“Sure they will,” he said. Well, he didn’t have the experience to back it up, but he read around the subject enough. There were plenty of male authors of erotic fiction writing about that kind of thing for him to know there were some guys out there who liked it.
The whole idea thrilled Dylan himself no end – if only some willing girl would let him.
“They will? Can I quote you on that, Rainbow Boy?” Noelle’s friends laughed at that, at her new nickname for him.
He wasn’t sure why they called it ‘rainbow’, but he was sure it probably wasn’t the best nickname someone could have.
Dylan felt awkward, he felt cornered. He let his mouth wander again, and that was always dangerous. It said: “Here’s the thing – a lot of guys love doing that, but there’s no way any of them can if girls won’t ask them to.”
Noelle rolled her eyes. “Here we go again,” she said, seeming to coil herself up ready for a return to the earlier argument.
“No, hear me out,” he insisted. “Girls can assume if they offer a guy a blow job, he’s never going to say ‘no’. But girls have all kinds of paranoid fears of letting a guy do it for them, that he won’t like it, that he won’t like how it tastes or smells, that he’ll never want to see her again. So they never seem happy to let guys do it, so guys figure they don’t like it anyway, so they don’t offer to do it. It’s a vicious circle.”
“You’re saying it’s our fault?” Noelle was irritated at him again.
Dylan heaved a sigh. He didn’t know what to say now, every word that left his mouth seemed to be the wrong thing.
He said: “Look, you know what the teachers told all the guys in St Josephs when they were freshmen?”
“I don’t know, what?”
“They took all the guys aside, and sat us down and explained to us that we might be starting to like the look of the girls right now, and that we might find ourselves tempted to do something about that, but that if we laid a single finger on any of them, there was a chance we might be accused of rape.”
Dylan spoke the truth. St Josephs might not be like most high schools out there, with its strong Catholic traditions, but that particular ‘sex ed’ class had certainly left an impression on its male students.
“Seriously?” someone said.
Noelle remained quiet, one eyebrow raised skeptically.
Dylan said: “We were told fairly clearly that if we touched a girl on the god damn ankle, and she wasn’t happy about it, she’d be capable of going to the authorities – and that would be the end of our hope to get into college, the end of our future careers, everything.”
“Jesus.”
“So you know what?” he said, “For the guys I know, if a girl doesn’t explicitly ask him to do something to her, they’re pretty nervous about doing anything with her.”
“Wow.”
That was Noelle. Dylan looked up, and he could tell she’d believed his story – why shouldn’t he? He’d sounded as earnest and truthful as he was.
She said: “And that’s why guys at St Josephs like girls to tell them what to do?”
“I guess.”
“Sounds kind of nice,” one of the other girls said. Sasha, Dylan thought.