This story may be archived on free web sites but is not to be distributed without the name of the author, changed in any way, or sold. Please do not re-post without consulting the author. Copyright 1998 by Jane Urquhart.

NOTE: If you haven't read "Phone Sex,"   by Taria, you probably should.
 

JANEY'S FRIEND (FF rom)

by Janey

        I was stretched out on the bed in this nice room in the Park Plaza that had cost me
a fortune gently stroking the cheek of a friend of mine when the damn phone rang. And
rang, and rang, and rang.

        "Get up and answer it, doofus," Taria said.

        "Why?" I said. "Nobody knows we're here." It kept on ringing.

        "Because it'll keep ringing until you answer it," she answered.

        I really hate people who are right, especially when it means I have to get out of bed
buck naked and barefooted and walk across a rug eighty-four thousand other people have already walked on to get to a phone that's got somebody on the other end who doesn't even want to sell me anything. So I got up and answered the phone.

        Now, this may seem an odd state of affairs if you have read any of my stories, or
Taria's, in the past. You're probably thinking, "How the hell did Janey get into bed with
Taria? What are they doing there? Does this mean what I think it does?"

        Well, yeah, I guess it does.  Maybe I'd better explain.

        A few months ago I got a little strange and started doing some things that were,
well, strange. Then I decided to write them up and put them on the Internet. Some people liked the stories and I got several "Great job, Janey!" notes that I liked a lot, and a good review that really astonished and delighted me. Some of the notes were a little more than just congratulations, though, and I made some new friends. Of course they may not be who they say they are, but somehow you get to know them anyhow.

        For a prim suburban matron who's a part-time vocational counselor with messy hair
and no tits, I was having a ball. Just chatting with these people was a terrific new thing for me.

        But then something happened that was not just strange, it was downright shocking.

        I fell in love.

        Well, that's what it feels like to me, whatever you think. And it didn't happen
overnight.

        One of the people who sent a message hadn't read the first two stories,  but she
wrote me the sweetest note when she read the one I wrote for Malinov's castaway island party. Among other things, she gave me a lecture:

        "You need to ditch this inferiority thing," she wrote,  "because you are High Octane and don't need to apologize to anybody.  As for your lack of massive cleavage, I for one want to say that when I've thought about women in any erotic way (and only in fantasy even then -- the fictitious "me" is MUCH more daring than the real only-ever-been-with-two-men-in-my-life Me) I've always thought that small breasts were extremely erotic."

        Well, what could I do? I wrote back and lied. I said it was all a fake and really I was terribly self-assured and not a bit jealous of women who actually have tits.

        Next you thing know another letter, and she tells me she located the first two
stories, read them, and immediately wound up her husband for three or four nights of red hot sex. Now that is a compliment. What's more, she described all this action in some
detail. Now I was the one getting turned on, but owing to my natural modesty, I'm not even considering telling you what I did about it.

        I was getting to know this woman, and I liked her. She's a little younger than I am,
and going through the kind of little-kid horrors I suppose everybody has to go through to get big, delightful kids like mine. I could relate. We shared a lot of stuff, from laundry
problems to work problems to how tired we get all the time to the way we felt about the
stories we read. We talked about our husbands, who are delightful, but, being
male, have these weird ways of thinking. She's got a real job, not a part-time dead-ender like mine, and she has to work a lot harder than I do, but she still wrote these wonderful
letters.

        One day she wrote this:

        "I finally bought myself a bike and I ride it to school every day. Then I have to
change my clothes in the office. Now I've gotten into the habit of  parading around the
office in my bra and panties while I cool off. Wonder what would happen if some horny
young student knocked on the door while I'm dressed like that?"

        If I did the same thing, what would happen would be I'd have a heart attack. But I
admired her. She's just the kind of crazy I never am.

        I had this odd thought. How nice it would be to hide out in her file cabinet and
watch! Then I started fantasizing about jumping out and turning her upside down and--
well, I stopped thinking right then, because this was getting strange. I don't do women! I'm probably the hardest core heterosexual in the whole United States. And
Canada. So I obviously wasn't having the thoughts I kept having. That's logic.

        I agonized about doing it (would she just stop writing to me?), but I finally got up
the nerve to mention to her that I had this thought. About the file cabinet, I mean. She
didn't seem at all upset. Thought it was pretty funny, I guess because she knew
from my stories that I'm five feet ten and slightly overweight. Kind of large to fit in your
average file cabinet. Even so, I figured I'd better just cool it.

        Of course I knew she wrote stories, too, and I had read a few of them. They were
really good.

        One day I was just wandering around the Net, waiting for a late client, and I
decided to check out her web page. Nice page, nothing earth-shaking, but it had links to all her stories and I was surprised at how many she'd written. Still no client,  and by that time it was obvious he wasn't coming, so I thought I might as well read one. More or less at random, I clicked on a title--Power and the Word.

        This isn't just a story, it's a masterpiece. Go read it. I was simply bowled over.

        That night I wrote her a note, telling her that if she's black, she could tone down the sex a little and sell that story tomorrow. If she's white, the story was the greatest piece of empathy I'd ever seen.

        This woman--obviously it was Taria--didn't just send back "Aw, shucks, twarn't
nothin'" like some people might. She told me how she came to write it, and what it did to
her. She told me she couldn't write things like that very often, because they made her hard to get along with, overbearing. It sounded as if she were maybe a little afraid of her talent. After all, she's a scholar, not a story teller.

         My whole attitude toward her changed. She'd been somebody to shoot the bull
with, just another ASSM fuckbunny like me. All of a sudden I was in awe of her. Wow!
She traded jokes with me! This great writer told me my stuff was good! I felt like a Little Leaguer playing catch with Cal Ripken.

          But she made that go away. I got a story on Celeste's goody list--Celeste is a
famous reviewer--and she immediately made it a point to tell me that she'd never gotten
one as high on the list as mine was. She talked about what she was learning about writing by reading other people's stuff; she really likes Bronwen's work. She went on then like
nothing had happened, like she was just an ordinary person, and joked about showing off for me when I was in the file cabinet. I think then was when I began to fall. Our
correspondence continued, and kind of got back to normal.

         I asked her to tell me more about herself. After all, she knew all about me because
I told the whole world in those stories. Talk about vanilla! She described herself:

        "I'm thirty, I'm five feet five, I'm a kind of medium build, medium waist, medium
breasts, medium hips, medium brown hair, medium everything. I wear glasses, gold-
rimmed, but round, not the icky narrow ones--because I'm near-sighted. My nose peels
every summer."

        Well, I already knew she didn't have a medium mind.

        And my feelings about her were not medium, either.

        She told me she had looked me up in the Hotmail directory and it didn't have
anything but my name and town. Well, now. Obviously I was not the only one with some
kind of weird feeling.

        The next night I was feeling really low. I had a writing problem that I thought was
big and important, not just about something I couldn't handle in a story, and I didn't know what to do about it, so I just dumped it all on her. On top of that, I'd just read a nauseating story that I had to comment on, and I was sad, and I dumped that on her, too. I told her she was essential to me. And I got physical, really physical, for the first time. I told her I wanted to hold her and to suck on her wonderful "medium" breasts. Me! I really did that! Was I out of my mind? Obviously. Surely she'd go screaming to the Hotmail complaint desk.

        She didn't. She told me she loved me. She said she nearly cried when I called her
"essential."

        But she's as straight as I am, and she was all mixed up about how could she be
physical with me when she loved her husband and kids and was always faithful? Then she told me about some English ladies long ago who had written highly erotic letters to each other, and talked about their love, but, as far as she knew, had never done anything physical about it. Maybe we could be like that. But that wasn't what she wanted, either.

        The next day she sent me--an apology!

        "I've made a fool of myself. Will you ever forgive me? Will you please not take my
name off your address list? I'll be good from now on and won't even MENTION any such things."

        Well, hell. I just wrote back and said that was the most wonderful letter I ever got
in my whole life, and, no, I thought I'd leave her on my list. And would she please mention those things a lot.

        We wrote back and forth the most awful gooey, gushy drivel you ever read. I loved
it. She told me vaguely she'd like to write a little story about us, and then she wrote a
disgraceful thing about a perfectly innocent telephone conversation we had and told me she was going to post "something" one day before it went up. And didn't send me a copy. First I heard about it was a note posted by Kim, one of our fellow authors, on ASSD, which is a discussion newsgroup for sex-story writers. The story didn't come up on my server. I tore apart the DejaNews archive and couldn't find it. I begged Kim to send me a copy and she did. Oh, my.

        Outed.

        I just sat there with this fat, dumb smile on my face.

       A few days later Taria told me she was coming to Boston to give a paper at some
kind of  history convention. She teaches history at some little college a long way from here. Being a little cautious, she didn't mention where or when--just said she was coming to Boston. Still, she knew  my husband is a history professor, so she must have guessed I could find out pretty easily which meeting she was talking about. I've been to those things with Bob, and they're awful for an innocent bystander. But I thought maybe I'd just look in at this one.

        As the day she was coming got closer, I got more and more absent-minded. The
washer ate more socks than usual. I almost placed one of my vocational counseling clients who has some striking artistic talents in a job at a boiler factory. I forgot to put ice cream in the freezer so it melted all over the kitchen counter. I was, to be frank, a mess. Even more than usual. I reserved Room 607 at the Park Plaza. Because I was going to that meeting, and I was going to find her.

        They made me work the morning the meeting was to start because busy season in
the vocational counseling office was beginning. I managed to carry it off all right, because of my usual steel nerves. That is to say, I was a basket case. But I managed.

        Then I got on the streetcar, rode it down into the bowels of the earth, got off at the
Copley stop, and walked the two blocks to the Park Plaza in a dreary sort of mist that was not quite rain. I got the key to the room and went up, checked it out, and took a shower. All o.k. Then down to the Lafayette ballroom, where the morning proceedings were just breaking up. I had seen the program; I knew that was where she'd be.

        People were milling around, carrying papers and notebooks and wearing plastic
name badges. I moseyed in and started looking around for the most medium woman in the room. Big ones, little ones, pretty ones, strange looking ones, all kinds. Some mediums, but they didn't look quite right somehow. Then I got up close to the rostrum. A couple of tall guys and three women were clustered around someone, talking away. I sidled up and got a look. At the center of the group was a woman. Just a woman. A "medium" woman. She was handing out what looked like copies of a paper.

        Oh, yeah, it was Taria. I was sure. Gold-rimmed glasses and all. She was wearing a light grey suit with a beige shell, knee-length skirt, and black flat shoes. Light pink lipstick, but not much makeup. Medium-sized gold earrings. Her brown hair fell almost to her shoulders. I didn't faint. My heart didn't go pitty pat or anything wimpy like that; it went, "Ka-BOOM! Ka-BOOM!" I just stood there.

        Taria started stuffing papers into a big briefcase, still talking to those people. She
glanced in my direction and went past. Whoops! She looked back. Right at me. A little
furrow appeared in her brow. She looked back at her companions and said, cool as she could be, "I'm sorry, I have to go now. My lunch date has just come." She smiled. They all shook hands. Took seven hours and fourteen minutes.

        Then she walked over, looked up at me.

        "Janey?" The little furrow was back.

        I opened my arms and she just walked in, put her free arm around me. I hugged
her. We let go.

        "Uh huh," I said, cementing my reputation for witty repartee.

        Taria just shook her head and laughed. I laughed.

        "Come on," she said, "let's go to that Japanese restaurant down the street. The hotel places will be too crowded." She grabbed her raincoat and we left.

        It was still misty and overcast, but I felt like the sun was shining. In the restaurant,
we hung up our coats and sat at a little black table. I was shy. Taria was shy.

        "I came to find you," I said.

        "I knew you would," she answered. "That's the real reason I'm here. It doesn't hurt to read a paper, but it won't make me a full professor anytime soon. I came to see you."

        I took her hand.

        "What do we do now?" I asked. "Talk like civilized people? Or what?"

        "Well," she said. "That's not a problem. For instance, I could say I really do love
you, and seeing you hasn't changed that one little bit. I could even say I love your holding my hand. Or I could ask you what you think about the Red Sox."

        "I think while we're eating we better talk about the Red Sox," I said.

        We didn't. Instead we gossiped about the Internet people we both knew, like
Celeste and Sandman and BillyG and Kim. We drank miso soup out of little lacquered
bowls. I asked how her family was, and she asked about mine. We ate. We paid. We put
on our raincoats and walked back to the hotel.

        "Where now?" she said.

        "I've got a room." I looked at her and smiled. "No ice cream, though, it's too cold."

        We went up in the fancy, mahogany-paneled elevator and walked to the room. I
opened the door. We walked in and closed the door. Then we hugged again, just as we had down in the ballroom. Only this time I put my hand under her chin, tilted her head, and kissed her. I had never kissed a woman in my life, but it seemed right. It felt right. I could feel her breath on my face. Her lips were soft and sweet, and  I was melting inside. I held her close and kissed her eyelids. I held her away from me and just looked at her.

        "Come on," she said. "I want to be in bed with you." She took off her jacket, laid it
on a chair, and started to take off her blouse.

        "Wait a minute," I said. "I want to do that for you."

        But first I just put my hands on her shoulders and ran them down her silky sleeves,
feeling soft flesh underneath. Then I touched her breast, just the top, and caressed her
through that silk blouse. Then I lifted it over  her head. She loosened her skirt, then she
stepped out of it. She kicked off her little flat shoes. Her bra was black and sheer--I could see her nipples through it. The panties were equally transparent. And she was wearing real stockings, the kind that hold themselves up. I stood there looking at her. She didn't say a word, just unhooked her bra, pulled down the panties, and revealed herself to me.

        "Go ahead," I said, "Get in bed. I'll take the stockings off." She pulled back the
covers and lay down, looking at me. Then I took my clothes off, slowly, while she
watched. Finally, I lay down beside her and we put our arms around each other.

        "You don't look medium to me," I finally said. "I think you're absolutely beautiful.
You lied."

        She laughed. "So did you, you weirdo! You're six feet if you're an inch! You're
taller than my husband."

        "OK, we both lied," I said. "I'm always afraid I'll scare people off. But I wasn't
lying when I said I love you."

        "Me, either," she said, and we hugged again.

        I sat up. "Time to take the stockings off."

        She held her left leg just enough off the bed for me to grasp the top of her stocking
and pull it down, then off. I did the same thing to the other one. I couldn't help just running my hands gently down a smooth, rounded thigh. I did it again, slowly. I reached up a hand and put it on her stomach and caressed her gently. I felt her hipbone. She felt so good I didn't know what to do. Then I did--I just lay my head down on that  smooth little stomach and drank in the feeling.

        "Come back," she said, holding out her arms, and I scrambled up beside her. For a
few minutes we just snuggled. I was luxuriating simply in the feel of all that warm flesh
against me. I kept thinking, "But she's so soft!" Not like a man at all. No bony edges, no rough skin.

        Then she started to stroke my breast, gently. It was exquisite. When she touched
my nipple I responded with a shiver. When she put it in her mouth I was faint with
pleasure.

        She looked up at me. "Are you comfortable with this woman-woman stuff?" she
said.

        "I don't think comfortable is the word," I replied. "Try exhilarated. Try deliriously
happy."

        "Good. Me, too. But it's you, not just woman."

        I held her so tightly she must have nearly smothered, poor woman. But I had to, or
she'd see my tears. When I let her go, she saw them anyhow. But she got a smile with
them.

        "Hey, sweetie," she said, brushing at my face. "I feel the same way. I never
expected this." Then she hugged me back. "I thought you'd always be just letters on a
screen that I translated into wisecracks. Bet you can't think of anything funny about this."

        Oh, sure," I said. "Give me a few minutes. Something funny will happen. It always
does."

        But it didn't right then, as she nuzzled her way down my stomach and put her hand
on my mound. She looked up questioningly.

        "Whatever you want, I want," I said.

        "I want," she answered. My legs spread, and her mouth was on my vagina. Her
tongue was in it. I was shot through with sensation. She breathed on my skin. She moved her tongue and touched my clitoris. I jumped a tiny bit in shock, put my hand on her hair, then settled down to exquisite torture as she held my hips and pressed her mouth harder
against me, sucking, touching, using her tongue like a brush to paint a picture of heaven in my nerves. I was lost to pleasure, totally unthinking, just feeling. And then it came, slowly, building, the climax violent and harsh like a tidal wave. As I came down I had a piercing desire just to hold her. I reached for her shoulders and dragged her up until I could kiss her, hard. Then I just held her.

        Desire grew, though. Not desire  for her to continue what she had done, but to give
her pleasure, equal to mine if I could. I felt as if love were coursing through my veins. I put my hand on her brow and caressed it gently. Moved down to her cheeks, then kissed her neck, her shoulders. She sagged into the bed, letting me do what I willed. I kissed her nipples, one, then the other. I sucked. I caressed her with my tongue. All the while my hands were moving, stroking her shoulders, her arms. I kissed her navel, the roundness of her stomach. I kissed along a tiny, almost invisible stretch mark, and nearly cried once again as I did it. I was totally unprepared for her vulnerability.

        So I gently fondled the lips of her vagina until she put her hand on mind and
pushed. I put a finger inside her, questing. My mouth followed. I can't describe the taste--it was something I had never tasted before, perhaps salty, warm. Her hand was on my head, again pushing gently. I moved my tongue around, knowing exactly where to go and avoiding it. Until I could no longer stop myself. I touched her clitoris.

        "Oh, Janey," she said. So little, so much.

        I fondled her with my tongue. She clutched my shoulder, harder, harder, then she
shook so hard I almost lost her. She moaned and squirmed. She cried out again, then she slumped down into the bed, spent.

        A few seconds later she spoke: "Come on up, here," she said, "I just want to hold
you." And she did. I lay my head on her breast, my shoulder pressed lightly into her ribs, and she squeezed me as hard as she could. She lightened her grip and began to stroke the top of my breast. I could feel myself relaxing, unwinding. I could hear and feel her
breathing get slower. We were both drowsy. I thought about all the guys envying women
because they could have three or four orgasms and smiled to myself. One's just fine, if it's right, I thought. Oh, yes!

         But what was nicest of all was just being held. Then she spoke.

        "You know what I like best?" she said. "Holding you. Just holding you."

        "I know," I said.

        We lay there, dozing.

        I guess we both slept a little, but after a while we started talking. We moved around in the bed. I was just lying there, playing with her hair, and we were talking just the way we did in e-mail. Except it was lot nicer in person. She told me she liked my mother a lot, if she's really the way she came over in "Janey's April," the story I'd posted most recently.

        "Hah!" she said. "I just thought of something. You're not the most heterosexual
person in the U.S. at all--she is!" My mother had tried a threesome when she was young, but it turned out that she wasn't the least bit interested in sex with women.

        I thought that over.

        "Maybe," I said. "Tell me something--do you lust after pretty women you see on
the street, or ones you know?"

        "Nope, just you," she said, snuggling closer.

        "I don't, either," I said. "Sometimes I look at boobs, but that's envy, not lust."

        "Yeah," she said. "Some of 'em are a lot prettier than I am, and it bugs me."

        "No, they aren't," I answered, "Nobody's prettier than you are. But if we don't lust after women, then we aren't lesbians, are we?"

        "Guess not," she said. "Must be something else."

        "And you still like men, don't you? I mean for sex."

        "Oh, yes," she said giggling. "You got any around you don't need?"

        "Of course not, you silly girl," I said. "And anyway, you told me you'd never sleep
with anybody but your husband."

        "Nobody said anything about sleeping," she said, giggling again.

        "God, you're awful, " I said. "I'm trying to figure something out. What I mean is,
you don't want women, and you do want men. I'm the same way."

        "Do that some more," she said. I was gently stroking her cheek.

        "My pleasure."

        "Well, go ahead. What did you figure out?"

        "If we don't want women, but we do want men, but we're lying here in bed with
each other, what does that make us? Apparently we aren't Lesbians, we aren't bi-sexuals, but we aren't exactly straight, either."

        "Sure we are," she said. "What we are is friends."

        "Friends! I never had any friend like you before!" I stopped stroking her cheek and just looked at her.

        "Me, either," she said. "But that's what we are, friends."

        "Good friends?" I ventured.

        "Very good friends," she said, laughing. She pulled me down for a big kiss.

        "Friends," I said when we settled down again. This time I was stroking her hair.

        "Yeah," she said. "Friends."

        We lay there a long time, sometimes talking, sometimes not. Sometimes laughing,
sometimes solemn. She held me, I held her.

        Then the phone rang. And rang. And rang. It was so loud.

        Turned out it was a wrong number. But we had to get up anyhow. It was time to
go. That's the way it always is.

                                            -------THE END-------

NOTE: My thanks to Bronwen for sharing the results of her research with me. J.

Here's   "Power and the Word " , by Taria
 

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