Preface.
Janine was—meaning as I knew her then—an extraordinary person. She defied a succinct label. Perhaps the closest I can come is to say she lived unselfconsciously as though a parody, or even a satire, of sexuality. If you don’t understand what I mean, I’m sorry. This is the best I can do. I’m not sure if I understand it myself. It would not be fair to her to say she was heterosexual or bi-sexual or lesbian. She was not political, and gender was not relevant. Her choice of partner might depend entirely on mood. And, as she was fond of pointing out, anyone who masturbates is playing with genitals of their own sex. What does that make them?
To have known her is one thing. To attempt to describe her is quite another. I have diaries full of Janine-speaks and Janine-does. And I have tried to use her before in various stories. She is too improbable. So, I’ve decided to just let her out of the bottle. She can do as she pleases. And you can take it or leave it. That’s up to you.
Janine 1. Hooker.
She came to me with the newspaper and showed me the ad: ‘Generous 40s fem seeks young fem ns gsoh, for cas fun.’ There is not the space here to explore the range of emotions this aroused. I knew well Janine’s disposition and attitude to our relationship. All the same, I can’t pretend I wasn’t hurt that one, she wanted to answer an ad like that, and that two (later) she wanted me to drive her over.
In the meantime, she said ‘You’re a bit of a writer.’ She needed a script to answer the ad. I wrote one for her: ‘Hi. I’m Chantelle. I’m twenty-six, five-two, brown haired, perky tits and I’m feeling kind of sexy right now.’ Something like that. I gave her what I’d written. She dialled the mailbox reply number and said, ‘Hi. I’m twenty-one. I’ve got a velvet cunt and a sand paper tongue. Call me.’
Saturday morning she got a call and arranged to meet the woman at a motel across the city and out the highway. I drove her and we got there about 10pm. We cruised the rectangular car park, spotted unit twelve in a corner, and I went up to the top carpark where I could watch the room while I waited. She said, ‘If you see anything strange, anything at all, get help. Christ. Why am I doing this.’ I had never seen her so scared.
I watched Janine make her way across the carpark, knock on the door, and go in. From what I could see, it was definitely a woman inside. I relaxed a bit. She may not have been alone, but I had no way of knowing this. I just hoped Janine had the sense to get out if she saw anything weird.
I almost missed her. Not much more than an hour later, she was a shadow running across the carpark. She was carrying her shoes. She threw herself into the car and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’
I wanted to know, ‘How was it.’
She said, ‘Just get us the fuck out of here.’
I swung the car out and headed back down the highway. She had her knees up fastening her shoe buckles. I was dying to know every detail. Her hair was damp and she smelled of fresh roses. With the motel behind us, I asked again, ‘How’d it go?’
‘We had a bath. A spa bath.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad. What was she like?’
“She wanted me to piss on her.’
‘Oh.’ I let it go for a while. We were back among the bright lights when I asked, ‘And did you?’
She said, ‘Are you crazy.’ She pulled some money from her jacket pocket and threw it into the console. Two, one hundred dollar bills. I wasn’t sure if this meant yes or no.
She didn’t want to go straight home. I didn’t much feel like going out, and I wasn’t really dressed for it, but I took her anyway. We went downtown to the Kennel, and upstairs to a bar among friends. Janine threw her jacket down and disappeared downstairs to the dance floor. She was in an odd mood, had been even before the motel. And she had managed to make it clear I wasn’t to get nosey. She wasn’t saying much at all.
She returned a long while later. I was chatting and having a drink with a girlfriend. Janine interrupted us and said, ‘Let’s go home.’ Her eyes were bright and fierce, her face and fringe wet with perspiration. She was flushed. In the car she said, ‘Go down to the beach road.’ And there she told me to pull into a carpark.
It was dark, no moon. There was only one other car. A chick’s head bobbed up in my lights, and bobbed down again, going for cock, it looked like. Janine and me sat with the windows open and listened to the ocean and shared a cigarette. We wound the windows up and kissed. She wanted more and I fingered her. She moaned a lot, a real lot, which was unusual, and she was very wet, which wasn’t unusual.
I would have to say she was angry. Not with me. Not with anything I could understand at the time. She orgasmed hard and snapped her torso forward and bent and hurt my wrist. We were driving again and she said, ‘Don’t let me do anything like that ever again.’ She meant the motel thing.
A couple of days later she’d had the two one hundred dollar bills framed, and she hung them in the study. Very nicely done, a simple black frame, the bills horizontal, one under the other. Later, we were admiring them and I remarked, ‘Not bad really. Two hundred for an hour’s work.’
She said, ‘One hundred. I stole the other out of her wallet. It was all she had. And a gold chain, but I must’ve dropped it running across the carpark.’
I said, ‘Fuck girl. She’s got our number.’ How can I say how astounded I was? I stared at the stranger standing next to me.
‘Well, she hasn’t called yet.’ Then Janine was off somewhere, thinking. She slipped an arm around me. Hugged me. And I was ready to forgive her. She said, ‘Anyway. She got her money’s worth.’
Janine 2. Cup Cakes.
The day was one of those typical of early Spring, gloriously warm and sunny, the sky gloriously blue, exactly the kind of day that kept Janine and me inside, in the bedroom, curtains shut. As if not bad enough that we happened to be awake during daylight hours on a Sunday, happy finches chirped outside our window.
I was studying Asian politics at the time, and being the good girl that I am, I was yawning through Marcos’s ‘Notes on the New Society of the Philippines.’
Janine was reading pornography. I was just getting to the exciting part where Marcos had suspended the constitution and imposed martial law, when Janine grabbed my book and threw it at the wall. She said, ‘Do something dirty.’
I met her mother. Once. Before she discovered that Janine and me living together actually meant living together. I had to wonder if there wasn’t, under the middle-class tweeds and cardigans and motherly respectability, an elder Janine, lurking and seething. This is my imagination. I saw nothing like this. I could only wonder where the hell Janine came from. I did think that. In exactly those words. Her father was plain and non-descript, and I’ve already said more than his ordinariness deserves.
Janine’s grand-mother had sent us over some cup-cakes on the Saturday. She was always doing things for us. I think this was her way of saying, ‘I don’t approve, but hell, oh to be young again.’ Or maybe she was just confused. Anyway, we weren’t so young.
There were three little cakes left on a plate on Janine’s bed table. I leaned over to get them, and she said, ‘Hey…’
I should warn you that her motto in bed was, ‘Position is Everything.’ She lived and loved by this. She got onto her knees and bent right over and told me to go for it. I hadn’t actually decided what I was going to do. I thought maybe eat the cake out of her navel, suck the icing off her nipples. Something manifestly coy like that. But Janine is always way ahead of any mental position I adopt.
However broad-minded, Janine’s grand-mother would not have approved of where her cup-cakes went. I pushed two of the cakes into Janine’s pussy, then she did me with the third cup-cake. She wiggled her ass and I ate what I could of the mashed up cakes, then we fucked like that, some hard grinding. Didn’t come or anything. It was just a lot of stupid fun. It took the two of us about twenty minutes in the bath to get cleaned up.
Janine 3. Love and Dildos.
Sunday morning, almost the afternoon, and Janine woke me with her fingers. She seemed more energetic than usual. She had been awake for a while, a cold cup of tea on her bed table. I figured she’d got tired of waiting for me.
I slipped my arms over and around her, hugged her. I felt it then, whatever it was, cold and hard slipping up between my legs. ‘Janine. If you want to, then I want you to. I really do.’
I wasn’t enjoying it. Not at first. The whatever was too big. But after a while I relaxed and things got a bit wetter and I started to think, well, this ain’t so bad. I can’t question Janine, not her need to put things in me, not anything. Just let it happen. I accept her.
Janine 4. Love and Anuses.
She was going through an anal stage. She said so herself. I’m not sure how it started with her, but once it did she was quite obsessive.
I was giving her a naked massage one night, back, shoulders, legs. I often did this for her, a bit of relaxation, oil and scented candles. And as usual I finished her off, going those few extra places on a girl’s body a professional massage ethically but painfully ignores. (Although, I used to go to a woman who, after the massage, would discreetly exit for five minutes to wash her hands. Plenty of time…)
So I was giving Janine some nice strokes, running the edge of my oily hand slowly up and down through her clenched thighs and the cheeks of her bottom and pussy. She was off on a pre-orgasmic planet somewhere and made little moans. I think this was my first clue. A moan popped out each time my fingers crossed her anus. I thought, Hmmm. I experimented, secretly, and tickled her more directly. It was the next night in bed and we were cuddling and stroking, working up to the main event, and she said, ‘Do that thing again. with you finger.’ I rubbed her a bit and she went wild. She demanded I keep doing it while she came.
For the next few days she wouldn’t have sex without it. Later in the week she wanted me to penetrate more deeply and I refused. She got a makeup brush and said, ‘Here. Use this.’ The next night it was the hair brush. The next night a carrot she’d put in the freezer. She wanted to do it to me as well. I said I didn’t want to and she said, ‘Fine.’ So long as I was doing it to her.
One evening she got into the shower with me as she often did. She told me to bend over as she sometimes did. She said, ‘Try it just once.’
Wow. A soapy finger shot right up inside my ass.
I said, ‘Janine. I don’t really like it.’
‘You do like it.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Then why are you wriggling around so much?’
‘I’m not wriggling around.’
‘Yes you are.’
‘No I’m not.’
I was, but when she pulled out I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I must admit, she’d really got my pussy going. I massaged my clit and really didn’t mind when I felt her doing something else back there. I realised she was licking me. I shut my eyes and didn’t want to think about it. I squeezed a couple of fingers into my pussy and leaned against the glass and wanked hard. Something horribly nice was wiggling around in my anus. I climaxed and wrenched my bottom away. But way too soon. I cried out.
“The Janine Chronicles” © 2002 by Nicholas M. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.