And Baby Makes Two

“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?”