This might sound selfish,” he says, “but I’m kinda glad we could, y'know…get a moment to ourselves. Not that I’m happy your sis ditched you. Sorry ‘bout that.”
“It’s alright,” Lexi smiles. “It was kind of worth it if I got to hang out with you.”
Fez glances down at his lap, unable to meet her eyes, and wow , that certainly does something to her—this big, bad, enigmatic dealer everyone speaks about but doesn’t actually know, too shy to look at Cassie Howard’s geeky little sister.
“Y’know, we haven’t really gotten to like, hang out in person much,” he says. “We should fix that. Unless you count that time you came to my store and Jacobs's daddy interrupted us.”
“I don’t think I want that to count,” Lexi laughs. “I didn’t even get what I came for.”
“What? A drink?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
He blinks slowly at her. “Is that what you came for?”
Her hands begin to wring together in her lap on their own accord. “Um, sort of. But I also wanted to see you. I needed to warn you about Cal Jacobs.”
“And I’m glad you did. You could’ve stuck around for a while longer though, y’know. I don’t bite.”
The image of Fezco biting her is doing things that are wildly too inappropriate to her brain right now, so she shoves that imagery away and vows to unpack it alone later.
“I know. You guys just seemed…preoccupied. I didn’t want to bother you.”
“There was nobody else in the store.”
“I mean like, you and Faye.”
The silence in his pause is thick and viscous, clinging to her skin like sweat.
“Yeah, I already told you. She’s the girl of this dude I do business with. It ain’t like that between us,” he says.
“Well, yeah, I know that now,” Lexi says. “I didn’t at the time, though.”
She watches his Adam's apple move along his throat as he gulps. “Would that've been a problem between us, though? If she was my girl?”
He says it without obliviousness, like he already knows exactly what her answer is.
“Maybe ‘problem’ isn’t the right word,” she peeps. Her voice is close to inaudible, and her cheeks burn. “I…don’t know what I’m trying to say. We’d still be friends.”
“Lexi,” he says, with a knowing finality to it. “I really dig being your friend, and you mean a whole lot to me. But do you really think that’s all I see you as?”
Her eyes flicker up to his, and suddenly everything around her is hot and airy and overwhelming, because this is one of those big life moments that arrests you completely, holds you down to your seat and doesn’t let go.
She licks her lips. He’s staring at her as she does it. “I don’t know. Do you?”
Fez shifts on the bench and extends his arm along the back of it until it’s framed behind her shoulders. “No. I don’t. I see you as more.”
Lexi’s breath hitches, and she doesn’t know how it happens, but she’s somehow ended up inches away from his face, leaning towards each other in the dark on some stranger’s porch. “I see you as more, too,” she half-whispers, voice caught in her throat.
“Can I confess somethin' like, lowkey embarrassing?”
Lexi laughs, girlish and flustered. “Sure.”
“That night you came by the store, and you said it was because you wanted to warn me…” He pauses. Bright blue eyes cast over her parted lips.
“I sort of loved that you were lookin’ out for me, and you wanted me to be safe,” he murmurs. “It was hot. Like, real hot.”
Her hands feel like they could burn holes right through her skirt from where they’re trembling on her lap. “You think so?”
“Of course,” he grins. “Told you you were brave as fuck.”
Magnetized, they meet in the middle.
It happens in slow motion, but Lexi is swept up away so rapidly by the feeling of Fezco’s mouth on hers. He’s warm and soft, but still a little rugged to the touch, simultaneously everything and nothing like how she imagined, solid and real against her skin and free of the confines of her head.
The stubble of his beard gently scratching her chin sends chills through her body. A hint of weed taste lingers on his tongue, but his lips are so strong, so soft, kissing her slowly and languidly but undercut with urgency, like he was meant to come here to this party on this night and do exactly this with her.
It’s in his kiss that Lexi walks through the fog of desire that she’s been swarmed in for the past month, like a God-like figure parting the Red Sea, and sees him, only him, waiting for her.
“Fuck,” he curses into her mouth. “You got me so fucked up, Lexi.”
And fuck, if that doesn’t make her feel powerful.
Lexi throws her arms around his neck until their bodies are flush against each other, his strong and broad shoulders blanketed beneath his thick sweater. “I really like you,” she breathes in between kisses.
“I like you too,” he rasps.
She’s on fire. It’s exhilarating, and intoxicating, and there’s a sensation pooling in her gut and heating her between her legs that she’s seldomly allowed herself to indulge in, kept it locked away for so long that it’s coming at her fast and strong now that she’s letting it come out, a caged beast on the hunt. Lexi could die happy in this moment knowing she went out being kissed by him—
And then his hand slides up her inner thigh, bunching up her skirt close to the curve of her hip, and Lexi freezes.
Without meaning to, she recoils, separating their lips with an intense hastiness. Fez’s eyes fly open.
“Shit, you okay?” he asks, immediately removing his hand from her leg. “Sorry. That was too much. Fuck, my bad-”
“No, it’s fine,” she murmurs, her automatic response to every and any situation, even if it was decidedly not fine. “It’s okay, it’s not your fault, I just…”
It’s inescapable—the wicked voice of self-loathing creeps into her mind and spreads like poison.
“This is as far as you’ll get with him,” it tells her. “He’s going to want to have sex, and you can’t give that to him because your body doesn’t work properly. You can try as hard as you want, but it’ll never work, and he’s going to resent you because of it, and no one will ever see you as good enough to fuck, good enough to love.”
“Lexi?” Fezco interjects. “Uh, you good? You sort of…disappeared for a sec.”
She blinks herself out of her haze, and she can feel the burning of tears on the waterlines of her eyes about a few seconds away from bursting out of her. “Yeah, I’m sorry. Don’t worry Fez, it wasn’t you. I think I just need to stop right now.”
“Oh,” Fezco breathes, and Lexi fucking hates herself, because now he thinks its his fault when all he had done was make her feel incredible. “Yeah, no problem. Whatever you need.”
Her hands are shaking again, and her throat is cinching closed with anxiety, squeezing her tightly in a vice grip. She can’t fucking stand it.
Lexi scrambles up from the bench and forces herself to look away from Fez’s bewildered and borderline hurt expression for the sake of her own sanity. “Lexi, I’m really sorry-”
“God, no Fez, I’m sorry,” she stammers, trying to get her words out as quickly as possible. “I swear it’s not you. I just. Can’t be here right now. Um, I forgot that I have to do something. I’m like, seriously so, so sorry. I’ll see you later.”
And with that, she turns on her heels and rushes back into the party before he can say anything else.
Thankfully, in the crowded, dimly-lit hallways of the house, no one notices her crying.