(Untitled)

[floozyfacade]

It's only a few weeks into the school term and, if Olive were sensible, she'd be studying. Today's a light day, meaning she has plenty of time to do so, if she just buckles down, and it's not like she isn't a focused, disciplined student when she wants to be. Even without these grades contributing to the college applications she won't be writing

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[notaparker]

It actually feels good to have a pretty full courseload again. Between that, lab work and squeezing in deliberately irregularly scheduled sessions of the all-new hit series James Barnes Presents: Exhaustion, it's fairly full-on.

Not enough to make me wish there were more of me, though. There will never be a time when that happens. I am completely content to be just the one me.

Because it's not like I'm so busy I can't find time to go swimming, which is what I'm just coming back from. Partly it's because it's a pretty ocean and it should be enjoyed, and partly in the vain hope that some extra conditioning will make it feel less like Barnes is trying to murder me.

Those people in his class don't know how good they have it. They have other students to take some of his attention

[floozyfacade]

"'Place one hand at the base of his shaft, and twist the tip with the other,'" Olive reads aloud, and though she tries at first for an overly sensual voice to mock the source material, she winds up shuddering as she finishes. "'Like you're opening a jar.' A jar. I don't think the people who write these things understand how much force I use to open jars. Or else they just hate men and they're deliberately trying to land them in the hospital, because that - I mean, that cannot be healthy. Or pleasurable in any manner."

Granted, there are a few scattered tips that make her wonder how much exactly she knows and has yet to learn, but mostly she's starting to suspect these people wrote these with dirty refrigerator poetry magnets.

[notaparker]

I wince and suppress the urge to cross my legs about halfway through the motion, and I don't even have the relevant parts, except in some weird memory-state I try not to think about.

"Tears about sums it up," I say, now consciously not looking at said magazine, because: "Wow, they just out and say it, don't they. Was that even shrink-wrapped?"

[floozyfacade]

Olive shakes her head vigorously, legs swinging over her and weight on her elbows as she flips it shut to show Jessica the cover: 99 Sex Moves: Sweet and Slow, Quick and Dirty, and Everything in Between.

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised," she says, "and that's just, you know, the one article, there are others that are, um... highly instructive. I'm guessing at least half in what not to do. Ever. Unless you hate him. Or yourself. But I wasn't actually expecting that, that's - it's not actually the most explicit." She's not going to read those to Jessica. Not aloud and in public. She's pretty free and open, but there are limits.

[notaparker]

Is this what's in all women's magazines? I guess it's always been right there on the cover, but I really didn't expect, for instance, that it actually involved the word 'shaft.'

"Man, you can get away with anything if it's text," I say. "Not that I'm for censorship, just, that's a whole lot of instructiveness. 99 moves worth, at least."

[floozyfacade]

"Oh, yeah, no," Olive says, "I mean, you know, by all means, print it. I would not be one to stop that. Freedom - freedom of press and speech and, yeah, but wow. I don't know what's more worrying, that I actually no longer know which of these are reasonable or that there's probably a handful of women who take these at face value and decided to surprise their boyfriends with that one."

She has to wonder if those guys can sue Cosmo for that. They should be able to, she's convinced, but probably their girlfriends would be the ones legally liable for assault since no one at Cosmo forced them to try tip number fifty.

[notaparker]

"First one," I say, and then consider, "no, second. You're, uh, still capable of spotting the problem, there."

I think the tips of my ears are going red, so that's the nice thing about having long hair.

[floozyfacade]

They can't all be pure nonsense, Olive knows, if only because she knows a couple of them aren't (aren't they also common sense? Or, no, that's the wrong one. Instinct, maybe). All of them start looking insane eventually, though.

She shakes her head. "'While out, lick the neck of a beer bottle the way you plan on licking him later,'" she reads, and she flushes a little herself at that. "Who writes this? Can I, too, get paid to pull words out of a hat and arrange them in an order that resembles a sentence?"

[notaparker]

"Holy public lewdness, Batman," I say, unable to help by twist back to see if this is indeed what it says, the problem being then I start noticing other items on the page. More to be filed under 'Not To Think About.' I don't even know if I'm in the group at which this is aimed, and even if I were, it'd still be odd to think about, with years of thinking in the opposite direction sitting in my head.

"What, like, just... in a bar? That's so classy. Who would not be into such a classy move as that."

[floozyfacade]

This is why we're friends.

I mean, there are other reasons, but a basic understanding on these matters helps.

"Oh, God, yeah," Olive says, nodding, "totally hot. Just... go to town on that... beer bottle." She pulls a face. It's not even that it's a totally white trash move in her book; it's the publicness of it, too, and the idea of advertising that kind of behavior to the world. If other women want to, they can go right ahead, but even if that particular kind of thing were in her repertoire at the moment, she's learned she has zero desire for anyone else to know what she's up to in the bedroom. "Like a dozen of these also advocate learning how to become a human pretzel. Which, you know, totally on my to do list."

[notaparker]

Admittedly, I'm not entirely unconvinced Johnny or Bobby wouldn't just stare enraptured at a girl doing that and then ask her to marry them, but that's Johnny and Bobby.

I mean, Johnny claimed he was ready to ask me to marry him once, so that was... super weird. He was kidding, but kidding as he hit on me, so, again, super weird.

God, I miss them.

Not the super weird hitting on, obviously, but the general hanging out. Even if they are a couple of neanderthals who have never actually hung out with me, Jessica Drew, except kinda sorta in Johnny's case.

"Do they actually use the word pretzel?" I say. "I'm hoping that's just interpretive, but after the 'opening a jar' incident I can't put it past them."

They'd be totally into pretzels, too.

[floozyfacade]

"No, thank God," Olive says. "They'd completely ruin snack food for me. Actually, they try to ruin both whipped cream and pudding, so... but no, it's, uh... 'Place your feet on his chest with your legs crossed to create an extrasnug grip.'"

Nothing about that sounds even remotely comfortable.

[notaparker]

While I thought the other ones were awkwardly phrased or straight-up dubious, this one initially strikes me as just plain incomprehensible.

"Are you gripping with your feet? How does moving your legs around relate to grip strength in any waaaah." My eyebrows shoot up to give my eyes room to widen. The blush isn't huge, so it doesn't need much room. "Ah."

Well, I'm sure glad I didn't try to move my legs around to try to comprehend that instruction. More than the little bit I did.

[floozyfacade]

Olive can hardly comment when she's had to repeatedly stop herself from doing the same as she's read. She's starting to suspect half of the instructions here have been run through Babelfish a few times.

"Yeah," she says emphatically. "Liiiike that. That would be how. With your legs like—" She settles her feet firmly on the ground halfway through trying to demonstrate. Even if she thought she were actually that flexible, this is not the time nor the place nor the bikini to do it in. "You get the idea. Isn't that uncomfortable? With, like, your feet up in your faces?"

[notaparker]

"Uncomfortable is the word that springs to mind," I agree, nodding firmly a couple of times. Still blushing. Not bad, but still going. "That's just asking for cramp. No amount of- I am never going to be able to look the word 'grip' in the face again."

[floozyfacade]

"Right?" Olive says. "Not that - I mean, I don't think I ever looked it in the face to begin with, but I'm, I don't think it's a word I wanted to ever apply to, you know... regions." Like with about half these tips, she's pretty sure the basic idea behind it isn't so bad, but the wording and method of achieving it is a different question altogether. "I'm pretty sure that what we can take away from this is that, the harder you try to work at being sexy, the more you wind up just looking like a candidate for Cirque du Soleil."