Appetites

by Ily Goyanes

  Strong back muscles rippled enticingly as the woman pulled the muffin tin from the oven. As she rested the hot baked goods on the unused burners, her body moved to the beat in her mind. She began to adjust the bacon in the pan when Rowan cleared her throat.

  “Dios!” She jumped, swerving around to find the source of the sound.

  Rowan’s half grin grew wider when she spotted a flour smudge on her cheek. “You have to be the sexiest intruder I have ever seen. Do you make a habit of cooking for your, um...” Rowan’s brow furrowed, not sure how to characterize the somewhat surreal experience of waking to a mouth-watering butch playing house in her usually grey and depressing kitchen.

  The butch sighed and relaxed. “Good morning to you, too,” she responded with a rakish grin.

  “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. It’s not every morning that I wake up with a guest...having her way with my stove.”

  “How rude of me not to introduce myself before getting intimate with your kitchen. I’m Alise and you are Rowan.”

  “How did you know my name? I’m a little hazy about what happened last night, but I’m fairly certain I didn’t introduce myself.”

  Alise winked saucily, then chuckled, a lyrical sound. The richness of her happiness sparked pleasure deep in Rowan’s chest. She could not remember the last time she’d smiled. Her smile wilted into a frown, her melancholy returning, once again, with force.

  Alise turned around, scooping the bacon from the skillet to rest on the folded paper napkin before it burned. She buttered a steaming hot blueberry muffin and silently offered it to the Rowan. The brief flicker of a smile was followed by a throaty moan when melted butter and plump, baked blueberries mingled in Rowan’s mouth. Alise took a cleansing breath.

  “Much better,” Alise approved with a smile.

  Rowan devoured one muffin, then another. She had just tucked into her fourth piece of bacon when Alise’s laughter stopped her mid-chew. “What?” she asked while crunching her last bite.

  “It’s...well, I’m glad you are enjoying your meal.” Alise paused, as if afraid to speak what was really on her mind. Rowan guessed her thoughts and was grateful not to have to answer awkward questions about her life. She was a private person, and she was unhappy that Alise had seen her in a weakened state. That’s why she kept odd hours, to avoid the prying eyes of others. In a small town like Northampton, there weren’t a lot of secrets. The best she could do was to maintain her distance from the warm and well-meaning people in the area.

  Her doctoral program was set to start in a few weeks, and Rowan had arrived early to collect herself before meeting her colleagues. Now she had this sexy, compassionate witness to her pain. The food soured in her stomach and she turned away.

  “Querida, if you would like me to leave, please say so. I will not be hurt.”

  Rowan’s body tensed, but she was silent. She didn’t want her to go, but was not sure she could bear it if she stayed.

  Alise approached slowly, then wrapped her arms around Rowan. Rowan’s body accepted the comfort, but she did not turn around. “I will be at the collective in the early evenings this week. If you wish for my company, you can stop by or leave a note.” She held Rowan close and pressed a kiss between her shoulder blades, then released her.

  Rowan flinched at the loss of body heat and comfort, but she couldn’t bring herself to say goodbye. Tears stubbornly clung to her lashes, and she knew the slightest motion would send them rolling down her face. The gently closed door made her flinch, and the tears broke free and streamed down her face.

  She turned around to take in the cheerful chaos in the kitchen. She dipped a finger into the blueberry batter and smiled. She imagined her hand being playfully slapped by Alise for the transgression. Something in the air had changed; in a few short hours Rowan had changed. She expected the room to be cold, but Alise’s healing energy lingered, like a whisper of hope. She bit into a still-warm muffin, the dusting of cinnamon and brown sugar enhancing the rich flavor, and she moaned with unrestrained delight. Alise had given her an incredible

  gift—a taste of home.

  The Second First Time

  Ashton Peal

  Jess watches her wife undress for bed. Her wife. Even silently, the words still sound strange as she says them to herself. Kelly is her wife.

  Kelly moves as though no one is watching, which, Jess knows, is a rarity. Out on the streets, Kelly is wound too tight, and she either moves too slowly or springs into exaggerated and, frankly, unnecessary action. She hasn't learned to be herself, even after all this time.

  But here, in their bedroom, from the bed, Jess watches the unhindered flourishes of her wife's movements. The way her long fingers pluck and dive through the hanging silk and cotton and lace—all these new ways to cover herself that she half removes, then lets slide back. Those hands dart like birds among the eaves, landing on a sleek white negligee. It’s the first time Kelly has taken it from the hanger since she bought it months ago. Jess watches as Kelly rubs it between her fingers, savoring the soft moiré ripple of the satin.

  Kelly takes it all the way out of the closet and holds it up. Like a paper doll, the lingerie is superimposed over her base layer of sweatpants and her college baseball t-shirt. She turns to Jess.

  “What do you think?”

  Jess still doesn't quite know what she thinks. But she knows, more or less, what to say.

  “It looks great.”

  Kelly giggles, the high and girly pitch at odds with her frame, but the contrast does something still unexpected to Jess. The laugh pulls out a shiver, the good kind, slowly from her back and runs it up around the corona of her head, making her tingle. She can't help but smile.

  It's funny, Jess sometimes thinks, how in the beginning a few of her friends—now ex-friends—would joke that at least she and Kelly could share clothes. Funny, at least for the part that is funny, because Jess is maybe five-foot two on her tiptoes and a hundred pounds if she's full of anything other than regrets. She's the kind of thin that gets mistaken for frail, but the last few years with Kelly have put the lie to that. Kelly, on the other hand, has changed a lot—her face is thinner, her hair longer, her body curvier but in different places—but some things can't change that much. She's still closer to six-feet than she is to five, and the one time Jess accidentally put on one of Kelly's shirts thinking it was hers, Kelly happened to walk in and asked her where she got the new dress.

  That was a while ago, though. The shirtdress incident, she thinks, happened back when they still weren't undressing in front of one another. Not like now, Jess thinks, as Kelly nonchalantly drops her clothes in a heap on the floor. Jess sighs; some things apparently never change.

  But now Kelly stands, admiring her naked body in the full-length mirror, and Jess can't help but admire it, too. The long curve of her spine draws Jess's eye down from Kelly's still-broad—probably always-broad—shoulders, across her hips, past her firm ass and the slight gap between her muscular thighs. In the angle of the mirror, Jess watches herself watch her wife's hands slowly move across her pert breasts and then down her stomach, stopping at her waist. Kelly shivers and Jess unintentionally echoes it from the bed, simultaneously feeling her hands on Kelly and Kelly's hands on her. Her scalp tingles again, but the sensation expands and radiates across her skin like a pond, seeming to ripple towards her nipples and then pool between her legs.

  She watches as Kelly slips the garment over her head; as it swishes into place, the hem across the tops of her thighs, the poetry of Kelly's dressing reaches a caesura. The room is thick with silence. This is the moment, then.

  “Come to bed,” Jess says. “Kelly.”

  The name still feels strange in Jess's mouth and, not for the first time, she wonders if it would have been easier if she'd chosen a name like “Roberta,” something closer. But that thought is fleeting; some sort of link like that to the past would have had her always looking for the hints of her husband, preventing her from seeing her wife for who she is. B
ut if Jess is hypersensitive of her every intonation, Kelly doesn't seem to notice how it sticks to her tongue. Instead, she smiles at the sound of her name and drags her feet across the thick carpet to where Jess pats the empty side of the bed.

  Kelly sits on the edge of the bed, her negligee riding up, closer and closer to the space between her legs. She pulls at the edge a little, but it isn't much of an effort to cover herself. As she gazes over her shoulder, suddenly blushing a little, Jess recognizes that smile and the hungry eyes above it, that look that says that Kelly wants something but is too afraid to ask. It's a look Jess knows well and even now, her heart starts racing.

  This is how it was their other first time, too. Kelly suddenly big and shy, seemingly all limbs and nervous smiles. Jess the little conqueror, left to take control. She doesn't mind. In fact, as Jess climbs up to her knees on the bed and guides Kelly by her shoulders down onto the mattress, she is growing more and more comfortable with her control.

  So much of the recent past has been out of their control. People can't control how they're born any more than they can choose who they love. That doesn't make it easier, but it makes these tiny moments of agency worth holding on to.

  Jess lays Kelly down, arms and legs extended, like a patient etherized upon a table. Kelly closes her eyes, the faux-relaxation belied by the tautness of her muscles in her statuesque repose. In this privacy, in this stillness, Jess can finally begin her own examination of the woman she is married to.

  She starts with Kelly's extremities, the pale pink tips of her toes and ends of her fingers. Jess runs the tips of her fingers over Kelly's ankle, up her calf and past the scars on her knee. Old baseball injuries, the faint white lines accentuated by the deep tan of her legs, the ridges beneath Jess’s fingers are all a familiar groove. Kelly shivers under her touch as Jess lightly rakes the backs of her nails up Kelly's thighs, skipping over the still-covered stretch of her body, and then over her arms. Inch by inch, Jess retraces the path that Kelly traced across herself in the mirror, the caresses raising a sympathetic vibrato through Jess.

  Now, though, Jess goes higher. She traces Kelly's collarbone, the nape of her neck, feeling the curve of her wife's rounded cheekbone, the smoothed jaw. Her fingers linger beside Kelly's lips, red without makeup, flushed and pursed. Jess draws closer and can hear the air whistle through Kelly's nose as she inhales deeply. Her eyes twitch beneath closed lids as if straining to see where each sensation is rising up from within her body.

  This is how you wake a sleeping princess, Jess thinks. This how you find out if there is a happily ever after.

  And she plunges in with a kiss.

  They've kissed since the transition, of course, but not like this. Jess leans into the surprising softness of her wife's lips, feeling the heat through them. Eyes still closed, Kelly moves to reach for Jess, but Jess pushes her arms down. The tingling feeling returns, spreading across her body, but now resonating deep within Jess. She throws a leg over Kelly, straddling her and beginning to rock as she teases Kelly's tongue with her own.

  Jess's grinding borders on instinctual, an echo of their early days, but instead of the old hardness, there is a different but equally welcoming flexibility to her wife. She can feel her clit swell and beg for attention as she slides across the satin negligee. Kissing her way down Kelly's neck, Jess's motion pulls her down until she is rubbing herself against Kelly's firm thigh. Even this way, Jess finds, their bodies fit perfectly together.

  As she squeezes Kelly's leg between hers, Jess's lips brush down the neckline of the negligee and between Kelly's breasts. Her face prickles at the sensory memory of coarse chest hair, but the skin now is so soft and smooth, she can't help but want to bury her face against it. Pressed against Kelly's chest, however, she can still see the little follicles raised up in gooseflesh and, beneath the satin, Kelly's nipples are straining against the fabric.

  Jess slows the movement of her own hips as she reaches up and rubs one of Kelly's nipples through the fabric. In response, Kelly moans softly and twists beneath Jess, but neither pulls away. Repositioning herself, Jess begins to rub and pull at the nub through the fabric, feeling it slide against and around the engorged skin. With her other hand, she begins to caress her own breast, then she pinches and pulls, the play of both hands mirroring one another. With each tweak and sensation that rings through her own body, she can feel the same reverberate through Kelly. Kelly's legs twitch against Jess's thrumming clit as they share the ecstatic movements.

  So enraptured is Jess with the work of her fingers across her wife's breast and how they are amplified in Kelly's arching body that itself arcs through her, that it is almost like Jess is watching from a distance as someone else slides away the negligee's strap and exposes Kelly's breast. The heat of the skin-to-skin contact brings her back.

  Jess leans in close to Kelly's swollen nipple, examining its new firmness. Before her transition, Kelly would have hated this, but now every movement of her body seems to beg for more, even if her still-closed eyes show that she can't bring herself to ask for it. But Jess is curious now: what else does Kelly like now? What else does Jess like now?

  Almost like a whisper, Jess flicks her tongue across Kelly's nipple and Kelly gasps in awe. The salt of her skin is intoxicating, and Jess tries again, but with a longer stroke. Kelly moans under the attention and, given encouragement, Jess finds that Kelly is dripping off her tongue now. She swirls around the areola, then teases the tip, then sucks on it. The way Kelly bows her back into it, Jess can tell she’s drinking her up.

  She lets go and slides back down into position, rocking against her wife's thigh, feeling the pressure build inside her. Kelly's thigh is soaked now from Jess's gyrations and the smooth but fit legs offer a pleasure that they never could before Kelly started shaving them. Jess's hand slips down between her own legs to her clit, and she begins to rub it. She stares up and down the panting, burning body of her beautiful wife.

  And then Jess stops rubbing herself. She stops in mid-thrust.

  She could do this, come on her wife. That might even be a successful first step in rebuilding—no, building—their life together as wives. God knows that she'd been aching for release, this orgasmic release, for months. Maybe even years.

  But what about Kelly? How long must she have been waiting for the same thing, only to have it be so desperately out of reach? All her life she had been waiting, never knowing if she could have the life, the body, the love that she wanted and deserved.

  The half-smile on her face, trying to hide those starving eyes, is the same look she'd had for months, maybe even years, before the night she was finally able to tell Jess who she really was.

  Jess has always been the little one, but never the weak one. She wants to do this for Kelly, not out of pity or duty, but out of love and, yes, she is even surprised to find herself thinking it, out of lust. Her wife is hot, and she wants to make her come.

  Taking the edge of Kelly's negligee, Jess slowly pulls it up to reveal her wife's bare crotch. The exposure makes Kelly shiver and her legs begin to close, but Jess's knees are between Kelly's knees, so she gently pushes back. Kelly's relaxes, but only slightly. Jess gets closer, closer than she's been to Kelly's most intimate spot in a long time, and, for the first time, sees her wife's vagina up close.

  Vagina, she thinks as she brushes the labia and feels Kelly tremble beneath the touch, is such a clinical term. And, true, in another frame of mind she might pause to admire the surgical craftsmanship. But she can feel the lips swelling, and, as she gently spreads them, Jess finds Kelly's clit seeming to glow with built up desire. In another frame of mind, Jess might stop to think that if she had never known otherwise, she'd have no reason to think Kelly hadn't been born with it. But as she slips a finger inside, just the tip, she is surprised to find that Kelly is also wet.

  And instead of dwelling on changes and the past, Jess looks up and sees her wife peering down at her. That look again in her eyes, wanting to tell Jess something, wanting to ask
for something, but unable to bring herself to do it. Trembling under the unnecessary restraint and fear of asking, finally, for the release she deserves, Kelly is positively trapped in her own body.

  She's a cursed princess, Jess thinks, frozen in a glass coffin. As Jess looks down at the swollen new clit and glistening slit, she’s sure the only way to wake a princess is with a kiss.

  And a lot of tongue.

  And some fingers.

  ***

  Kelly's breath comes in shallow, rapid movements. Never-before used muscles between her hips tremble underneath Jess's head resting against her lap. As Jess raises herself up, she smiles to see that Kelly's pursed lips are now slack and half-open. Her eyes are sated, finally full of the nourishment she wasn't quite sure existed.

  From where Kelly lies, sprawled out in a new kind of repose, she half raises her arms to Jess. It's an old and comforting invitation from back after the first time they made love as boyfriend and girlfriend, offering Jess a place within those arms. Jess feels a different kind of warmth as she looks down.

  But then she gently pushes those arms down, rolling Kelly over onto her side. And Jess crawls up behind her, taking the outside position and wrapping her small body around her wife. She buries her face against Kelly's back and feels the soft rise and fall of her stomach, the slowing beat of her heart.

  If she could, Jess would lie like this forever, protecting the woman she loves.

  When Kelly first came out, Jess's friends—trying but failing to be supportive—would tell her that she was losing a husband, but gaining a wife. But Jess has never really seen it that way.

  She never lost anything. It's all right here in her arms.

  Kicking The Habit

  Jillian Boyd

  Everyone’s had that one ex in their lives. That one person where when you look back on your time with them, you just shake your head, going “what the hell was I thinking?” before you go on with whatever it is you’re doing at that moment, content at your now heartbreak-free life.