Jeane nodded. ‘And the next night you hooked up with Lauren from Manchester and the night after was Heather from Basingstoke and—’
‘Do you want to hear this or are you just going to keep interrupting with a whole lot of bullshit that isn’t even close to the truth?’
She opened her mouth then closed it again, and settled back down with her head nestled in the space between my head and my shoulder. ‘Sorry, I’m shutting up now.’
‘Yeah, for all of one minute.’
‘Five minutes, tops,’ Jeane corrected. ‘So, right, Carly from Leeds?’
‘Well, we met on the first night and I liked her and she liked me so we decided that we might as well stick together, instead of going out every night and shagging random, um, randoms because we’d had too much booze. And before you ask, yes, we’re still in touch and have both vowed that we’ll never have sex on a beach ever again.’
‘Why?’
‘One word: sand. What happened to shutting up?’
Jeane mimed zipping her lips together, but nudged me to continue.
‘And then there was Megan, who was my girlfriend before Scarlett. Went out for about eight months and, well, we did it a lot. Like, all the time.’
‘Oh, are your parents the kind of parents who are cool about giving you your own space and being respectful of your burgeoning sexuality?’ Jeane asked. ‘Because I have to say that your mum really didn’t strike me as being one of those kinds of parents.’
‘Well, she’s not, especially when she caught me and Megan going at it.’
‘She didn’t?’ Jeane breathed, as she struggled up on one elbow and nearly broke one of my ribs in the process. ‘What did she do?’
‘Gave me an excruciating speech about sex and respecting women and every week she returns my laundry with condoms stuffed in the pockets of all my jeans,’ I told Jeane, who gurgled. ‘But seriously, I’d go to Megan’s house after school every day and we’d work our way through her parents’ porn collection and their instructional sex DVDs. Y’know, like, The Lovers’ Guide To Sexual Positions. One of them was even in 3D.’
‘You are so making this up,’ Jeane said crossly.
‘I am not,’ I insisted as crossly. ‘You wait. Just you wait. You’ll see.’
‘Whatever. Is that meant to be a threat or a promise?’
‘Bit of both,’ I said, and I was starting to get really tired. Truthfully, I wasn’t starting to … I was tired. It was almost dawn o’clock and I’d been up for twenty-four hours, two of which had been spent playing a really rough game of football and there’d been the scene with Heidi and I’d come twice and I was ready for sleep. But when I looked down at Jeane she was wide awake and barely blinking.
‘Aren’t you tired?’
She shook her head. ‘Nah, I’ve got my second wind and anyway, I’ve trained myself not to need that much sleep. But I know you’re not as evolved as me so if you want to bed down that’s cool.’
‘I’m all right,’ I said through clenched jaw as I stifled a yawn. ‘So, how about you? Where did you learn your moves?’
Jeane began to talk and it was as if her one-note voice was the aural equivalent of a sleeping pill and my eyelids began to droop down and I’d drift off but the more Jeane got into her stride, the more animated she became. She’d wriggle and fidget and dig me with her elbow and I’d drift back into consciousness.
So, from what I could gather, her previous sexual encounters had been with:
David, who blogged about books and was a committed Christian. Jeane was only fifteen and he was only sixteen and wrestling with his faith so they didn’t go all the way but went about three-quarters of the way for a few months. Then they started to have lots of arguments about how organised religion was just an evil conspiracy to keep women down, ‘and in the end, I told him that he had to choose between me and Jesus and he totes chose Jesus.’
Jens was the editor of some Swedish lifestyle magazine who Jeane met at a conference for Free Thinkers, Radicals and Next Big Things. ‘Wanky, I know, but it was a week, all expenses paid, in Stockholm.’ So, Jens, who was twenty-seven and should have known better than to glom on to a girl eleven years younger than him, spent most of the week hanging out with Jeane and they shopped for bright orange tights together and went to see modern art and dined on moose burgers and at the end of the week when the conference decamped to a cruise ship to tour Sweden’s archipelago, Jens very kindly took Jeane’s virginity. ‘I thought it was cool,’ she mused. ‘He was Jens and I was Jeane and he was really handsome. Swedish men are total foxes. They all look like Eric from True Blood and sometimes I am that shallow. And yes, he was older than me but I figured that I was going to have sex sooner or later so I might as well have it with someone who was stupidly good-looking and knew what they were doing. It was, like, twenty-four hours of sexual boot camp.’ I was wide awake at this point and could see Jeane shake her head sadly. ‘I didn’t get to see the archipelago though. I never left Jens’s cabin.’
Ben, fashion student and part-time hairdresser, who Jeane had picked up at a craft fair because he was wearing a Little Monsters T-shirt. They got off with each other for two months until Ben decided that he preferred boys and they parted on good terms. Or Jeane said that they had but as he was the one responsible for her hair being iron-grey I wasn’t quite sure that I believed her.
Cedric, French, taught Jeane about Anaïs Nin, good coffee and eBay France, before he went back to Marseilles to finish his degree in Advanced Pretentiousness.
Judy, who played roller derby, and then I was all Judy? JUDY?
I’d come out the tunnel of tiredness into being teeth-clenching, eye-popping awake with no hope of sleep, and Jeane telling me that one of her past hook-ups was called Judy was like having icy-cold water flung in my face. ‘Are you bisexual?’ I asked, because that was something she might have thought to mention. ‘Are you into girls? What’s the deal with Judy?’
Jeane looked perturbed like she had no idea why I was acting as if she’d started speaking in tongues. ‘Dude,’ she said. ‘Dude, your voice is getting so high that it’s making my ears hurt.’
‘Are you generally into doing it with girls as well as boys then?’ I asked, as if my voice breaking had never happened.
‘Well, see, it’s like I really like Haribo but then occasionally I’ll be in the newsy’s and I’ll think, Hmm, maybe I could fancy some Maltesers for a change. So, I have the Maltesers and they’re all right but they don’t really hit the spot and I couldn’t have them every day like Haribo,’ Jeane finished with a pleased smile like comparing sexual orientation to sweets made perfect sense and in a weird kind of way it did.
‘So, there was Judy, but it turned out she was a total player and when I stopped seeing her, I saw Barney and we never did anything but kiss and that is all the people who I’ve had fun and not-so-fun sexy times with.’
Apart from the Swede, who sounded like a total paedo skeeve, it wasn’t such a bad list and I realised there was no need for me to start feeling insecure that she preferred older men or girls. Jeane wouldn’t have been here if she hadn’t wanted to be and although the sex was an exciting, new development, it wasn’t like we were going to stay together for ever. We were just a chapter in each other’s sexual histories.
Jeane settled back down in my arms and even made a snuffly little noise as if she hadn’t quite trained herself to do without sleep. My hand crept up to stroke the back of her neck and as I began to knead the ginormous knot I found there, Jeane’s limbs slackened and the half of her body that was sprawled on top of mine seemed to get heavier.
‘That hurts,’ she muttered. My hand stilled. ‘I didn’t tell you to stop.’
I kneaded and massaged and stroked until the knot was gone and Jeane was breathing evenly and deeply and I thought she was asleep.
She wasn’t. Just as I was about to turn out the bedside lamp she curled herself tighter into me and raised her head.
‘Michael, will you … when
my dad turns up on Friday to take me out to dinner and give me a hard time about my lifestyle choices … it would go a lot better …’ Her eyes were almost crossed with the effort of getting the words out, then she collapsed back on my chest. ‘No, it doesn’t matter. Forget it.’
For one moment it crossed my mind that this whole thing, the sex, had been a cunning way to get me onside so she could introduce me to her dad. Then it wouldn’t matter that she lived on jelly sweets and black coffee and handed in all her coursework late and didn’t sleep enough, because she had to be doing something right if she was going out with someone like me. Not to be big-headed or anything, but on paper I’m pretty much a textbook-perfect boyfriend. Textbook best mate. Textbook son. I’m whatever people expect me to be.
Then again, Jeane was the only person in my life who didn’t expect me to be a perfect anything. And she was always honest with me, brutally honest, and she had many faults but sneaky ulterior motives weren’t one of them. If she wanted something from me then she’d come right out and ask me, except when the thing she wanted was too hard to put into actual words. I got that because I was starting to get her.
‘Did you want me to come and meet your dad then?’ I asked gently. ‘Safety in numbers and all that?’
I thought she was asleep until she kissed my bicep, which was the bit of me that was nearest to her mouth. ‘It will be torture and we’ll have to go to a Garfunkel’s. He’s freaking obsessed with the free salad bar.’
‘That’s all right. I like salad. Besides, you’ve met my parents. Meeting your dad would be payback.’
‘You don’t have to … I mean, I don’t expect you to, it’s not like we’re dating and it’s time to meet my dad.’
‘Yeah, I know, but if you want me to then I will.’
There was another pause. Jeane kissed my bicep three more times and then actually nuzzled my arm with her cheek. ‘Yeah, I do want you to.’
I didn’t even realise that I’d been tensing up until she said that. I untensed. ‘OK. Cool.’
‘Cool,’ she said. ‘Now will you shut up so I can get some sleep?’
21
It was only now, now that we’d got down with our bad selves, that I was forced to admit that I had a HUGE crush on Michael Lee. It sort of happened about ten minutes after he woke up the next morning. I’d already been up for hours, or minutes if we’re going to be technical about it, and was perched behind his desk as I uploaded the photos I’d taken the night before to my Flickr, when he sat up, stretched, then stared at me like he wasn’t sure why I was in his bedroom. It was interesting to watch the recall of last night’s events play out on his face and when he reached the end, it seemed as if it was only sheer force of will that stopped him from pulling the covers over his head.
‘Oh. Hey. Right. So, how are you?’ he mumbled.
I was tempted to describe a burning sensation and a terrible itching in my lady garden just to wind him up, but that would have been mean. Also untrue. And he’d been all kinds of lovely the night before and had even offered to come and sit next to me and partake of all the salad he could eat when my dad rolled into town, so I just smiled at him.
‘I’m fine, better than fine,’ I told him, and, if possible, he looked even more panicky, like he was having a serious case of regrets and that he’d never meant any of it to happen. There was only one way to find out.
‘Look, Michael, can we not do the awkward morning-after thing? We’re both better than that but if you think it was a terrible mistake and actually someone slipped a date rape drug into your lager last night then just say and we’ll pretend that it never happened and we can go back to how we were, or we can go further back than that and just pretend the other one doesn’t exist? OK?’
‘How can you be so … so like you this early in the morning?’ he grumbled.
‘What can I say? It’s a gift.’
Michael scratched his head, then cautiously touched the tufts of hair that were in serious disarray. ‘For the record, I don’t regret last night. Well, apart from the bit when you didn’t get your happy but I did.’
I hadn’t expected to feel quite so relieved. ‘Oh, I remember feeling fairly happy.’
Then Michael smiled. It was a slow, sexy smile, and with him sitting in a rumpled bed with rumpled hair and his muscles rippling in a pleasing manner, he looked like a model in an aftershave ad in a men’s style magazine and I finally got what all the fuss was about. It wasn’t the pretty. It wasn’t his join-the-dots cool. It wasn’t his being good at everything. It was because he was ridiculously sizzling hot and I was so glad that I wasn’t the type of girl who simpered or blushed or giggled, because I’d be doing a sickening combination of all of those three things.
‘What time do we have to meet Molly?’ he asked, as he settled back on his pillows and folded his arms.
I checked the time on my phone. ‘In about two hours, just as we’re ready to leave, she’ll call me and say that she’s only just got up and can we put it back by an hour?’
‘Three hours, then? Well, I could get up and make us some coffee or you could get back in bed and we can do something about the happy you didn’t have?’ The slow, sexy smile got leershaped. ‘What do you fancy?’
If I’d worn glasses I’d have pushed them up my nose, but I settled for a prim look. ‘Coffee, please,’ I said, because I knew it would make him stop leering. It did. He pouted instead and I was laughing as I wrenched myself away from my various Mac devices and leapt on to the bed so I could pounce on him.
That set the tone for the rest of the week. We weren’t at it all the time. I had to work on my presentation for the New York conference and write something for the Guardian and take a lot of meetings in Shoreditch and Michael’s parents were around and he was boringly fixated on coursework and dull admin work for his mum and dad to get money to buy stuff, but, apart from that, we managed to get together to do IT. Doing it. Seems so weird that you could classify the things we did with each other and how they made us both feel with a mere one-syllable, two-letter word. It.
Anyway we did the amazing, transcendental, life-affirming it every chance we had, which wasn’t as often as we wanted because it wasn’t as if Michael could stay over. He did vague up the idea of telling his mum and dad about us but before I could list the three hundred and fifty-seven reasons why that would be a bad idea, Michael decided he wouldn’t.
‘She’d be bound to mention it when one of my mates was round mine and we’re still keeping this on a strictly need to know basis, right?’
I nodded. ‘Right, and people who go to our school don’t need to know about us.’
But there was one other person who was going to know about us, whether he liked it or not, and that was my dad. But as my dad was in his sixties and mostly lived a long way away and only used the internet to hook up with women at least twenty years younger than him who had a thing for ageing, alcoholic Lotharios, it didn’t matter.
And even though the week had turned out to be one of the best weeks in recent memory, the threat of my dad’s visit hung heavy in the air, like the scent of wet dog.
Roy, my dad, was due to come round at 4.30 on Friday afternoon. We weren’t meeting Michael until seven at the dreaded Garfunkel’s. Given that it would take half an hour to get there, that was two whole hours spent in the company of a man with whom I had nothing in common apart from a microscopic shred of DNA. Sometimes I wondered if we were genetically related but, as Pat absolutely wasn’t the type of woman to play away from home (during my facts-of-life talk she’d told me that she found gardening far more fulfilling than sex) and Roy and I both had identical crooked middle fingers on our left hands, I had to accept the cruel hand that fate had dealt me.
By 3.45, the flat was gleaming. Well, it was tidyish by my standards but probably not by Roy’s standards – he might have liked his drink but he wasn’t one of those sloppy drunks, which would have made my life a lot easier. He could take half an hour to lay a table. One Easter Sunday, t
here had even been a ruler involved.
Anyway, I’d filled the fridge with nutritious food, quite a lot of it green and not Haribo-green either. Not that I was going to be eating any of it. I’d also given myself a makeunder. I wasn’t getting rid of my peach-coloured hair, not for no man or paternal signifier, but I’d toned down the technicoloured splendour of my ensemble. Normally I wore what I wanted, but Roy was allegedly my father and he paid the service charges on the flat and the utility bills and put some money into my account for housekeeping, and in return I went to school, did my coursework like a good little girl and when he rolled into town for a visit, I tried to give every appearance that I could live a successful, independent life free from the parental yoke. Part of that was not letting my freak flag fly quite so high, which was why I was wearing a matching jumper and cardigan, a silver lamé twinset that I’d found in a charity shop, a red knee-length circle skirt and shoes that didn’t look like an old lady had worn them first.
Even so, when I opened my front door and Roy saw me, his face dropped. Like he’d had an idea of me in his head that was prettier and smilier and just a lot less than I actually am and, as usual, I’d disappointed him before I even opened my mouth.
‘Oh, hey, Roy,’ I said, and his face dropped a bit more. My dad looks like the human equivalent of one of those really jowly dogs, so he always seems fairly morose, but when I’m with him it gets more pronounced, especially as I refuse to call him Dad. I mean, he’s not really my dad. He kind of stepped back from that role a long time ago and I don’t live with him, I don’t speak to him much, he wouldn’t dare give me a curfew and he doesn’t help me with my homework, so why should I call him Dad?