Chapter Twenty
Jenna
Fuck, I've missed good sex.
I've missed feeling like my insides are on fire. I've missed feeling this full and satiated. I have a sudden urge to thank Marty for how I feel, but as I open my eyes to look down at him, I see his eyes are still closed, his breath still shallow, and there's a slight frown on his forehead.
“Are you okay, Marty? Was it good for you?” I ask in a quiet voice, suddenly panicked it was all very one-sided.
His eyes pop open.
“Good? Good!?” His frown disappears as his dimples emerge. “I just saw stars and comets and planets and green little aliens on those planets high-fiving each other because of how good that was.”
I collapse on him and bury my laughter, and my relief, in the few hairs he has in the middle of his chest. His arms come around my body and hold me there.
“So good,” I say, and it feels like I'm revealing too much but also not using words that are close to adequate.
“Yeah, that was pretty fucking special,” he says, and I can't stop my smile at first, but a second later I bite it back into my mouth.
Special must be one of those words Irish people use like “grand” and “mighty” which have so much more power to us unassuming British folk who rely far too heavily on middle of the road adjectives like “nice” and “fine”.
Hoping, therefore, that I'm not saying too much, not exposing too much of myself, I risk agreeing. “Yeah, it was.” I give him a kiss of thanks, right in the middle of his ribcage. We stay like that until his dick slides out of me and he taps my arse gently.
“Better deal with this,” he says, and I move to the side so he can stand up. “Is there a bin in the bathroom? Can I put it in there?”
“Yeah.” I think how strange it is I can't ever remember being asked by a man where to put a condom after we had sex but surely it must have happened. Now alert for more unpleasant feelings, I wait for the hormone crash that should follow that incredibly satisfying trio of orgasms, but it doesn’t come.
Not yet, not when I can still see him, and he is still naked.
I pull my eyebrows together as I lay face down on the bed and watch his delightfully muscled backside walk away from me.
I then watch his swinging dick walk back to me after I hear the toilet flush and the taps run.
I should go and do the same, but I can't move.
I can't do anything but lie prone on the bed and smile at the sight of him walking back to me.
“You know you have the most amazing arse,” he says as he joins me lying on the bed, and his hand is on it.
“Better than my brother's?” I suddenly want him to smack it, berate my cheekiness with a hard slap, but he just buries his face in my shoulder and laughs.
“Well, I haven't got to know your brother's as well as I have yours, and now I never will, but still, I really can't imagine it would beat this.”
“You know you can smack it,” I say gently pushing my shoulder against him.
He nods as he swallows that information, but he doesn't move his hand.
“I'm serious,” I say in low voice.
“Do you want me to smack your arse, Jenna?”
“Maybe later,” I say, embarrassed all over again. It doesn’t help when I realise what I just said. Maybe later. Assumptive, much?
“Can I stay? For a bit longer?” he asks as if reading my mind. He sounds almost as fearful as I am to invite him to spend the night here. To ease this unwelcome new awkwardness, I reach for what has worked best between us so far; humour.
“You just made me come three times,” I say. “You can stay as long as you want. You and your dick and your talented tongue can move in.”
He laughs but it doesn’t sound as hearty as usual. “The three of us appreciate that. But I will go back later. I'm getting up early to ride with Dad.”
“To do what?”
“A bike ride, Jenna, get your mind out of the gutter.” I feel a light slap on my left arse cheek.
“Hmm,” I say with great satisfaction. “You were listening.”
“Tell me more about your work,” he says out of nowhere as he rubs very gently at the exact spot he just hit. It shouldn't feel as good as it does - sore, hot, prickly, tender.
“What do you want to know?” I ask, pushing up to rest on my forearms.
“Did you like study sex or something to become a sex writer? After that performance, I can kind of believe it.”
“I wasn't just a sex columnist. Actually, sex was a very small part of what I wrote about. Really what I was writing about was people, and relationships, and love. Sex is just a big part of that for some people, but not everyone, of course.”
“So, tell me about it.” I feel him shift a little closer, the hairs on his calves, thighs and in his groin tickling the side of me in the most delightful, teasing way.
“I always wanted to be a writer. I love books and reading, and was convinced that I would end up writing the steamy romance novels I used to smuggle out of the library as a teen, but then, in my last year of school I had this horrible break-up and got really angry with those kind of books giving me completely false expectations about men and love, so at the very last minute, I pulled out of my combined creative writing and English Lit uni course, and switched to sociology with creative writing.”
“And that helped you learn what makes relationships work, and what doesn't?”
“No, of course not. That can’t be taught.
If it could then I wouldn't be single, divorce wouldn't be a billion-pound industry, and half of the television shows we watch, books we read, or music we listen to wouldn’t exist. Of course, there are some things that definitely enhance relationships that research proves and experience confirms - good communication, honesty, being self-aware, being forgiving and open-minded - but truly, there's no winning formula and it's my experience - professional and personal - that luck and timing play as big a role as anything.”
He props his head up on his elbow. “But how did you start writing about all this?”
I find myself smiling as I recall a fuzzy string of memories I'd not thought about in a long time.
“Once I knew I wasn't going to be the next Danielle Steel, I thought about maybe going into journalism, so at university I joined the student newspaper, doing all sorts from film reviews to local job listings - really thrilling, ground-breaking stuff - but then they wanted someone to do an anonymous advice column and I put my name forward, and it took off.
This was back before social media and blogs, when Dear So-and-So agony aunt columns were really popular.
To my mind, I was just giving very obvious answers to very obvious questions - about how to ask someone out on a date, how to go on said date when you had next to no money, how to talk to a fuck buddy about contraception, how to tell your parents you're queer - but people apparently needed the advice, and others liked reading it. In my second year, I was asked to do a weekly one-hour show on the uni radio station answering anonymous questions, and I also ended up interning at a national newspaper for a summer, doing research for a features editor. After I graduated, I was all set up to do a journalism MA, but that summer I was bored working in a clothes shop so I just sent out some examples of my columns to a women's magazine in London and they got me in for work experience. After a few weeks doing that, they hired me to support their D-list celebrity agony aunt, by which I mean, I wrote her column for her while she partied six nights a week, filling tabloids with paparazzi pics. When she very publicly had to go into rehab about a year later, they took some headshots and I took over, officially. Ask Jenny, it was called, because they thought Jenna was too weird a name.” I laugh at how I didn’t even put up a fight then.
I was so young. “God, it was so cheesy, but I was so proud, and it was really rewarding helping people.
I never did do my MA, and instead started freelancing for women's and teen magazines, and even the gossip rags when they were popular for all of five minutes before social media took off. Once I had a decent portfolio, the broadsheet and tabloid editors came knocking and I was able to pitch articles wherever I wanted.”
“Wow, the big guns.” He kisses my shoulder which makes me shiver. “Are you cold? Should we get under the covers?”
I nod, not cold but suddenly desperate for that.
“But you said you’ve stopped. Why?” Marty asks once we're under the sheets.
This time I'm lying on my back and somehow that makes me even more aware of the length of his body lying on its side beside mine, and how his dick rests against the curve of my hip.
It is only too tempting to reach my hand and play with him, take us away from this conversation.
“You don't want to know about that,” I say.
“I asked, didn't I?” His eyebrows lower.
“Okay.” I give him a smile that I hope apologises for doubting him.
“Well, because it's sex and sex is, well, always interesting to a lot of people, I was often encouraged by editors to answer more sex-related questions than the general questions about relationships and intimacy and that's fine, because, yes, I'm an allosexual who loves sex so I was happy to do it most of the time, but then it became more of a struggle, and more than a little ironic because...” I squeeze my eyes shut to summon a bit more courage.
“Because?” he prompts, and now I'm also holding my breath because his hand is on my stomach, his fingers stroking and searching.
I am a second away from tensing my muscles to pull it a little tauter, but I don't. I am who I am.
He's seen me, and now he's feeling me, and by the feel of his hardening cock at my side, he’s enjoying it.
I will not let misogynistic beauty standards even get close to ruining this for me.
The answer to his question comes quickly and easily.