THE BIG LEAP
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - SEXY CHRISTMAS SHOPPING
"Do you think, this will turn him on?" Harley asked Joey, as she held a piece of sexy lingerie up in front of herself. They were in the middle of the underwear section of one of the cheaper clothing stores at the mall and while Joey had batted an eye, when Harley wanted to go over there and look, she hadn´t thought that it would be to shop for slutty looking underwear.
"Harley, you´re sixteen!" Joey exclaimed.
"So? You were my age, when you started having sex, weren´t you?" Harley asked and she almost had her there. Joey had waited until she was seventeen, but with Harley´s own seventeenth birthday less than a month away, it was like two distinctively same shades of the same color.
"You´re not ready for it yet" Joey tried telling her, but it didn´t look like it changed any of the young teenager´s plans.
"I´m kind of hoping that our first time will be on my birthday, That would be like, the best present ever!" Harley confided in her and Joey could tell from looking into her eyes, that this girl was far too gone in the depths of her crush on her latest boyfriend to listen to reason, a boy she went to school with called Zack, that she´d already dated twice before and had broken up with both times, the first time (in grade seven) after he´d cheated on her and the second time (in grade eight), when she´d dumped him for another boy, she liked more at the time. This time though, she was absolutely convinced that he was the one (the third time that Joey had heard her utter those words) and that they would stay together forever (also the third time that Joey had heard her say those exact words), now that they´d made it past the, in Harley´s mind, almost magical two month mark in their relationship. On one side, Joey had to applaud the boy for paying his dues and putting up with Harley´s teenage mood swings and tendency for jealousy for so long, still she didn´t want to see the girl, who had practically become like a slightly annoying, albeit still kind of lovable, little sister to her over the past year or so, end up doing something that she would regret later in life.
The only reason why she knew Harley was thanks to her father, one of the professors Joey had the year before and seeing as she could use the money, he´d paid her to basically be a babysitter to his teenage daughter and keep her out of trouble. At first, she´d seen her as a snot-nosed, arrogant teenager, who was far too full of herself, but the more she got to know her, the more she started to feel a kinship with the girl, that went both ways. When you´re a teenager, having friends your own age that you can talk to about your problems is important, but especially at Harley´s age, it doesn´t hurt to have someone you can go to, who has experienced the bigger things in life before, like she herself had during those years with Bessie and Jen. This school-year so far, she hadn´t had much time to hang out with her, which was why they´d come up with the idea of going Christmas gift shopping together. What had happened in reality was that Harley had practically bombarded her with sex questions from moment one, some of which had made their fellow shoppers stare awkwardly at them, to where it made Joey question if they were teaching this girl any kind of sex ed, at that high school she went to.
"How did you know that you were ready?" Harley asked her, while they were browsing through the racks a clothing store, where she was hoping to find something for Bessie and perhaps also Audrey.
"Well, for one thing I´d been with Pa ... my boyfriend at the time for a lot longer than two months" Joey told her and it made Harley smile to herself.
"So, Pacey was your first, huh? I always thought it was that Dawson guy."
"Why did you think that?"
"I don't know. You told me once that he was your first boyfriend, so I guess I just figured ..."
"That we did it then? We were fifteen!"
"Like that stops kids that age from doing it! I can name at least ten girls from my grade alone at my school, who had sex before they turned sixteen. One of them became pregnant and had an abortion" Harley told her and it made Joey feel sorry for the girl in question, even if she didn´t know her. "So, how was it, your first time with Pacey?"
"It was ... very nice" Joey told her quietly, not wanting to get too graphic, especially considering that five people at the least could hear what they said.
"That´s all you´ll tell me? That your first time was nice? Come on, I´m fishing for some pointers here!" Harley said far too loudly for Joey´s liking and her face almost turned bright red, when a woman with her daughter, who couldn´t have been more than eleven or twelve, put her hands over her daughter´s ears and sent them a glare, that could have turned a Medusa to stone.
"Not in here!" Joey told her, while trying not to sound too angry with her.
In spite of being in the company of the world´s biggest sex question machine, she still managed to find a nice sweater on discount for Bessie, that usually would have been too expensive for her to buy, but now could just be fitted within her hundred dollar total gift budget, if she saved a little here and there on the rest of the gifts. Seeing as she didn´t exactly feel like being stared at anymore, thanks to the many, many questions of a teenage girl in heat, she called it a day on the shopping front and they instead went to get a deli hoagie, that they could eat somewhere more private. They found that on a bench a little away from everything, where they could both eat in peace and Harley could get some of the answers, she so obviously craved.
"Okay, so spill it!" Harley ordered her before taking a bite of her hoagie.
"What do you want to know exactly" Joey asked and took a bite of her own.
"Did it hurt?"
"Only a little at first. I´d already had plenty of practice to get ready for it by myself. Maybe I shouldn´t have told you that!"
Harley laughed so hard, that she almost choked on the bite she was chewing.
"Come on! I don´t know a single girl at my school, who doesn´t as a minimum give herself a little shower nozzle action from time to time", Harley reassured her, after she finally managed to swallow. "Were you in love with him?"
"Yeah, I was" Joey told her truthfully. "It was very special and romantic and I wouldn´t change anything about it, even if I could. That´s really all there is to say and I just hope that your time will be half as good, as mine was."
Harley smiled to herself at her answer and Joey hadn´t been lying or overdoing it either. That evening in the ski lodge, it was like her and Pacey´s bodies had melted into one and even if she didn´t have any huge orgasms or anything like that, she´d felt closer with him in those moments, than she ever had with anyone in her life. It hadn´t just been sex, it had been making love in every sense of the word and every time with him after that, it had been more of the same, although he did become better as far as durability went in time, which also gave her much more physical gratification from it.
"I guess, if you want one piece of advice to go by, it´s that sex with someone you´re sure that you´re in love with will always be more special, than with someone you´re not entirely sure with. If you have any doubts over how you feel about this guy ..."
"I´m only planning on doing it with him, so he doesn´t break up with me for a girl named Tina!" Harley suddenly confided in her. "She told me that she´s made it clear to him that she will ... do that with him, so now if I want to hold on to him, I have be ready to do it with him too. Only, I´m the furthest thing from sure, that I´m actually ready to".
Harley´s smile had faded and Joey could now see her for who she exactly was: Just another very insecure teenage girl, who was ready to do whatever it took to stop the boyfriend, she was so absolutely crazy about, from breaking up with her for her rival.
"Harley, if he´s ready to break up with you, just because she will and you won´t, then he´s not worth wasting your first time on. Believe me, he isn´t" Joey told her imploringly and it looked like those weren´t thoughts that Harley herself hadn´t been having.
"Things were going so great for us and I was even planning on introducing him to my dad. You what he´s like!" Harley told her and didn´t have to say anymore on the subject. Professor Heston was an acquired taste at best and a walking pain the butt to every unfortunate soul that he came into contact with at worst. The fact that he had somehow managed to raise such a well-adjusted, if not somewhat boy-crazy daughter, was a true miracle, if there ever was one. "Then his ex-girlfriend had to come into the picture and ruin everything."
"Have you asked him if he still likes her?"
"No, but why wouldn´t he? She´s everything that I´m not. She looks like a high-class fashion model, she´s always confident, she has a rack that all of us other girls at school envy her for, she´s captain of the girl´s track team, where she´s won every race she´s ever been in and she´s been on the honor roll every year, since we were freshmen. How can I compete with that? I´m only me, just yet another mostly anonymous girl at my school, who isn´t really good at anything, especially not school or sports, isn´t confident most of the time and definitely isn´t anywhere near as popular as she is. I´ll just have to accept that I´m no more special than the next anonymous girl like me in line after me."
"Harley, you´re special in your own way!" Joey told her and it brought a small smile back on Harley´s face. "Listen, if there´s one thing I´ve learned about boys, it´s that most of the time the things we think they´re looking for in a girlfriend, aren´t the things they´re actually looking for. Now, I don´t know Zack personally, but I know there´s a very large chance that his dream girl isn´t some overly-confident, super-athletic, ultra-popular, honor roll Femme Falate with a great rack! If he chose to be with you over being with her in the first place, then I´m willing to bet that the perfect girl in his mind isn´t her, it´s you. As a fellow anonymous girl, who´s been chosen many times over the kind of girls that I grew up thinking that guys would like way more than they liked me, I know exactly what I´m talking about here."
Harley giggled and Joey was glad that she could cheer her up. "You can be very sweet and lovable, when you want to be" Joey reassured her.
"Really? I haven´t been a bother with all of my questions today?"
"Maybe a little, but I can´t claim that I didn´t have as many questions as you have, if not more of them, when I was your age. It´s better that you ask me about these things, than us having you trying to come up with your own answers, because that´s often how girls your age end up getting themselves pregnant. If I´m the only outlet you have for these things, then I´ll help any way I can. That should go without saying."
"Do you think, I should have sex with him?" Harley asked her, only very subtly hiding which answer she wanted to hear.
"I think that you should talk to him first and then sometime in the future, if you´re still together and there aren´t any other girls or boys getting between you, like there clearly has been a tendency for there to be in the past and you´re absolutely sure that you´re in love with him and trust him will all your heart, then you should come to me with this again, so we can start talking about contraceptives and things like that. But as a general rule, just don´t do anything that you´re not entirely comfortable with or don´t feel like you´re ready for, okay? That goes for all walks of life, by the way" Joey answered her and Harley nodded like she got the message.
"Thanks, Joey" Harley told her and gave her a small hug.
"You´re welcome. Sex can be and will become an amazing part of your life, but I know you, Harley. You´re still just a big kid at heart and there´s no need for you to rush anything in getting there. Take some time to smell the roses on the way, if you get what I mean."
"You mean like oral and stuff? I´m so not ready for that!" Harley blurted out and it made Joey smile to herself.
"In that case, I can with all certainty say that you´re not ready to go all the way yet! It´s okay though, that you aren´t, even if other girls your age like Tina or even some of the younger girls at your school feel like they are. If this Zack boy can´t accept that, then he just isn´t the guy for you. The good ones are out there, Harley. I´m living proof of it."
"If you know who they are, then why aren´t you with any of them right now?" Harley (quite logically) asked her.
"Because romantically speaking, I´m a total and utter dumbass, okay? As a matter of fact, disregard everything I´ve just told you and go and sleep with Zack, so that Tina hussy won´t use her huge intellect and giant boobs to steal him away from you!" Joey said jokingly and they laughed together, which helped to close the subject.
After dropping Harley off with her dad outside of her former place of employment, she made her way the short distance home to their dorm on foot. It hadn´t only been the good tips and her friendship with Emma, that had been an advantage to working at "Hell´s Kitchen", also that she could walk the short distance from her dorm room to there in a good twelve minutes, if she kept up a brisk pace. On the way, she considered in her mind if she really was fit to give someone like Harley romantic advice. At her exact age, she´d been sneaking around with Pacey with only Jen knowing about it and had hardly been someone, who should give anyone advice on what they should do in their love lives. That was Jen´s specialty, not her own and without her having had Jen in her life during those crucial years, there´s no saying what her situation would have looked like now. As for other mistakes she´d made in her love life, it was like "Oh, boy! Where to begin?". Her first kiss was with a guy she lied to about her identity, so that was an obvious F for fail. Then there was that guy at the beach party, which she somewhat excuses herself for, since she was too drunk to fight it, but after that she cheated on her first boyfriend, so that´s another one and didn´t pick up on her next one clearly being gay, when she looked back on it, so that´s three F´s already, before she´d even turned sixteen yet. AJ had been another clear-cut one for that column and the more she thought about it, she could put every relationship she´d had with a guy in the F column for one reason or another, with the exception of one and even that hadn´t been entirely perfect.
Her own first time with Pacey, as much as she wanted to make herself believe at the time that it wasn´t that way and for those reasons, had for the most part been to keep him from moving on to someone else, because she knew that he was growing impatient with her and was ten times, if not a hundred times, more afraid of losing him, than Harley was of losing Zack. Knowing this, she came home feeling like a hypocrite for having told her young protege in the game of love to stick it out until she was entirely sure, when she herself hadn´t been anywhere close to it, when she´d lost her own virginity.
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT