Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica (11 page)

I never wanted to be a waiting woman; who does? But at some point I realized I had spent my whole life in anticipation, a slightly parted mouth, red and superstitious, frozen in a state of readiness. Waiting, I suppose, for a kiss to end all kisses. The big one, ominous and delicious, where you melt and melt until you disappear. But when wanting itself becomes bigger than the thing that is wanted, well. My grandpa would say, if it was a snake it woulda bit you. Meaning: everything you ever wanted could present itself on a tray with dancing girls and you wouldn't notice. You've got your eyes closed and your lips open and all that's happening is your mouth is going dry.

My mother never waited for anyone or anything, not as far as I know. She was a go-getter from the get-go. I always picture her with car keys in one hand, her pocketbook in the other, and a crazed look in her eye. Whenever I saw that look, I scrambled to do whatever it was that needed doing: getting my brother into his snowsuit, or mopping up spilled apple juice, or just getting out of the way.

 

The second time you came over I knew I would seduce you. I made lasagna and garlic bread, and salad with red bell peppers and artichoke hearts. I was feeling poetic in the grocery store and I put my thumb over the label so it read “choke hearts”—it seemed appropriate to my mission. I asked the neighbors to watch Otto for the night—college girls, I buy pot from them sometimes.

In the middle of dinner I took your hand and placed your first two fingers in my mouth, all the way to the back of my throat, the soft, spongy part that reminds me of a cervix. Your other hand found the wetness between my legs and I moaned, feeling the fullness of being entered in two places at once.
“Oh, Annie,” you said. “I had hoped, but I wasn't sure…” My hands found the curls at the back of your neck, the only place that wasn't full of hair grease, and held on.

 

I went back to work not too long ago, just a couple of days a week, and my first day back the other cooks were talking about some shrink they'd heard on the radio. Jeannine told us how he'd said that as soon as we become lovers with someone, as soon as we lay claim to them, we start expecting them to fill all the gaps our parents left in us, give us all the love we never had as children.

Cathy started laughing, shrieking almost, pounding the counter with a floured fist. “That's so fucked!” she wailed. “How ridiculous can you get? No wonder, God, no wonder the world is so fucked up.” I kept chopping up broccoli florettes, tossing them in a metal colander so large it always reminded me of a flying saucer. I didn't think it sounded so outrageous to ask for those things from a lover. I mean, where else are you gonna get them?

Seems like my heart is always tripping over itself trying to catch up to the way the world works now. You're not allowed to own people anymore. They come and go and you're just supposed to be okay with that. I want to belong to somebody, and if they don't want me anymore they can just put me in a burlap sack with some rocks and throw me over the bridge. I'm tired of being free.

 

All my knives at your disposal and you had to use your own pretty little hunting knife to mark me. This was the fourth time you came by, but only the second time you fucked me. It started out silly. I giggled when you pressed the flat side against my throat and told me to unbutton my blouse. I giggled when you traced circles around my nipples with the tip. I gasped when you pressed the tip between the bones that fence in my heart.

I knew you weren't trying to leave any permanent traces, just scratches really, a lopsided heart with angel wings. It took three weeks to fade.

 

The first night you came by unannounced there was no booze in the house, so we drove to the Grand Union. I waited in the car watching snowflakes sizzle when they hit the windshield, watching my white breath fill the VW like ether, temperature fronts clashing in and around the car like religious armies, each trying to win over the other side.

You came out of the Grand Union the way you burst onto any scene, shoulders back, chest up high like a bulldog, shy puppy grin on your face. Then your heel caught a patch of ice and you skidded, regained your balance for a second, then pitched forward to land with the bottle of whiskey smashed under, or rather through, your hand—your left hand, the one you live by.

I ran to help you up. “I'm taking you to the emergency room,” I said firmly, putting my arm around your waist as if you might have trouble walking with an injured hand, and as if I could hold you up if that were true.

“I don't have insurance,” you stated, as if that would matter to me. We were already seated in the car. I revved up the engine to warm it back up. I was kinda revved up myself, excited by the prospect of being useful to you. I wondered briefly if it was fucked-up of me to take a small measure of delight in your dependence. I was pretty sure Cathy at work would think so.

“They have to take you whether or not you're insured,” I told you. “Jesus, you're bleeding all over the place!”

“I'm sorry.” This was said so earnestly that I wondered if you were in shock.

“Oh, Jesse. That's not what I mean. I mean it's serious. I don't care if you ruin the ripped-up seats.” The only towel in
the car was full of dog hair. I didn't want to give you that so I took the Indian-print scarf from around my neck and wrapped it around your hand tightly. You rocked back and forth holding it and seemed to be trying not to cry.

“Look, Annie, I'm not going to the hospital, okay? I'll figure something out. Take me home with you and I'll make some phone calls, see what I can figure out.”

By the time I pulled into the driveway I knew what I was going to do. I got out my sewing kit and some unwaxed dental floss, sterilized a needle and threaded it. Got out the rubbing alcohol and the Vicodin. Got to work.

 

If there's anything I know, it's how to stitch things up so you can barely see the seam. Flesh isn't so different from thick upholstery fabric, the satiny kind that stretches when you sit on it, and lord knows, I'd watched doctors sew me up enough times. Made my eyes focus on the surgical needle and black plastic thread that looked like insect parts so I could tune out my mother explaining why I was so accident-prone.

Not that I didn't believe her. I believed I was prone to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the wrong girl in the wrong skin, the wrong daughter in the wrong house. I would turn too suddenly and knock into something and that something would pound back. I would tumble into a wall, or into the hot stove, or against the edge of a paring knife. I rarely heard the words that accompanied my tumbles, for I had a thick layer of cotton that descended into my head at such times, and it kept my brain from colliding too harshly with my skull, but once I heard the words “little bitch”—they sounded squeezed out like sourness from a lemon and for a long time I heard nothing else.

 

Sharpen your knives on my long bones. A tender anesthetic, your hand inside me, curled as if to grasp some brass ring,
some key to some faraway lock. Your eyes locked onto mine, always a contest to see if I can hold your gaze without blushing or feeling my blood surge into tears. Since the baby, a fist is the only thing that can fill me to capacity: I'm a plowed field, I'm a workhorse, I'm a petunia coming apart at the petals, I'm a sucking wound, wrapped around your wrist. Who is being bandaged here? Who is being healed?

 

The hundred-and-twelfth time you came over—well, to tell the truth it was only the twelfth, but it felt like so much more. I was always counting, adding articles of evidence in my head, wrapping things up for safekeeping like wineglasses in newspaper. I just wasn't sure how to measure things, what standards to use. My own obviously wouldn't do; they got me in trouble more often than not. I'd expect a field of rubies instead of gravel and blood, that skinned-knee feeling, but all over. I'd mistaken a certain blistery rawness for love too many times.

The twelfth time you came over you let me make you come. We had been smoking a little pot in the living room, tending the fire in the woodstove, and you lay back on the couch, unzipped your jeans, and said, “Come here, little girl.”

I nuzzled my face into your crotch and worked my fingers past the sharp teeth of the zipper, through the cotton flap of your briefs, and your fingers found my mouth and I took them as if it were your cock and I gave the best head of my life, fucking my own face with the whole of your hand, your right hand, not the one I mended for you, although that one had almost healed, a puckered scar running between index finger and thumb. You held my hair away from my face with that hand while I fucked you stealthily with my own little fingers—that part we don't talk about, that part that is hard for you—and soon you started bucking your hips and pressing my head hard into your crotch, choking me on your cock, then
letting out the softest little moan and stroking my hair and we didn't move or say anything for the longest time. Then I heard the baby crying and got up to go feed him.

 

Jesse. When you touched my throat it went dry. When you laid your hand flat against my chest it was as if a cellar door had opened, and I tried to suck you deep into my darkness. I wanted to swallow your flame without extinguishing it, keep it burning in my belly.

Every time you fucked me I wanted it everywhere at once. All the way down my throat like the tubes they feed you through in hospitals. So far up my pussy I could feel my uterus contracting, remembering the baby, that kind of fullness. So deep in my ass I'd start thinking about all those miles of intestine and wondering if I could digest you in reverse, shit you out through my surprised mouth. Wouldn't that be something.

 

All that winter, everything I felt was grand and unspeakable. Maybe because I'd been nothing but a mother for so many months, I had grown used to communicating through blood and through milk, through lullaby. I thought you knew the song I was singing. I thought I recognized your song.

 

To have neither you nor the pleasure of your company didn't occur to me. I thought it was up to me. If you wouldn't love me, not right away, at least I would have your presence. If it was a bit hollow, a bit vanishing at the edges, at least it was you, the huge physical fact of you. A body choosing to keep time with my body. A body intersecting with my body in the kind of pleasure that could turn a girl religious.

But you left. Your body left. It ran away to be with your mind. Eloped in the night with no attempt to warn me. I loved you. Why is it so satisfying to say that now, now that you aren't around to hear it? Now that the words are implicitly
sad, parentheses around loss, two pathetic arms that hold nothing. Loved. You.

 

Sharpen your knives on what's left of me. I have been carved down to nothing, a skeleton of longing. You left me all wrong, turned inside-out like a pair of spent gloves. You were lifted out of me too soon, like a C-section baby, a baby who couldn't bother to be born. I woke in a fog, needle and thread in my hand, stitching myself up.

 

 

 

 

 

I don't fight well till I'm in a rage. As a matter of fact, I fight pretty much like a girl till someone's about killed me or scared me so bad I feel like I'm gonna die. And no one, absolutely no one, leaves her mark on me. Danne knows how I feel about that. I would die first. Well, tonight Danne had a few drinks and decided she'd waited long enough to put her mark on her “property.” She tied me down, which was wonderful, but then she started in with one of Tony's blades and something in me snapped. I don't know how I did it, but I was out of those knotted ropes in about half a second.

She was my dad, then, taking something not hers. And me grown big enough to do something about that drunken bastard's huge, calloused hands. I gasped in air and squeezed out rage. Furious, she tried to force me back down.

To make an ugly story short, she saw the wrong side of these painted nails. I left and came down here to the bar while she was under the sink looking for peroxide. I needed to visit some familiar turf and cool off for a bit.

It's been about five years now that we've been sharing the same bed, my waitressing tips shoring up her drinking. I'm not usually this nasty, and she doesn't really drink all that much, but tonight the woman said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing. Nobody marks me. Nobody owns me.

But someone did, once, and the strange thing is I allowed it, even craved it, needed it. Felt shivering ecstasy in the harsh salt spray of her touch. I have an old, unframed black-and-white picture of her taped up to the fridge. I carry her knife, too, so in some small way it's like she's still with me. But she isn't. She's about as far as one body can get from another. My Tony's dead.

Danne couldn't get me to take down that picture or leave that knife at home even if she took after me with her fists. Danne's my butch, and they are how they are, and I don't especially blame her for trying to take the piece of me I hold separate even from her. I understand pride, and I understand the price of loving under someone else's shadow.

I've watched this place, this “club” they used to call a bar, change over the past twenty years, too, the younger women coming in pairs, each of them wearing lipstick and spandex. It's not something I can bring myself to understand. I am a femme. Faded now, and perhaps not so fluffy over the years as some have been, but I have loved my butches since the first time I screwed up the courage to come down here. First time, I sat near the doorway in that corner over there with Suzie and Bette, friends from high school who knew they were different from other girls. I was afraid to be seen but afraid to be ignored, too.