Truth or Dare

“What, tell me, tagidi li, are you scared?”

Of course I was scared. I was also turned on. I took a look at Dov who was seated at the next table — a leather necklace grazing his tanned neck, the self-tapered and cuffed black jeans and the slight pompadour-like lilt of his hair — and came up with a radical proposal of my own.

“On one condition. You bring Dov, and we make it a foursome,” I answered, as if we were organizing a bridge game. I wouldn’t go all the way with Ari in the context of our flimsy to non-existent relationship, I concluded, using the logic of a buzzed 21-year-old, but a night of group sex during my summer adventure fell into a different category.

Ari grinned, whispered in Dov’s ear, and grabbed a bottle of vodka from behind the pub bar.

The four of us went back to Dov’s room.

“Let’s play Truth or Dare,” I suggested. Somehow, I’d become the initiator.

Really I was just channeling my inner Madonna.

“Ari and Dov, I dare you to kiss,” I said.

Unexpectedly, they took the dare. A joke — and then it wasn’t. Lips touching, then lingering, until the depth of their friendship, their boyhood bond, the army years, turned the kiss unexpectedly tender and real — beautiful, even. It didn’t take long until we were all in bed. Moving from one to another, swapping partners — first Ari and me, then me and Dov. The Swedish woman reached for me and I kissed her back, feeling the unexpected soft weight of her breast in my hand. What happened between the four of us was consensual if vaguely dirty, friendly but devoid of love, hot though lacking in the sensuality that comes when you care, when you know someone. But I didn’t feel ashamed or like I’d been used. I felt as powerful and as in control sexually as those soldiers I’d seen out the window had seemed. I felt alive. The next morning was Shabbat, our day off, and we all went to breakfast together, hung-over and half shy.

The following day, Sunday, I went back to the fields. It was time to pick apples. In the orchard we were paired up, one person climbing up the short ladders to harvest while the other held the ladder before carrying the filled baskets of fruit back to the truck. Stefanie and I were partnered up; we still hadn’t talked about why I hadn’t come home on Friday night. I knew what she’d think without having to ask.

But I didn’t feel like a bad girl; I felt like a woman. Over the next several years, I’d continue to explore my sexuality. There would be plenty of non-Jewish boyfriends, and there would be more flings — the housing co-operative parties in Madison, Wisconsin, that became excuses to kiss each one of my roommates I had a crush on; the sculptor in Iowa who took me out for beers and grilled cheese and kissed me all night in his car during a summer thunderstorm; the broke and beautiful hipster band manager who spent New Year’s Eve with me in Brooklyn after I finally dumped my latest not-so-good-for-me boyfriend.

I’ve been married 10 years now, to a Jewish man, and am the mother of a five-year-old son. It’s been more than a dozen years since I’ve been with anyone other than my husband. The sex we have these days — when we make time to squeeze or schedule it in between parenting and working — is deeply familiar, intimate, emotional, and comfortingly predictable. When I look back on that long ago night in Israel, I regret nothing. 

Jessica Berger Gross is editor of the anthology About What Was Lost: 20 Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, and author of the yoga memoir enLIGHTened: How I Lost 40 Pounds with a Yoga Mat, Fresh Pineapples, and a Beagle Pointer. She writes the Enlightened Motherhood blog for yogajournal.com.