Best Sex Writing 2012

by Rachel Bussel

  Most supporters of anti–sex offender policies don’t have minor prostitutes, let alone the average sexually active teen, in mind. Many are simply shell-shocked by horrific tales of child molesters and are terrified that a predator may strike at random. Cases like those of Jaycee Lee Dugard (kidnapped at 11 and kept captive for 18 years by a known sex offender), Elizabeth Smart (abducted at 14 and sexually assaulted by a religious fanatic over a period of many months), and Shawn Hornbeck (snatched from his bicycle at 11, also by a sexual predator, and held for five years before escaping) are so horrifying that many people simply want to pass laws allowing us to just lock up the perpetrators and throw away the keys. But while such cases are gruesome, they really aren’t common. This is hard to remember when the news media, politicians, and TV shows like America’s Most Wanted (just ending a 23-year run) and To Catch a Predator (recently returning after a three-year hiatus) make it seem as if there is danger lurking around every corner. Add to this the fact that no criminals are more vilified than are sex offenders, and you can see how easy it has become to target anyone—no matter how young—who is involved in any behavior identified as a sex crime. This is true even if the illegality of the crime in question is, well, questionable.

  It’s not that real sex offenders don’t exist, or that teens can’t commit brutal sex crimes. But the way our legal system treats sex does little to address the real risks. In reality, the majority of sex crimes against children are committed by an adult who is known to the child. The US Department of Justice reports that 73 percent of rape victims know their assailants. For victims under 18, that number rises to an astonishing 93 percent. Additionally, a 2009 study conducted by the National Institute of Justice and Rutgers University found that the ever increasing laws requiring sex offender registration, residency restrictions, and mandatory minimum sentencing for sex crimes have not made a difference in preventing sex crimes against children. These crimes, if New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center is to be believed, are actually decreasing. This think tank discovered that between 1993 and 2005, the rate of reported child sexual abuse fell 40 percent.

  But studies like these are ignored by terrified community members and by lawmakers who want to look tough on crime. So, rather than fighting to revamp the system, many people argue for more and more regulations. When these pass, the pool of those affected increases, and legislation designed with hardened criminals in mind gets applied to teens whose activities are significantly less threatening. To complicate matters further, state sex offender laws can trump juvenile offender laws (which generally result in milder penalties, shorter sentences, and sealed records). Moreover, our constitutional guarantee of states’ rights has resulted in numerous situations where a sexually active teen may be doing something that is legal in one part of the country but criminal in another. It is little wonder, then, that minors have found themselves sitting in jail, or saddled with lifetime sexual offender status, for behaviors they honestly didn’t know were crimes.

  Think about it in this way: if we assume that kids are too immature to consent to have sex or to view pornography, then how can we possibly turn around and say those same kids have to be held to adult standards when they post a naked picture of themselves online or have sex with a slightly younger peer? Yet in many cases that is exactly what our legal system does. Hypocrisy about teens and sex is nothing new. Continuing to legislate contradictions into law without batting an eye is something else.

  Love Grenade

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  When I first met Hannah in graduate school I was a woman gone numb. I would do anything. Anytime. Anywhere.

  Hannah was one of those lesbians who looks like a beautiful boy—hazel eyes, that cool short curtain of hair hanging over one eye, broad shoulders, little hips, barely-there titties. More like M&M’s. Hannah played basketball and softball and soccer when she wasn’t being a Eugene lesbo and English grad student. She used to wait for me by my blue Toyota pickup truck between classes and hijack me and drive me to the coast, where we’d stay up all night getting it on in the back of my truck, drinking Heinekens and waiting for the sun to come up. Then we’d drive back and go to class. Or I would—Hannah thought grad school was kind of lame. She much preferred sex and club dancing.

  So when Hannah captured me and my best friend, Chloe, in the hall after our 18th-Century Women Writers seminar, grabbing our wrists and pulling us toward the wall, I already knew it would be something sly. She smiled her sly Hannah smile and whispered, “Wanna go to the coast? I got us a room.”

  Chloe blinked so blankly her eyes looked like a doll’s, and I think I coughed academically. But I have to admit it—my crotch went messy pretty much that instant.

  Chloe said something about not having enough money or time, and anyway didn’t we have seminar papers due?—to which Hannah said, patting Chloe’s head like a puppy dog, “Don’t worry, I already bought us the weekend, complete with a kitchenette ,” making Chloe smile as if she’d just eaten chocolate. I said something equally lame-ass, like I have to see what’s up with my boyfriend (I have to see what’s up with my boyfriend?), to which Hannah replied, “Really? Is he your dad?” and reached underneath the waist of my jeans with her thumbs. Hannah picked at something on the front of my shirt until I looked down like a 12-year-old fucktard and she tweaked my nose, laughing a little Hannah laugh, and then somehow we were on our way to Albertson’s to load up the back with beer and wine and food.

  We cleaned out my monthly food stamps buying Gruyère cheese and pickled herring and smoked salmon and those cool not-American chocolate bars with fruit ooze in the center and baguettes, the checkout lady scowling at us like somebody’s mother. And, me being me, we also scored three great filet mignon steaks I stuffed in my pants. To try and recover some semblance of coolness.

  Listen, you probably think you wouldn’t, but I’m telling you, if Hannah said get in my truck we’re going to the coast, raising her little trickster eyebrow and putting her hand right underneath your breast and against your first couple of ribs, going, I dare you, you’d go.

  So there we were, crammed three-way up front in a pickup truck, beers at our ankles, Hannah at the wheel, Chloe in the middle looking a little like our kid, and me with my mane of blond out the window yelling wooooooo-hooooo. Chloe kept squirming between us. I mean, she was talking like normal and laughing like normal but her eyes had little electrical sparks in the corners. I kept looking at her but she kept looking away, or into the rearview.

  About Chloe. We met each other in a Women’s Studies class and hit it off right away. She was smart as a whip but not kiss-assy women’s studies smart—her questions always burrowed underneath the obvious and her seminar papers were more thoughtful than mine. A lot. Not only were her eyes the deepest chocolate you’ve ever seen, but her tits were the roundest and fullest, most beautiful tits I’ve ever seen. When I first met her I assumed she was a dyke, mostly because she didn’t have a boyfriend and her hair was cut in a boy haircut and she knew so much about women writers. Also, after about a year we shared a graduate teaching fellow office together and sucked some quite serious face. So we were definitely headed for—something.

  That’s a lie. I mean, it’s not a lie—it’s just that I’m telling it as if what was best about her was her hotness. I wish I could go back and tell her how intelligent and beautiful she was. I wish I had been able to understand the two best things about her—that she was loving, and that she was kind. But you don’t get to go back and tap yourself on the shoulder and go, Hey, fucktard. There’s something big here. I was busy dramatizing my sexuality.

  In the truck with Hannah we were headed for the See Vue Inn. If you’ve never been, you are missing a lez secret hideaway. It’s located on a bluff above a beach full of agates, fossils, and tide pools. Whales migrate within view and sea lions play in the surf. Elk, eagles, and deer are frequent visitors. But that’s not why women go.

  Women go because of the themed rooms. The Secret Gard
en Suite (private garden). The Crow’s Nest (nautical). The Salish (Native American). Princess and the Pea (weirdly medieval). Mountain Shores (rustica). Far Out West (cowgirl). The Cottage (you get the “house” to yourself).

  We had The Cottage.

  But halfway there Chloe had to pee, so we stopped at a ratty little gas station in the coast range between Eugene and Florence. Peeing women trigger other women’s bladders, so I went into the bathroom with Chloe. Those gas station bathrooms are squalid dumpholes that smell like someone shit air freshener. The floors always have weird black slime on them, the sinks are always stained with something that looks a little like a serial killing, and more often than not the toilet is backed up with either toilet paper or, well, you know. Miraculously, our toilet was not backed up. I tried to break open the crappy machine with the tiny sex toys in it like French Ticklers—no doubt installed for truckers—while Chloe peed.

  When it was my turn, as I peed, I looked up and asked her, “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Then why are you scratching your mole?” I wiped up and flushed, looking back to see if the water was going down or coming back up at me.

  Chloe went to look in the mirror—the glass made her face look kind of Special Olympics. She messed with her hair, pushing her bangs one way, then the other. Her face started to go red.

  “Um, are you sure you are okay?” I asked.

  When she turned around her eyebrows were knitting across her forehead. Then she blurted out, “NO. I am NOT okay. Okay?” Her voice had a tinge of I’m a grown woman trying not to cry in it.

  I sat back down on the toilet, which was making a high-pitched water-pipe screeching sound. “What’s up?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes. She took a breath and held it in. I hate to say it, but she kind of looked like a Muppet there for a second. I said her name out loud. Then she spilled it.

  “I’ve never licked pussy.”

  “What?” I said, as if I’d gone deaf.

  I sat there staring at her. I looked at the ceiling, the floor with the black slime, then back at her. Was she nervous about having sex with women? It suddenly occurred to me that this was not something I ever thought about. And the reason I didn’t think about distinctions such as this is that I was using my body as a sexual battering ram. On anyone and anything available. In fact, you might say I sexualized my entire existence at that point. It seemed to work a lot like alcohol and drugs. If you did it enough, you didn’t have to think or feel anything but mmmm, good.

  I looked at Chloe more playfully. “I thought that’s what graduate school was for? I thought that’s why we took Women’s Studies? I thought all women did women in grad school so they could say I did a woman in grad school? ” I laughed. I was kidding but kind of not.

  “Shut up!” she spurted at me from her corner of the shithole. “It’s not funny! I feel sick to my stomach!”

  This threw me. “Like you’re gonna barf? But why?”

  She turned around in a circle or two, scratching her mole vigorously. “I just…”

  “You just what?”

  “I’m just afraid I’m going to—you know, like, gag or something.”

  “You’re afraid you are going to gag? ” I started laughing. I couldn’t help it.

  “Shut the fuck up!” She stomped her foot and made fists. I swear.

  “Look,” I said. “Calm the fuck down. I’m no bona fide lesbian—” This was indeed true. In Eugene at that time, anyway, if you were with women but you also, dang it, still liked the poke, you couldn’t really be a card-carrying member. “—but I’ve been getting it on with women since I was fourteen and, you know, there’s … there’s lots of stuff to do.”

  She considered this.

  Then I said, “Besides, even if you did gag, gagging could be, you know, sorta cool, too, couldn’t it?” I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing again. She began to swear at me and kind of fake-slap my head, so I reached over and grabbed at her pants. “I’m going to do you right now, you coy little minx,” I yelled, unbuttoning her pants and pulling them down. “Jesus. Your underwear is pink. People still wear pink underwear?”

  But instead of laughing or swearing at me, she just stood there with her pants down. I looked at her. She looked at me. Then I said, “Do you want me to? I mean, for real?” She shook her head up and down. She closed her eyes.

  Women all taste different. Her taste I’d say was a cross between kelp and heavy cream, plus a little hint of pee on the palate since we’d just peed. She smelled like hay and skin lotion. Partway through my lip smacking she said, “Okay. Stop. Let me try you.”

  I said, “Okay, but did that feel okay?” She laughed. I took that as a yes. Secretly I was glad she wanted to switch because my knees on that nasty floor grossed me out. I dropped my pants. She stared at me. I wasn’t wearing underwear at all. “What?” I said. When she got down there and began her mouth-to-mouth I had to lean up against the wall to take the force of her. I laughed and said, “Well, jeez, for someone who has never done this, you are a natural.”

  From within her wet suction she said, “Shalty. Ish okay. Ish mmrowlrm good.” Then she looked up and said, “Um, you kind of smell like filet mignon.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s lots of other stuff to do, too, you know.” I didn’t think I was going to hit the high note on this one so I treated the whole incident as a teaching opportunity.

  Then I heard a weird noise like the wall was being rammed. Chloe shot up and I turned around, and yep, there was Hannah’s head up at the shitty little prison window on the wall. She was grinning and her fingers were curled over the railing—no doubt she’d hoisted herself up boy style.

  “Whatcha doing?” she said. And laughed her Hannah laugh.

  By the time we got to The See Vue, there were three of us in the car who had licked pussy. Tragedy averted. Minimal gagging.

  Our little cottage sported a fireplace, so I said don’t do anything without me and drove off to get firewood. When I got back, the door was open. I went in. The two of them were in bed with the covers pulled up just underneath their tits—Hannah’s M&M’s and Chloe’s glorious pendulous globes—smiling like Cheshire cats. Cheshire cats who had licked pussy. And in the middle of the bed was a little suitcase that Hannah brought—filled with toys.

  I immediately dropped the wood on the floor, shut the door, and stripped, launching myself onto the bed like Superwoman.

  Whoever was staying in the Princess and the Pea or the Salish or the Far East, they must’ve gotten an earful. Hours of woman on woman on woman whose regular lives didn’t allow for such wild abandon. Sometimes Hannah’s fist up my cunt, Chloe’s mouth on mine or me sucking her epic tits. Sometimes Hannah on her stomach, me up her ass with a strap-on, Chloe behind me giving me a reach-around—a skill she intuited. Sometimes Chloe on all fours, me and Hannah filling every hole licking every mouth rubbing her clit making her scream making her entire corpus shiver her head rocking back her woman wail let loose gone primal cum and shit stains and spit and tears. I came in Hannah’s mouth, her face between my legs like some goddess in a new myth. Chloe came with Hannah’s fingers in her ass and pussy, her body convulsing and falling off the bed, me wrapped around her and laughing and hitting my head on the wall. Hannah came while jamming a dildo up herself as I buried my face in the clit of her. She pulled my hair. She pushed my head. Chloe curled under me licking and gagging but not not not stopping. I don’t know how many times we came—it seemed unending.

  We ate each other we ate pickled herring we ate Gruyère cheese. We ate the animal out of each other’s bodies we ate steak we ate chocolate two women my chocolate. We drank each other we drank all the beer we drank all the wine we peed outside. We got high on skin and cum and sweat we got high on pot. We came in waves we ran out and into the waves.

  I wanted to stay like that forever—outside of any “relationship” I had ever had and inside the wet of an unnamed sexuality. The moon a gra
nd spectator. As full of alive as the ocean outside the door. All the night it was difficult to tell whose body was whose. The woman of it drowned me. It nearly cleaved my mind. And again. Again. Waves.

  In the morning we wrapped ourselves in blankets and drank coffee and perched ourselves about. Hannah on the porch railing outside and Chloe in a big overstuffed chair in the main room and me back in the bed curled up like a lion who’d just eaten a baby. It would have made a nice photo, three women contented like that, three women waking from their own pleasure without anyone or anything to put them back in their clean and proper places. But life is life.

  On the beach later that day Hannah grabbed Chloe’s hands and swung her around ring-around-the-rosy style, harder and harder. Chloe was laughing and then the wind and rain kicked up and then Hannah swung her too hard and let go and Chloe went tumbling over sand and rock and scraped the shit out of her face and shoulder. Also she wrenched her back.

  Back in the cottage, I smoked a great deal of please-don’t-let-this-all-go-to-hell pot and got so high I passed out at 8:00 p.m. When I awoke, Chloe was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace crying and Hannah was nowhere to be seen. When she came back to the cottage we were just three women again, living women lives, me with a boyfriend and Chloe with a seminar paper due and Hanna just standing there with her idea that had gone to shit. On the solemn heavy drive home I got pulled over and given a ticket by some man cop—a little piece of paper that might as well have read: Not so fast, ladies.

  I don’t know why women can’t make the story do what they want.

  I don’t.

  I don’t know why the story of a woman’s sexuality can’t be the next Great American Novel. Form coming from content.

  When we got back to our ordinary lives, Chloe told me she was in love with me. A sentiment I couldn’t find in myself to return, hard as I tried. I wish I could go back and try. It was real, what she offered. But kindness wasn’t something I even recognized. Hannah’s girlfriend tried to commit suicide, feeling betrayed and alone. Though I had an episode or two left with Hannah, I was seduced away from her wild abandon eventually by a man with a fifth of whiskey, and like Faye Dunaway in Barfly, I followed him toward the meated smell and taste of poke.