by Sacchi Green
Her teeth scraped my nipple. I surged up against her hand and cried out. My legs went rigid and my hands clenched. My whole body spasmed. She rocked her hand against me, pressing rather than stroking my clitoris, as I shuddered and panted.
Ages later, I leaned up on one elbow.
“Wow.”
Natasha tossed her ponytail back and grinned. “There was a fair bit of wow in that for me, too.”
I reached out and touched her heavy breasts tipped with brown nipples. She turned to give me easier access. More confident now, I explored with my fingertips, my eyes, my tongue. I became fascinated by the ridges and puckers of each nipple, the change in her skin’s texture where nipple turned to breast, the flesh that was both yielding and solid.
She captured one of my hands and tugged it to her leg. “Touch me.”
I slid my hand up her thigh and then down the other. In between, her wetness coated my fingers. I touched her there again. Silky, pillow soft, and so slippery that there seemed to be no contours at all.
She moaned. Amazingly, she was as aroused as I had been. Her musky scent filled my nostrils.
A warm glow washed over me. I felt powerful. Beautiful.
I slid my fingers forward and then back. My fingertip slipped inside her as if pulled in by her desire. She pressed herself against me. I mimicked her earlier movements: sliding in first one finger, then two, then three. I raised my thumb. Her clitoris felt swollen, hot. She moaned again as I rubbed it.
She rolled on top of me. My hand slid out of her. Breast to breast, belly to belly, groin to groin, we rubbed together. I parted my legs, and she pressed herself closer to me. Her coarse curls rubbed my clitoris. Then her clitoris pressed mine, rubbing, grinding. I panted and wrapped my arms and legs around her and moved with her, following the pleasure, a sensual joy that I wanted to go on forever.
She made a series of small sounds, animal-like, as she pounded faster and faster against me. I caught her breast in my hand, raised my head, and drew her nipple into my mouth. She gasped, never slowing her movements. I licked her nipple and then grazed my teeth along it as I sucked it in and out of my mouth.
Natasha cried out, high and sharp, and slumped atop me.
Wrapped around each other, we slept. Twice in the night we woke. The first time we kissed and caressed and talked about our childhoods; the second time her caresses became more purposeful, and once again I exploded with pleasure. At seven in the morning, Natasha kissed me good-bye. She wouldn’t give me her phone number or email address. We were from different generations, she said, different worlds. One night had been enough. She had taught me what I needed to know.
My heart knew she was right. We couldn’t even be just friends. But my body didn’t want to say good-bye.
“Where do you want to go tonight?” Margaret asked. “Tatou, the Blue Room, the Pound? It’s drag night at the Pound. Or the women’s rugby team will be at Blend’s tonight. Or we could go to M & S—Eteta said she and Lynne will be there, it’s karaoke night.”
Margaret had stopped teasing me about my older woman fetish, and seemed intent instead on “curing” me by dragging me on pub crawls every other night. But I was sick of the Courtney Place bars, the rave and techno music, the drunk students puking on the footpaths. I was sick of hiding at a corner table trying to look dykey enough that no guys would bother me, but not so dykey that I looked butch instead of femme; of worrying that a woman would walk up to me and then visibly decide not to ask me to dance because she didn’t like my long nose and stubby eyelashes. Or, worse, that she would ask me to dance and then I’d have to stand up and she’d see my fat thighs.
“Nah, I’m going to stay home tonight,” I lied.
“No worries,” Margaret said cheerfully. “I’ll join Eteta and Lynne.”
After Margaret went out, I took a shower. I knew damned well where I was going tonight. I’d managed to stay away from the Duke for three months, after sitting there every night for nearly two weeks hoping against hope to see Natasha again. Tonight, though, I’d go back. Not for Natasha. But to remember. Just to remember what it was like to talk to someone about art and poetry and politics and feminism, someone who was smart and funny and kind, someone who made me feel interesting and beautiful and confident.
The Duke was as dingy as usual and smelled of stale beer. They’d installed a tinny radio behind the bar, and it was playing some godawful country western twangy music. I sat at the table Natasha and I had shared, drank a Speight’s Dark, and cringed at the sound of a nasal-voiced man whinging about his achy breaky heart.
I wasn’t heartbroken. I hadn’t been in love with Natasha. I liked her and admired her and was grateful to her, but I knew that I didn’t want her to come back. What I wanted back was the feeling I’d had that night with her, the person I’d become with her.
A woman walked up to the bar and spoke with the bartender, who nodded and changed the radio station. I rained silent blessings on her head and tapped my foot in time to the Mint Chicks tune.
Some girls about my age, all with perfect faces and expensive-looking nose rings and slender hips hugged by low-cut jeans, got up and started dancing in a circle.
The woman went back to her table. I’d never seen her before. Lean, almost skinny, in baggy trousers, probably in her mid-twenties, with pale crew-cut hair. But the way she walked, the set of her shoulders—she had Natasha’s confidence.
And she was looking at me. Smiling.
She stood up.
I stood up.
She walked over to my table. “Hi. I’m Ruth. Want to dance?”
My nose wasn’t too long. My legs weren’t too fat. Ruth had a look on her face that said I was just right. We moved next to the nose-ring girls and kind of swayed back and forth a bit. Ruth was still smiling.
She put her hands on my hips and pulled me a little closer. Her hair was white, not just pale. It didn’t look frosted; prematurely gray, I guessed. It made a fascinating contrast with her face: old hair, young body.
Her crew cut looked soft and stiff at the same time. I wanted to rub my hand over it. Shyly, I put my hand on her forearm instead: smooth, silky skin, hard muscle beneath.
I leaned even closer. My hips touched hers. Something hard bumped the seam of my jeans. I tried to look down without looking as if I were looking down, but her gaze followed mine. Our foreheads touched. We stood there, staring at our crotches. And now I saw the bulge beneath her loose trousers.
My whole body went stiff. I couldn’t swallow, thinking of her clitoris rubbing mine and feeling a rigid hardness in me at the same time. The blood roared in my ears.
“Does it bother you?” Ruth asked.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. All I could do was suck in air.
Ruth took a step back. Her head lowered, and she began to turn away.
I grabbed her hips, and pulled her to me.
“I do not want to just be friends,” I said firmly.
She smiled and curled an arm around my shoulder.
“Me neither,” Ruth said.
We danced, closer, faster. Small, soft breasts pressed against my chest. Hard desire pressed against my crotch.
I hoped I’d be learning something new tonight.
Remembering how a soft bite on my nipple had tipped me over the edge when I’d neared orgasm, and how the same move had brought Natasha to her climax, I smiled. Ruth might learn something new tonight, too.
GIRLS AND THEIR CARS
Renée Strider
It started out as a joke—until things got a little out of control.
Carole and Janis each owned a Lexus. They were extremely proud of their cars and kept them in tip-top shape, always clean and shiny, motors purring, every bell and whistle working.
Carole was into old luxury cars. Her previous car had been a twenty-year-old Caddy. Her Lexus, which she’d had for about four years, was a shimmering, silver gray sedan. A very big sedan, one of the first from the early ’90s, with a very big V-8 engine.
Did Janis get her Lexus as a nyah, nyah to Carole? Their friends wondered. The two certainly competed in other areas and had done so from almost the day—well, night, at the lesbian bar—that Janis moved into town a couple of years back. Moved into Carole’s territory, really, because Carole was the number one player in town and suddenly had to make room for another dyke who went after the ladies—the femmes—with just as much charm and enthusiasm, and with just as much success.
On the surface, the competition between the two was friendly, whether it was over women, pool, or cars. At the bar they would often discuss cars, especially their “Lexi,” offering advice to each other and comparing specs till their friends would roll their eyes from boredom. But sometimes there was an edge to it—a sarcastic comment from Janis, a pointed joke from Carole—and those around them would widen their eyes or smirk knowingly.
That’s how it went one midsummer Saturday night at Red Emma’s. The whole crowd was there, including most of our heroes’ past conquests. Nobody was completely sober, but nobody was really drunk, either. Both Carole and Janis were between girlfriends. That happened a lot—though not necessarily at the same time—a reluctance to commit being the sine qua non of playerhood.
It was close to midnight, and Carole was standing comfortably with her back against the bar, one knee bent, boot heel hooked over the brass rail near the floor. Her pelvis was tilted forward both for balance and for effect. In her right hand she hefted a bottle of beer, while the thumb of the other hand stuck through a belt loop of her black jeans. She turned her head slightly and nodded as Abby, her companion at the bar, spoke to her, but her dark eyes were fixed on Janis.
Janis was sitting more or less across from her on a table with one thigh balanced on its edge, one black-and-white high-topped foot dangling and the other flat on the floor. She wore tight, faded blue denims and a loose white tank top that showed off her broad shoulders and tanned arms. Patty, one of the women sitting at the same table, said something to her, and Janis bent her head to listen. She grinned and sat up, tipping her glass for a couple of big swallows. As she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, she looked up and noticed Carole watching her.
“Hey, Janis. Car okay?” Carole drawled, lifting her bottle in Janis’s direction. “I thought maybe she was stalled when I passed you today.”
“Carole.” Janis raised her beer, too, and straightened up, half-sitting, half-standing, with both feet now planted on the floor. “Was that you in your grandmother’s car?”
Their friends snickered and they both smiled, if a little thinly.
“You guys should have a race,” Abby said.
Carole snorted. “Wanna shoot some pool?” she asked Janis. “The table’s free.” Janis had beaten her two out of three games a few nights back, and Carole wanted payback.
They moved to the pool table at the back of the room, set their beers on a nearby table, and took a couple of cues off the wall, examining them carefully. Some of the other women gathered around to watch. Janis shoved a few coins in the tray, pushed, and the balls came rumbling out into the slot under the end of the table. Carole loved that sound and always imagined a network of dark tunnels under the tabletop through which the colorful balls raced at breakneck speed. She racked them up, solid and striped, into the triangle for eight-ball.
The lamp above the table turned Janis’s short feathered hair to copper as she bent forward, sighting down her cue to break. Her top gapped open, partially revealing the swell of her breasts to Carole at the other end of the table. Carole quickly shifted her eyes away, but not soon enough to prevent her stomach from clenching and her face from reddening, to her total and utter consternation.
After the balls finished breaking, sinking one, Janis pocketed one more. Carole was still rattled, her cheeks hot, when Janis winked and stared at her pointedly, waiting for her to shoot. She failed to make a ball, but finally did get it together, and the score was four games to three for her by the time the bartender announced, “Time, ladies,” and they called it a night.
Carole lived nearby, so she walked home as she usually did after an evening of drinking. What the fuck was that! Her reaction to seeing Janis’s cleavage—pulse quickening, guts buzzing, and blushing for god’s sake!—had been a shock. She’d never been attracted to another butch, yet she’d actually been aroused. She must really need to get laid. That’s all it was, she decided. But what was that wink? She shrugged it off.
As she turned into her driveway, she admired the massive old Lexus glowing softly silver in the dim light of the streetlamp. Seeing it reminded her of Abby’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion and the reactions in the bar. The rumors had flown.
“Hey, Abby said you’re gonna have a race. When?” Jude had asked, as if it were a fait accompli.
And, as Carole was racking the balls up once more, this from Cindy, who was very cute and one of Janis’s exes: “Janis, can I drop the flag, pulleeze?”
Carole and Janis had mostly just grinned and brushed off the comments and questions and concentrated on their game. Their friends wouldn’t let it go, though.
As Carole lay in bed going back over the evening, her thoughts lingered on the peculiar incident at the pool table. She drifted off in an erotic haze, her hand in Janis’s shirt, reaching for a nipple. No! She came to with a start and sat up, heart racing. She breathed deeply to calm herself and then lay back down on her stomach and thrust her hand down, under her body, touching herself. She was so wet. She willed herself to think about somebody else, one of her current fantasies. She climbed on top of the gorgeous—and ultrafeminine—woman she’d been admiring at the gym, and took her hard, on a mat, pushing her fingers into her. Then she was licking her, all wet and hot, and the woman was writhing and moaning. In her imagination, even though Carole was going down on her, she was able to see the woman’s face while she was coming. But as she jerked herself to a shuddering climax, the face dissolved into Janis’s, and it was Janis arching against her and moaning with pleasure.
On Wednesdays—Hump Day—Red Emma’s was usually pretty full right after work, as the women took advantage of the pub food served only on that day and on the weekend. That Wednesday was no exception. Carole and Abby were both sitting on bar stools eating and talking, occasionally glancing up at the mirror behind the bar to check out the room, when Abby said, “So what about that race, eh? C’mon, how about it? I’m serious. What a gas.”
Carole shoveled a forkful of meat pie into her mouth, ignoring the question.
“You know you’d really like that SUV to eat your dust, not to mention its driver.” Abby continued harassing her.
“Are you nuts? We’d get caught and they’d take away my car. Forget it.” Nevertheless, she felt a tiny thrill, quickly suppressed.
Abby chewed thoughtfully. “No, you wouldn’t—we wouldn’t.”
Carole regarded her best friend in the mirror. Uh-oh. Abby had the look that meant all the wheels were turning, and “no” would be a remote option when she finally marshaled her arguments.
Just at that moment, they saw Janis passing behind them. Abby whirled around and grabbed her arm, almost spilling the glass of beer in Janis’s hand.
“Janis! C’mere. We’re still talking about that race.”
“No, we’re not. I’ve been telling her no way,” Carole growled. She hoped she sounded normal. Part of her mind was trying desperately not to think of her masturbatory fantasy of the other night.
“No way is right. We’d get caught and they’d take away my car,” Janis said.
“What I said.” Carole nodded solemnly.
“C’mon, Janis, you know you’d love to see that big old boat eat your dust,” Abby
urged. Indignantly Carole raised her eyebrows at her. “And I know just how you won’t get caught.” Abby smiled conspiratorially and lowered her voice. “You know my parents’ farm north of town?”
Carole nodded. She’d been there many times.
“Well, it’s huge, right?” Abby continued. “Lots of fields, mostly corn. Very tall corn. A couple of fields are fallow every summer, though. Just clover. You can see right across the field—no obstructions—so you could race around that. If there’s one with cornfields all around, nobody would see us. And if it’s at noon on a Sunday, nobody’s around, anyway.”
“What about the noise?” Carole asked, in spite of herself.
Janis just stared at them with round eyes.
“It’s in the middle of nowhere, and nobody’s gonna call the cops just because they hear a couple of engines revving.”
“Are you guys nuts?” Janis found her voice. “I already said no!” She didn’t sound as vehement as she might have, though.
“Hey, I haven’t said yes either,” Carole said.
But soon some of the others got involved in the discussion. They were all so high with enthusiasm that finally Carole and Janis got caught up in the excitement, too, and caved and said yes. Red Emma’s buzzed with anticipation all that evening.
One woman suggested taking bets. Jude quashed that idea pretty quickly. They could be in enough trouble already without adding illegal gambling to illegal racing.
“Listen up, everybody,” Abby said in her take-charge, gravelly voice. “The race will be this Sunday. High noon. Do not advertise it, even as a joke. Don’t talk about the race. If this gets back to us from outside this group, we’ll have to cancel.”
“But I was thinking of doing a poster for the bar. Butch-on-Butch Street Racing,” said Patty. Everybody laughed, but Abby glared at Patty. “Hey, I won’t. I’m only kidding. Geez.”
The butches in question both flushed as their glances locked. Neither seemed able to look away. Carole was dimly aware that Abby was watching them, fascinated, her eyes going from one to the other. Then somebody called to somebody else across the room, and the moment was over.