How to Have Sex at Your Parents' House

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada

Welp.

The holiday season is upon us, and with it, the usual slew of obligations: buying presents, topping up grandma's wine, running interference on that right-leaning uncle. And for the 60-ish percent of us who don't already live at home, it likely means spending a night—or two—nestled snug in a bed at mom and/or dad's.

Now, we know what you're thinking: "I'm a sex-crazed twentysomething! I'm not capable of keeping my hands to myself for 48 consecutive hours! How the hell am I going to get through a week with nothing to put inside me besides booze and mom's cooking?"

To answer this ago-old question, VICE polled a few brave pioneers who have already blazed that trail. Of course for most of us, having sex in our childhood bedroom is weird and off-putting (don't look at me with those eyes, Elmo), but since you're going to be doing it anyway, maybe you can learn a thing or two from these tales of success and failure.

My strategy was always simple: get my dad drunk and wait until he passed out.

My dad and I really don't get along. We don't talk anymore, but when I was younger I used to go to his house around Christmas and we'd have to stay over and he'd make us ooh and ah over his stuff—child support money never seemed to show up, but he always managed to buy expensive shit like plasma TVs or a fucking pool table. Every time I had to go, it was horrible. I dreaded it all year long.

So one year, to make the whole thing bearable, I brought my boyfriend, with the idea that having him fuck me in my dad's house would be a good way to get back at him for, you know, my entire childhood. I knew that when he passed out, he passed out hard—a train couldn't wake him up. So we all hung out and drank, and anytime my Dad needed a drink, I'd do him the "favour" of refilling it for him. He inadvertently put down a lot of doubles that night. For good measure, we made sure to have him do a couple of hits off of a joint with us, and BINGO. He was out like a light by 10:30 PM. And then my boyfriend and I proceeded to have the most aggressive sex we could all over his stupid pool table.

The holidays really bring out the best in everyone.

This is back when I was in high school. We get back to her place after a night of partying—I don't know when it was—probably one or two in the morning. The house is asleep. We go to her room and get to fooling around, and I start going down on her under the covers. Classic: her on her back, knees up, with me in this little tent. And that's happening for a little bit. Then suddenly, her legs snap shut. It was probably a couple of seconds in retrospect, but at the time, it felt like I spent forever trying to pry myself out of there.

I figured that something must be up, so I poke my head out the sheets, and there's this dark figure standing in the doorway. It must have been opened, I guess. And I catch sight of this person, and my response, for whatever reason, was to immediately collapse onto the pillow and pretend to be asleep. I imagined that this was some cunning plan. It would have been the most painfully obvious thing in the world: me poking my head up, seeing this person, and then being suddenly 'asleep'. But it worked. Not that anybody was convinced, of course, but the situation just kind of resolved itself. They backed away. Nothing was said. And we never talked about it.

To this day, I don't know if it was her mom or her dad. I suspect it was her mom. I don't think her dad would have put up with that sort of behaviour at all.

Sometimes you have to get creative. A few Christmas eves ago, I got drunk at a local pub near home, and invited two friends—a guy and a girl—over to pass out since cabs weren't available. Mid-sleep, me and my male friend slipped into the living room (while mum and sis were asleep upstairs, and our female friend was still asleep in my bed). We just did it on the couch, and no one was ever the wiser. Although the next morning, my mom was pretty shocked to find two randoms in my bed and promptly called them a cab. Success?

The problem I have with sex at your parents' house is, every time I do it I feel 17 again. I moved [to Vancouver] from Ontario ten years ago, so I've always had my own place, but a few years ago my girlfriend moved back in with her dad while she was going to school. Her dad's house was way out in the suburbs and I don't drive, so we were almost never there. Why would you? I had an apartment in the city. But the one time we did have sex out there, it turned into the most 17-year-old thing ever.

We were on the phone, and we ended up getting into this big fight—she wanted me to come visit her, but wasn't willing to pick me up. She wanted me to spend two hours on the bus when she could have been in the city in less than half the time. Anyway, we got into a fight, and she kept getting more and more unreasonable. So finally I said "OK, I'll come out, but you're not going to like it when I get there."

I hung up and got on the bus and just hated her the entire way out to the suburbs. She'd calmed down by the time I arrived, and apologized for being unreasonable, and then I took her upstairs for some very angry makeup sex. And as she's probably ten seconds from an orgasm, we hear the front door open. And her dad walks into the house and starts calling her name. Not just once, either—probably two or three times.

Her bed is quite squeaky, so we had to stop basically right away. We just kind of froze and waited to see what he'd do. She didn't say anything at first, but then he came up the stairs toward the bedroom, asking if she was home. We were terrified he was just going to open the door. She said something obvious like "We'll be right out!" and we put our clothes on in this big rush. Literally the only time I've ever done it, and it turned into a scene from American Pie. She never did have that orgasm. Which, given how mad I was, was fine with me.

Her dad bought her a new bed a month or two later. A big part of me hopes it was some kind of comment.

Jesse Donaldson is a Vancouver author.