Best Lesbian Erotica 2007

by Tristan Taormino

  She drives carefully. Melville is just the kind of butch I like: shy in the streets, confident in the sheets. Snow hits the truck in a dizzying hurl. The roads are so rural we just pass thickets of tall pines. Then, the snow begins to grow more treacherous, blocking visibility except for a few feet away. I notice the edge of the horizon wobble. Suddenly, Melville loses control. Without warning, the truck goes black: the headlights shut off, the motor stops dead, and the whole vehicle coasts over a bank, bouncing on its shocks. Melville pumps the brake but the truck doesn’t stop. She tries to turn over the engine but it makes a wheezy grind. It is as if the battery has been thrown into water. We coast amphibiously into the dark. “Oh god,” yells Melville.

  We glide through the marshmallow fluff landscape. I am sure we are going to hit something—a tree, a pole—but the car stops abruptly in a sea of snow, just floating there. We both jerk forward against our seat belts and then the cab rocks back and forth. It seems like we are rocking in water, not on solid ground. The snow looks like froth on top of surf. I see a few protruding rocks that look like dorsal fins. Melville’s face casts an odd light: round as a lighthouse lantern.

  “Are you okay?” she asks with alarm, putting her hand on my knee. I scan her face, then see it in the dark: her giant dick, protruding from her fly.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and point. “But your bone is sticking out.”

  Melville’s eyes shoot to her crotch. “So it is,” she laughs. “See what your hot self could have done to my fibula? At least I have a splint for this.” She takes one hand and wraps it around the base of the cock, jerking it gently as she stares intensely at my face, then at my fishnets. The truck is rocking back and forth like a schooner, the Berkshires rising in swells. I whimper when I see Melville handle her cock. I almost start to salivate, like a man on a hunt.

  “So, baby, do you have a blowhole?” she asks, and my face wrinkles in confusion. Then she traces a finger on my lips. “Oh,” I answer. “Blowhole. I guess I do.”

  She guides my head down over her soft leg. I pull my hair back with one hand, then wrap my lips around her dick and suck. Melville grips my tangled kudzu of hair so I can work with free hands and knead her thighs. Her hips rock gently into my throat, making me gag a little so I’m struggling back. “That’s right,” she sighs. “Take my cock in your blowhole, baby.” She starts jerking and heaving into me like she’s going to come. I pull up for a moment and beg, “I need you to fuck me.”

  Melville says, “Let’s brave the storm and crawl into the back. I’ve got lots of wool blankets under the truck cap.” She pulls me to her side of the cab and the rope follows with me, tangled in my legs, so that I trip when we tumble out the driver’s-side door. Then we sink down so far into the snow it seems liquefied. Melville grabs the door handle of the truck, and swings the rope to hook the corner of the rear bumper. Then she drags us through the snow, holding me tight with one arm, until we can crawl into the capped space in the back. We shake off snow and then Melville drapes me in blankets, then warms me up with her body. She takes off her down vest and rolls up her sleeves so I can see her naval tattoos: an anchor, a school of fish, and a pinup girl on her forearm flesh. She slides a hand up my leg. “What are you trying to catch with these fishnets?” she says.

  “You know what,” I answer. “Your Moby Dick.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing,” says Melville. She fumbles under the covers for a minute, then puts a flashlight in my hand and guides the light down her own body. She’s strapping the biggest dick I have ever seen. A whalebone of a boner. “Spread your netting,” she orders me gruffly. She twists the rope around my wrists and ties a slipknot. “We’ll moor you til you can’t take any more.” She pries one finger through a hole in my fishnets. “Oh baby,” she moans. “You’re a stormy little thing.” She rams her cock against the fishnets, trying to force her way in. Her cock is so huge she has to throw me on my back and get on top of me and grunt and push to get it through. I pull her by her belt loops. Once she breaks through a square of string she has to conquer my hole. The cock is huge and Melville has to really work to get it in. Her big seaworthy hands push my thighs up in the air. I bang sideways against the cold metal of the truck, rocking us further into the drift. All my life, I have been a landlocked mariner and a tongue-tied storyteller. I have been shipwrecked and parched of words. I have been pirated and buffeted and overturned. I’ve had a need so big and shameful that I couldn’t even speak of it. Melville holds my mouth closed with her hand so I can barely whimper through. “It’s okay, baby, take it all,” she says. “You’ve got an oceanic need.” She epic-fucks me all night long with her behemoth cock. It is a pleasure I would drown to get.

  SWEET HUNGER

  Skian McGuire

  It’s hot in the sugar house, with the fire that never goes out and the sap boiling off in clouds of steam. Too hot for clothes. There’s nobody to see me, and the old warped windows are fogged up anyway. When the time comes, the fog will clear, and there will be a face looking in. That’s the way it always is. The magic, as near as I can tell, is supposed to be done naked as you’re born and naked as your soul is when you die. Sugar is what comes in between, and pain.

  It used to be a collective, dykes in the woods and dykes in the milking barn and dykes coming out the proverbial wazoo. Good part of the world to find them, next to all those women’s colleges and the leftovers hanging around. I was never a college girl; I’ve been here on this farm since there were still Indians for neighbors. But for a time it was lesbians, and you could say that’s what She likes best. After all, She’s the one that makes the maples’ love come down in buckets, in the spring, when the whole world is getting pregnant.

  For a time it was wimmin’s land, that’s the way they wrote it then though it sounds the same regardless, for a little minute in the history of the world. They came looking for the simple life, or safe haven from the men who raped them, or to be pure in the holy spirit of womonhood. Some came looking for Her, and it was these last—few and far between—that made the sugar with me.

  They were good women. The ones who came for their own reasons left for their own reasons, too, and I can hardly remember them now, but Hers are burned in my mind just like splashes of boiling sap have left white scars on my hands and arms through the years. There was Bethie, who went back to school to be a doctor; and Sue, who left to marry a man; and Chris we lost to breast cancer. And Patty, who died in that terrible car crash; she was the last of the ones who chose by daylight, and what went wrong with it was not her fault. I suppose you could call them lovers, for what we did in the spring. Now I take such help as comes, when the glass clears. I don’t remember their names.

  I know what they see through the streaky pane. A tall woman, powerfully built, broad of shoulder and hip but narrow in the waist, breasts high and full, lush ass, round thighs. I am their dream of womanliness. Tied-back hair sprung loose in wisps that plaster themselves to my sweating face, and its color is always the color their mothers’ was, when they were tiny children. Their eyes drop to the triangle of hair between my legs, and something about my sex casts a spell on them, that and the smell of the maple, to be caught in the sticky sweetness of the air.

  They have wakened in the night and gone for a walk to ease their restlessness. That is the way it always is now, and they are always women, because, as I said, that’s the way She likes it. It would be women, I think, even if it weren’t for the clientele I make purpose to court here at my B&B, which is what the farm has come to. It’s advertised in all the lesbian magazines. A down-home Yankee vacation. Perfect for your same-sex honeymoon—I even put in a hot tub. I cook them a breakfast and I leave them alone, which seems to be the way they like it. The sugar house and the maple trees figure in all the advertising photos, though I never mention these things by text. Let word of mouth bring them here, when it’s time. When the sugar comes.

  I keep the boiler going all night as long as the sap is running; a couple of local boys help d
uring the day so I can get some sleep, not that I need much. It’s at night I have to be here, chucking in cord wood, adding sap, skimming froth, waiting. The steam swirls up, sweet enough still to make every surface sticky. Sometime—never the first night, but always before the last gallon is finished—there will be a cool draft, and a pale shape in the foggy window will become a face behind the flickering orange reflection of my fire. I will watch her expression change from curiosity to surprise, and her eyes will pass down my body as her expression changes again. I know what desire looks like. I open the rattling old latch of the sugar house and let her in.

  She takes my hand as she steps through the door, and my hand is as soft and young as hers. I don’t need to say anything. I pull her toward me, her eyes glittering with the fire inside her, her lips slightly parted. She is breathing fast. I am the one who has to push her big heavy coat off her shoulders, undo each button of her flannel shirt. The clothes are cold from the winter night. They fall in a heap on the rough floor. She is as compliant as a child, lifting her arms obediently for me to pull her thermal shirt over her head. I pull her to me, then, pressing my sweaty breasts against her cool ones, and she gasps as our flesh meets. I lower my mouth to open lips for a kiss.

  She is hungry for it, letting my tongue invade her and answering it with her own. Her breathing quickens still more as we kiss hard and long, until she moans deep in her throat and her hips move against mine and her cold hands slip around me to pull me even tighter to her.

  I break off the kiss to push her away and find the elastic waistband of her sweatpants. Even as I slip my fingers under it, against her flesh now warming to my touch, she is toeing off her unlaced pac boots. Her hands come to my hips to steady herself, as she hides her face against my shoulder. Is she ashamed of her desire? Her infidelity to the lover left sleeping in their room? I have never known why, since this is a woman’s offering to the secret Goddess of her heart, and nothing shameful. I try to keep from smiling, because it is always the same: however shy, she is not wearing panties, and never more than the loosest, most easily disposed-of clothing. Whatever dream sent her here, it sent her here ready. When I part her legs with my hand, she is slick and swollen with wanting. My two fingers slip right in and she clutches me tighter, her legs suddenly made of rubber. I lower her to the floor, to the heap of clothing and the blanket I laid there ahead of time. After the long winter, like the quickening Earth Herself, I am ready, too.

  I lay her down gently, kissing and licking and nuzzling as I go. She licks me too, idly at first but then as purposeful as a dog, for the salt of my body and the sweet of the maple steam. I let her lick until I have slipped down, out of reach.

  Her nipples are tight and pink as oak buds. She shivers when I tongue them each in turn, gasps when I suck one hard, cries out when I take it in my teeth. I force myself to be gentle, and suck for a long time, like a baby, while my fingers explore the landscape of her body, the firm ridge of ribs, the swell of belly, the crest of hip. My body presses her legs apart, and she spreads them even further. My mouth follows the trail my hands have blazed—gentle, gentle, my teeth grazing lightly across the surface, taking only a tiny carefully restrained nip. I must not draw blood. I know that now. Poor Patty.

  She is bucking her hips now, trying to draw me down, moaning. Now she is as slippery with sweat as I am. I bury my face in her pussy and her moist thighs clamp spasmodically on my shoulders before surrendering. She is so wet her juice is like a liquor I can dip out of her on the curled end of my tongue. She shivers when I do. I take my fill.

  When I take her with my hand at last, her cunt is like a ripe raspberry ready to drop from the cane, soft and juicy and bursting. Sometimes she has already come in my mouth; sometimes she comes as soon as I plunge into her; sometimes she comes again and again as I drive my fingers in and out. The one that has come to offer herself tonight spreads her legs for me to ease my whole hand inside her while I hold her in my lap, one arm cradling her, the other squeezed in the dark hot cave of her cunt. I churn my closed fist while her pleasure rises and ebbs and rises again. I breathe in her musk, lush and fertile and clean as the breeze through the June marsh grass. It’s the summer that has risen in her, like Persephone returning from the underworld, like the sweetness that the trees held back until the sun had come round again. When she is limp and spent, I pull my hand from her, careful not to wipe the juice away on our discarded clothes, and rise.

  The time has come to open the tap that lets the sap down from its collection tank into the boiler. It is icy cold compared to the heat inside her. I taste the crystal-clear sweetness of the maple on my palm, suck the savory richness of her from my fingers, the two flavors mingling on my tongue. Now spring can come. The magic is done, the world is remade, from the molecules of sap that will boil for hours before becoming syrup, to the metal of the boiler and the rough planks of the sugar house walls, to the hard winter earth beneath us, to the she-bears giving suck in their sleep, to the budding trees to the house where other guests lie sleeping and my own bed waits.

  The syrup itself carries magic into the world, too, not just the act of making it. Sex and sweat and the rising sap itself are power enough, no need of blood to turn eros into something else. It’s no business of Dionysus, with his bloodthirsty wild-eyed girls strewing chaos, like the chaos that tore this women’s house apart when once I was not careful. Now I leave that for the vintners and brewers and the moonshiners who boil something stronger than sweet amber syrup. What magic gets bottled into gallons and quarts and pints and why is beyond my knowing, except to know it’s there. Is it for love? For healing? For fruitfulness? That’s Her mystery. All I know is the magic of making it. There must be other places where sweet desire is tapped and made into something the human world can use, shut off as most of it is in concrete and steel and rhythms based on prime time and season premieres instead of sunrise and the circle of the year. This is my part.

  I rouse my guest into just enough wakefulness to restore her to her clothes, push her boots back on her feet, bundle her into her coat. She leans on me heavily as I guide her back to the old farmhouse, up the creaking steps to the room where her lover lies sleeping. Has one of them ever woken in the night, nothing but an empty place cooling in the bed beside her? Did she lie there, waiting, becoming afraid? Did she shiver by the window, wondering if she ought to pull on her jeans and boots and go out looking? If she did, she thought better of it and climbed back under the heavy quilt to fall into dreamless sleep, her memory of the night haunted only by the faint scent of wood smoke and sugary steam and the bite of the cold night air. I know how it goes: they will wake together at daybreak, ravenous for each other, and if their lovemaking is a little rougher than it usually is, well, whatever slight sweet bruise, whatever red imprint of a grasping hand, whatever soreness of a woman well-fucked might linger into the light of day, there will be reason for. And neither of them will remember anything else.

  The moonlight from the hall window is bright enough to see the liver spots on my gnarled old hand, bright enough to catch a glimpse of my white hair in the mirror by the stairs. I move stiff and slow with weariness, but I must return to keep the fire on til morning. No bed for me, yet; no release for my own want, which the years have never quenched. I am crone now, but maiden still. There is power in that, beyond what comes from the sugar and the rising sap and the hunger of women’s desire for each other.

  I bottle the syrup and sell it like any other, never knowing where it goes in the world or what it’s for, except to knit the green earth’s lust for life back into the human heart where it’s grown so stale of late. That’s not my part. Here in the woods, women come and bring me their hunger for sweetness. I take it and give more back, and mix the two with what the winter trees draw up from the waking earth and send it out to make its magic in the world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ZOË ALEXANDRA is a twenty-one-year-old student at Southern Connecticut State University. She has studied creative writing
at New York University and has been published in the summer 2005 edition of Deconstruction Quarterly. She is involved with Food Not Bombs New Haven and she likes to cook vegetarian delights, ride her bicycle and hang out with her Shiba Inu, Sasha. She is currently working on a collection of erotic poetry.

  D. ALEXANDRIA (d-alexandria.com), “Boughetto Princess,” a Jamaican descendant, hails from Boston. Her work has been published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2005 and 2006, Ultimate Lesbian Erotica 2006 and, under the pseudonym Glitter, in Queer Ramblings Magazine and GBF Magazine. She is a regular contributor to Kuma2.net. She is currently penning her first novel and a collection of black lesbian erotica.

  TARA ALTON (taraalton.com) lives in the Midwest where she works as a travel consultant. When she is not working or writing erotica, she collects tattoos and worships Bettie Page. She has contributed stories to online magazines such as Clean Sheets, Scarlet Letters, and Mind Caviar and her work has been included in the anthologies Best Lesbian Erotica 2006, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, and Best Women’s Erotica.

  A. LIZBETH BABCOCK lives in Toronto where she has done extensive work in the queer community, including counseling LGBTQ youth, conducting anti-homophobia workshops, facilitating groups for children of queer parents, and developing programming for lesbians with substance use concerns and for people living with HIV/AIDS. She likes beaches, puppets, and street sausages. This is her first published work.

  ANNETTE BEAUMONT is a self-described risk taker. Racing skeleton sleds down iced tracks at speeds exceeding 80 mph paled in comparison to coming out in her late thirties in fear of losing her children. She still enjoys a life of multiple identities. A CEO by day, she finds balance in extreme sports and adventure travel. She bravely admits to attempting her first novel, but her greatest thrill comes from her two children who openly take pride in their lesbian mother.