Once in a Lifetime

by Bliss, Harper

  Her eyes are still filled with tears and her cheeks are smeared with mascara.

  “Take off your skirt.” I hadn’t noticed before, but it’s the one we bought together a few months ago, during a weekend which we both firmly believed was to bring us closer together again. Because the human brain can trick you into believing anything if you really want it to. Is that why she wore it? It doesn’t matter now. It’s coming off, slipping into a puddle of dark-green fabric on the hardwood floor.

  She’s taken off her underwear as well and she stands before me naked. Quite the parting gift, I think, without a hint of cynicism.

  I strip quickly and methodically before pulling her toward me because, as always, this is going to be my show. The one where I call the shots.

  Together, we sink to the floor. Only part of it is carpeted, but it’ll do. Jodie stretches out beneath me, her legs already spread. But some of the earlier frenzy has escaped us and the atmosphere is now morphing into a more solemn one, like a moment that needs to be cherished. If we rush this, we’re lost forever. We will have spent our last moments on a quick orgasm built on heartbreak. I think we both know it can’t be like that. Making a memory like that now would hurt too much, and everything is already so unbearably painful.

  I lean over and kiss her. Slowly. Savoring her, although all I taste are salty tears. Our breasts press together in this final embrace, our nipples meeting in that way that can be so exciting. The way only being with another woman can feel. Softness on softness. Everywhere we touch, pillowy curves and smooth skin. It’s what Jodie said to me after our first night together. “I can’t believe how soft it is,” she’d said, and it had made me laugh, although it was true, but she was just so damn cute when she said it, as if it was the biggest revelation of her life. Maybe it was.

  While I kiss her I let a hand roam down her belly. I wonder how many fingers would be appropriate for a goodbye fuck. I can’t give her less than three, but all five seems too much for the occasion. Too intimate.

  “Fuck me,” Jodie says again, her hands in my hair. And then I do. I let three fingers slither through a wetness that baffles me. Then again, it always has, and it’s almost cruel that even now, during our very last moment together, it still does.

  And it still turns me on as much as it did the first time I let my fingers wander between her legs. And this time, she gazes back, she stares up at me, and I know what that look means, because I know Jodie better than anyone does, and, especially in these circumstances, I know her better than I’ve known anyone in my life. She wants more. That’s what the non-blinking is about. The open mouth with no words coming out. Because I can’t give her anything else anymore—and, more particularly, the very thing she wants most in life, more than me—I give it to her.

  I push three fingers inside of her, but quickly follow up with a fourth. To be inside of her after such a long time, because the past six months we spent most of our private time either in fraught arguments or in cold, distant silence, makes me well up. I can’t help it. The sob starts in the pit of my stomach, engaging my entire body. Because I’m fucking Jodie. I can feel my clit throb between my own legs, and this might be the most painful fuck I’ve ever been a part of. There’s pain, and more pain, but also the look of longing in Jodie’s eyes. Those beautiful green eyes, which were probably the first thing I noticed about her that time, so long ago when we were introduced at the courthouse. Green eyes are so rare, so of course they captured my attention. And I liked what I saw. I still do. Even though a mist of tears clouds them and our faces are so close my own tears add to the wetness of Jodie’s face, and I can’t see them right now. And then I realize that what we’re doing right now is just as messy as what we’ve become. We’re lovers who will turn into exes, perhaps even strangers.

  I’m inside a woman who will disappear from my life. A woman I’ve loved for six years. A woman who opened herself up to me in ways we both deemed unimaginable when we first met.

  “Oh Leigh,” Jodie moans, in that way of hers, and this is a million times more painful than when I walked out of the door at the house in The Hamptons. But maybe we need this pain. Because how else could we possibly mark the end of our affair than with regret in our hearts and tears in our eyes?

  Then she comes for me for the very last time, and I can feel her climax shudder through me, like a parting gift. And then, it’s over. Then we’re just two naked people on our—her—apartment floor, trying to wrap their heads around what just happened, and quickly realizing that nothing has changed. I still need to drag my suitcases down the stairs and leave.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My alarm clock is one that Leigh bought. She’d broken the one I’d had for years after slapping it with all her might one too many times. She was never much of a morning person. And now I’m stuck with it. It sits there, during the night when I can’t sleep, its red digits mocking me. I should have put it in one of her boxes. I still can. She left them. I’ll never know if that’s because she still wanted to leave a piece of herself in our apartment, or if she genuinely didn’t know what to do with them. And if she thinks it’s easier for me because the lease on this apartment is in my name, she can think again. Even with most of her things packed up, her presence is everywhere.

  Not for the first time, I wonder if this agony is worth it. But I can also hear Leigh’s words in my head: “We’re fundamentally different people, Jodie,” she said, in the aftermath of one of our fights, after we’d calmed down enough to use a normal tone of voice again. “Perhaps, if our differences were about something less important than the desire to procreate, we could maneuver around them, but this… it’s too big for negotiations and compromise. The last thing I want is to make you unhappy. If I stay, that’s what will happen.”

  When she first said it, I still believed I could change her mind. That my love was powerful enough to accomplish that. That was my mistake. Perhaps I should have run at the first sign of our incompatibility.

  “Do you want children?” I asked over a breakfast of mimosas and croissants. We sat half-dressed on Leigh’s sofa after one of our early dates and a wild, wild night that had left me so dazed and satisfied, her reply didn’t even matter at that point. I was just thinking of Troy, the way I always did after waking up.

  Leigh put her mug on the coffee table and reached for her champagne flute. “Can’t say that I do.”

  I was so smitten her words barely registered, even though, somewhere in the back of my mind, a red flag was being raised nonetheless. But this was our third date, so not exactly the time to plan how many kids you see yourself having. But there was no hesitation in her voice when she said it, only determination.

  “Is that a deal breaker?” she asked.

  “Well, you know I have a son.” Troy was at Muriel and Francine’s, most likely being spoilt rotten.

  Leigh smiled the sort of smile that could make the more susceptible kind of judge melt on their bench. “Whom I would love to meet.” She locked her big brown eyes on mine. She’d slipped into the silk blouse she’d worn the night before, but hadn’t buttoned it properly, and it had slid off one shoulder. Those shoulders. I could look at them for days. “But I don’t want any of my own.”

  It was more than enough to placate me at the time. “Maybe we can pick him up together later?”

  Leigh nodded thoughtfully. “As long as later means I get to do this now.” She disposed of her glass and reached for my legs, pulled me toward her and flattened me on the sofa. The first year of our relationship, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking. She fucked me again then, and not even in the way that would change me forever.

  The first time Leigh really took my breath away, we’d stayed in at my place during a weekend that Troy was at Gerald’s.

  “Why go out?” Leigh had asked when she’d arrived. “When there’s plenty to do in the comfort of your home?”

  I was sure my eyes had started glittering with anticipation, but I only saw Leigh’s eyes when she said it, and somet
hing I couldn’t place shone in them. A darkness I hadn’t yet encountered. It ignited a yearning in my belly I’d never felt before.

  She barged her way in, shut the door behind her, and with subtle but clearly noticeable force, shoved me against it. She looked into my eyes, waiting for some sort of approval, but I was already too aroused to give her that. The stupid grin on my face was probably enough for a woman like Leigh to understand that she was on the right track.

  Slowly, she trailed her fingers along my arms, only to snap them around my wrists hard, denting skin. She hoisted my arms above my head and pinned my wrists to the door with those strong fingers of hers. All the while, her lips sported a grueling, sneering sort of smile that left me wet like a river. It was as if what I had seen in her the first time we met, what I had seen flash in her eyes, that unquantifiable spark that had passed between us that I had mistaken for gaydar, was actually something else entirely. A sort of recognition, perhaps, an unexpected encounter of kindred souls.

  She didn’t say anything, just looked at me, giving the impression that a few glances were enough to read the entirety of my being, my desires, what—bone-deep—I really longed for. That sneer told me that she had it all figured out, and the wordlessness of it was the biggest turn-on of all.

  One hand grabbed my wrists in a tight grasp while the other unbuttoned my jeans. No kisses, and certainly no displays of tenderness, were exchanged before she slipped her fingers all the way into my panties and caught my already swollen clit between two digits, pressing hard.

  My breath caught in my throat, my knees giving a little.

  Then, she broke eye-contact and brought her lips to my ear. “Here’s what’s going to happen, Jodie,” she said, her voice all command. “I’m going to fuck you against this door and you’re going to come for me. Don’t make me wait for it, or else…” She released my clit, and the walls of my cunt clenched around nothing. Not for long, however, because one of her fingers was already sneaking closer.

  Leigh dug her hand deeper into my pants, her wrist rubbing against my clit as she sought entrance to my cunt. She jammed her fingers inside in a rugged manner while her teeth sank into my earlobe. The fingernails of her other hand dug into my palms as—there’s really no other way to describe it—she took possession of me. And I knew, there and then, that nothing else would ever do for me again. This was it. Nothing I, or even we, had ever done together had impacted me so profoundly. Because it wasn’t pain I felt. It was something beyond pain, something beyond physical awareness, like a life-long thirst in my soul being quenched.

  All my senses stood to attention as Leigh fucked me. This was not making love, as Leigh would later point out. This was fucking, and the fire in her glance when she said it left no room for contesting. Her DKNY scent filled my nose, and her teeth kept biting, rhythmically, and her fingers kept delving, and I was spread so wide, and filled to the brim, that I had no idea how many fingers she was using, but what turned me on the most was the immobilization of my hands, the sense of surrender that came with her controlling me in that way. What she’d asked of me earlier, came easily, although I was quite curious about the ‘or else’ she had threatened me with.

  She must have known I was about to come and brought her face back across from mine to glare at me. She pushed harder with both hands, pinning my wrists painfully to the door, probably leaving bruises, while down below, she seemed to take hold of me, of everything of me, my pussy the entrance to the core of my being. She was in charge of everything.

  My brain went blank as the climax momentarily paralyzed my limbs. Leigh pushed her body against mine to keep me upright, otherwise I would surely have crashed to my knees, weeping, as if this was my first time coming at her hands.

  When I came back to my senses, her lips were on my neck, and both her hands in my hair. I remembered how I’d said to her the first time we had sex that I was blown away by the softness of it. Maybe that had inspired her to try something else because there was nothing soft about what she’d just done to me.

  “This is just the beginning,” she whispered, her lips on my cheek. “Just an introduction, Jodie.” And only then did she kiss me.

  I toss and turn in the faint red light of the alarm clock. I’m not wondering where and when I’ll ever find a woman like Leigh again. I know I won’t. I don’t want to, either. I had the passionate, all-effacing love affair. Now it’s time for something else. A visit to my ob-gyn, for starters. I’m thirty-six. If I’m lucky, I have more years for this, but now feels like the right time. If I can’t have both Leigh in my life and another child, I’ll choose another child. For the longest time, I held on to the belief that I would never have to choose, that life would arrange it so it would never have to come to that. But here I am. Alone in bed. Leigh’s side unoccupied from now on. Because I can’t possibly imagine another woman taking her place in my bed. Not because we only just broke up, but simply because I can’t envision another woman doing what she did to me.

  * * *

  At the first light of dawn, I can’t bear to be in the apartment on my own anymore. I take a shower and go for a walk. My plan is to keep walking until the hour is decent enough for me to pick up Troy from his friend’s house. I need desperately to spend every minute of this day with my son. Life always goes on when you have children. When you have someone to take care of.

  “Up at the crack of dawn.” I hear a voice behind me. I don’t need to turn around to know that it’s George from 4A. “Are you sleeping like us old codgers now?”

  I wait for him to catch up with me. He’s probably gone around the block a few times already. It’s what he does to pass the empty hours of his life. His words, not mine.

  “Just going to fetch Troy.” It’s not a lie and I don’t feel like getting into the real reason behind my early Sunday morning walk.

  “Missus having a lie-in?” He cocks his head like he’s asking about a secret between us. As if Leigh hasn’t lived in the same building as him for the past five years, carried his groceries up the stairs, and even watched baseball games with him on his tiny, old TV. As if she only moved in yesterday, and it is still news-worthy that I am shacking up with another woman.

  “She left,” I blurt out. “She’s gone. It’s over.” It comes out in a rush of short words, like something that really needs to be said. As though saying it to George equals announcing it to the world.

  “Oh, dear.” George leans on his walking stick a bit more, like he’s the one who needs the most support. “I sure am sorry to hear that.”

  Not as sorry as I am, I think. But sorry is not the right word. A car swooshes past us, obviously over the speed limit, and this would normally snag George’s attention, but he doesn’t even bat an eyelid.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, and this old man asking about my emotional well-being shakes me again.

  “Not really. But I will be.” I catch a sly tear that has escaped with my thumb.

  “Anything you need. I mean it.” He stomps his cane, as if his voice alone is not enough to make the point. “If you need some quiet time when you have the little fella, let me know. I’ll look after him. He loves my model plane collection. Can play with it for hours.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and it suddenly hits me that, although Gerald and I share equal custody of Troy, and I’ve never really been a single mother, that’s kind of what it feels like now. Me and my child against the lonely world Leigh left us in. Gerald and I had only been divorced a few months when I met Leigh. When she came swooping in and, so quickly, became a massive part of our lives. “I may take you up on that.”

  “Any time,” George says. He tips his forehead with his fingertips. “I’ll leave you to your business now.”

  I watch him wander off and it feels like all I’ve done of late is watch people walk away from me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Six months after Jodie and I broke up I jump at the chance of trading New York for San Francisco. Everything in New York reminds me of her, especially
in October. We met in October and I can’t seem to separate the month from all the first times we shared during it.

  I don’t care that I’ve only just settled into my new mid-town apartment. That I only found the strength two weeks ago to unpack the last of the boxes that, in the end, remained in a corner of Jodie’s apartment for months. When the offer from my firm comes to join the new office on the west coast, I don’t hesitate. I grab the opportunity to leave with both hands.

  Because I need to start over. I crave new surroundings. A clean slate. Soon the ice skating rink will be up in front of Rockefeller and I won’t be able to walk past it without memories of Troy’s and Jodie’s gleeful smiles at my attempts to venture onto the ice with them. How Troy put his tiny, gloved hand in mine and said, “Come on, Leigh. I’ll teach you.” And how even a genuine, beautiful gesture like that wasn’t able to sway me. For I fell in love with Jodie’s son too. My heart is not made of stone and ambition alone. I loved Troy, but as soon as Jodie started talking about another child, something in my brain failed to compute.

  By the time the New Year rolls along, I’ll be on the other coast. Maybe Jodie will be pregnant by then. Who knows? We have gathered mutual friends and acquaintances over the years, of course, but, as if they’ve all secretly agreed on the best strategy, they never mention my ex when we meet up, not intentionally anyway.

  Granted, it was awkward when I ran into Muriel and Francine at the Chelsea Market a few weeks ago. Sonja had looped her arm through mine and I guess someone not in the know could have mistaken us for lovers, which we were, sort of, but it was all very lackluster on my side, a fact which Sonja didn’t seem to care much about. All I could think when Muriel and Francine appeared in my line of vision was, please don’t let them see me and please don’t let them draw the obvious conclusion and tell Jodie. Then I was ashamed that I even had the audacity to think of Sonja that way. Sonja who had only been good to me, who’d given me a place to stay, and a shoulder to cry on. It remains unclear who actually took advantage of whom. I guess we’re both guilty.