I didn’t want to love Janine Jordan, but I did. My heart broke for her in the moment, with her hand in my lap, at her dining room table, on an October late afternoon.

“I know what you want,” she whispered, embracing me with the tenderness of a mother reassuring her child. I closed my eyes and imagined we had been together many years, at a different dining table in a modest bungalow somewhere in the 59

Florida Keys, the billboard charts and tours and concerts and fans long behind us.

She drew away from me, put her fist under my chin, and said, “Did you bring it with you? You did! Can I see it?”

How could I not love her? She was always such a good sport about everything.

When the dishes were done, we sat in the middle of her bed examining my little bag of tricks. Casually holding a dildo in one hand and a harness in the other she said, “One thing I never understood, what do you get out of it?”

I pointed to the base of the apparatus where there was a small latex ball for clit stimulation. I didn’t need it. I could come just fantasizing about the things I wanted to do to her.

“Oh. You know, this feels so real,” she said, amazed.

“It’s supposed to.”

I took my toys from her and pushed them onto the floor. “It doesn’t have to be today, you know. I’m not going anywhere.” I put my head on her lap and reached up to caress her face. She kissed me upside down, and her hair fell all around my face.

“How about now?”

I giggled. “Can we wait until its dark?”

“Why? Is it somehow better then?” she asked, completely serious.

“No!” I was in a full on giggling fit. Early social conditioning makes us snicker when someone says “penis” or otherwise named genitalia, even as adults. Strap-on sex conditioning, if such a thing exists, makes lesbians lighthearted about their approach to the whole business.

“I feel silly at first walking around with it just hanging there.

I don’t know how guys get through their day. Please, let’s do it later when it’s dark. With the lights out. And the door closed.”

We both broke into hysterics.

We smoked a small bowl of pot to calm our nervousness and watched TV for a while. On one of my trips to the bathroom, I did the deed, and strapped on my latex manhood and put my sweatpants back on. I liked to start out clothed, it just seemed more appropriate for some reason. No other sexual experience 60

is precluded by more awkwardness, no matter how many times you’ve done it.

Janine took one look at my sheepish grin and knew, and another fit of giggling ensued. I went and sat behind her on the couch and tried to focus on the TV. There was a Hitchcock marathon on, and before I got to see the famous Psycho shower scene for the 100th something time, I heard the distinct change in Janine’s breathing pattern as she caressed my inner thigh and I kissed the back of her neck. She stood up and took my hand, nearly dragging me back to the bedroom.

I closed the door slowly, leaving a candle on the headboard the only light in the room. There was a giant mansion behind Janine’s brownstone that eclipsed the city lights almost entirely.

I wanted so much to please her I was ready to burst out of my skin. I stood and watched her undress and decided to leave my sweats on for a little while longer. She remained standing, waiting to see how she should position herself for me, an overwhelmingly considerate gesture, I thought. I sat upright, leaning against the headboard with my legs out in front of me.

She mounted me and we began a slow, rhythmic rocking.

Sometimes, being with a woman who’d been with men had its advantages.

We clung to each other and I knew already whatever reservations she might have had dissolved. She breathed hotly into my ear and whispered, “It’s already different. I haven’t felt like this since our first time together.”

I hadn’t either. I wanted to be more aggressive, but I didn’t want to frighten her. “Do you trust me?”

She nodded. I leaned forward and gently pushed her back onto the bed. Freeing myself from beneath her, I swung my legs over the side and kicked off the sweatpants.

She lay there with her eyes closed, breathing heavily, spread before me like a Thanksgiving feast. I knelt beside her for a few moments in silent worship. I couldn’t recall the last time I had actually gotten something I’d wanted so desperately. It is one of the most erotic memories I have; her face in the 61

candlelight, the sound of a saxophone down the street, a second before an experience that can only happen once.

I fell on top of her and used my hips as she guided me into her. I had planned on going slowly, but we were both beyond that. As I entered her, we both held our breath. I kissed her as I had in the dining room and felt her nails digging into my shoulder blades. For perhaps the first time in my life, I wished I were a man and could love her the way she wanted to be loved. When we came together in our harmonious opera of moans and sighs, I wished only she would take me, as a woman, and let me love her the only way I knew how.

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