Holiday sex confessions

Holidays in your twenties mean sun, sex and no suspicious parents. Granted, occasionally there are parents around, but by the time you’re out of your teens they’re more likely to laugh – or at the very least turn a blind eye – if you get off with someone. All this makes for a calamitous approach to shagging. For every idyllic week-long affair with some swarthy Spaniard, there’ll be a clumsy shag in a club loo, or a failed attempt in a tent. 

George

I was on a cruise ship (it was a family holiday – I’m not 80 years old). I’d been out with my brother, but he’d turned in for an early night so I was left on my own and very, very pissed. The bars all closed so I stumbled into a lift, ready to go to bed, and ended up awkwardly in there with this 30-year-old American woman. I literally don’t know how it happened, but before I could get from the 13th floor to my room on the 18th we were very aggressively making out and trying to tear each others’ clothes off. However as my brother was asleep in our room, we had to take it to a sunbed on the top deck. It would have been properly raunchy, except I couldn’t get it up. More depressing than the fact that we had to cut it short there was that we organised to meet at the lifts at midday the next day to seal the deal in my room, after I’d sobered up. 

Alex

I was on holiday with my girlfriend. We left our hostel one morning and decided to start walking in a direction and see where we ended up. Just as the sun was setting we reached the top of a cliff – you could see down the coast for miles. There was a little stone building with a bench that was clearly designed for people to chill in and watch the sunset. It was pretty romantic and we started shagging. Just as we were getting into it a middle aged woman and her mate arrived to take in the vista with a thermos flask and some sandwiches. They started talking in a foreign language quite agitatedly but we couldn’t tell if they realised what was going on. We were both fully clothed and she was just sitting in my lap. We ran off and I imagine they clocked it.

Sam

I never gonna leave you alone

The tide is high and the groove is on

She said her name was Cindy

“Would you like a drink of me?”

Bikini on the left, Daiquiri on the right

Come and give me lovin’ all through the night

Do the wild thing, dinga-linga-ling

Girl I wanna hear you sing

Da girl them, da girl them, da girl them ho

Them all like to have fun now

Da girl them, da girl them, da girl them hey

Girl, I wanna hear you sing

I wanna have sex on the beach

Come on move your body

Sex on the beach

James

Holiday sex is great. The first time you have holiday sex it’s even better. Admittedly it was on a family holiday with my new girlfriend, but all the same. It was still my first holiday sex. The first thing we did when we arrived was to go and “unpack our bags”. We broke the bed and it’s probably in my top ten shags.

Zoe

It was on our girls’ holiday to Zante and we’d met some of our guy friends from home. I’d fancied one of them for a few months and as we were getting progressively drunker we went to the beach for some alone time. There were quite a few clubs on the beach, so we headed into the darkness. We eventually ended up down a side alley next to some sunbeds and undressed each another. I’d been going down on him for a few minutes when a bright torch shined on us and old fat Greek man who owned the sunbeds started screaming at us to get off them and chased us down the alley as we were trying to put our clothes on.  

Emma

I went down to my parents’ place in Cornwall for a romantic weekend with the guy I was seeing. I was under the impression they wouldn’t be there that weekend. We had music on and this guy was lying down on a fur rug in the middle of the living room floor – me on top – when my mum and dad walked in. They hadn’t realised I was going to be there and definitely hadn’t expected to walk in on their daughter completely naked, straddling someone they’d never met, in their house.

Josh

I was in Italy and I met this lovely Spanish girl in a bar. I was quite pissed and in a bit of a dickhead-Brit-abroad mindset, so I started going off on one in Italian about how I was going to tutor this girl (who didn’t speak English) English. We ended up going back to my place and having sloppy drunk sex, and by the time we woke up in the morning, I had eight missed calls from my mum – I was supposed to be meeting my cousin at the train station three hours earlier, and he and his wife were still there. I had to usher this girl out as quick as possible – promising  English tutelage – and proceeded to never talk to her again, until I saw her in the same bar a week later and she threw an entire drink in my face.

Cara

We were swimming in the pool, and saw loads of couples pulled really close to each other. Jokingly, he quipped: “You probably wouldn’t even be able to tell if they were having sex right now.” So without saying a word, we decided to try it out. In the middle of the day, in our hotel’s pool. No one noticed a thing. We did the same in the sea later.

Lucy

Eight of my friends and I went travelling in southeast Asia. We were on an overnight train, where there were loads of bunk beds. It was really cramped, and me and the guy I was travelling with ended up sharing one. Obviously one thing led to another, so we closed the (paper thin) curtain and pretended we were going to sleep.

Jack

I’d escaped to Croatia with my two best mates. Opposite our apartment were four Irish girls. One took a shine to me very quickly and we hooked up. The problem was we had a tiny single bed, in the kitchen, of a one bed apartment. The double bed was occupied by my friend who had taken a French girl back early. Our third companion walked in on me, in the kitchen, strolled around, grabbed some orange juice, and spent the night on a hammock outside. He fell off at 5am, rolled down the hill into an ants’ nest. The next night, the Irish girl and I hooked up again. It was her last night. She went home before I did, so in true holiday Romeo fashion, as she wouldn’t answer my call, I climbed up from one side, over the roof, down onto her balcony and she opened the window for me. The next day my back went red raw when the suncream mixed into the cuts enacted by her nails.

Ellie

I was drunk, the sun was coming up, and I’d managed to bag myself a beautiful Spanish man who told me he was a lifeguard. So what better place to watch the sunrise than from the lifeguard tower. I call it a tower, but it was actually just a beach chair suspended about 15 feet in the air. Hands started wandering, and unbeknownst to me we had an audience. I haven’t been able to live it down with my friends ever since.

Katie

It had been a long six months, and after several failed attempts at pulling, I was optimistic about a trip to Barcelona. A friend and I jetted off for a long weekend of sunbathing, drinking, and trying to get laid. We’d gone on a bar crawl, and found ourselves chatting to a group of Australians. We all had a lot to drink, and about 4am, my friend and these two Australian guys decided to go skinny dipping – except my friend ending up arguing with the guy she was getting with, leaving me and the other guy alone. It was the perfect opportunity – and what’s more pleasingly cliche than shagging in the sea on holiday? It started to heat up – we were naked in the sea on a deserted beach after all – and then he chose that moment to tell me he’d just proposed to his girlfriend of four years, who’d said no, and he didn’t know if he could go through with this. Cheers mate.

Sophie

I was in Paris visiting a mate. A group of us had started boozing on the Eurostar at lunchtime, so by the time we were at a club in Le Marais, the lights were blurring and I was stumbling. Despite the fact I was struggling to stand, a really hot French guy took a shine to me. Usually, I’d bat off wandering hands but not when they were this French. We started snogging, I sent a string of incomprehensible texts to my mates in which I tried to express that I was leaving with him, and did so. He spoke virtually no English, and I remember trying to talk about football in French.

Vaguely, I was aware that wherever we were going was really far from central Paris. Finally, we tipped up at this imposing suburban apartment block and it transpired he lived with his parents and we had to be very, very careful not to wake them. He poured me a vodka orange, which is about my least favourite drink in the world, and then we sat in his room smoking, which is about the last thing I should have done when I was this drunk. We had sex – fine – and by the end, the room was spinning so hard I knew I was going to be sick. I collected my clothes – not my bra – and ran onto the street, mumbling something in English which he definitely didn’t understand.

It was about 5am, and I realised I had no idea how to get back, or where I was even staying. I didn’t have any money and my phone was out of battery. I walked to a ring road and threw up vodka orange for about 10 minutes. Then I sat by the side of the road and waited for a taxi to swing by (another half an hour), providing the name of the club as my “address”. I waited there until the following morning when I managed to charge my phone in a cafe (what’s the French for dirty stop out on a walk of shame?), rinse my data to find my mate’s address and returned to the apartment to a chorus of taunts and a re-reading of my texts from the night before.

Livi

It was in a hostel in Berlin. Not one of the ones with hundreds of beds, but hardly a secluded private double either. After a quick scan of the room we determined that everyone was out, but there’s something about hostels and jetlag that means there’s always an Australian sleeping somewhere. Thankfully he gave us a few minutes until letting out a loud and very deliberate cough. I nearly fell out the bunk.

Julia

I was on holiday with my boyfriend at the time and his family in a caravan in Devon. His parents were in one of the beds in the caravan, and his brother and his girlfriend were in the other bed, which meant we had a tent in the awning away from everyone else. One evening we decided to have an early night. We were still in the phase when you can’t keep your hands off each other, so it wasn’t long before we started shagging. We didn’t have to worry about anyone hearing anything, or rocking the caravan.

A couple of months later, I was round at his house and we were reminiscing about what a lovely holiday it was, when all of a sudden his dad and brother started laughing. I had no idea why they were laughing, and to my embarrassment they revealed they’d come out of the caravan on that evening to go and clean their teeth, only to hear us and see our tent rocking. It was mortifying.

Ed

It’s 1am in a strange European city and I’ve lost my friends. They’re no longer in the bar where we’ve spent the last hour drinking and trying to chat up the local girls. Panicked, I go over to the group of girls they were trying to talk to last and ask them if they know where my friends have gone. Obviously, they don’t but it seems they liked them enough to see them again because they offer to come with me and help them find them.

As we walked around the city streets I finally got through to one of my mates, who tells me they’re in a different bar, and gave me the name. Two of the girls know where it is and say they’ll show me. The rest drift away, looking a bit fed up. Half an hour later we’re sat down in this bar when the girl next to me offers me her cigarette. I’ve never smoked before. I give it a try, hoping I look cool. I pass it back. She takes another drag and then does this smoke-kiss thing I’d seen people do at parties before. After blowing the smoke into my mouth and snogging me in the process, she pulled back and said three words, pointing at the other girl: “Now do her”. A short while later I’m alternating between making out with two different girls, the only pauses coming when they stop to make out with each other. This is turning into quite possibly the greatest moment of my entire life. Then it’s time to leave. My friends ditch me (again) but this time it’s OK, I’ve pulled, surely I’m going home with at least one of them? Wrong. They explain, awkwardly, that I can’t go home with them, leaving me to walk back to the hostel alone.

What makes it even worse? I didn’t have sex, but they certainly did. The next night we met up with them again and all they could talk about is how they were so horny they went home and fucked each other “for hours”. Good. For. Them.