She finished letting her other arm out of the flannel. Then took its sleeves and wrapped them around her waist, tying them in a knot. Janet watched as she pulled the knot tight, tighter, then let it go. The sleeves falling down in a ribbon over her crotch. She looked up to Wendy’s face. Wendy was smirking. Something smug in it; arrogant. Like she’d known Janet would watch.
“You know, when I was a little girl, I used to be afraid that if my leg wasn’t covered by my bedsheet, that a monster would get me.” Wendy looked down at the bed.
Janet’s right foot poked out from under the bedsheet. The nails still red from her pedicure, almost black in the moonlight.
“Were you afraid of that?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Did you stop believing in the monster? Or stop being afraid of it?”
“I got a bigger bed.”
“I’ve noticed.” Wendy’s hand dangled down.
Her touch light, when it brushed against Janet’s ankle through the sheet, but still unbearably tangible. Janet’s mind ran away from her, tried to remember the last time she’d been touched. Just…touched.
“Should I cover you up?” Wendy asked. “Or…”
She pulled at the bedsheet. Its hem dwindled down the slopes of Janet’s breasts, the contact as sweet and achingly teasing as Wendy’s fingers had been.
Wendy stopped. Only teasing. She was careful to set the sheet down behind Janet’s foot. Leaving it exposed. “I don’t think the cops are coming,” Wendy said. “I don’t think I tripped any alarms.”
Janet breathed. It was hard.
“Do you even have any alarms? Or did you just have another woman to keep you company?”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Janet said. Her voice shook. Gasped.
“No, you’re not. You’re afraid of you.” Wendy’s body lowered. She crouched. She got down on her knees. “You’re afraid of how this will feel.”
You bitch, Janet thought. You bitch, don’t say that. Don’t put that into words. Don’t let it be true.
Wendy’s hands reached forward. They delved under the sheet to either side of Janet’s foot. They touched her calf. Then they pulled back. Fingers dragging down the skin of her legs. No, not fingers. Not even fingertips. Fingernails. Short. So damn short.
Then Wendy’s fingers on the bony protuberance of her ankle, the hardness of her heel. Pressure, pointed pressure, thumbs pressing into the bottom of her feet. Almost ticklish, mostly not. Mostly something else. Fingers wrapped around the tops of her feet, thumbs on the soles. Pressing, but not hard enough. Touching, but not lightly enough. Janet felt it. Nothing else. She just—felt it.
She was acutely aware of her foot, of all things, of the slight ache from a day in her fuck-me heels, or her don’t-fuck-with-me heels. Roberta had liked to call them that. Roberta wasn’t there.
Janet’s mouth lapsed open. She didn’t gasp. She wouldn’t.
Thumbs, tracing down the arches of her feet, moving their pressure across them. More ticklish. Janet tried to jerk away on instinct, but Wendy had a good hold. An insistent hold. Not too tight that Janet couldn’t slip away, but…
Squeezing. Her palms now. A gentle pressure, a soothing one. She could feel Wendy’s fingertips pressing in. The whorls of her fingerprints. The bones providing force. Hands moving up and down, the pressure firm, dwindling on the downstroke, pressing just a little harder on the upstroke.
Janet’s lips pinched inward. Tried to come together. She held her mouth open, though. Not because she wanted it to be, but because it already was, and she didn’t want to react. Not to such a minor thing. Not to just being touched a little. Not to the look Wendy was giving her, darkly hooded eyes, smug smirk saying she’d known how much Janet would like it. Janet’s eyelids tried to flutter shut under that stare. She kept them open.
Wendy leaned forward. Her breath was warm on Janet’s toes and the room was cold. Her lips were soft, a trickle of air, and they touched where Janet hadn’t known she was sensitive. She could’ve kicked. She could’ve pulled her foot away. She was holding still for Wendy. She was wanting this.
“You can touch yourself,” Wendy said, “while I do this. Or do you need the vibrator?”
Janet’s lips were still parted. She could feel her breath flowing through them.
“Or do you need me?”
“I…I…I could have you fired,” Janet managed.
“You don’t have to threaten me,” Wendy said innocently. “I was going to do it anyway.” She stood up, again.
Janet’s body tensed with need, her eyes screwed shut, and when she forced them open, Wendy stood over her. At her bedside. Out of the way of the moonlight. The shirt was a white shadow on her body, her jeans a shadow on a shadow. She took them off. Slid them down her thighs, then raised one leg, then the next. Her boxers an interruption of her legs. She stooped again. In the new darkness, there was no new shadow, no white glow. Just her. Something sweet-smelling, the flannel covering her. Almost. Maybe. Not quite.
“You tasted good,” Wendy said. “Just now. Does all of you taste that good? It has to taste better, right? Than your foot? Because even with that pedicure—it’s still a foot.”
Janet didn’t know what to say.
Wendy reached out. Took her glasses, took them off, set them down nearby. “You don’t need to see right now,” Wendy said. “You just need to feel.”
She sat down on the bed. Her flank in the light, on display, smooth, clear skin that looked like it would be perfect to the touch. As creamy and as liquid as the light itself. And behind that firm thigh, before the other one—she smelled so good. No perfume, no fragrance, just her.
“You’re not very talkative now,” Wendy said. “Nothing much to say?”
“Your ass is on my mattress,” Janet replied. “I hope you haven’t used any public toilets lately.”
Wendy laughed. She moved her leg up onto the mattress, then her other one, and then she was lying down beside Janet. Just lying there, her hands behind her head, as if they were any other couple. As if they were a couple.
Janet’s foot brushed against Wendy’s. The breath rasped down her throat.
“I know you’ve wondered what it would be like,” Wendy said.
“With you?”
“With a woman.”
“I was married.”
“You forgot,” Wendy retorted. “Maybe you remember what Roberta was like, and maybe you remember what you were like with her. But you don’t remember being a dyke. You don’t remember women. I can tell you, Ms. Lace. I’ve been with women. I’ve fucked them. They’ve fucked me. I can tell you how it feels to have a woman’s head between your legs, soft hair on your thighs, kissing you so good you try to squeeze your legs together just so you can breathe, but she holds you open and shows you how much more there is for you to feel. I can tell you how it feels when a finger just isn’t enough, when her pussy clenches and tells you she needs more, just one more finger, just one more, until she’s taken all four and she’s thanking God that she’s gay. I can tell you how a woman tastes, Ms. Lace. I can tell you how I taste—when she’s done worshipping me with her tongue—when she comes up for air and kisses me just to thank me for spreading my legs. I can tell you how I taste after I come in a woman’s mouth. Would you like to know that, Ms. Lace? Would you like to see how soft and smooth and gentle a woman can be…until she stops being gentle? Have you ever wondered how hard softness can be?”
Janet could feel how wet she was. She couldn’t remember the last time she was so ready that she needed it, but God, she remembered it felt like this. “What would I have to do?”
“Turn over,” Wendy said. “I want to see your nightie.”
Janet rolled over. The sheet rolled with her, bunched and bundled beneath her, and above her, the air had such a firm touch that she could feel every stitch she wasn’t wearing. Feel Wendy’s eyes on every inch of her.
She was being fucked before Wendy ever touched her.
“That doesn’t look
like a nightie,” Wendy said. “Have you been lying to me, Ms. Lace?”
Janet’s buttocks quivered, exposed, so damn visible. God, when was Wendy going to touch her? She knew it’d be any minute… “It was,” Janet said, “a bluff.”
“Lying’s a very naughty thing, Ms. Lace. Not as naughty as what you do at your desk, of course. After you’ve watched me. When you’re thinking about me.”
Janet could feel the bedspread shift, the eddies and currents of its fabric being pulled minutely by new pressure. Wendy’s hand between Janet’s legs now. Not touching her, touching the mattress beneath her.
“You open your legs so wide…” Janet could hear Wendy’s fingers slide along the bedspread as they moved upward. “Then you close them, nice and tight. Clench them up.” She felt the sides of Wendy’s hand brush against one leg, the backs of her fingers tingle along the other. “Are you doing that for me, Ms. Lace? Are you thinking one day I’ll be there?” The hardness of Wendy’s knuckles along her thigh… “Well, I’m here, Ms. Lace. I’m right here.”
Wendy’s hand sliding under her body—sliding along her…
“I can feel the heat coming off you. God, tell me what it’s like to finger-fuck yourself with that cunt of yours. Feeling the heat all around your fingers, running down your thighs…”
“Touch me…” Janet breathed into her pillow. The heat of her gasp burned against her own face. “I want you to touch me.”
And suddenly Wendy had mounted her, thrown a leg over her prone body and straddled her, body pressed down atop Janet’s back, flesh against her flesh, the sparse hair of her pussy tingling on the curve of Janet’s ass. Now Janet gasped. Now she heard herself.
“Is that what I want?” Wendy asked, her voice, her breath right in Janet’s ear. “To touch you? Because I think I want to fuck you. And not on your terms, on my terms. I wanna fuck you so hard, and so fast, and so good that you almost wanna beg me to stop, but you can’t. You can’t speak, you can’t even breathe almost, all you can do is come. Like I want you to come. And when I’ve had enough—when I’ve fucked you so hard you can’t even remember your name—I want you to thank me. Because you’ll still remember my name. And you’ll be so damn grateful I made you my bitch. Now say it. Say it, Lace. ‘I want to be fucked.’”
Janet burned. She clenched. Her pussy was on fire and she tried to put it out by rubbing against the mattress, squirming against it like a bitch in heat, but that didn’t help. Wasn’t what she needed. She needed it to burn hotter. She needed to explode.
“‘I want to be fucked,’” Wendy repeated. “‘I want to be fucked.’ ‘I want to be fucked.’ ‘I want to be fucked.’”
Janet’s eyes fluttered, her jaw clenched, her fingers gripping the bedspread tightly, gripping it until it pulled free of the mattress pad.
Wendy kept repeating herself, chanting like some orgiastic cultist, and Janet could feel her mouth forming the words, could feel their echoes beginning in the back of her throat. She just had to say it. No, she just had to admit it.
Then she looked up and saw Gal Gadot by her bed.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, as if she weren’t the meat in a bottomless-woman-and-bed sandwich.
“I’m in everything these days,” Gal Gadot said.
“Yeah, you do show up a lot. You must have a really good agent.”
“Thank you,” Gal Gadot said, and then Janet pointedly woke up, turning over the words ‘I want to be fucked’ in her mind like it was a foreign phrase she was trying to learn.
CHAPTER 5
“The problem with posting your cooking on Instagram,” Wendy said as she swept through the door, “is that I know when you’ve made snickerdoodles. Fork ‘em over, sis.”
Regan sighed and plucked at her apron, as she led Wendy to a towel-covered plate in her kitchen. “You know, it would bother a lot of women that they have the same palate as my second-grader.”
In the kitchen, Wendy hopped up on the counter and graciously took a snickerdoodle from the plate, before Regan equally graciously moved it away from her.
“Are you shitting me? Kids know where it’s at. They eat Reese’s Puffs, we eat Oat Bran. No wonder they think they’re in charge.” Having said her piece, Wendy bit into the snickerdoodle. She moaned approvingly.
Regan leaned against the kitchen island across from her. “So?”
“So what?”
“How’s your workplace romance?” Regan demanded, arms crossed. “C’mon, Mac and Keith are at the movies, this is the perfect time to dish.”
“There’s nothing to dish.” Wendy spoke through an angry bite. “I ‘misinterpreted the relationship.’”
“Oh,” Regan said. She handed Wendy another snickerdoodle. “So, she’s straight?”
Wendy ate with small nibbles. “Married.”
“To a woman?”
“Like it matters,” Wendy growled.
“I’m just saying, you can’t give up that easily.”
“She’s married.”
“But not everyone is,” Regan insisted. “You just have to keep putting yourself out there. I’m really proud of you, trying to get something going there, and maybe it didn’t work this time, but next time—”
“Next time, I get to go to a sexual harassment seminar.” Wendy hopped down from the counter. “Let’s face it, Regan, you don’t have the most unbiased opinion of the dating game.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Regan, you have the perfect husband, okay? He looks like he’s captain of a starship. Crewed by a ragtag bunch of misfits, always trying to stay one step ahead of the oppressive Universal Imperium and their psychic enforcers—”
“Not that this doesn’t sound interesting, but what’s your point?”
Wendy threw her hands out. “There’s not someone like that out there for me! There’s no perfect girl that I’ll get if—” Wendy sardonically pumped her arm. “I just keep at it! You got lucky.”
“And you can’t?”
“Correction,” Wendy said, “you got lucky and you were born with the grace and charm of a Disney princess. I’m a hot mess with the social graces of a Michael Bay movie. So if there is some perfect person out there, they’re gonna have to really be into, like, sarcasm and bad dancing.”
“It’s not like Keith and I are made for each other, you know,” Regan countered. “There are plenty of things we don’t have in common.”
Wendy indulged in the kind of sour face she knew Regan hated. “Name one.”
“He likes his orange juice to have high pulp, and I of course prefer it pulp free…”
Wendy raised her hands to her face. “Oh my God, your marriage is doomed.”
“There’s no call to be snide. And my point is, maybe your person won’t seem right for you, but if you’re willing to work at it…”
Wendy hung her head. “Even my sister, who thinks I’m going to find my one true love on Tinder, says I’m going to have to work at it.”
“What do you expect?”
“I would settle for maybe a quarter of what you have,” Wendy said, bringing up her hand with the thumb and forefinger held an inch apart. “I’m not asking for, like… Okay, I assume you don’t want to know my idea of a fantasy girlfriend.”
“Would it cause me to lose respect for you?”
“You have respect for me?”
“Would this fantasy girlfriend own any particular kind of costume?”
“No, not exactly. See, she would actually work as—”
Regan held up a hand. “I’m good. I’m fine.”
“Right. So I’m not looking for a whole list of Wendy-candy. I would just like someone who would take care of me the same way Keith takes care of you.”
“I take care of him too, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah. Cookie me.”
Regan tossed her another snickerdoodle.
“Like I said, not going to happen, so I might as well plan on dying alone.” Wendy moved to take a bite, then
paused with the snickerdoodle in her face. “Hey, are there any foods you should avoid so that if you die alone and your cats eat you, they won’t get sick? I would hate to poison orphaned cats with my bloated corpse.”
“Is this your subtle way of wanting to be hugged and having someone pet your hair?”
Wendy pouted. “Yeah. Ya mind?”
“No, not at all.” Regan went over to hug Wendy, who cuddled her right back. “Mac’s getting too big to lavish affection on. You’ll do until we get a dog.”
“You’re going to get a dog? Oh my God, can I move in?”
The sick thing is, Wendy thought, Regan would lurve if I put as much effort into my life as I do into my work. She’d just checked the clock and three hours had passed since she started on her e-mail of recommendations for Project Hawkowl Revision A114. No Facebook. No Twitter. Just cross-checking and correlation. If she could just get lesbians to send in notes on their aerodynamics, she would be married by now.
She was about to rectify the ‘not checking Twitter’ thing when Elizabeth Smile cleared her throat. Wendy hadn’t even noticed the secretary in her doorway, and that was saying something. Maybe she was turning straight and that’s why her dating life was going so bad. Now if she could just reverse-engineer the process and find a way to train it on Emily Blunt.
“Lace wants to see you,” Elizabeth said, without preamble, and turned on her heel without explanation. Her skirt was just long enough for the sway of her hips to be in perfect pendulum counterpoint to the fringe of her hem, her stockings hard-pressed to stretch all the way down her endless legs.
Not that Wendy was in any mood to notice, not after hearing those five words. The boss-lady wanted to see her. Her boss-lady? Was she getting fired? Promoted? Janet Lace was so saturnine it could go either way. She reminded Wendy of a cat. You never knew if you were going to get to pet the kitty or if you were going to get your hand bitten.
Pet the kitty, Jesus, Cedar! Wendy thought to herself as she rose, gathering a few of her things and doing a quick spot-check of her appearance. She dusted some crumbs from lunch at her desk away from her slacks, tucked in her blouse again, tightened her belt one notch over complaints from her spine. Her hair was still in the updo she’d put it in that morning, barely, and when she powered down her monitor screen, her reflection’s makeup looked presentable.
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