Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (24 page)

“Shut the fuck up!” She stomped her foot and made fists. I swear.

“Look,” I said. “Calm the fuck down. I’m no bona fide lesbian—” This was indeed true. In Eugene at that time, anyway, if you were with women but you also, dang it, still liked the poke, you couldn’t really be a card-carrying member. “—but I’ve been getting it on with women since I was fourteen and, you know, there’s … there’s lots of stuff to do.”

She considered this.

Then I said, “Besides, even if you did gag, gagging could be, you know, sorta cool, too, couldn’t it?” I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing again. She began to swear at me and kind of fake-slap my head, so I reached over and grabbed at her pants. “I’m going to do you right now, you coy little minx,” I yelled, unbuttoning her pants and pulling them down. “Jesus. Your underwear is pink. People still wear pink underwear?”

But instead of laughing or swearing at me, she just stood there with her pants down. I looked at her. She looked at me. Then I said, “Do you want me to? I mean, for real?” She shook her head up and down. She closed her eyes.

Women all taste different. Her taste I’d say was a cross between kelp and heavy cream, plus a little hint of pee on the palate since we’d just peed. She smelled like hay and skin lotion. Partway through my lip smacking she said, “Okay. Stop. Let me try you.”

I said, “Okay, but did that feel okay?” She laughed. I took that as a yes. Secretly I was glad she wanted to switch because my knees on that nasty floor grossed me out. I dropped my pants. She stared at me. I wasn’t wearing underwear at all. “What?” I said. When she got down there and began her mouth-to-mouth I had to lean up against the wall to take the force of her. I laughed and said, “Well, jeez, for someone who has never done this, you are a natural.”

From within her wet suction she said, “Shalty. Ish okay. Ish mmrowlrm good.” Then she looked up and said, “Um, you kind of smell like filet mignon.”

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s
lots
of other stuff to do, too, you know.” I didn’t think I was going to hit the high note on this one so I treated the whole incident as a teaching opportunity.

Then I heard a weird noise like the wall was being rammed. Chloe shot up and I turned around, and yep, there was Hannah’s head up at the shitty little prison window on the wall. She was grinning and her fingers were curled over the railing—no doubt she’d hoisted herself up boy style.

“Whatcha doing?” she said. And laughed her Hannah laugh.

By the time we got to The See Vue, there were three of us in the car who had licked pussy. Tragedy averted. Minimal gagging.

Our little cottage sported a fireplace, so I said don’t do anything without me and drove off to get firewood. When I got back, the door was open. I went in. The two of them were in bed with the covers pulled up just underneath their tits—Hannah’s M&M’s and Chloe’s glorious pendulous globes—smiling like Cheshire cats. Cheshire cats who had licked pussy. And in the middle of the bed was a little suitcase that Hannah brought—filled with toys.

I immediately dropped the wood on the floor, shut the door, and stripped, launching myself onto the bed like Superwoman.

Whoever was staying in the Princess and the Pea or the Salish or the Far East, they must’ve gotten an earful. Hours of woman on woman on woman whose regular lives didn’t allow for such wild abandon. Sometimes Hannah’s fist up my cunt, Chloe’s mouth on mine or me sucking her epic tits. Sometimes Hannah on her stomach, me up her ass with a strap-on, Chloe behind me giving me a reach-around—a skill she intuited. Sometimes Chloe on all fours, me and Hannah filling every hole licking every mouth rubbing her clit making her scream making her entire corpus shiver her head rocking back her woman wail let loose gone primal cum and shit stains and spit and tears. I came in Hannah’s mouth, her face between my legs like some goddess in a new myth. Chloe came with Hannah’s fingers in her ass and pussy, her body convulsing and falling off the bed, me wrapped around her and laughing and hitting my head on the wall. Hannah came while jamming a dildo up herself as I buried my face in the clit of her. She pulled my hair. She pushed my head. Chloe curled under me licking and gagging but not not not stopping. I don’t know how many times we came—it seemed unending.

We ate each other we ate pickled herring we ate Gruyère cheese. We ate the animal out of each other’s bodies we ate steak we ate chocolate two women my chocolate. We drank each other we drank all the beer we drank all the wine we peed outside. We got high on skin and cum and sweat we got high on pot. We came in waves we ran out and into the waves.

I wanted to stay like that forever—outside of any “relationship” I had ever had and inside the wet of an unnamed sexuality. The moon a grand spectator. As full of alive as the ocean outside the door. All the night it was difficult to tell whose body was whose. The woman of it drowned me. It nearly cleaved my mind. And again. Again. Waves.

In the morning we wrapped ourselves in blankets and drank coffee and perched ourselves about. Hannah on the porch railing outside and Chloe in a big overstuffed chair in the main room and me back in the bed curled up like a lion who’d just eaten a baby. It would have made a nice photo, three women contented like that, three women waking from their own pleasure without anyone or anything to put them back in their clean and proper places. But life is life.

On the beach later that day Hannah grabbed Chloe’s hands and swung her around ring-around-the-rosy style, harder and harder. Chloe was laughing and then the wind and rain kicked up and then Hannah swung her too hard and let go and Chloe went tumbling over sand and rock and scraped the shit out of her face and shoulder. Also she wrenched her back.

Back in the cottage, I smoked a great deal of please-don’t-let-this-all-go-to-hell pot and got so high I passed out at 8:00 p.m. When I awoke, Chloe was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace crying and Hannah was nowhere to be seen. When she came back to the cottage we were just three women again, living women lives, me with a boyfriend and Chloe with a seminar paper due and Hanna just standing there with her idea that had gone to shit. On the solemn heavy drive home I got pulled over and given a ticket by some man cop—a little piece of paper that might as well have read:
Not so fast, ladies.

I don’t know why women can’t make the story do what they want.

I don’t.

I don’t know why the story of a woman’s sexuality can’t be the next Great American Novel. Form coming from content.

When we got back to our ordinary lives, Chloe told me she was in love with me. A sentiment I couldn’t find in myself to return, hard as I tried. I wish I could go back and try. It was real, what she offered. But kindness wasn’t something I even recognized. Hannah’s girlfriend tried to commit suicide, feeling betrayed and alone. Though I had an episode or two left with Hannah, I was seduced away from her wild abandon eventually by a man with a fifth of whiskey, and like Faye Dunaway in
Barfly,
I followed him toward the meated smell and taste of poke.

Pottymouth

Kevin Sampsell

You can’t judge a mouth by the shade of its lipstick. Sometimes the girls you imagine would talk the dirtiest in bed turn out to be the most offended when you grunt something about how they should push their tits together, while it turns out that nice girl who always wears the long-sleeve turtleneck wants you to “spray it” on her face. I like girls who break the stereotype in that way—the bad good girl. But whether you’re dating a girl or merely adding to your booty-call roster, you must scramble to adapt to their semantics. Their love language.

After years of research, I have compiled some case studies.

The girl who ran away from home as a teen, whose father is a cop, and exhibits reckless behavior: Christy introduced me to the concept of oral sex; I was ignorant of the possibility that men could go down on women until I was 18. We woke up together at a friend’s apartment. She asked if I wanted to eat her out. Flustered and grossed out, I said no, thanks. The next time we were together, she stole a line from Prince and said, “I sincerely want to fuck the taste out of your mouth.” I was intimidated by her and almost lost my erection, even at an age when it was impossible for me not to have an erection. “Fuck me harder, baby,” she said, in an attempt to soothe and encourage. A few minutes later she lost patience and screamed, “Pound my fucking twat!”

The girl who is still close to her parents, has various pets that sleep with her, likes to imagine that she is “one of the boys,” but often kills the mood when she’s around: Beth said she would leave me if I spoke the word
cunt
in front of her. I asked politely if I could say
pussy
, but she didn’t like that either. We had our sex in silence. Once, when I tried to add even the blandest vocal dynamics, mid-fuck—“Does that feel good?”—she had a meltdown and asked if I was trying to humiliate her. She also would not let me pet her animals unless I was clothed.

The girl who is too self-involved to ask you about yourself, dances ballet but likes angry rap music, joins organizations like PETA and Greenpeace but loses interest in them quickly: Whitney never once mentioned my cock or my eagerly darting tongue, but focused on her own goodies whenever we screwed around on her ridiculously large bed. “Doesn’t my pussy feel good?” she would ask me. “Yes,” I would pant, trying to fuck her good enough so she’d notice me. “I’m the best fuck in the mall, ain’t I?” she’d query (we were working in a mall at the time). Once, in a moment of generosity, she said, “If you make me come, I’ll make you come, too.” She must not have realized that I already came and was merely working overtime until some tension left her body. “Feed on my titties,” she said. “I wanna hear you slurp.”

The girl who doesn’t own a television, likes (and understands) poetry, sometimes gets blind drunk and loses her cell phone at lesbian bars: Jen was basically a sex machine who would suck or hump anything that limped. She had a loud voice and talked constantly, even with her mouth full. She would suck my cock first thing in the morning while talking about her fucked-up dreams. Strangely, she always referred to our body parts in proper clinical terms: “Your penis turned into a hammer (lick, pause) and you were nailing me to a cross, and then (suck, head twist, lick) your hands turned into penises and you fucked my vagina (lick, pause) with your left hand while titty-fucking me (suck) with your right.” When she got drunk, she liked to turn the tables. “How’bout I fuck you tonight?” she’d slur. “I got a strap-on with your rectum’s name on it. You wanna be my sexy bitch tonight?”

The girl with enormous breasts whose parents were hippies: When I first slept with Blossom, she told me that sex was the best drug, the “highest high.” She would move up and down on me, making wild animal noises, as I lay on my back. Then she’d laugh unselfconsciously and raise her arms as if she was worshipping some wacky moon goddess. She smelled like cinnamon and said things like, “When you come, it’s like you’re painting my soul.” And I would try to match her with my own woo-woo hoo-ha: “Your tits are like beautiful planets that I want to explore and write poems about. Your pussy is the most delicious pomegranate.”

The just-divorced girl with an exotic accent: I wasn’t really sure where she was from (maybe Australia, maybe Oklahoma), but the sound of her voice made me hard in my pants, even when she was talking about how she and her ex-husband had sex every day for nine years. Sometimes more than once. Before she moved “back home” (wherever that was), she spent her last night in town at my place. She called me by her ex’s name a few times but didn’t apologize (she had downed the last of my liquor). She wanted me to speak Spanish to her but I didn’t know any. She told me a few key phrases:
Se siente rico
: “That feels good.”
Te voy a echar de menos
: “I am going to miss you.”
Ajustado culo
: “Tight ass.” I wanted to impress her, but I was saying the words wrong and then I ejaculated too soon. “I’m sorry,” I told her, “that wasn’t my best.” I felt like an athlete who had just choked in a winnable game. “It was good,” she said. “You fucked me good.” We were drunk and falling asleep but I felt bad. “You’re just saying that,” I said.

About the Contributors

RADLEY BALKO
is a writer and investigative journalist in Nashville, Tennessee. He now writes for
Huffington Post
, formerly for
Reason
magazine. Balko’s reporting is credited with freeing a Mississippi man from death row. In 2011 he was named the L.A. Press Club’s Journalist of the Year.

GRETA CHRISTINA
is one of the most widely read, well-respected bloggers in the atheist blogosphere. She is a regular atheist correspondent for AlterNet; she has been published in
Ms., Skeptical Inquirer,
the
Chicago Sun-Times
, and more; and she has been writing for her own
Greta Christina’s Blog
since 2005. Find her at
www.freethoughtblogs.com/greta
.

TRACY CLARK-FLORY
is a staff writer at
Salon.com
, where she covers sex, love, and relationships. Her personal essay “In Defense of Casual Sex” was selected for the anthology
Best Sex Writing 2009
.

A biomedical engineer by training,
ADRIAN COLESBERRY
works in pharmaceutical manufacturing by day and, in the evenings, writes dirty, funny, dirty books and does stand-up comedy, proving again the age-old formula: corporate drug manufacturing + time (approx. 2 hours) = comedy.

AMBER DAWN
is a writer, filmmaker, and performance artist based in Vancouver. She is the author of the novel
Sub Rosa
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010), editor of the Lambda Award–nominated
Fist of the Spider Woman
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008) and co-editor of
With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005).