“That you are an elf, an angel, a goddess.”
“A female-female she-goddess? Really, with all this embarrassment hanging out all over the place like this?”
She let her cock and her smooth, smooth balls brush Nina’s buttocks, smiled and kissed her again.
“Always. You will always be a goddess to me,” murmured Nina, drinking in the kisses, her eyes closed. Her hand searched for Julia’s hand, their fingers wove together of their own accord, and Nina drew the hand closer to kiss Julia’s fingertips one by one, adoringly. Julia smiled and pressed her breasts down on Nina’s back, rubbing them gently on her shoulder blades.
She kissed Nina again and again, on her temple, cheek, eyelid, nose, the corner of her mouth. She was so precious. Sleek, small-boned, but fierce and sharp, like a bird of prey, hooded and caged, but never quite tamed. And I have set you free, and you chose to fly to me.
“I love you. Darling,” she whispered in her ear, in her huskiest, deepest voice, and Nina shuddered all over while her spine gave a twist, as Julia knew it would. Nina turned under her, to hug her and draw her body down. Julia moved her knees within Nina’s legs, and just like that, without any difficulty, her untimely erection found a place to go.
So wet. How can you become so wet just by looking at me? What do you see that nobody else ever saw? What do you see that even I don’t see? Julia sank her face in Nina’s neck, to kiss her, bite her, whisper in her ear, yes, oh yes, whisper and murmur and cajole, until my voice will make you melt, my love, my love, my love.
****
Nina
Julia smiles again as her cock finds its way inside my ready slit. I close my eyes and arch my back, living every instant of that first slow, slow thrust. I can’t believe how wet it makes me just watching her dress. Or undress. Or practically anything she does, really. Just thinking of her bare skin makes me swoon.
I can feel her glans making its way through me, defining the contours of the obscure depths of my body. It’s like I never knew the true shape of me until I met Julia.
But she made me visible, out here in the light, and she gave form to my emptiness, down there, in the dark.
I hug her narrow hips with my legs as tight as I can, holding her inside me, while my face is pressed in the side of her neck, and her voice murmurs in my ear. I can’t really understand what she’s saying. Maybe it’s just noises, but they carry me to a different world, a quiet dark place where only the two of us exist.
For a long, long time, I just float in her voice and the magical feeling of her naked smooth skin all over mine and the slow hypnotic movement of her hips. Then I gradually come back to myself and after a minute of relishing her slow thrusts to the utmost, I gently, very gently, push her up and off me. She looks at me, questioningly, but with a slight smile still on her lips, which I return. Tall as she is, she is still so light that it’s a nothing to dislodge her from me and roll her on the bed on her back. Her hair is spread wild all around her, and some of her lipstick has gone astray. She has a delightfully tousled, windblown look about her. She smiles more broadly as I climb over her, pinning her hands down on the pillow as my clitoris searches and finds her stiff cock. I bear down on her slowly, savoring the smooth wetness, my wetness, on her shaft as it digs between my labia, finding that in me which feels most, waking it to life.
I let go of her hands to caress her stomach. It is flat and taut with two slim bands of muscle each side of her navel. They mold themselves to my palms like hot sand. Her waist is warm and smooth under my hands. I follow its alluring shape up, to her hard rib-cage, feeling each bone with my fingers. So many different textures in her. Gently, very gently, so as not to unsettle her, because I know she might be unsettled, I slip my hands under the edge of her bra, without displacing it, to touch her true nipples. For a moment, for the briefest moment, she’s alert to something, like prey snuffling the wind. Then my fingertips gently roll her nipples round and round and round, and her eyes close, her back arches and she gives a broken moan, long and low and raw, like pain. But it is not. It’s not pain. She’s free. She’s been freed of something, and she’s loose and wild and mine, mine, mine.
I close my eyes, too, although she’s so beautiful that it almost hurts, and in my eyes, I see them, Julian’s nipples, taut and surprisingly dark in so pale a man. I feel them now, like warm, lush, supple raisins between my fingertips, while Julia moans and moans. My slit finds her glans and holds it, and then I slide her inside me, smooth like warm water, something so tender and elemental that it’s almost a shock when her shaft runs its length and my body bumps down onto hers. Her glans reaches the very bottom of me. When I let go of her nipples to take her hands into mine again, she doesn’t look at me. She hardly reacts at all in fact.
I look at her while our bodies come together again and again, deeply and without hurry. I am rubbing my mound on her and it’s like I am thrusting into her, and when I do it again for the third or fourth time she finally opens her eyes, and looks into mine, and smiles a slow smile, breathing deep. Her hands hold my hands a bit tighter, as if she came back from somewhere. I thrust and thrust, my whole body searching the pleasure that she holds for me, that she always held for me, like a treasure to be found. My eyes are closed again, and I am lost into this dance, lost into her stiffness, lost into the rhythm that binds us, until her hands break loose of mine and come to rest on my hips, to steer that rhythm into a new one, a new music, one that I didn’t know yet, not quite like this, a wild crescendo, her mounting urgency unbounded, as she claims her pleasure out of me, wholly unrestrained.
This time, when she comes, I can see it happening. Her head digs backwards into the pillow, and her face is strangely blank, but a blankness that is a sort of deflected intensity. She moans, loudly. I have never seen anything so shockingly intimate. I am almost embarrassed to have witnessed her so naked, so completely unguarded.
After a while, when her chest has stopped heaving in deep breaths, she looks at me, and smiles, a slow lazy smile. Her gorgeous hands rub my hips in leisurely circles. Her eyes are sleepy slits.
“Ok, you really didn’t want to go out, I get it,” she murmurs, smiling.
I lie down on top of her to kiss her throat, and she makes a low sound between a hum and a purr.
“Sorry. I didn’t … plan it.”
She laughs, and pushes me away to sit up under me. She is still inside me, although her member is swimming in wetness and almost slipping out. I try desperately to hold her in while I hug her. Her arms and her perfume and her hair are all around me.
“I am not complaining,” she whispers in my ear, and I hold her a bit tighter. A bit too tight perhaps, I think with a pang of regret, as she finally slides out of my slit. I give a deep sigh.
“We can still go out,” I say, through a curtain of soft fragrant hair, and she holds my head closer, to kiss my neck and cheek.
“In a minute,” she says, with a deep sigh, and she leans back on the pillows, stretching like a cat. I slide down her body to lay my cheek on her belly, and then further down. I stroke and kiss her long thighs lovingly.
“How can you be so smooth?” I ask, rubbing my cheek and lips and nose on her thigh, and up to her crotch and belly, as I go upwards again along her lanky body.
“Well, you know, waxing parlors?”
“You mean that there is a woman out there who is allowed to smear hot wax all over you and then make you squeal?”
She laughs. “Well, I guess you could say that, yes. Although I try to keep the squealing to a minimum. It tends to upset the other customers.”
“Mh,” I say, licking the inside of her armpit, which always makes her squirm. “…to be a fly on that wall…”
****
Later, Julia looks at the mirror in dismay, studying the ruins of her careful makeup. There are freckles coming out everywhere.
“Crap. I will have to start all over.”
“Or…” I say.
“Or what?”
“Or we
could all agree that freckles are harmless forms of life, pretty adorable actually, and there is no need to systematically exterminate them.”
She grimaces, and shoots me this doubtful, uncertain look.
“Mh. You think so?”
“I know so.”
“Mh.” She does not sound convinced, but when she remerges from the bathroom, after an unusually brief makeup interval, her lips are blood red and her eyes stunning, but her freckles are still visible, just a little toned down. She hasn’t spent thirty minutes hunting them down one by one with the concealer, for once. I smile in delight. She looks gorgeous in her usual flawless pale makeup, but she’s somewhat less intimidating with all her freckles showing, less like a sylph and closer to the wonderfully kind human being I have come to know in our intimacy. Time was, just a few days ago, can you believe it, when I knew nothing of this kind person while the flawless Julia walking down the corridor like a supernatural being treading the cat-walk of my imagination was the lover of my dreams.
It’s all upside down now. Or maybe it’s finally the right way around. That Julia only existed in my fantasy. Or almost. I smile dreamily watching her tall figure in front of the wardrobe mirror. Two of her, the real and the image. Maybe there will always be two.
“So, still an elf?” she asks with a slightly diffident smile, while shrugging into a short, grey knitted dress.
“Oh yes.”
“Really? Is there any mention of Elves with freckles in Tolkien’s books?”
“None whatsoever. He never mentioned the sexy stuff, you know? But we know that they were taller and fairer than any human being, check, that they recited poetry and made beautiful music, check, and he’s always going on about Legolas’s luminous eyes, and his pale, long slender hands. Check, and check.”
“If my students knew half as much about English literature as you know about Elves and hobbits…”
She leaves the sentence hanging in mid-air like a Cheshire Cat smile, because she’s head down in front of the shoe locker, rifling through boots of every sort for the boots she will wear this evening. I watch in awe when she picks a pair of thigh-high burgundy suede boots. I’ve seen them every time I opened the locker, but I never saw her wearing them. Once she has wiggled her long calves into them and zipped them up, she looks if possible even taller than ever. The dress she’s wearing tonight is so short that the boots have to do most of the covering.
“What do you think?” she asks doubtfully. “I am a bit of a whore. Aren’t these the real original fuck-me-boots?”
I nod with absolute conviction. “Yes, they are. Perfect. Don’t you dare take them off.”
I give her a mischievous smile, which she returns, and then she looks at my makeup with a slightly critical look.
“Shall we go absolutely crazy and put some lipstick on you?”
“What? No!” I say in horror. I draw the line at lipstick. It looks great on Julia, with her gorgeous lush lips, but on me? For some reason, it seems really wrong.
“Why not? Come on. Just a little color. For me. Pick one of mine. Any color you like.”
“Er … no.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
She suddenly bends forwards and places a single firm kiss square on my lips, holding my head very tight between her hands.
“Umph,” I exclaim, surprised. When she stands back she looks at me and grins.
“There. Almost perfect.” She turns me to face the mirror and cleans a smudge of blood-red from the corner of my mouth with her thumb. Much as I would like to rant and rage at her, I’ve got to admit that my red lips look rather lovely. I never imagined my face could be so sexy. I grudgingly smile at her through the mirror, and she positively beams at me.
“If you would only believe me,” she says.
We hold hands as we walk out of the door and down the corridor. My small fingers are entwined to her long pale ones, and I am touched once more by how slender they feel, almost frail. I can’t resist bringing them to my lips for a kiss, and I almost jump out of my skin when a door quickly gapes open and old Mr. Ragona pokes his disapproving face out of it. He shoots us both a critical up-and-down look and disappears just as quick back into his hole, like an inverted Jack-in-a-box.
“Well, buona sera, signor Ragona,” I say to the closing door.
Julia shrugs. “He likes to do that. Don’t take it personal.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. He’s a great pal of my mom, that one. That’s how she learnt that you are an L-E-S-B-I-A-N, just so you know.”
“Oh, I see,” says Julia, laughing, while we wait for the lift.
“Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is he?”
“As thick as yesterday’s soup, I’d say.”
When the lift’s door closes behind us she wraps me in a tight hug, and I know I found my place on Earth.
****
Nina
When I come home from work, on Monday evening, I walk up the hallway from the lift to my door with a smile on my face.
I will go in quick, have a shower, check if the pudding is still alive, change into something nice, and go over to Julia/n’s. It’s becoming our routine. We will cook together and then snuggle up on the sofa to watch a movie, before falling in bed to make love and sleep and make love again. I feel like I am floating. Maybe I am becoming a spirit of the air, like Julia.
As soon as I open the door of the flat, I realize something is afoot.
The TV is quiet. The whole flat is suspiciously quiet.
In the living room, among the confetti scatter of candy wrappers, three people are sitting side by side on the sofa. That the sofa has not collapsed is a testament to Scandinavian quality. Who would have thought that a cheap IKEA couch could take the weight of my mother and her two sisters all at once? I almost laugh, but there is something ominous in the air.
“Hi, Auntie Luisa. Hi, Auntie Valda? What news?”
“Hello, Nina. Siediti. Dobbiamo parlare.”
Sit, we need to talk.
Sure.
“Ah, well, that’s a bummer, because I have plans for the evening. Another time perhaps? But make yourself at home, by all means. There’s probably ice cream in the freezer. Probably. I wouldn’t swear to it.”
I walk right off to my room. When I open the door, I gasp. All the boxes and bags, and piles of glittering clothes are gone. There is nothing left. Nothing! Lizzie’s ghost has departed in a hurry, leaving nothing behind but dusty box-silhouettes on the carpet. That, and the black boots, safe as always in Julia’s flat.
Tears sting my eyes, and I push them back with the heels of my hands. This is not the time for tears.
“Mother?” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. For once the place is so quiet that a fly landing on a marshmallow would make a ruckus.
“I gave it all away. Uncle Giuseppe came with the car and took it all away.”
I walk back to the living room, slow and dark like a thundercloud.
“You did what?”
“It is no good, Nina. You are changing so much. And I don’t like it at all! You owe me some respect, and lately … well, I do not approve.”
“You have no right. I am thirty-two years old, and I will dress as I fucking please, is that clear?”
“Really, Nina, is that the way to talk to your mother?” puts in Valda. Unlike her sister, she dresses with a sort of painstaking, dull, provincial elegance. Her hair is dyed a weaselly reddish brown and done in fluffy curls. She wears a rope of leaden pearls around her neck.
“Of course you can dress as you please, Nina,” says Luisa. She is the “pretty” sister of the trio. Coquettish in baby blue and pink, with gold rings on her chubby fingers and hair like an angora cat. “There is no need for you to go around like a gang boy all the time. It’s really unseemly, in fact. I know there were some … misunderstandings in the past. Dirty laundry was washed in public that should not have been washed at all. I know things were difficult here, but … your father … he w
as not evil, Nina. He was a troubled man. There was no need to… But, anyway, there is no need to quarrel now. We will buy some nice things for you. I always wanted to. I would have done so much more for you if you had let me.”
I once had a present from Luisa, for Christmas, a viciously pink knitted thing with teardrop-shaped little holes all along the front and pink baby pearls knitted in every hole. I would not have used it as a dog bed, out of respect for the dog.
“I will get you something pretty, eh, Nina? Your cousin Rossana has so many clothes, she can never wear them all, you can have some of those, too. That is all right. But these friends of yours, all this black and sparkles… Una brava ragazza non si veste così, Nina, lo sai anche tu.”
“I don’t want Rossana’s clothes.” Hell, aside from anything else she’s four times as broad as I am, can’t you bloody see it? “I want my clothes back. You had no right.”
“Your mother is just worried about you, Nina. We hear such alarming things. These artistic friends of yours, buoni da niente, lo sai, and this new neighbor… She is a, un’invertita, Nina. A godless woman. Is it true that you are not coming home to sleep anymore? All the neighbors know! Think of your mother, Nina! Nina, you can’t possibly want to be a, a…”
I look at my mother. She knows what I told her, doesn’t she? Surely, she must remember that much? One unkind word about Julia, and she’ll never see me again?
“Be a what, pray?”
The aunts exchange a glance. They are wonderfully uncomfortable. It would be worth going through this ghastly charade just to see them fidgeting like that.
“A, well, an unnatural girl.”
“No, Auntie,” I whisper, soft as silk, sweet as licorice. “You have my word on that. I am not an unnatural girl. My girlfriend has a beautiful and perfectly functional cock and knows how to use it. All regular, see? Do you feel better now? Good. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have stuff to do.”
I leave them sitting on the sofa like three owls caught by a camera flash.
In my room there is so much space now, that it is just a matter of minutes to sort out my less disreputable working blues, a pajama and some smallclothes, and stuff them in a clean rubbish bag. It’s just fitting really. They have always been rubbish. The rest of my old clothes, big, baggy jeans, denim shirts thrice my size, sail-like t-shirts and sweaters you could camp under, I leave. They were never really mine. They were never really me. It takes two more bags to pack away my small library of myths, legends, and fantasy. My old battered laptop has its own bag. I drag my bags over my shoulder with an effort and stagger off to the front door.
Woman as a Foreign Language Page 11