Best Lesbian Erotica 2007 (2 page)

Then it occurred to me that these writers are more interested in mental blocks than legal ones. It is at the private level, in the emotional intricacies of a scene of infatuation, compulsion or voyeurism that these characters knock down barriers. The protagonist in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s “On Fire” makes herself learn fire-eating for a burlesque performance to fulfill the whim of the woman she wants. The nervous heroine in “Public Pet” by Cynthia Rayne has never yet been taken out in public on a leash.

Some of these stories are about sex in committed relationships, others about thrillingly unpredictable pickups (at parties, clubs, conferences), but either way, the excitement lies in achieving a contact so intimate, so naked, whether with partner or stranger, that you can really let go: angels and demons alike released into the shrieking sky.

Many of these tales are about the trembling pleasure of anticipation as much as the moment when sex actually happens; desire is as much about the past and the future as the now. The adult women in Anna Watson’s witty “Homecoming Queen” get to resolve the angst of their adolescence by playing out the cheerleader-and-tomboy-loner scenario they never dared when they were in high school.

Unlikely pairings are a great tease, like that of the drop-dead gorgeous twenty-something Hollywood actress with the aging, crop-haired butch photographer in Sacchi Green’s “Bright Angel.” These stories range widely in settings: from the Grand Canyon to a dark wood where the babes in D. Alexandria’s “Tag!” hunt each other down by—
mm!
—the scent of their juices. These authors reveal a fascination with the world of the richest lesbians as well as the poorest: homeless and crack-smoking in Jolie du Pré’s oddly romantic “Kiki‚” bike messengers and strippers in Zoë Alexandra’s gritty “French Handwriting,” which concludes “…and then it hit me. I wasn’t going anywhere.”

The protagonist in Lynne Jamneck’s “Voodoo and Tattoos” has both her dreams come true when she winds up in the hotel room of a corporate type and her pierced, tattooed bit of rough. In “Bingo, Baby‚” Radclyffe riffs cleverly on contemporary queer tourism when her butch character gets ordered into skirts by her femme for Drag Bingo in Provincetown.

Bathrooms come up a lot, either as places of privacy where you wash up or strap on, or as illicit places to have sex. The stories vary greatly in tone, and some of the S/M stories are the sweetest, oddly enough.

What’s missing? I was surprised by how little anal sex came up this year. Lynne Jamneck’s story is one of the only ones to feature even an uneasy moment of butch-butch desire. Bisexuality is oddly invisible, too: Suki Bishop’s “Rupture” and Jean Roberta’s “The World Turned Upside Down” are the only ones to include sex with a man (though the protagonist in “Public Pet” is ordered by her Mistress to give oral satisfaction to a strange man’s wife while he watches). And I looked in vain for a story of two convent schoolgirls behind the bike sheds stuffing each other’s every orifice with strawberries—but perhaps that’s just me? Never mind, everyone’s entitled to her own favorite flavor….

Several stories go well beyond the everyday of contemporary lesbian circles. As an aficionado of historical fiction, I was delighted by the aforementioned “The World Turned Upside Down‚” in which a Regency gentleman is appalled to realize that his rival for his promiscuous beloved’s heart is her mannish maid! Girls who still ask “What’s your sign?” will be highly amused by Andrea Miller’s set of encounters with twelve contrasting “Heavenly Bodies.”

One outstandingly atmospheric story, Skian McGuire’s “Sweet Hunger,” offers an unusual variant on the vampire: a mysterious maple syrup maker who seduces a different guest in the middle of the night every spring as a sort of erotic offering to the Goddess to bring the sap down. Our fantasies have infinite power: if the smorgasbord of stories in this collection add up to any message, that may be it.

 

Emma Donoghue
London, Ontario
August 2006

Joy Parks

 

 

 

 

 

Watching Petey Ginoa knead bread dough is like watching a thing of beauty.

Watching her do it when she doesn’t know anyone is watching her is even better.

First there are her hands, which are large but not too large; peachy pink hands that get washed soft over and over again every day, strong with short square nails and slightly knobby knuckles, the kind you get when you crack them too much. And flour. I don’t think I’ve ever seen those hands when they weren’t covered in flour. Strong hands, but not rough at all. Hands that can shape delicate flutes on a tartlet crust or fix a tiny broken motor on the mixer or, I believe, unfasten a button so slow and perfect, sliding a finger down the space between breasts, sliding past a slight
mound of belly, sliding down. I take a gulp of Fair Trade fresh-ground something or other to keep me still and watch how she grabs a hunk of sunflower rye or cornbread with organic red pepper slices, or whatever delightful concoction is in her bowl today, and drops it onto the breadboard, her hands dancing it into a perfect round, her fingers disappearing inside, then out, inside again. Kneading. Needing. I watch those fingers turn and poke and stretch the dough. I feel heat welling up between my thighs, try not to squirm. I watch her with my lips parted like I’m waiting for a kiss.

And then she stops. I hold my breath. She pushes up the sleeves of the white shirt she’s wearing beneath her apron and begins to knead some more, flexing her perfectly shaped muscles, girl muscles but firm and healthy and strong looking. The kind of arms that make you wonder what it would be like to be inside the circle of her body, to feel those muscles tighten and press against you, what that would be like. That close.

It’s warm in here and the windows are sweating from the steam of the kitchen; it’s still morning cold outside. I should go. I should get up and walk out of here as best I can and get to work on time for a change; the walk would do me good right now. If I could just stand up.

I could watch those hands for hours.

Yeah, I know I’ve got it bad. And I don’t quite know what to do with it.

 

Everyone back home told me I was going to hate moving to a small town even if it was the only place I could get a job. In a small town everybody knows everybody’s business and I’d have to watch my
P
s and
Q
s, they said. Growing up in the city and having the natural luck to get away with a whole lot of stuff, I hadn’t had to work very hard at being discreet. Who was going to know and who was going to care?

So I’ve been laying low, working at the library as the junior librarian in training, trying to make it look like I’m far more interested in learning how to organize the periodicals and start a community reading circle than I am in running back and forth to Petey’s all day to buy coffee. I can’t sleep most nights now. I don’t know if it’s all that caffeine or the fact that when I do sleep I keep dreaming about those hands on my skin and then I have to get up and drink a lot of cold water just to keep from melting in my own heat.

But bless the gossips in town for helping me learn all about Petey. I guess since some of them saw me spending so much time in the bakery, they wanted to warn me so I could be on guard and not fall prey to her seductions. You’d never know from looking at me that I’ve dealt with plenty of seductions by women like Petey and enjoyed every single one of them. From the very first day I walked into her shop, if she’d ever even looked at me with half a hint that she might be interested, I’d have fallen on my back so fast I might have ended up with whiplash. It’s funny being femme. Sometimes you hate the fact that no one knows, and you have to go out of your way to make sure some butch realizes you’re available, ’cause you look too straight. But the good ones know. The smart ones. They can look past the heels you wear to work and the lipstick and the girly clothes, and love all that about you, know what you are beneath your clothes, not just any woman, but special. One who would fall on your back for them, let them touch you all over, let them reach inside your body, fuck you hard and tender and whatever it takes to make you both feel so good about what it is that you are.

But since I’m not so obvious to normal people, I got the whole deal on Petey.

Petey Ginoa is a legend in town. Everybody knows she’s a lesbian even though nobody’s ever seen her with any woman at any time. She’s too smart for that—to get caught. It’s a small town and she’s got a damn good business and she’d be crazy to take a chance on losing it all. Petey’s not her real name; it’s Pia, which is the name on the sign above the door. Her father named the shop that back when she was a baby. But everybody calls the place Petey’s. They eat Petey’s bread and take Petey’s cake home for birthdays and baby christenings and stop by Petey’s for coffee. Sometimes I think if not for her, the whole damn town would go hungry. Petey suits her more. That’s just how it is with some lesbian children; they outgrow the names their mommas gave them, grow into something different, someone different from what anyone could have expected of them. Taking a new name is like being born all over again into who they should have been all along.

Not that Petey’s the kind of woman who’d think about it that way. She probably just realized she was becoming someone for whom a delicate name like Pia didn’t fit. It made her feel uneasy. So she gave herself a more comfortable handle. I get the feeling she’s the kind of woman who would do whatever she needed to do to feel okay about herself and not give a damn about what anyone might think.

I wonder if any of her lovers—who no one’s ever seen—call her Pia.

Wouldn’t seem right somehow.

I want to be one of those women no one’s ever caught her with.

I want those hands needing me.

On a belt under her apron Petey wears a measuring cup that looks like it was made by Black and Decker. She wears clean, crisp, white pants that cup her fine ass just right and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She wears a full-length, white apron slung over her neck and tied real loose, and clean white sneakers that don’t make a sound. Her dark hair is cut short and loose around her face, which seems a little tanned. Even in winter that hair curls up at the back of her collar when she’s moving around the kitchen in the heat. That collar, those curls. I have to keep my hands in my coat pocket or flat, fanned on the counter, when I order my coffee. I look the other way when she slides the little waxed paper bag of cannoli my way; stop myself from reaching across the counter; stop myself from reaching out to touch her neck, smooth those curls. Touch her face real slow. I think her forehead would smell like butter, that her skin would be lightly glazed all over with a fine dusting of sugar, that if you put your mouth to her skin, you would come away tasting sweet.

I’m thinking Valentine’s Day will be the time to make my move, ’cause that’s when everybody’s all crazed over romance and hearts and flowers and wanting to be loved. Petey can’t be all that different from anyone else. Can she?

 

Today is Friday the thirteenth, and not a soul on the street fails to comment on it. I don’t feel unlucky, just a little racy knowing I’ve got just today to figure out how I’m going to pull off the seduction of the town dyke. I wonder if she has a girlfriend now, but only for a minute, because something tells me I’d sense it if she did. At this point I don’t think it would
matter if she was dating my own best friend—if I’d been in town long enough to have one.

When I hit the doorway of the bakery, I almost swoon. It’s the clouds of moist heat that gather inside, rain on the window, plus the scent of something sweet and deep, along with something fresh, like fruit juice, underneath it. And there’s Petey. She’s behind the counter, smiling at me. It must have been my reaction to the aroma that wrapped around me as I came inside. I wrinkle my nose like I’m sniffing for more and look at her grinning, as if to ask what’s making such a delicious smell. Her eyes are actually lit, wide and open, more so than I remember ever seeing them. She motions me over. I’ve never been that close to her aside from her pouring my coffee or taking my money when I paid for bread or muffins or those slices of all-natural Queen Anne’s cake with caramel-covered nut crust swirled with spidery feathers of toasted coconut. Or crème brûlée custard on a toasted almond crust. Or shiny pecan buns, moist and slippery as the flesh of my thigh right now. I’m weak. I don’t think she’s ever really talked to me. Specifically to me. And she still isn’t—talking. I step up to the counter and she’s still smiling and motioning me even closer. I move in like I’m in a trance, move in for a kiss, to touch my lips to her cheek, her lips. Desire bubbles up within my belly, there are tiny flutters inside my cunt. Like wings. I wonder if she can see down my blouse, see my breasts nestled in the pink, lacy, silk demi-cup I bought mail order from Victoria’s Secret just in case something like this ever happened. I catch myself when my eyes start to close. She raises a fork to my lips like a present, speared with a tiny piece of something pink and fluffy, like cotton candy covered in chocolate. Oh baby. She directs the fork toward my lips as I open them on command, take the gift inside. Something sweet and deep breaks on my tongue; my mouth wells up with wetness. I think about the pink of it, pink like the tender underside of a breast set free, pink skin of a vulva, all shower fresh and warm; my tongue roaming my mouth to seek out and find every touch of sweetness, the citrusy aftertaste a surprise. I worry about drooling. I swirl it around my mouth, take it in, inhale it. Most of your taste buds come from scent. I taste an orange cream chocolate like from the Whitman’s Sampler but warm. I want to tell her it’s like sex on a fork, but that’s too bold, too early in the dance. She’s close still, watching me, silent. I open my eyes wide now, finally able to open my mouth.

Then she speaks real low, her voice deep but clear against the clang of coffee cups and beaters in the kitchen.