When Girls Page 3

  I doubt that was the first time I’d felt horny as fuck but it’s the first time I remember. I stormed into the kitchen - no, I didn’t storm, I walked earnestly into the kitchen, only it felt loud because my heart was beating and I knew what I was going to say - I stormed(ish) into the kitchen to remind Jules that we had at least one sleepover every week, and didn’t she remember that my dad had offered to teach her to drive, well he only did that because he thought I was a dyke and that she and I were already fucking. (I said ‘fucking’, then I blushed, because I wasn’t entirely sure if lesbians actually ‘fucked’ according to the definition of the word.) Jules pouted and mumbled something like, ‘Then why did he put that futon in your room?’ and I replied, ‘because you practically moved in last summer and he didn’t want you sleeping on the floor,’ and she opened the fridge to see what might be of interest to Clarice, whom Jules was now wearing on her shoulder, and I thought to myself This is what a lesbian pirate looks like then, which made me laugh.

  Jules turned round and asked why I was laughing, and I didn’t want to call her a lesbian pirate so I just shook my head, then she wanted the card back because I was being a cunt, and I said I wasn’t, and that I was sorry, and that I loved the card and everything in it, then I told her that I loved her more than anything in the entire world.

  I don’t know if that was true. In that moment it probably was. For what it’s worth, Jules angled her neck so she was looking deep into Clarice’s eyes (?) and it struck me momentarily that she was already doubtful whether she loved me more than she loved the snail. But so what; she didn’t move away when I went closer and leant on the fridge. I put an arm out, put a hand on her (snail-free) shoulder, stood even closer, and kissed her - properly, this time, on her mouth.

  Jules is still the best worst kiss of my life. It was typically teenage: when you think there’s one right thing to do and you do that and nothing else, meaning you stand rigid holding your head at one precise angle, both of you moving your tongues in a singular way from which neither person dares deviate, and you’re conscientiously keeping your eyes squinched shut because you know that she’ll think you’re weird if she opens her eyes and sees you looking at her, and you didn’t know that breathing solely through your nose was this hard, you’re racking your brains trying to think of other occasions when you’ve breathed solely through your nose because you know you must have done it before, but you can’t think of when, and now you’re wishing you’d practiced this in advance (although you don’t know how you’d have practiced, and likely it’s just more evidence of how the world’s a bitch that you haven’t been afforded the opportunity to do so), and you don’t want to breathe into her mouth, because 1) you have no idea if that’s a thing that people do, and 2) you’ve been eating Wotsits and Peperamis and are pretty sure your breath is rank.

  Nonetheless, a kiss is a kiss is a kiss, and a first kiss makes everything times infinity. And I’m not saying I want to marry every woman I meet but Jules was my best friend and now we were both sixteen and pretty much had a daughter together (Clarice) it was like the stars were pointing in that direction, or whatever it is stars do to indicate their approval. When we broke the kiss - and yes, it did go on way too long because neither of us wanted to have to talk about it after - Jules’ face looked like she’d been slapped hard on each cheek. I desperately wanted to tell her that I’d wanted nothing else for months, but I didn’t say so for fear of sounding like whatever the definition of ‘slag’ was (I kind of knew, but wasn’t sure I knew exactly). Because Jules was gorgeous: she swam in the sea for fun, and was a member of a youth archaeology group, and she had pale skin and black hair that grew in natural ringlets that you could ping like actual springs, and in my teenage fascination with female anatomy I was fixated on what her pubic hair might look like. I’d almost decided it was like actual tiny springs and so thick and black I wouldn’t be able to find her clit even on our wedding night, so now I was worried about that, as well as what Jules’ mum would say if she’d found out I’d given her daughter a snail and tongued her on the same day under her very own roof. I desperately wanted to look for her clit though, even if I couldn’t find it, because Jules was my best friend and gorgeous and I loved her and all I wanted to do was have sex with her then fall asleep on her naked chest.

  We needed to laugh; at ourselves, at it. I said, ‘There’s something on your shoulder, by the way,’ and we did. Jules made cutesy noises at Clarice then said that she still hadn’t got a drink and made a sort of blaah sound as if she was chronically dehydrated and there was nothing else critical to life except finding the blackcurrant concentrate and boiling a kettle and making hot juice. I watched her do this, then I asked, ‘Do you want to come to mine?’ knowing that Jules’ mum was going to return with the dog and resume her monologue about how the dog was going to get confused by the snail and how it might eat the snail in the middle of the night and how the snail was probably poisonous to dogs, had I asked about that when I was at the pet shop or not? If we got into that conversation we’d be on an irretrievable tangent and there’d be no more chance for me to look at Jules’ pubic hair or ask her to marry me or anything else.

  Yes, Jules desperately wanted to go back to mine. She didn’t say ‘desperately’, but when I asked she replied, ‘Yes I do,’ in the clipped and measured tone she only used in critical situations, and she told me to pack Clarice’s stuff while she went upstairs to pack hers. If she was packing stuff it meant she’d be staying over.

  My mind was yelling at me in a loud and grinding voice. BE TERRIFIED. YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO GIVE HER ORAL SEX.

  Everyone’s got to start somewhere, I replied, feeling meek and foolish and way beyond terrified and clammy between my legs and exhilarated and so fucking lucky to be alive. So fucking lucky I wasn’t a snail because snails never have the opportunity to smush their faces in the big black spiralized bush of their brand new girlfriend.

  Not a friend who was a girl.

  A girlfriend. No space in the middle. No qualification at all.

  Jules texted her mum and we walked back to my house, taking it in turns to carry Clarice in her plastic tank. Conversation jumped weirdly between Christmassy things and a quasi-argumentative rehashing of the last four or five months, whereby Jules accused me of ignoring her signals and I accused her right back. ‘I kissed you first,’ I told her, ‘both times, in fact.’ She could remember the wet smooch on the cheek but pretended she hardly did at all, then said she hadn’t realised it was a ‘signal’ (pronouncing the inverted commas very emphatically), given that everyone kisses everyone on the cheek and she kissed her dog on the cheek every damn day. This was in Jules’ phase of saying ‘damn’ all the time, as if she was a high-achieving thirty-five year old trying to run career and family under strenuous circumstances. She made me ache; behind my sternum, in the hollow of my throat. I let her berate me for being strange and confusing and unbrave and imagined she was moving in with me and that what she was carrying was all she owned in the entire world.

  It wasn’t, of course. It was a bag containing a hoody and pyjama bottoms and a very small tube of the extremely expensive face wash Santa had put in her stocking, and a pair of headphones, and two of the four boxes of mint Matchmakers her family had accrued. We went back to mine and Jules kissed my entire family on their cheeks.

  Then we all played the board game version of a gameshow I’d never seen.

  Then we ate bowls of bubble and squeak with turkey scraps and cranberry jelly on top.

  Then my dad put on his DVD of Life in the Undergrowth, since Jules now owned a snail.

  Then we played Scrabble. I had given Jules A Look the very moment my mum stood up and said ‘Let’s play Scrabble!’ and Jules had acknowledged The Look but nonetheless said, ‘Yay! I love Scrabble!’ (which to be fair she did), and by the time I finished disappointing my parents by coming sixth out of six players it was after ten p.m. and Jules was conspicuously yawning.

  I was sixteen. I didn’t kn
ow whether a yawn was a yawn was a yawn or whether we could still make love. Make love were the words in my head as well as the imperative; there had been revelations, declarations, her tongue had been in my mouth, which was a sensation I could nearly call back to being if I thought about it hard enough.

  The futon was still in my room. Jules hadn’t packed a sleeping bag but this might mean nothing at all, since her preference was to steal a pillow off my bed and drape herself in the four hundred tog duvet which lived in the cupboard in the hall. We went upstairs together - in silence - then Jules spent the next ten minutes trying to find a good overnight spot for Clarice in my room: not too near the cold window, not too near the hot radiator, not under a lamp, not perilously close to any precipice or draught. Then she asked if she could have a shower. ‘You don’t have to ask,’ I reminded her, and picked out the best and biggest of our spare towels. Jules borrowed a hairband and took her fancy face wash and off she went, leaving me to wonder if it was too obviously thirsty for me to get a shower too. I didn’t think of the word thirsty actually, because that hadn’t yet been associated with the obstinate and overwhelming sexual desperation I was sure was written all over my face. Actually, I was just worried I might taste like wee, if Jules licked her fingers then put her hand(s) between my legs then put her fingers in her mouth. Or what if I smell like poo? I asked myself, What if Jules goes down and I smell like poo and she gags like her mum did when she met Clarice?

  There are a hundred thousand ways for a virgin lesbian to terrify herself, and although I am prone to exaggeration that particular number is exact. I sat on my bed with my legs crossed and pinpricks of sweat breaking out under both arms, embarrassed that my pubic hair looked kind of flat, kind of patchy, and that my labia minora were dark and ragged. They look like what a mental patient cuts out when they do therapeutic collage, I thought. A simile Jules would probably laugh at, but I couldn’t tell her, because you can’t point out the ways in which your genitals are ugly. The idea struck me to mitigate the fact that my mons pubis looked like the aftermath of an Australian wildfire by shaving it bald in the shower, then I thought that would probably take a long time, then I remembered that being hairless would only escalate the obscenity of my vulva. Don’t shave, I told myself, now worried that I would.

  Maybe Jules would only want to kiss and touch each other’s breasts.

  Pipes juddered somewhere in the walls, the sound of the shower turning off. I pulled my pyjamas out from under my pillow and folded them neatly, then unfolded them in case folded pyjamas made me look like an idiot. Jules came back in with pink cheeks and her hair pulled back and for the first time in the years we’d been friends I was scared of her.

  ‘I’m getting a shower as well,’ I announced. Jules made a noise of acknowledgement. As I left I was vaguely aware she’d got her headphones and was about to sit at my desk, presumably to watch something on my laptop. In the bathroom I took the showerhead out of its slot and washed every part of me at point blank range, using a pea-sized glob of conditioner in my pubic hair, which I rinsed out quickly in case for some reason I hadn’t thought of this was a bad idea.

  Then I had to get dry. Maybe Jules is already asleep. I kind of hoped she was.

  She wasn’t.

  I dried off as quickly and slowly as I could, avoiding looking at the nail scissors in the basket on the shelf in case I started trimming my pubes. My pyjamas were embarrassing too (white horses on grey, eyeless and running) but what could I do? I couldn’t walk naked down the hall. I couldn’t go into my room naked. I couldn’t tell Jules I suddenly hated the pyjamas she’d seen me in so many times before.

  How do people do this? I thought. Night after night for a lifetime, think about the sex they may or may not be about to have and get ready for it and be sexy so their girlfriend doesn’t hate them. The effort and the angst were making me cross. It was her fault. If only she hadn’t given me that card I’d be in bed watching a film and eating Matchmakers even though I’d already brushed my teeth and -

  I hadn’t brushed my fucking teeth.

  I brushed my fucking teeth. Brushed my tongue as hard as I could without throwing up into the sink, not knowing how it was possible I was already sweating again.

  Everything hates me and thinks I’m a joke.

  This is the least sexy anyone has ever been in the history of the entire world.

  Literally in tens of thousands of years of human history no-one has never been so crap at anything as I am at being attractive.

  Fuck it, I thought. It was time. I couldn’t live in the bathroom forever. I mean, I could stay there until Jules went home but I’d have to come out sometime and I’d have to go back to school and she’d be there, and even if I changed schools I’d still see her in the park or just around the place, and at some point she’d probably try to talk to me.

  I went back to my room. Jules was sitting in my bed. She’d taken the laptop with her and was watching something, arms folded, headphones on, wearing her jut-chin, pout-mouth expression.

  My coming in snapped her out of it. The look of focus broke and her mouth relaxed although not entirely; she looked like she had something to say but was holding it in for now. She dropped her knees so her legs were straight and pulled one ear of the headphones back.

  ‘OK?’ she said.

  ‘Uhuh. What are you watching?’

  ‘Just a video. Some festival. I thought we could go but it’s in Michigan.’

  ‘OK.’

  She’d said ‘we’, so I decided it was safe to get into bed. I went round the other side so Jules didn’t have to move.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, course.’ Then after a long moment, ‘Why?’

  I was lying down with one arm folded under my head, propping myself up enough to see what Jules was watching. Anyway, she’d pressed Pause.

  ‘Just checking,’ she said. She clicked on another couple of videos but tutted at both and turned them off.

  My breathing felt weird. ‘Are you sleeping in here tonight?’ I said.

  ‘In your room?’

  ‘Not in my room,’ I poked her leg, ‘in here.’

  I don’t want to say ‘bed’. ‘Bed’ sounds way too sexual.

  ‘I love your dad,’ Jules said. She didn’t have one of her own.

  ‘Cool. Borrow him anytime you like.’

  ‘Rent-a-dad. Are you hungry?’

  ‘No. Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you, though?’

  ‘No.’ She closed the laptop and put it down on the floor. Jules’s pyjamas were plain, brushed red cotton with white trim.

  ‘Our pyjamas clash,’ I said as she sat back upright again. She lifted the duvet to look at us better.

  ‘Hmm,’ then, ‘I didn’t choose these, though. They were a present.’

  ‘My mum bought mine,’ I agreed.

  ‘Case closed.’ Jules smiled and an almost undetectable let’s get this fucking done then look crossed her face. She scooched down under the covers and turned onto her side, then put one hand on my hip.

  This is the first time she’s ever had her hand on my hip. I wonder if she knows that.

  Yeah; she probably knows.

  I didn’t know whether to sit up or lie down. Who does what? When do they do it and how do they know? Jules was looking at my face and we were close enough that I could tell she was looking at my mouth in particular. You’ve done this already, I told myself, then argued back that doing it lying down was harder than hard.

  Just kiss her, before you turn into literally the most ineffective lesbian since the beginning of time. Maybe that’s what the universe wants you to be but you don’t have to just jump into the role like you actually want it, like you’ve always aspired to be shit.

  Jules inched closer so I leant forward and kissed her.

  Turns out kissing is better in bed than kissing in the open doorway of a fridge. Jules seemed to alternate between holding her breath and making incy wincy moan
s, and I allowed myself to be enchanted and eventually to relax. She was the first to move down (she kissed my neck) and I was the first to take my top off. Jules blushed hard and I could see she was trying to stop herself laughing, but not in a horrible way, rather with adrenaline, and with the same amazement I felt, that we were actually doing this: showing and touching each others tits. At first neither of us hardly dared; I held her right breast cupped in my left hand as if it were the fertile egg of the last dodo. Warm, fragile, with a soft sort of weight, and a milky chocolatey nub of nipple standing hard and proud. Jules was stroking and kissing my hair, not mildly, then we heard footsteps coming up the stairs - I leant across and flicked the light off and we lay down fast, both of us pulling the duvet up to our necks.

  We giggled in the dark.

  ‘You need to put a lock on your door,’ Jules said under her breath.

  ‘Like that wouldn’t give it away,’ I replied.

  It was easier in the dark. Honestly, I didn’t know what it was, only that it didn’t feel like making love, or at least what I had imagined making love to be. It felt experimental, as if no-one had done this before ever in the world, and even while we were twining and pressing together I was thinking that maybe there wasn’t actually such a thing as lesbianism at all, and we were just exceptionally close friends who had jointly bought into a stupid rumour, or maybe we were deviants, or maybe we were just missing the point. When Jules put her hand between my legs I jumped a little, and she noticed and moved her hand away, and I didn’t want to say anything because we weren’t really saying much and it was going well and what if talking would ruin it irretrievably. I just kissed her more, more passionately, moved my hips in better rhythm, slid my hand further down her back to where the shape gave way to the fleshier spread of her ass. Then she put her hand back again, back between my legs.