Adorkable (24 page)

‘It’s
all right. Your world still exists. I didn’t sleep with Scarlett and please don’t tell me that Barney taught you that thing you do with your tongue.’

‘As Barney leapt about a foot in the air if I even tried to French him, of course not.’ Jeane’s hands stilled. ‘I wonder if Scarlett and Barney will ever have sex, like, with each other? Who would make the first move? I’m sure they haven’t even kissed yet. It will be
decades
before they can even muster up the courage to grope
under
the clothes. So, anyway, if it wasn’t Scarlett, who did teach you your moves?’ Jeane asked, while I was still reeling from the thought of her masturbating and then Barney and Scarlett having sex. Jeane was right. They’d probably be getting their telegrams from the Queen for hitting the big one hundred before they got down to getting down. But now Jeane had moved on to my sex life and I knew she wouldn’t move away from my sex life until I told her everything.

I sighed. ‘Well, my first sex girlfriend …’

‘A sex girlfriend? What the what, Michael?’ She chortled with glee. ‘Sex girlfriend!’

There was nothing for it but to pinch her arse so she’d shut up, although she bit down hard on my earlobe in retaliation. ‘OK, the first girl I had sex with was when I was fifteen and it was Ant’s older sister so I didn’t go out with her properly but she’d get me on my own or drag me off at parties to have her way with me and bark orders at me when I wasn’t doing it to her exact specifications.’ I thought back to the fraught but exhilarating two months I’d been Daria Constantine’s sex slave. ‘Actually you and her have a lot in common.’

‘She
sounds excellent,’ Jeane said. ‘Who was your next girlfriend?’

‘Well, I was so scarred by my experiences with Daria that I didn’t have sex with my next girlfriend,’ I lied, because that hadn’t been the reason why Hannah and I hadn’t slept together. What we’d had had been so perfect, so intense, that sex would have got in the way. Just kissing her had been enough and I didn’t want to tell Jeane that because she wouldn’t get it and she’d mock me. There might have been times when I probably needed the piss taken out of me, but not when it was to do with Hannah. ‘And then I went on a fortnight’s lads’ holiday to Magaluf after GCSEs and I hooked up with Carly from Leeds.’

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.’

‘What
ever
. 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:

1. 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.’
   

2. 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.’
   

3. 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.
   

4. 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.
   

5. 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?’

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.