by Miranda Mars
Sara's eyes twinkled and a half-smile crossed her mouth. “I think you better just shut up and count your blessings.”
God, you're right about that, Laura thought. She burrowed her face into Sara's warm neck, kissing it hungrily, digging her fingers into Sara's thick round buttocks at the same time through her jeans.
“Whoa . . . hold on there, buster,” Sara giggled, twisting her ass out of Laura's grip. “You're getting a little familiar there, aren't you?”
Laura slid her hands up under Sara's sweatshirt one more time, massaging Sara's naked back. “You can't blame me for trying,” she breathed into Sara's ear, feeling Sara's flesh clench tight as a quick shiver shot through her body.
“Laura, cut it out,” Sara gasped softly. “This is going too far.”
“Not far enough,” Laura panted, raising the sweatshirt up this time, pulling it quickly up to expose Sara's magnificent breasts.
The most startling thing was that Sara made no attempt to stop her. Laura had her face between the delicious mounds before Sara could do anything. She held them in her hands, rubbing Sara's large, soft nipples with her thumbs while she kissed the flat warm expanse of skin between them.
Now Sara squirmed away and pulled her sweatshirt down. “No. Step back. I work here, remember? What if somebody comes in?”
“You locked the door.”
“A few people have the key.”
Laura raise one hand and ran her fingertip along the curve of Sara's lips, clearly astonished--and showing it--that she had been able to kiss them again, even more than once. Sara could see her astonishment. Without warning, Laura's eyes overflowed with tears, which spilled down her cheeks and kept coming.
“I love you so much,” she choked, almost inaudibly.
Sara stared at her, saying nothing. Laura didn't wonder. The emotions in the room were too complex and intense for either of them to understand. Then Sara smiled her half-smile again. Laura was crying, but now Sara's eyes were dry.
“You're cuckoo,” Sara said, sympathetically. Then she came over closer again to Laura, brushing away Laura's tears very tenderly with one hand. “Don't do that. You make me feel sad.”
Laura smiled and sniffled. “Could I kiss you one last time?”
Sara pondered it, her dark eyes flecked with amusement. “You know,” she said, airily bemused, looking up theatrically at the ceiling. “I once had an affair with a supermodel. She looked a lot like you.”
Laura sniffled again. “And how was it?”
Sara winked at her. “It was heaven, if you want to know the truth.”
“Maybe it could be heaven again,” Laura whispered.
Sara shook her head. “I doubt it. Stratospheric, maybe. Heaven, no.”
Laura felt glum but thankful that she had finally stopped crying. She hated herself for being so pathetic. She was trying to puzzle out what Sara might be saying. Maybe she doesn't even know herself, she reasoned.
“Could we sit down over there?” Laura asked, being exhausted by all this wracking emotion. She indicated one of the small waiting room sofas with her head.
Sara shook hers. She again stared up at Laura, as if enjoying Laura's desolation at this refusal. I guess that means I have to leave, finally, Laura thought, feeling her heart drop to her feet.
But Sara now reached up with both hands and pulled Laura's mouth slowly down into hers. This time she kissed Laura, instead of the other way around, kissing her emotionally, searchingly, but with exquisite tenderness, holding Laura's cheeks firmly between her palms. No tongues, just moving, aching lips.
“I'm finished here,” she murmured into Laura's lips, her dark eyes still shiny with feeling. “Let's go to your place and talk.”
Oh god! Laura thought. She had never had a stroke but thought if she did, it would feel like this.
“Don't be mean,” she said softly, her eyes imploring Sara. Please say you mean it.
Sara crossed her eyes. She gave Laura one of her most devastating funny faces, a wildly loopy, dorky grimace. “I'm not being mean, cuckoo brain. I think I can still remember how to get there.”
“But all those files are still all over the desk in there.”
Sara made yet another funny face, not so hysterically amusing as the first one but still hilarious. This one involved scrunching up her nose and sticking out her tongue halfway. “There you go not counting your blessings again.”
“I could help you file them first.”
Sara took one of Laura's hands. “What do I have to do to get your attention, cuckoo brain? I can do them on Monday. C'mon.”
Laura, feeling a little relieved and a little confused, sparred back. “Stop calling me cuckoo brain,” she smiled.
Sara playfully poked her on the chin with a loosely balled up fist. “What do you prefer, Buttercup?”
Then she turned and went to switch off the lights and get her purse. Laura stood paralyzed, unable to believe this was happening, unable to figure out why it was happening. But she forced herself to relax and act natural when Sara returned.
“You parked in the garage down the street?” Sara asked. Laura nodded. “Good, then we can walk together.”
They walked the block to the parking garage in near silence. Sara's car was parked on the ground level, since she had arrived early, and she drove Laura to her car on the fourth level.
“See you in twenty minutes,” she smiled warmly as Laura got out.
“Sure you remember the way?” Laura asked.
Sara nodded. “I remember.”
Slowly, almost introspectively, Laura shut the passenger-side door and watched Sara drive off. I can't believe this is happening, she thought.
“I can't believe it . . . I still can't believe it . . .” she said over and over, as she started up her car.
And once she was at home, waiting for Sara to arrive, she began to think maybe she was right not to believe it. Fifteen minutes passed. Half an hour passed. Still no Sara.
Laura began to wonder if she had been taken in. That would be a way to get rid of me and get her revenge too, all in the same moment, she reflected. She could be sitting somewhere just laughing herself silly, imagining me here waiting for her, stewing, longing, crying.
Then the better half of her nature would reassert itself. Oh, you're just getting all worked up over nothing, she told herself. She got stuck in traffic. She had a flat tire. She took the long way. Anything could explain it. I'm being silly. Self-centered, selfish, adolescent.
But why is she coming over here? Laura still had not puzzled it out. It was not as if Sara had said, 'Okay, I was mad at you for a while, but now that's all over. Let's pop into bed and make up for lost time.' She had been sweet, even funny in her old way, but not exactly smoldering with love and sexual heat. And yet, she had been the one to suggest coming here. Here, where it was private. Here, where it was soundproof. Here, where they had shared the most intense moments of deep sexual love Laura could remember having.
And yet, she thought, if she really wanted to hurt me bad, that might be exactly what she would do: send me home, here, to sit and have exactly these thoughts.
After another fifteen minutes had passed, she was beside herself. She had not embarked on this challenge only to have everything dribble out into frustrated anguish and desolation. She had been determined to end it forever or start it up again, one or the other, with no gloomy in-between like she had been enduring over the past few weeks.
In a flash, she was out the door again and into her car, cautioning herself not to speed through the parking lots as she gritted her teeth and clutched the wheel, determined to chase Sara down and confront her again, this time probably not so apologetically. She sped down Twin Peaks Boulevard, even screeching to a halt at the stop sign at Seventh Avenue, her head still swimming with anger and rejection and pain and love all swirling together in the same confusing mix.
As she sat waiting for the traffic to clear, her frustration nearly reached a boil. The signals on Seventh were set s
o that cars from one direction always cleared just as cars from the other direction began coming. Sometimes you had to wait five minutes even to turn onto the street. While she was waiting, through the whirling soft-focus of her anger and fear she dimly realized that it was Sara's old dark green Nissan Sentra turning the corner right across from her and heading up the road in the direction from which Laura had just come.
“Oh shit!” she said, under her breath, to no one in particular. “It's her.”
By now there were two cars behind her, waiting too. Laura was a very law-abiding driver, and it was painful for her to immediately rip her car around in an illegal U-turn and leave a little rubber on the pavement too as she took off after Sara. I don't want her to get there and leave because I'm not there myself, she thought, desperately, crazily. At least Sara would wait a few minutes, part of her realized.
A few seconds later, she pulled up into her spot and saw Sara standing on the steps that led up to her door, waiting. She had a wry expression on her face.
“Was that you I saw waiting to turn down there at Seventh Avenue?” she asked Laura quizzically.
Laura blushed. She had controlled her embarrassment pretty well with Sara so far, but this was the last straw. “I . . . I thought maybe you weren't coming,” she confessed.
She brushed past Sara, deeply embarrassed, and climbed the steps, opening the front door. Sara followed her inside.
“I had to stop by the ATM for some money,” Sara said, softly. “There was a line.”
Laura threw her purse on the chair and turned, shutting the door behind Sara. She almost sighed aloud with relief and shame. “I was afraid you hated me. You were laughing somewhere, enjoying my humiliation.”
Sara tossed her purse onto the chair with Laura's. She grinned. “I'd kiss you again to make you feel better, but we already went through all that wet, sloppy stuff back at the office,” she said. “Why don't you make me a cup of tea and get it through your head that I'm not the kind of person who lies. Cuckoo brain.”
Laura swallowed and smiled nervously, feeling like a fool. “I would've died if you didn't come.”
Sara gave her a crosseyed moue. “Oh, they all say that.”
Laura smiled and tried not to wince inwardly. She could not help taking this both as a joke and as a reference to Evangelina Torres, although a moment's reflection made her realize that Sara didn't know she knew about Evangelina. To steady her nerves, she busied herself in the kitchen, making tea, putting shortbread cookies on a plate. They sat at her small dining table.
I can't act like I want to make love to her, Laura told herself. I do, but I can't act like it. I have to act like sex has nothing to do with it. And really, it doesn't. If she said she still loved me, I wouldn't care if we had sex or not. My heart would be so full I might just be too inert to get up anyway.
Still, her curiosity was killing her. She was dying to ask Sara why she had agreed to come here, even suggested it. Should I ask her now . . . or later, after whatever . . . is going to happen has happened?
“Do you think we can still be friends?” she said softly, tentatively, to Sara, before even considering what she was saying. You couldn't pre-plan every utterance.
Sara smiled warmly. “I don't think we'd be sitting here like this if we weren't.”
“I thought you would never speak to me again.”
Sara sipped her tea and looked out the window. “I thought about it.”
“What made you change your mind?”
Sara looked mysterious. She stirred her tea and ate a small cookie. Laura watched her mouth moving, her thick, sensual lips closing over the cookie, her pink tongue snaking around it. The whole thing was a deliciously sexy action to her.
“Shit happens,” Sara said, with crumbs on her chin, her eyes opaque and serious. “Isn't that what they say nowadays?” She saw Laura looking and brushed away the crumbs with the fingers of one hand. She shot a stare directly at Laura, a deep stare, deep into Laura's eyes. “I . . . have feelings too, you know.”
Laura did not dare ask what her feelings might be. Maybe they were better left unspoken for a while. Instead, she ran one hand across the table and drew curlicues on the back of Sara's hand with one finger.
“If you say you love me again, I'm going to scratch your eyes out,” Sara said, with a straight face.
“I can't wait,” Laura breathed. “I love you again.”
They both broke into uncontrollable laughter. Sara choked a little on her cookie, and Laura had to get up and go around the table to thump her on the back.
“You okay?” She leaned close. “You okay? Sara?”
Sara stopped coughing and looked up, her eyes watering. She nodded but still seemed unable to speak. However, Laura's face was so close to hers that she could not keep herself from covering Sara's mouth with hers and kissing her ravenously, much more heatedly than she had done in the dentist's office. She kissed her hungrily, tasting the cookie crumbs on her tongue, drinking Sara's mouth, and quickly thrilling as Sara started to kiss her back, having recovered from her brief choking fit.
This was a very awkward position, with Sara still seated at the table, and Laura half-crouched over her. Slowly, while still kissing her, Laura slid her hands under Sara's arms and pulled her up. Sara rose out of her chair almost eagerly, and as she got to her feet completely they were embracing in a feverish clutch.
“Oh god . . . I've died for this moment!” Laura panted, sucking Sara's full lips, digging her fingers again into Sara's ass.
This time Sara did not complain. “You talk too much,” she said, touching Laura's breasts through Laura's shirt and bra.
“I love you,” Laura panted.
“You talk too much,” Sara panted back as Laura slipped her hands under her sweatshirt again, as she had in the office, lifting it, pulling it up under Sara's chin, exposing her naked breasts. “I told you not to adore me.”
“I can't help it,” Laura gasped, filling her hands with these magnificent, warm, springy globes, kissing Sara's cheek and neck. “I do adore you. I can't help it.”
“Are you going just hold them like that, or are you going to do more?” Sara cracked, her face deadpan, looking down at her breasts in Laura's hands.
“I'm going to do everything to them,” Laura said, solemnly. “These are the most beautiful boobs in creation.”
At this instant she felt so close to Sara that she was sure she could almost read her mind. Looking in her eyes, she was nearly certain that Sara was about to ask her how Laura thought these breasts compared with her sister Dee Dee's. This would have been such a sheer, willful murder of their present mood that a shudder went through Laura. Her own eyes begged Sara not to do it, and Sara seemed to acquiesce, perhaps realizing the same thing.
“Are we going to do it in the kitchen, or do you have a bed?” Sara cracked again, her eyes now dancing with irony and mischief, not jealousy.
Laura did not move. Instead, she dropped her mouth slowly to one of Sara's breasts, running her tongue all over the large, dark, puffy areola, then flicking the center nub with the tip of her tongue. In the fairly bright kitchen light, Sara's nipples had taken on their dark burnt umber hue, and Laura could see the tiny bumps appear on Sara's soft areola as if the sensual sweep of her tongue had raised them.
Sara said nothing, but her breathing became audible and more rapid. Laura opened her mouth and sucked the large nipple into it all the way. She released Sara's other breast and now held this one cradled in both hands. She sucked Sara's thick, soft nipple until it became a little thicker and more rubbery, letting it out of her mouth to lick and stroke it with her tongue.
“Are you sure you want to go to bed with me?” she teased softly. “You might not get out alive. I've been dreaming of it so long.”
“Hhhhhhhhh!” Sara panted. “Hhhhh . . . hhhhhh!” She looked down at Laura's mouth and Laura's tongue dancing around her excited, wet nipple. “You better do the other one . . . it's getting jealous. Unhhhh!”
Laura could not suppress a few joyous giggles at this. It was so typically Sara, the same thing she had said many other times. It seemed, for the moment at least, to prove to her that they were together again in the old way, relaxed with each other, pulsing with love and physical hunger and sweet, humorous interaction.
“Let me do the other one in on the bed,” Laura whispered, raising her mouth again to Sara's, her eyes positively throbbing with love. “Where I can give it my full attention.”
Sara nodded. “I've been dreaming of it too, you know,” she said quietly, without a trace of irony.
Laura said nothing and pulled her by the hand down the hallway to the bedroom. She found herself closing the door behind them, something she had done almost routinely in the old days, in her old apartment, but never here. For some reason, she felt she wanted to sequester them completely, intimately, in this room, a completely sealed inner sanctum where they could merge in a reunion that could not be violated or defiled even by the dust particles and oxygen molecules outside of it. Sara noticed but did not even ask why Laura had done it.