TikTok Virgin

The person in the video wears purple lipstick. Crushed purple. Bruised purple on full lips. It isn’t until the third time Ava watches the video that she notices the eyes: a velvet brown. A kind of fathomless brown. 

A kind of spongy warmth between her legs. 

Ava also realizes that even though the video shows up in her Instagram feed, it’s originally from TikTok—a platform she’s always thought of being for people her daughter’s age. Young people with nothing better to do. But she downloads the app, because of those eyes. 

Signs up for an account. Those lips. 

Follows the creator. That jaw.

And Ava’s not shocked by the images that flash through her mind: smashing her mouth against those lips, tracing a chiseled mandible with her tongue, biting the diaphanous silk off a shoulder and running her hands down a smooth muscular back. But, she registers she should be shocked. Ashamed. 

Jendeh. Whore.

A gold earring dangling against the pulsing heat of a neck.

Ava bites her lip. Her parents would disown her. She considers this: the absurdity of fearing censure from her parents, at her age.

And these feelings—natural as bodies folding into each other—may mean nothing.

Nasar slams through the front door and plops onto the couch beside her, dropping his head back and rubbing his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. 

Ava puts her phone face down on her lap. It’s just a phase. Maybe. As fleeting as the taste of salt licked from the inside of an elbow. The initial shock of sweetness sucked from a plum. It doesn’t have to make sense. She puts a hand on Nasar’s thigh and tries to absorb his familiar static. Her other hand, which hovers lightly over her phone, twitches. 

But it doesn’t have to mean anything at all.