by Erin O'Riordan
(03/28/07)

After a long day at the counseling center, I was excited to see my boyfriend show up at my door with dinner.

Jay isn't like any man I've ever dated before. He's just so comfortable in his own skin. It never bothers him that I'm a few years older, or that I have a master's degree in psychology while he's a pharmacist's assistant, working on his associate's degree in nursing. He doesn't have to be my competitor. He can just be my lover.

He looked so sweet, standing there on my porch in his jeans and T-shirt, with his bucket of fast-food chicken in one hand and a bottle of my favorite honey wine in the other. I didn't have the heart to complain about the trans fats or the calories. I just let him in and gave him a long, slow, wet kiss.

"Thanks for bringing dinner," I said. "You saved my life."

He smiled. After another kiss, he went into the kitchen for plates and wine glasses.

I'd brought work home with me -- a fat paperback book with a magenta-and-white cover that sat in the middle of the dining room table. I looked around for a place to set it, a place where I wouldn't forget about it.

"What's that?" Jay asked, setting down the plates.

"Our Bodies, Ourselves," I said. "I used it in my female adolescent counseling group today. We talked about boyfriends and sex."

I set the book down on the kitchen counter. When I came back, Jay had opened the wine and was pouring me a glass.

"So, is that book any good?"

I sat down, and he served me. Then he sat next to me, pushing his chair close so that our knees touched. So sweet.

"It's a great book," I said. "I read it when I was in college, and it really helped me feel good about my body."

Jay said, "You never seemed to me like the kind of woman who has a problem with her body, Laura."

"I'm not now," I said. "But I had to work hard to get this way. I told you about my first boyfriend, Jason?"

"Yeah," he said. "He made you feel all insecure. I'm sorry, Laura. I didn't mean to bring that all up again."

"It's okay," I said. We spent the rest of the meal talking about something happier. When we finished the meal, Jay took the plates away.

To my surprise, he returned with Our Bodies, Ourselves in his hand. "So, you're kinda like an expert on this book, huh?"

"Yeah," I said. He set the book down in front of me, and I flipped it open to a random page.

"This is a newer edition, but the first time I ever read it was when I went away to college. My roommate had a copy that her older sister gave her. Whenever she was out of the room, I used to read it, secretly. It felt so good to know that I wasn't alone, that there were other teenage girls like me who had sex and weren't awful, evil people."

As Jay refilled my wine glass, I looked down. The book had opened to the page with the anatomical drawings of a woman's external genitals.

"So you're going to teach the girls in your counseling group the parts of their bodies?" he asked. "Wow. Even I never knew that women have so many different parts, and I'm halfway through nursing school."

I believed him. I remembered how, when Jay and I first got together two years ago, I'd had to patiently train first his fingers and then his tongue to find my clit. And even then, it took another month before he learned to stop shocking me by bearing down on my most sensitive areas, or frustrating me by touching me so lightly I never got to come. He might have been a nursing student, but he obviously hadn't concentrated on gynecology.

"Actually, I was thinking more of teaching them the different birth control options," I said. "Some of these girls think abstinence, condoms and abortion are their only choices. Even if they never use them, they should at least know about the other forms."

Jay stroked the back of my neck with one hand. It was a familiar gesture, one he often made when he was trying to make me feel better.

"It must be tough to grow up as a girl," he said. "When guys want to talk about sex, we just talk to our friends. Of course, young guys are pretty clueless."

I laughed. "You seem to know what you're doing, most of the time."

Jay held his glass of wine in one hand. With two fingers of the other, he lovingly traced the lines of the drawing in the book, as fascinated by it as any eleven-year-old boy would be.

"Did you know that your clit has a shaft, hood and glans?" he said. "You didn't tell me that it had separate moving parts."

"Sure it does, just like your cock," I said.

"Did you know that you have something called Bartholin's glands?"

"Not really," I said. "I'm sure it must have come up at some point, in one of my college classes..."

"I want to feel 'em," Jay said. He'd finally torn his eyes away from the book. He turned to me and gave me a look of sheer lust.

"Well, I was going to wash the dishes, but the dishes can wait," I said, gulping down the last sips of my honey wine. I took Jay's hand and lead him up to the bedroom.

We stood by the bed, Jay behind me, kissing the back of my neck as he unbuttoned my cream-colored silk blouse. As he worked the buttons, his hands brushing up against the bare skin underneath, I pushed my back up against his front.

"You seem eager all of a sudden," he said.

I let my blouse fall to the floor and turned to face him. "I like a man who knows his way around my clit," I said. "I just can't wait for you to show me what you learned from the book."

Jay gave me one of his little self-satisfied smirks as he reached behind me and unhooked my bra. "It's too bad I didn't read about your tits," he said. "I'd love to spend some time showing you what I know about them."

For a brief moment, I considered running back to the dining room for the book so that we could explore the anatomy of breasts together. But then it occurred to me that while the outsides of my breasts are a huge turn-on to Jay, the insides were little more than fat cells and milk ducts. Somehow that just didn't seem sexy.

I lay back across the bed. Jay positioned himself on top of me. Although he was still dressed, I felt the hard presence of his cock between my thighs. He held himself up on his elbows, his face hovering inches from one of my breasts.

"Your breasts have a beautiful shape," he said. I felt the warmth of his breath on my skin as he spoke. "Like two ripe pomegranates underneath the skin. And these little brown nipples..." He blew on one. "...are so sensitive. The slightest bit of pressure and they get hard."

He studied the other breast. "Now this nipple," he said, "still has its pretty little cone shape. How can I make it erect? We've learned that blowing on them makes them hard, but a more efficient way..."

He opened his mouth wide and took my nipple, and a good deal of my breast as well, into his mouth. His tongue brushed up against the sensitive underside of my nipple, gently at first, and then more forcefully. Then, making those loud slurping sounds that Jay likes so much when I suck his cock, he began to suckle me.

"That's great," I moaned.

He took off his shirt, and I let him suck my breasts for a while. His kisses are great, and he was making me wet, but breasts have never really been my favorite erogenous zone. I wanted more, and it was time to let Jay know. "I thought you were going to show me everything you know about female anatomy."

"Yeah," Jay said, looking up at me. He stood and undressed down to his briefs. His chubby cock stood at attention under the thin black fabric. "What were those parts of your clit again?"

"Hood, glans, and shaft," I said.

"Hmm," he said, screwing up his face with concentration as he stuck his face between my legs. "I see the hood. What's the glans supposed to look like?"

"It's the head," I said. "The sensitive part." Remember your training, I added in my mind.

"I can find the shaft, no problem," he said. "The book says I can't see it, but I can definitely feel it."

"Good boy," I said.

"Your body doesn't look exactly like the drawing," he added. That phrase could have been ego-crushing enough to end sex right there, if he hadn't followed it up with, "It looks so pretty. And delicious. I just want to eat you all up."

I wasn't going to say no, but before I had time to say anything, Jay's tongue was making a big lap around my vulva. After a few licks, just to taste me, he stuck his tongue deep inside me. That was Jay's style; he liked to taste the moisture and spread it around. Then he started on my clit.

Burying his nose in my pubic hair, Jay nipped at the glans of my clit, just to let me know he was there. Then he gave it a series of rapid flicks with the tip of his tongue. His tongue was drumming out a rhythm, but I was too lost in pleasure to follow it.

Then he began to alternate tongue-tip-flicking with long, slow strokes with the broad side of his tongue. My fingers clutched at the sheets. My pussy contracted, as if reaching for Jay's cock to fill it.

"Stop," I said. "You're going to make me lose it."

"Lose it," he pleaded, looking up at me from between my legs with his face covered in my juices. "I want you to come in my mouth. I want to give you a screaming orgasm while I suck your clit."

He went back down and sucked voraciously. That, and his words, were enough to send me over the edge. I came so hard, he's probably lucky I didn't kick him out of the way.

Jay kept sucking my clit for a moment, humming like a vibrator as he did. But it was now extra-sensitive, and the pleasure was so intense it was almost pain. He returned to licking my vulva, then stuck his tongue deep inside my vagina one more time.

"God, you're so wet," he said, before easing off. He stood over me as he shucked off his briefs, staring down at his work for a moment. My hips were still pumping as he eyed my soaking-wet cunt. "You should see how you look from here. You're beautiful."

His words were so sweet, they brought a tear to my eyes. There's nothing more heart-warming than a man giving respect to a woman's cunt. I'd been ready for his cock before I came, but now my body practically grieved every second he was separated from me.

Jay stuck an index finger into my well-lubricated pussy. Not quite what I was expecting, but it gave me something to grind against. After a second I realized that while he was pleasuring me, he was also exploring me.

It was time to put my diaphragm in. At the beginning of our relationship, I'd inserted it solo in the bathroom, even though Jay kept insisting that he wanted to watch. Now we did it together. He carefully applied the spermicide to the diaphragm, and I inserted it. He watched me with the same fascinated look he'd had for the line drawing in Our Bodies, Ourselves.

"You should see your Bartholin's glands," Jay said. They're so obvious. Of course, your real-life ones are so much more detailed than the drawing in the book. They're like soft, wet little puffs. I could get a mirror and show 'em to you..."

"Show 'em to me later," I said, giggling. "Put your cock inside me, now."

Jay didn't have to be told twice. He helped me up onto my hands and knees and entered me from behind. Jay liked this position because the head of his cock -- excuse me, the glans -- bumped up against my cervix. He said it was an interesting sensation. I liked it, too. I had two more orgasms before Jay had one. When he finally came inside me, it didn't take long for him to fall onto the bed, exhausted. He grabbed me around the waist and held me close to him.

"Laura?" he said quietly into my ear.

I mumbled something that sounded a little like "Hmm?"

"If you ever start feeling insecure about your body again, get this book out. Because you have nothing to be insecure about."

We lay there together for a while, panting, worn out. Then Jay got hungry again and remembered the leftover chicken. After a quick scrub-up in my bathroom, we put on our robes and went downstairs to recover.

"Did you want another piece of chicken?" Jay asked from the kitchen, where he was piling breasts and wings onto a microwavable plate.

"No thanks," I said, passing through the dining room on my way to the living room sofa. Our Bodies, Ourselves still sat open on the dining room table. The disembodied pussy in the line drawing seemed to stare at me. I turned the page, then began flipping through the book. I stopped on another picture, a close-up of a couple kissing. The woman turned her head and smiled sweetly as the man kissed her cheek. His eyes were open, but hers were closed.

I thought of Jay. I wondered if our relationship would have been possible if not for those moments in college, reading the true story of my sexuality, finding my own voice. They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Maybe everything Jay knew about sex was secondhand information from other boys and trial-and-error with me and his previous girlfriends. But in some ways, he knew more than I did. He knew how to be completely comfortable in his own skin. I was still learning.

I closed the book, smiling back at the multicultural women on the cover. I was sure that the book would come in handy with my counseling group. Clearly I needed to get my own copy, though. One I could keep in the bedroom, just for reference.

Author's note: Our Bodies, Ourselves (A New Edition for a New Era), written by The Boston Women's Health Book Collective, was published in 2005 by Simon & Schuster.

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