“So how’s your science project going?” Amie asked one lunch-break.
Shanee squashed her drink carton under her foot.
“OK. My plants seem to be doing what they’re meant to be doing. You know, different stuff depending on how much light and water they get … I haven’t lost any yet.” She looked over at me. “What about yours, Lana?”
I groaned. “Oh, my God, the plants…”
Shanee bought the seeds, planted the seeds, separated the tiny plants out into pots, and then gave me a dozen to look after. I was meant to put three in a place where they got a lot of light, three in a place where they got a bit of light, three in a place where they didn’t get much light, and the rest in the dark. I was meant to check them every day and keep notes. I was meant to be making scientific observations.
“I totally forgot about them … I’ve been so busy lately…”
“Not doing homework obviously,” said Gerri.
Shanee bit back a smile.
“No,” said Amie in this baby voice. “With Les…” She gave me one of her sour looks. “I thought he had a job. Doesn’t he ever go to it?”
“You know, you’re not the only one with a boyfriend, Lana,” purred Gerri. “Other people manage to have a love life and occasionally get some work done.”
It was as if their bodies had been taken over not by aliens but by preachers. What was wrong with everyone all of a sudden?
“I never said I was the only one with a boyfriend,” I snapped back. “I just said I’ve been busy.”
Amie snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“So what’d you do last night?” asked Shanee, the Peacemaker. “Anything exciting?”
The other two spluttered.
“Nothing special. The old bag went to Charley’s, so Les came over after work and we hung out.”
The first couple of weeks we were going out, Les and me did do things. We went to the park and had tea in the café; we went to the cinema; we had a meal in the pizza place by the station; he took me for a drive up to Hendon because he loved roundabouts. But as time went on, nothing special was all we did. Not that I was complaining. I wasn’t complaining. I’d be happy watching paint dry with Les. Doing nothing with Les was a hundred times better than doing something with anybody else. I’d meet him for tea after school, or I’d drop by the shop, and, if Hilary was out, he’d come round at about eleven-thirty or twelve, after he finished work and the pubs had closed. We’d watch a bit of telly, then we’d snog for a while, and then he’d go home. He never invited me round to his, because he lived with four other guys and there wasn’t any privacy. He wanted me all to himself.
Gerri glanced over at me. “Have you slept with him yet?”
Gerri’d been having sex since the day before her fourteenth birthday. So, since she was thirteen. At least that’s what she said. She never actually went into much detail.
“No, not yet.” I crumbled up my sandwich wrapper. “Les is a gentleman. He never pressures me.”
This was true, but it did puzzle me a bit. Boys were meant to want sex; they were meant to pressure you. But Les never did. We’d snog in his car, we’d snog in my flat when Hilary was out, we’d even snogged in the Blockbuster office a couple of times, but he never tried to go any further. Most of the time I didn’t think about it, but when I did think about it I couldn’t decide if there was something wrong with Les, or with me.
I wasn’t the only one.
“Oh, puhlease…” Amie spluttered with laughter. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with him?”
“Maybe he’s gay,” said Gerri. “Only he doesn’t know it yet.”
I’d seen that film, too. Only the guy Kevin Kline played was obviously gay. I mean, it was incredible that it’d never occurred to him or anyone else. Les wasn’t anything like that.
Shanee waded in again.
“Maybe they have a real relationship,” said Shanee. “It doesn’t mean a person’s gay just because he’s interested in more than sex. ”
“Exactly.” I could always count on Shanee. “Not every boy is sex-mad, you know.”
“Wanting to have sex with your girlfriend isn’t being sex-mad,” Amie shot back. “It’s natural.”
Gerri’s smile was as slimy as a slug trail. “You have been seeing Les for a while now. You’d think he’d at least ask.”
I raised one eyebrow. “And how do you know he hasn’t?”
Amie burst out laughing. “Oh, I get it,” she said. “It’s not Les who’s gay. It’s you.”
Personally, I think life would be a lot easier if it came with instructions. You know, like a video or a stereo system. So you wouldn’t always have to be wondering what was going on and what you were supposed to do about it.
I’d always found magazines very helpful like that, so I went straight home after school and looked through every women’s magazine I had. There were stacks of them, because my mother was always going to take them to the recycling but never did. I reckoned one of them was bound to have something that dealt with my problem. If not a feature, then a letter:
Dear Auntie, My boyfriend and I have been going out for a year now, and he’s never tried to have sex with me. People say I’m pretty. What’s wrong?
There wasn’t much. There was a lot on clothes and make-up and exercise and how men are different to women (in case you hadn’t noticed) and stuff like that, but not anything that was exactly like my problem.
There was a letter in Cosmo, or maybe Marie Claire, from a woman whose husband never wanted to have sex with her any more. It had been four months. He always said he was tired or stressed out from work. The agony aunt said that the husband was probably tired and stressed out from work. She said that women had the idea that all men wanted to have sex all the time, but that this wasn’t true. Men were people, too. Sometimes they felt like having sex, and sometimes they didn’t. If you’d had a hard day at work, she said, you weren’t going to feel like breaking the bedsprings when you got home, and men didn’t either.
Even though I didn’t learn anything very helpful from the magazines, I felt better knowing that men really weren’t meant to be horny all the time. It took off quite a bit of pressure. I mean, it definitely wasn’t him or me, was it? It was just life.
And then I remembered a film I saw once. It was about a man and woman who lived together, but just as flatmates. They became really good friends, but he never made a pass at her or anything. She couldn’t work out why. But it was because he knew she’d been raped once and was nervous of sex. That’s why he’d decided they would just be friends, because he loved her and didn’t want to lose her completely. When she finds out the truth, she seduces him and everything’s OK.
It wasn’t exactly like me and Les, but it was close enough. Les didn’t know I was only fifteen, but he knew I’d never had a boyfriend. He was probably just being sensitive and tactful. He was a very sensitive and tactful person. He didn’t want to take advantage.
It was two nights after the conversation with Amie, Shanee and Gerri before I saw Les again. He rang up on Friday to say he was coming round, but that somebody at work was getting married and they were going for a drink to celebrate, so he’d be a bit later than usual. I’d been pretty certain he would come round. Hilary almost always went to Charley’s on a Friday night.
By then I had made my plan. I reckoned it was time. I mean, since I already knew I was going to marry Les and have his babies I couldn’t see any reason for holding back. The sooner we started, the sooner I’d get away from Hilary Spiggs.
But I wasn’t going to seduce him. I didn’t think I was up to seducing someone yet. It’d be like taking a job as a manicurist when you’d never even had your nails done yourself. Plus, since Les wasn’t exactly experienced with girls, I reckoned he might not be up to it either. Maybe he needed some encouragement. All the magazines agreed that men were not as confident about sex as they seemed to be. Especially someone as sensitive as Les. So I was going to make it possible for him to seduce me without wondering whether or not he was going to be rejected.
As soon as my mother left, I had a bath. I put in three bath pearls and played a George Michael album to get me in a sexy mood. I lay there, using my toes to turn on the hot tap to top up the water, imagining Les seducing me.
“Let me give you a back rub,” he’d whisper. “Let me just see you naked, I swear I won’t do anything.”
I, of course, was all coy and shy.
“Oh, I don’t know … what if someone comes … I feel so embarrassed…”
Les was quiet and gentle.
“Don’t be,” Les said softly. “I’ll help you undress … I’ll stop whenever you say…”
I got as far as him sliding his hand behind me to undo my bra, but then I stopped. I didn’t want to ruin the best part for myself.
After my bath, I spent a couple of hours getting dressed and made-up. I wanted to be provocative, but subtle. Which meant I had to wear something that would have the effect of a miniskirt and stilettos, but that wasn’t so obvious. In the end, I found inspiration in the cinema, as per usual. I wore my tartan boxer shorts and bra, with one of Charley’s white shirts over it. I think it was Ellen Barkin I saw dressed like that, and it was incredibly sexy.
I borrowed some of Hilary’s Opium that she bought when Charley took us to Disney World. It was old, but it smelled OK, and she had tons of it left because she only wore it for very special occasions and she didn’t have many of those. While I was in her room I also borrowed herlarge gold hoop earrings and her thinnest gold chain. Ellen Barkin always wore gold, and our hair colour was almost exactly the same. At least sometimes.
It was just as well I knew Les was going to be late, because after I was ready, it took me ages to get my bedroom ready.
The first thing I did was take Mr Ted, my teddy from when I was little, off the bed. I’d never spent a night without Mr Ted that I could remember, but I didn’t think a stuffed bear was really appropriate in a seduction scene. Plus, it would’ve been strange fooling around with Mr Ted sitting there with his one eye. I put him on my shelf, facing the wall.
Then I went through the whole flat and got every candle I could find: night-lights, Christmas candles, garden candles, the big candles in glass jars with saints painted on them that Charley brought back from Florida, the candles the two of them had in the kitchen for when they went camping, the beeswax candles I made in primary school that Hilary never bothered using, even the special round candle that looked like stained glass when it burned that Charlene gave me. In films, someone’s always filling a room with dozens and dozens of burning candles. I wanted my room to look like that. Candles are really romantic. I don’t know who lights all those candles in the films, but I bet it’s more than one person. I didn’t have more than twenty candles, but it took me hours to get them all going. I’d light two or three, and the first one would go out. Or I’d get six going on my chest of drawers, and half of them would be blown out when I walked past. By the time they were all lit, the room looked like there’d been a gunfight in it and the first few candles had gone out again.
I was spraying a little more Opium into the room, to get rid of the smell of sulphur from all the matches, when the doorbell rang.
I raced into the hall, took a deep breath, and smiled.
“Hello, babe.”
Les leaned over me from the doorway. His gaze was like a sponge sucking up spilled lotion. “Is that a bikini under that shirt?”
He had the glazed eyes and fixed smile of a man watching a dancer in a topless bar. I could feel myself flush. God bless you, Ellen Barkin!
“Sort of.”
Half of me wanted the neighbours to see me getting off with him on the doorstep, but the other half of me knew that if they did, one of them would blab to Her Majesty sooner or later.
I gave Les a tug to pull him inside, and he sort of tripped past me.
I tossed my head so he could see my earrings. Dangly earrings are very sexy.
“You look like you had a good time,” I teased.
Les propped himself against the entrance to the living room, grinning like a Hallowe’en pumpkin.
“Videos,” he mumbled. “We watched these videos…” The pumpkin smile turned into a leer. “It would’ve been better if you’d been there.”
My blood began to bubble. Les had never leered at me before.
“Really?” I purred. “Are you sure?”
Les swallowed and sort of sucked on his lips. His head bobbed up and down.
“You look good.” He held out his arms. “You gonna give me a kiss?”
I moistened my lips and started walking towards him, slowly. “Maybe…”
The “maybe” always works.
He lurched forwards, pinning me against the wall. He was bigger than me. I was powerless beneath his weight. It was pretty exciting. His breath smelled like the kitchen after one of my mother’s parties, but it was masculine and almost intoxicating. Unless I was just getting drunk on the fumes.
“I’ll kiss you till Peter Pan grows up…” I whispered.
It was a line from a film, but Les didn’t recognize it.
“You should be a writer.” His lips touched mine. “Or a professional kisser…”
I couldn’t believe it! We’d been seeing each other for over six weeks and I’d never even got my bra all the way off. But all of a sudden he was all over me. Tongue, hands, knee, even face. He kept rubbing his cheek against mine, which was like being licked by a very large and strong cat. I ignored the slight pain and rubbed back. The last person in the world I wanted to see right then (or ever, really) was Hilary Spiggs, but in a weird way I wanted her to see me. There’s your little girl, Mrs Spiggs, put that in your teacup and drink it!
“Let’s go to bed.”
I was speaking softly, the way you do in romantic moments, and my face was squashed against his neck, so I wasn’t sure he heard me. I gave him a shove.
“It’s late … let’s go to my room…”
It never occurred to me that it would be so easy.
“Bed,” said Les, and he kind of tottered backwards.
I grabbed hold of him and steered him down the hallway.
I reached round him and opened the door to my room. I suppose he didn’t realize, because he lurched forward, pulling me with him. He straightened up immediately, and I bounced against the door.
“Jesus Christ!” I’d never heard Les sound frightened before. “The place is on fire!”
For a second I thought it really was on fire. I’d forgotten all about the candles. Fire was a definite possibility.
I looked round him, and started breathing again with relief.
“It’s all right,” I assured him. Nothing was burning that shouldn’t have been. “It’s just the candles.”
He nodded, slowly, like I’d explained something very complicated to him and he was taking it in.
“Oh, right. The candles.”
I’d half thought he might scoop me up in his arms the way Nicolas Cage scoops up Cher in Moonstruck, but I suppose to be fair to Les he was having enough trouble holding himself up, without holding me up, too.
He grabbed hold of me, and started licking at my ear. It sort of reminded me of Nan’s dog.
“You light my candle,” Les murmured.
“Me too,” I murmured back. “I’ve never felt like this before.”
Les burped. “Me neither.” He ran his hand over my breasts. “I’ve never felt you like this before either.”
Things got a little hectic after that. I’d never seen him so worked up. And because he was so excited, I was excited, too. Scenes of passion flashed before my eyes. Some were even in black and white.
Kissing and sort of climbing all over each other, we finally reached the bed. I helped him get out of his shoes and trousers. I had to leave him for a second, to turn the stereo on, and when I got back he was stretched out with a smile on his face.
“Baby…” he moaned. “Baby … baby…”
“Les…” I whispered. “Les, get under the duvet.”
I climbed in beside him.
His eyes were closed, but he immediately wrapped himself around me and nuzzled close. His leg rubbed against mine.
“Skin…” mumbled Les, yanking at my bra. “Skin on skin…”
Skin on skin…
It was the most grown-up thing anyone’d ever said to me. I kissed him with passion. He kissed me back.
Over and over.
We were kissing and groaning and all that stuff, and then Les started pushing against me. I could feel him sort of groping around between us.
Push … push … grunt … grunt…
“I can’t find it,” gasped Les.
I wasn’t sure what he was looking for.
Push … push … grunt … grunt…
And then there was this little jolt of pain and Les’s eyes moved around like he was having some sort of fit, and then he rolled on to his back.
“Geez,” he panted. “Was that your first time, too?”
This is going to sound weird, but I didn’t really know it’d happened until then. First of all, I didn’t remember him putting on a condom. I wasn’t sure, but I had the impression it wasn’t something you could do too far in advance. Plus, it wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined.
I propped myself on one elbow and leaned against his chest. “You mean you’ve never done it before, either?”
Les was staring at the ceiling. He shook his head. “What’d you think?” he asked.
I kissed the side of his head. “What did you think?”
He grinned. “I thought it was great.”
I nestled my head on his shoulder.
“So did I.”