by Sacchi Green
I really didn’t know what to say. Lina’s eyes were so wonderful, expectant and green in the twilight. I just gave her a kiss. I needed all my strength to lift myself on my tiptoes, bring my face close to hers, and put my dry lips on her warm and soft mouth. Bang.
This must have been love, because what else could it be if this little touch took away all my fears? All of a sudden I felt like I could do everything. There was no No and no When and no But. I didn’t know if what I was doing was right, but I knew I had to do it or die. Thoughts raced through my head while all kinds of sexual images lit up my mind. I was driven by every fantasy I had had about Lina during the last weeks, and she seemed to feel the same because her lips kissed me back right before she took a look around and then led me away from the water over to where the forest began.
“Lie down here,” she whispered, and pushed me gently down on a soft bed of moss and grass growing under the oak trees beside the lake. Slowly, appreciatively, her shadow glided over me. Her fingers followed her shadow; they caressed me and pulled off my baggy T-shirt so I was left in only my bikini.
Lina smelled so good! Like real life, like Jil Sander Sun perfume, like tobacco and summer, like sex and like woman. Carefully she slid her arm under my neck and pulled me closer so I could feel her firm, muscular body underneath the cut-off army shorts and white tank top.
“That feels so good,” she whispered into my hair and kissed me again, on my lips, my chin, my neck, and my boobs. Raw like a cat’s tongue, hers wandered over my collarbone, down between my boobs, around my navel and lingered right above the edge of my bikini bottom until I couldn’t stand it any longer and begged her to go on.
Giggling, she hooked her thumbs under my bikini and pulled it down over my legs. Then she lifted herself up and took off her shirt so I could see her small boobs and her white skin. Her feet touched me briefly when she took off her shorts and came back down beside me again.
For a moment I thought about who would do what and then decided to let Lina give directions. “Mmm,” I moaned when her fingers started to slide across my legs and she kissed my knees.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“Yes, everything is great. It just…feels so good,” I answered.
“I haven’t done that much yet,” Lina whispered, her lips close to my ear again. That was true. She hadn’t done so much yet, but still my cunt was wet and my nipples stiffened as I felt Lina’s hot breath, like the dragon lady’s exhalation in the fairy tale, burning my skin.
With a skilled movement she reached underneath me and unhooked my bikini top so that my breasts fell loose into the warm air. Greedily she clamped her mouth over one, then the other hard nipple. “Maybe we shouldn’t do it here,” I whispered weakly, half-hoping Lina wouldn’t hear me at all.
“Why not?” she asked with a mouth full of nipple and breast.
“Well…just because of…the others,” I sighed.
“I don’t see any others,” answered Lina, and I closed my eyes when she laid her hands on my knees and spread my legs carefully apart. Her hand was warm on me when she squeezed my damp crotch in a way I almost couldn’t take.
She glided deeper between my thighs, explored me, and pushed my legs farther apart. “Like a butterfly,” she said, and dipped first one, then two fingers into my wetness.
Moaning, I arched my back, pushed my hips toward Lina’s fingers, and lifted myself up to come down on her hands while her thumb pressed hard against my clit. Again and again I pushed down on her fingers, rode them until I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep myself from coming…and that was when Lina pulled her hand away from me.
“No, please, no,” I moaned, and then opened my eyes when I felt Lina’s hair on the insides of my thighs. Rough like the fur of a wolf it rubbed across my skin, leaving sparks that disappeared when Lina closed her mouth over my cunt. Hot and moist, her tongue slithered across my swollen clit, licked and sucked me while her fingers spread me open as wide as possible.
I closed my eyes and dug my fingers into her hair while she entered me again and again with her warm angel’s tongue and made me moan like a little soft animal, an animal captured in a trap. I placed my legs over her strong shoulders and pulled her face deeper and deeper in my pulsing crotch.
Once more she pierced me with a finger, pushed it deeper, searching and demanding. An electric shock seemed to flash through me.
The sensation that her drilling tongue and her probing, turning finger caused inside me was almost violent in its intensity. It wasn’t the kind of feeling I knew from touching myself. It didn’t build up slowly; no, it was there within a second. Like a motorcycle that starts running all of a sudden it went through my center where Lina’s finger drove me, down to the depths of my body where suddenly another kind of fireworks illuminated my inner night. It was so strong that it was nearly unbearable.
Lina had kidnapped me and brought me into this no-man’sland between ecstasy and lustful pain. I almost wished it would stop, while another part of me hoped this would go on forever. I pushed so hard against her finger that it nearly took my breath away when her broad hand smashed against my clit again. I tried to lift myself up on my elbows, but I couldn’t find a hold on the mossy ground and I fell backward.
Suddenly I didn’t want to escape anymore. Every resistance disappeared. What I felt now was like a breach in a dike, as if a part of me would be stretched out infinitely. My juices flowed and dripped off of Lina’s hands and lips when something broke inside me, spilled out of me, and took me away with it into the night. Silently I screamed out, and somewhere out on the lake a bird answered my call and disappeared again, leaving me shivering under Lina’s hands.
Grinning, she crept up to me, lay down next to my exhausted body, and shoved me gently onto my side so that I could feel her wet chest against my back and her hot face lying moist in the curve of my shoulders. “You know what?” I asked her with my eyes closed.
“Hm?” Lina murmured into my curls.
“I am…I am a lesbian,” I said, knowing I finally had arrived where I belonged.
“A lesbian? Indeed?” Lina answered, pretending to be surprised
“Yes, and what a lesbian I am,” I said. “You want me to prove it?”
WELLINGTON NIGHTS
Fran Walker
I just want to be friends are the six suckiest words in the English language. Annie said it after we’d been hanging out together for a month. I tried initiating a snog, and she stood up and gave me the “just friends” line. She and her ex-girlfriend, I found out the next day, had made up, and the ex was moving back from Auckland. I think Annie just used me to make her ex jealous.
Kerin said it after we’d kissed at the movies, made out on a park bench at the waterfront, and groped each other through our clothes in her car. No explanation from Kerin, just that lame “friends” crap, like somehow it would make up for dumping me. Or maybe she thought it sounded better than saying, “Sorry, your thighs are too fat for my tastes.”
And Jane, hell, Jane hadn’t even bothered to want to be friends. She showed up an hour and a half late for our first date, with some skinny blonde sitting in the passenger seat tooting the car horn and flouncing her long hair while Jane came to the door of my flat and canceled our date with more haste than civility.
The only girl I did just want to be friends with was my flatmate, Margaret. Margaret and I were both femmes, both cashiers at the New World grocery store in Upper Hutt, both nineteen, both looking for a nice butch. And, sadly, both virgins. At least I was, and I believed Margaret when she grumbled that she was, too.
I was still a virgin femme looking for a nice butch when the phone rang on a Wednesday evening in March. It was Margaret. She sounded half-sloshed. “Girlfriend, you have totally got to come down to the Duke. The place has gone wild.”
“The Duke?” The gay-friendly dive in downtown Wellington had neither music nor billiards and barely filled half its bar stools even on a Friday night. We’d only b
een there a few times. “What’s so wild?”
“Some kind of convention. Not sure what, exactly, but the place is full of granny dykes, and they’re buying drinks like there’s no tomorrow.”
Free drinks? Hell, yes, I was on my way. I put on a clean scoop-necked T-shirt and the tight black jeans that sort of hid my fat thighs, jogged to the Upper Hutt station and just managed to catch the last Number 91, and then hopped off the bus after Lambton Quay. Walking down Cuba Street, I could hear the roar of voices twenty meters from the door of the Duke.
I wriggled through the doorway. Women—short, tall, thin, fat, young, old—packed the place. Mostly old, I realized, peering through the dingy gloom. Margaret had been right. The place was full of granny dykes. One gray-haired woman winked at me. Another beckoned me to her table, pointing to an empty stool. I smiled, shook my head, and struggled through the crowd. Where was Margaret?
I found my friend at the bar, grinning like an idiot, with a fuzzy navel in each hand. Four older women with rainbow bandanas hovered over her.
“Yo, girlfriend!” Margaret shrieked. “Ladies, this is…yo, girlfriend!”
I wondered just how many drinks she’d had. “Hi. I’m Alison.”
After a chorus of “Hi, Alison’s!”, one woman asked me what I’d like to drink. No leers. No come-on winks or surreptitious pats on the shoulder. Just delighted smiles from a happy group of women who seemed happy to have me join them. Still, I felt uncomfortable, as if I were there under false pretences. I wasn’t pretty. The difference in our ages wasn’t reason enough for them to pay for my drinks.
“Erm, a glass of wine, please.”
“Live it up, Ali! Have a sex on the beach,” Margaret said, sloshing one of her fuzzy navels across my wrist. “They’re your favorite.”
“Order anything you like, honey. We’re celebrating,” one of the older women said.
“Just wine would be great. Margaret and I both have to be to work at eight tomorrow morning.” I nudged my friend meaningfully.
“Screw work!” Margaret downed the rest of her drinks and sat both glasses on the bar with a bang. “It’s party time!”
The women whooped, and two of them began dancing together to nonexistent music. Margaret grabbed their rainbow bandanas and waved them around like a cheerleader’s pompoms.
“White wine or red?” the bartender asked.
Nearby, a tall woman with a salt-and-pepper ponytail caught my eye. She turned toward me, and one silver earring swayed against her shoulder: an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life. The laugh lines around her eyes deepened when she smiled at me. She beckoned to the bartender. A few minutes later, the bartender handed me a slender glass of fizzing wine.
“From Natasha,” the bartender said, nodding her head toward the tall woman. “She says it’s guaranteed to make you smile, and it won’t give you a hangover.”
Margaret was shouting out her life story to her rainbow foursome. I eased back from the bar and took a sip of the champagne. The bubbles frothed over my teeth, tickled my tongue, and danced down my throat like some kind of magical fairy dust. I found myself smiling.
“Hi. I’m Natasha.”
I looked up. Her laugh lines crinkled again as she grinned. How old was she—forty? Forty-five? Her eyebrows and eyelashes were still thick and dark, though her hair was mostly silver. A solid, stocky body, like a construction worker’s. She raised her own glass of champagne and touched it to mine. The noisy crowd drowned out the clink.
“I’m Alison. Thanks for this.” I indicated the champagne. “It’s really nice.”
“My pleasure.” She sipped her champagne, holding her glass with one square hand. I looked closer: blunt, strong fingers; short nails—butch hands. Something inside me quivered.
I followed her to a table in the corner. Over three glasses of champagne, she explained to me who the celebrating women were: forty-odd lesbians from all over New Zealand whose poetry in a book called Tapestry had won some big literary prize. I nodded a lot and missed half of what she said; the noise level in the Duke got louder and louder, and my attention kept wandering to her hands. Those strong, square hands.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when I went to pee, and I found myself behind Margaret in the queue for the toilets. She was still listing to one side but seemed to be sobering up.
“Let’s get a taxi home,” Margaret said.
“Are you leaving now?”
“Yeah.” She lowered her voice. “We need to get out before the grannies ask to get paid for the drinks.”
I frowned. “I don’t think they’re expecting anything in return. They’re just being nice.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Margaret muttered in my ear. “Let’s nip out the back so we don’t have to kiss any prune lips good-bye.”
“I’m going to stay a while longer.”
Margaret shrugged and disappeared into a toilet cubicle. By the time I’d peed and washed my hands, she was gone. I returned to Natasha’s table.
“What was your poem in the book about?” I asked.
Natasha ran an idle finger around the rim of her champagne glass. “About teaching. How the old teach the young, and how the old learn as much from the teaching as the young do.” Her finger circled the glass. I wondered what it would feel like to have that strong, blunt finger touching me, circling my nipples, circling my clitoris…I squeezed my knees together.
“Are you a teacher?” My voice sounded hoarse.
“Not a schoolteacher. But I do teach. I run a creative writing class, and I also teach life skills at a homeless shelter.”
What would it be like to have the surety and confidence to teach, to work with homeless people, to write poetry? Maybe it was something that came with age, like gray hair and wrinkles. But Natasha didn’t seem like anyone’s nana. Her mouth didn’t look like a prune. Her lips looked strong and purposeful, like her hands. I watched her single earring twirl and catch the light.
“I’ll fetch us another drink.” Natasha placed her hands flat on the table and pushed back her stool. I didn’t feel the least bit tipsy, but the champagne was fizzing between my thighs. As she stood up, I reached out and touched my fingertip to hers.
She stopped, looked directly at me, and then circled my fingertip with her own.
I twined my index finger around hers. She slid her fingertip along my finger, up and down, and then around and up my thumb.
I was glad I hadn’t left with Margaret.
My knees trembled. A shudder ran up my arm and down my spine. After an endless moment, I noticed some women at the next table watching us. Heat flooded my cheeks.
Natasha flicked a look at the next table and then turned back to me and withdrew her hand. “What would you be comfortable with?”
“Somewhere…somewhere more private,” I managed to say.
She took my hand. We walked out of the Duke and into the cool night air.
“I have a hotel room just up the street,” Natasha said.
I nodded. We walked in silence. My fingers felt hot twined with hers. I took short, fast breaths. We walked past reception, rode up the lift, and entered Natasha’s room without my even noticing which hotel we’d entered.
“It’s okay to just sit here and continue our conversation, if you like,” Natasha said, switching on a lamp near the bed. “We don’t have to—”
I must have gaped at her like an idiot. She smiled, moved closer, and bent her head. Her lips touched mine. Her strong hand settled at my waist.
My knees buckled. She caught me as I sagged.
She laughed softly. “Whoa there, tiger!”
I clung to her, clamped my hand over hers to hold it against my waist, and pulled her mouth down to mine. She kissed me again and then straightened.
“I’m old enough to be your mother, Alison.”
“I don’t want a mother. I want a teacher. Teach me.”
“Have you never…?”
I shook my head. Slowly, I touched her cheek, her neck, and the
n stroked her ponytail. I ran my fingers down her bare arm to her hand. Oh, god, those strong hands. “You’re beautiful.”
She pulled me over to the bed. My mouth met hers as she unfastened my jeans and pushed them over my hips, and then pulled my shirt up. We broke long enough for her to yank my shirt over my head. I lay down in my bra and panties. She shucked off her clothes and climbed over me, naked. Her hands stroked my body.
“You’re beautiful,” she breathed.
I felt beautiful under her gaze. My too-big bottom and thighs, my long nose, my stubby eyelashes—they all became beautiful as she kissed me, licked my throat, sucked at my bottom lip. I shivered. The tremors slithered down my body and centered between my legs. I smelled my own desire.
Natasha removed my bra and panties without my even realizing it. She cupped my bare breasts, and then squeezed. Hard, strong, firm, blunt hands, just as I’d imagined. My nipples stiffened against her palms. My breath came out in a long, quivering sigh.
“If there’s anything you want…” Natasha said.
“You. I want you.” Every sexual act and technique I’d fantasized about in my lonely bed, or read in books, or seen in movies left me in a rush, leaving behind nothing but blind, pulsating desire. I had no idea what I wanted her to do, but I wanted her to do it. Now.
She lapped at my nipple. Her hand slid down my belly. Lower. Lower.
My knees fell apart. My thighs trembled. Her fingers stroked me, and I felt how slickly wet I’d become.
She slid one finger inside me, then two, then three. I pushed down, wanting more. She thrust her fingers in and out, sucking on my nipple with a matching rhythm.
My breath caught. She moved her hand faster. Her thumb bumped my clitoris. I gasped and twisted to increase the pressure. She thrust her fingers in me harder and harder, rubbing her thumb against my clitoris with each stroke.