WARNING: This is a story for adults. If you are under 18, please
stop reading immediately.

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: This story is part of a series. Later stories sometimes
refer to earlier ones, but each also is meant to stand alone.
Five stories have appeared previously--"Janey's January,"
"Janey's February," "Janey's Trip," "Janey's March," and
"Janey's April." My web site is
http://www.asstr.ml.org/~Jane_Urquhart

ANOTHER NOTE: If you haven't read "Phone Sex," by Taria," you
probably should. There is a link to it on my web site.



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 a regular 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 at some little college a long way from here. Being the
cautious type, 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 and checked it out.
All OK. 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.

				-------END-------

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

Please write to me at janey98@hotmail.com.