When She Was Good

by Tristan Taormino

  Sunday night was sex night; it was then the local girl-girl elite held candlelit play parties at an expensive downtown hotel. Wet and gleaming we were the first time I looked in the mirror and saw us, newly risen from a foamy bathtub, other wet naked girls squirming around us. She slid her hands over my breasts to play with my nipples as her white grin cracked across her face in the mirror. The suite bathroom was too hot, too feminine, smelling of bath gel, lipsticks and sex. I tugged her out to the living room and hand in hand we walked barefoot through the orgy of girls naked, girls in their underwear, girls in Saran Wrap and Astroglide pawing and grunting and kissing each other.

  “I want to get fucked out of my mind tonight,” she said and she did. On her ass, her head thrown back on my shoulder while a girl in a black Lone Ranger mask fucked her with a leather phallus. She moaned and tossed her head around in feverish half circles, her dark hair sticking to my damp face. The girl leaned over her with a satanic smile, working the leather cock inside her harder, while everyone watched the tender flesh of my girlfriend’s pussy stretch wider. I held her steady, felt her trembling build and shake until her body seemed too fragile to house such chaos. Almost sobbing with need, she jerked her hips in wordless supplication for more, her fingernails digging into my knees. I cupped her breasts and thumbed her hard pink nipples as the Lone Ranger long-dicked her like a pro. She moaned and thrashed in my lap and then her tempest blew with a scream so hard her throat went raw. Then she collapsed, sliding down into my lap, and looked up at me, breathing hard. I kissed her wet forehead and she squeezed my hand.

  Before then, everything up to that point, was just killing time until I got to her. Straight girls I seduced, gay boys I dressed up and played with, married women who wanted me secretly and on schedule, none of them could begin to compare. The entire world had once seemed a carnal banquet but she was not an entrée but another guest.

  We were sure of our Promethean brilliance and we could see the future shining ahead of us.

  We would write, direct and produce lesbian films, all kinds. I favored a pretty porno flick revolving around a Catholic girls’ school. She imagined a forbidden romance between a repressed middle-aged executive and a young club-girl slut. We would make lots of money. Girls everywhere would long to be recruited.

  We would have eccentric children, at least three, and two adorable dogs. We would hire young and nubile help to wash the car and scrub the floors. We’d own a secluded estate in the islands where we would hold famous A-list orgies. We would fund shelters and feminist politicians, be active in our community.

  We would dedicate our lives to penetrating the glorious mysteries of the skin.

  We would see each other through mastectomies, menopause, old age, lost teeth. One would keep her hearing when the other lost her sight. We would blaze long into the century like beacons.

  “What if you die?” she whispered, when I was in her arms late one night. “What if I die?”

  Paradise was melting; everything was sliding around, skin and words and time. “We’re not going to die,” I said with my mind or my mouth. “We’re perfect.”

  One spring night we stayed awake until dawn, drinking champagne and snorting coke and playing games. We drew on the walls with colored chalk and listened to loud opera all night long. I was so dazzled to be conscious with her. Around four we were wet and serious and naked on the floor. She wrapped her legs around my face, grinding her wetness against my mouth. My tongue writhed inside her like a snake, making her come until she rolled moaning onto her side, holding her sides as if she hurt. But then she pinned me against the carpet and fucked me slowly and deliriously over and over, the strap-on between her legs so big I felt stretched impossibly wide. With each thrust of her cock, the floor burned my tailbone until the pain and the heat were one. My cunt was incandescent, every nerve ending alight with fire where she touched me, until I rolled her over and rode her hard, stoking that fire up into a blaze of wet and throbbing glory. We were wet with sweat when I collapsed on her, and we kissed over and over until daybreak showed through the windows. Then it was time to go.

  The fresh sky was a dark slate as we walked down the road. Birds hopped after us, branch to branch. A convoy of squirrels began to follow us, pausing to salute us with one paw over their hearts. The breeze of morning picked up, lifting our damp hair off our necks. My thighs were wet and shaking and I could still taste her in my mouth.

  The sun was rising at the end of the road like a promise. We looked into each other. She was as flushed and alive as the dawn.

  “This is it,” she said. “This is the moment.”

  Her face was lucent. Looking into her black gaze I feared my heart would burst with happiness. I started to speak but then we were struck with a numinous lightning of an epiphany. And in that moment we knew that we were in Paradise.

  And as it has turned out so many years later, you were right. That was it. That was the one crucial moment I could never come back from. No other moment has ever been able to compare. Every other lover, other knowledge, has been a dull placebo even though it’s been well over a decade since that dawn in which you and I understood everything. How fast it was gone, eight months in which we saw each other as royalty and our hopes spread before us like a shining promise—hopes that didn’t foresee the arguments and the fade into mundanity that came so soon. Friends would say now that it wasn’t so perfect, they would speak in clichés of narcissism and the idealization of lost youth, but what I am describing is a truth—that perfection does exist and once you’ve tasted it, the rest of your life turns a little gray.

  An Internet source of some dubiety reports the average age for the onset of gray hair is thirty-four. I was two years past that the morning I found a white hair in my darkening blonde. Strangely it was you I thought of, wondering if you’d also been tapped by that first sign of mortal obsolescence. You were just seven months younger than me and it was inevitable that you had changed from my perfect beloved of the flawless skin and firm body I was once so privileged to worship. For a moment I tried to imagine you as her tired, older version, another mother I might not recognize immediately at my son’s day care. But that image was a blasphemy so I quickly retreated into the past, the preferred immortality of memory. It’s the one perfection you left me with ultimately—the perfection of never seeing you again.

  WHEN SHE WAS GOOD

  Betty Blue

  Tib was a master of misdirection. While you were watching her left hand, the right was stealing your heart straight through your rib cage. But you didn’t notice it then. Only later, when you needed it for something, you’d go fishing through your pockets, patting down your jacket, trying to remember when you had it last. And there you’d find instead a hollow thud beneath your left breast pocket: your empty pericardium.

  But that was all later. Before that, there were wet, sticky days and nights of being rolled by her. And Tib, make no mistake, played you like a virtuoso cellist, fingers drawing out notes you didn’t think you had in you, slipping and sliding along your taut strings until smoke was coming from her fingers, and she had you, thoroughly and expertly played.

  The first time I saw Tib, she was playing someone else. It was hotter than hellfire in the trapped bowl of the town below us, driving us up into the foothills and over desert trails into a canyon that hid in the belly of a mountain. Perched on a rock beside the falls with a leg over each side of the stone like she was sitting on a horse, Tib was dressed in a black, pinstriped suit, barely breaking a sweat. The long jacket was open to reveal a crisp, white shirt, its neatness marred only by the sleeves, rolled up to give her room to pluck her instrument. I found out later that she’d ridden her motorcycle up into the canyon. That she remained so unaffected could only be a bona fide miracle.

  The object of Tib’s attention as I crested the path before the rain-filled pool was a petite, white-bleached blonde with a 1940s flip. She was bent over the horn of the rock “saddle” with her legs spread wide, and buck naked. Tib,
with two fingers in the blonde’s cunt, and two in her mouth, was bringing her composition to a rousing crescendo. The fingers in her mouth that she was sucking on feverishly were clearly to keep her mouth shut as Tib fucked her. She was moaning against them, tits and ass bouncing as Tib gave her what-for, and whimpering with regret as Tib slowed down at last.

  Tib gave me a smirk beneath her shades as the piece came to an end, patted the blonde on her ass, and stuck out her hand.

  “Hey, there. I’m Tib.”

  I stared with my mouth open for a beat and then stammered, “Sadie,” without taking the offered hand.

  The blonde shook out her hair and sat up, giving me a cursory glance before leaning back to kiss Tib. She took her time, letting me know I was of no consequence before she slipped down from the rock and dove into the pool.

  “And that,” said Tib, hooking the heels of her boots against the rock, “was Bethany.” She leaned back and smoothed her hands through her slicked-back hair to interlock her fingers behind her head, an effortless gesture that spoke of powerful abs.

  The arrival of my friend Greg at the top of the trail saved me from spontaneous muteness. He stopped and took a long swig from his water bottle, snapping the sport-top back into place. “Someone should have told me the Cherry-Popping Daddies were playing here today,” he said. “I’d have worn a better hat.”

  “At least you brought your cherry,” said Tib.

  My mouth dropped open again, and Greg rolled his eyes. “Keep it in your zoot suit, sweetie. I’ve already got a boyfriend.” He turned back to the trail and gestured ahead. “That picnic site you were looking for is down the road, sweetheart. Say good-bye to the nice man and come on.”

  Tib’s laughter followed us out of the canyon.

  Barely six hours later, I found myself toe to toe with Tib once more as Greg and his boyfriend Pete and I hit The Club—part of the revitalized downtown hotel where Dillinger was once famously apprehended—to get out of the stifling desert evening. I was at the bar waiting for my drink when I spotted the unmistakable suit in the hotel lobby. The Gwen Stefani blonde was on her arm, white crop top showing off a perfect tan and a perfect torso over a pair of jeans slung just below her hips. The top of a pair of red boxers peeked out over the belt, with matching suspenders stretched over her breasts.

  Tib gave no indication that she saw me and I looked away, intent on calculating the tip as the bartender scooted the drink and change in front of me. When I looked up, Tib was sliding onto the stool beside me. Bethany had disappeared into the crowd.

  “Long Island iced tea,” she said to the bartender, and I laughed out loud. Tib gave me a sidelong glance. “It’s not for me.”

  “Sorry,” I said, trying to swallow my drink. “None of my business.”

  “And what the hell is that? Grapefruit juice?”

  I breathed in at the wrong moment, trying to be cool, and choked, sputtering into my glass. Tib pounded me on the back and I knocked the drink across the bar.

  “Well, that was charming,” said Tib, and nodded to the bartender with a ten tucked between her fingers like a smoke. “Another juice for my friend, here.”

  “Salty dog,” I corrected, coughing.

  Tib raised an eyebrow. “And that’s the story you’re sticking with.”

  Bethany appeared at her elbow and plucked the tall glass of Long Island iced tea off the bar, sipping from the swizzle stick. Tib dropped the ten on the counter. “Try not to spill that one,” she said as she turned and steered Bethany through the crowd.

  The last time I saw her that night, she was leading a tipsy Bethany up the stairs across the hotel lobby.

  Greg, Pete, and I closed the place down, straggling out to the street when the temperature finally dropped below ninety. I had ridden over on my Vespa, but I was in no shape to drive home, so we left it in the parking lot looking like a shabby cousin beside a shiny Valkyrie, to be picked up in the morning.

  When Greg dropped me back at the lot several hours later, the owner of the Valkyrie was stepping into the heat shimmering off the tarmac: Tib, in a pair of leather pants and a white ribbed tank.

  “Nice ride,” she said, slipping her sunglasses down her nose.

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “You got me. I ride a scooter and drink grapefruit juice, and don’t fuck in public.” The night’s festivities had left me a little cranky.

  “I could remedy one of those,” said Tib.

  I blushed to my roots, not sure if I was more angry or hot.

  Tib smiled, mounting the bike. “Come on, Sadie. Why don’t you hop on, let me give you a ride?”

  “Where’s Bethany?” I blurted, unreasonably pleased that she’d remembered my name.

  “There’s only room for two,” said Tib. “But if you want a ride with Bethany, I’m sure she’ll be awake by sundown.”

  “I don’t want a ride with Bethany.”

  “Then hop on, sweetie. Let me show you what you’re missing on that scooter of yours.” Tib patted the seat behind her. “I’ve got an errand to run over on the east side and I could use the company. I’ll have you back in an hour.”

  Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was my muddy head from the night before. But God help me, a minute later I was behind Tib with my arms wrapped around her hard waist, heading into the white blur of the desert midday. With my thighs hugging Tib’s hips and the vibration of the bike between them, I was oblivious to how far we were going or how long we’d been doing it until the bike slowed and Tib turned onto a dirt road between two brick columns.

  The road wound through a field of scattered stones, and as Tib brought the bike to a stop, I realized they were grave markers, small white crosses poking up between them like wildflowers. Tib switched off the engine and kicked the stand into place, swinging her leg over the seat. Her boots crunched on the gravel as she crossed to one of the markers and dropped down in front of it, arms resting over her thighs as she balanced her weight on her heels. I slipped off of the bike and waited, not sure whether I should follow. She stayed where she was, so I moved forward, hands in my jean pockets.

  “I come here every year,” she said. “I head home once a year to visit Mom. I think she appreciates the company.” I had no idea what to say, so I said nothing. Tib stood up, wiping her palms on her pant legs, and turned around. “It’s not really the kind of place I could bring Bethany.”

  “But she makes the trip home with you.”

  Tib laughed. “Bethany? I just met her yesterday.” She started back toward the bike. “Anyway, it’s hotter than fuck out here, so maybe the public sex will have to wait. Leather may not have been the wisest choice.”

  It really was hotter than fuck, and I was too sweaty and flushed to bother with prim outrage at her assumption that I’d come along for sex. I held onto her belt loops on the ride back, not because I was embarrassed to hold on any closer, but because at that point, with my head encased in the steamy helmet, I might have passed out from the heat and fallen off. At any rate, Tib didn’t seem worried about my body language.

  We pulled into the parking lot beside Nellie, my Vespa, and I stared at the vinyl seat and shining metal. I had parked at night, no need to look for shade. At three in the afternoon, Nellie was a potential human griddle. Maybe I’d go inside for a soda.

  Tib followed my glance. “They don’t open until five.” Most of downtown was closed on Sunday afternoon, making my chances of getting even a bottle of water slim. “I’ve got a refrigerator in my room,” said Tib.

  “Isn’t Bethany sleeping?”

  “She’s not even here,” said Tib, grinning. “Crawled out sometime before eight a.m. and took a cab. She had church.”

  “Church?” I made a face and Tib laughed. “Do they still have those?”

  “Oh, indeed they do, Little Miss Sin.” She flashed her wide smile and put an arm around my waist. “All over the Southwest. I hear they even have some in California.”

  “Yeah, they’re weird there,” I said.

  The
room was furnished in deserty art deco, a Sonoran blanket thrown over a sleigh bed, and a lamp on the 1930s waterfall table beside it with a stand covered in stamped leather and a rawhide shade painted with cowboys and steer.

  “I’ve always wondered what these rooms were like,” I said. “Kind of appalling and fascinating at the same time.”

  “You a townie or a sorority girl?” Tib was pulling off her sweat-damp leather pants.

  “A sorority girl?” I laughed. “Yeah, that’s me, how could you tell?”

  “You never know. Appearances can be deceiving.”

  “I know I’m no Gwen Stefani,” I said, folding my arms across my waist, aware of my belly. “And if you must know, yes, I’m a ‘townie.’ I’m not even a college student, actually,” I added, feeling even more defensive. “I was, but I had to quit. I’m a working girl.” Tib raised an eyebrow. “I mean I have a nine-to-five job.”

  Tib left her pants where they fell, crouching down to get two sparkling water bottles from the fridge, a white thong separating her muscular ass. “So who needs another Gwen Stefani?” She stood up and handed me a bottle. “I wasn’t comparing you to Bethany.”

  “I should probably go,” I said.

  “Jesus, Sadie. It’s a million degrees out there. Just take the water and sit your ass on the bed. I wouldn’t have asked you up if I didn’t think you were cute.”

  I uncrossed my arms and opened my mouth to say something indignant, I wasn’t sure what, but Tib pushed the bottle into my hand and steered me to the bed.

  “It’s a drink of water,” Tib said, twisting the top off her bottle. “It’s hot out, you’re thirsty, we’re both hungover, and I happen to think your little tummy is adorable.” She took a sip and grinned. “The water’s free, by the way. You don’t have to pay for it with sex.”

  I nearly choked on my water, and the carbonation stung my nose.

  “You clearly have a drinking problem,” said Tib. I tried to take another sip, but I was laughing too hard. Tib climbed onto the bed and took my drink, setting it on the end table. “No more of this for you. You’re out of control.” She pushed me back against the pillow and climbed over me, shutting me up.