Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica

by Tristan Taormino

  Her thumb traveled to my clitoris, running over that elongated spot with a flickering exactitude. I arched into her hands, my breath came hard. Then, a catch in my throat; for one long moment I could not breathe. I felt something buzz around me, something almost tangible, a cloud hovering over me, waiting to descend. As Ingrid Bergman leaned over to the airplane’s small window, her lips parting, the Brazilian landscape opening out beneath her, it fell and I came for the first time.

  It’s five years later, it’s seven, it’s ten, and still when I walk into a theater I walk into her. My scalp tingles, my hamstrings contract. The air, close around me, opens up to her form. The worn wood of the seat arm softens into the edge of her biceps. Already her thigh presses tight against mine. Already she is descending on me, her mouth at my ear, her hand between my legs, the fingers adding and subtracting into me. One two three. Three two one. I arch back, spread my legs wider. There, in a high corner of the balcony, the safety bar cutting the screen in half, dividing Ingrid Bergman at that flash of white skin, I remember the mottled and flickering light on my classmate’s face, Ingrid Bergman floating out of the screen, her mouth on the lip of my mind, the edge of that white abdomen, that narrow ribbon of flesh, like a road, a rope, a signal light flashing, flickering in the half-empty darkness.

  Cleo’s Gone

  Gwendolyn Bikis

  I.

  I’m just getting ready to wash my white school blouse in the bathroom sink when the phone rings.

  “Baby sister. What’s shakin’?” It’s Marla, calling from Charlotte. From the Girls’ Club, no doubt, she’s talking so street-like.

  “Nuthin’ doing,” I reply. “You comin’ home this weekend?”

  “I just might. But that sure isn’t the reason I’m calling. I just got a call, long distance—collect. From Cleo.”

  I feel my breath leave me. Already I am certain this isn’t going to be real good.

  “She asked me to send her some calculus books.” A pause. “Tammy? She called me from the women’s prison? They’ve already moved her from the jail. She’s ‘up against a li’l charge’ is all she’ll tell me. And she’s not sounding too proud of whatever it is she’s been charged with this time. This time, sounds like it’s gon’ stick.”

  I can see the loose little shrug that Cleo’d give, acting cool and shucking, all the way into...into prison, this time. Before it had just been lock-up, “diddly little county time,” Cleo called it, bragging about it in that way that people will about their trouble when it’s the only thing they have.

  Marla sighs into the phone. “Cleo’s life has done went all to hell and pieces, exactly how she wanted it to go. I’m not sure if knowing where she’s at is any much better than wondering if she’s dead.” She lets out a flat, not-happy laugh.

  “Aah, Marla—” is all I can say.

  Cleo’s gone; gone for sure now.

  II.

  Cleo was Marla’s Little Sister, whom Marla had adopted soon as I’d gone off to college. I think I was supposed to be jealous that Marla had a substitute, but I was the one who ended up getting that last laugh.

  I remember the first time I saw her play, saw her legs and arms as long as licorice sticks, so whip-like she nipped the ball out the other players’ fingers, snapped and plucked the rebounds before they hit the backboard, jumped so quick it seemed there were springs in her knees. Cleo is a li’l bit darker than me and built just wiry, all tight and smooth at once. Cleo moved like silk sliding through water.

  Cleo...I can see you with your sleek legs flying, your lanky muscles stretching tight, the stripes around your socks, around the hems of your red-silk real-tight basketball shorts...

  Her jump shots were so smooth she could have been diving up through water, and watching her make them put me in the shivers, as though she were sliding, silkenly, all along the most secret of my places. She’d bounce and flick that ball around a helpless tangle of legs and arms that hopelessly tried to stop her. One time, she dribbled the ball right out of some chick’s fingers, then darting and springing around her, bounced the ball—I swear—right through the girl’s outspread legs, catching it off the bounce before her opponent even had the chance to think of turning around.

  “Cleo’s Back,” said the front of her favorite black sweatshirt, in bright pink letters. “Cleo’s Gone,” said the other side. Sometimes, by the time you figured out where Cleo was back from, she’d already be long gone. “Slick” was the word she chose to describe herself, because like everyone with the player’s personality, Cleo had two sides: street side and court side. On the court, Cleo wore her lucky black-canvas hightops; but coming in off the street, she wore new suede or leather tennis, and she cussed if someone so much as scuffed them and fussed when Marla asked her where she’d gotten them from.

  “Because she knew I was actually asking her where did she get the wherewithall to get them from.”

  Everybody knew that Cleo had absolutely no visible means, other than hanging ’round the littered, rotten-smelling court-yard of the M C Morningside Homes, hanging out supposedly empty-handed.

  “But you never can tell what-all I got in my socks, or in my secret pockets,” Cleo bragged.

  Man oh man, when I think of how gone I was over that girl...from the beginning of that summer I was visiting Marla, managing her team, until the August day she made me leave, I had one hopeless schoolgirl crush. I’d be sitting on the sidelines making like my own Girls’ Club cheerleading squad, until everybody started to see who I was really cheering for. And the thing about it was, Cleo didn’t need more cheering.

  “F that ‘everybody’s a star’ stuff,” she’d say, not saying the full curse word because Marla had forbidden her to swear. “I’m the only star on this team.” And she’d thump her ball a couple times off the locker room bench, as if to punch the point home.

  Cleo is an Aries, like me: sometimes we’re so selfish, we don’t even know we’re being it. Or so Marla says—but I believe that Cleo’s a whole lot worse, a lot more selfish, than me. If it was me, I’d think twice about kissing someone, especially some other girl—even more, some other girl who, most likely, would not want it. After she picked me, and after she kissed me, she told me this:

  “I knew you’d like it, once I did it, so I just went ahead and did.” And that smile again—flashing, then closing, like the quick white glint of a pocket knife.

  Cleo thought she was smooth, but she sure had one quick attitude. Let someone step on her toes wrong, even in a basketball game, for goodness’ sake, and Cleo’d go off. I remember tears in her eyes, she’d be so hurt that someone had made her so red-hot mad. I remember how she got, cutting her eyes and snarling ’bout “someone” saying this or doing that. I recall a time that “someone” had draped Cleo’s jacket over their own “stinkin’, sweatin’ shoulders.” By pure mistake, thinking the jacket was their own, but you sure couldn’t tell Cleo that, just like you couldn’t tell her that this wasn’t the Training School, where everyone just naturally stole from her, the youngest and the skinniest of all.

  That’s how I knew that Cleo really thought of me as “her” girl: the game when she let me wear her jacket for a whole entire two quarters. After that game, after everyone was gone, the showers dripping off and me innocently picking up the dirty towels, Cleo backed me up against the lockers, and her mouth was spicy with the taste of Good ’n Plenty. I knew, that day, that it was just a matter of time before I’d be back on the bus toward home, back toward everything that was boring to me.

  III.

  Cleo never gave me flowers, never said she cared for me, and always asked for money—which sometimes she would get— so why’d I ever love her? It was all about her beauty, the way that she would press her hands all along her long, strong body and grin at me.

  “Sometimes I makes sweet love to my own self,” she would say.

  Not too many people are as dark as I am, and Cleo’s one of them. What does it mean to put your hand beside someone’s and see how clos
e its color matches yours, even more than your own sister’s does? What does it mean to know this color, so beautiful, chose your color out of knowledge of its beauty?

  By the end of August, when Marla finally called Mama to let her know that I was on my way back home, by that hot and steamy time, I’d heard the threat one hundred thousand times:

  “Im’a send you back down home, Tamara.”

  The first time I heard it was the July night I came in drowsy, hungry, and smelling like burnt rope. Me and Cleo had smoked weed, sneaked it back behind the Homes where they backed up on a park that really was kind of piss-stinky. Though naturally I didn’t say as much, not wanting to be called a “sissy country girl.”

  “I know that you afraid to go with me and get sky-high,” she said to lure me, smiling in her shark-like way. Didn’t she know it though? Don’t nobody tell Tamara what she’s afraid to do.

  That day, she was wearing black suede tennis shoes, shorts, and pulled-tight knee socks. And carrying her cap, I’m sure so I could see how neat her hair lay, all newly dressed and styled, shaved short around her ears and back along her hairline. And Lordy, she was smelling so good to me, like sweet grease and barber-shop powder, she smelled good enough to be eaten; and she surely knew it too.

  We settled in the evening sun beside the worn-out courts. Cleo reached inside the lining of her cap and held up a little hand-rolled cigarette. She stretched, and then she yawned so wide I could see the whole way up inside her mouth.

  “Act as though you got some manners,” I almost let my sister’s words pass through my own two lips. Cleo liked to stretch and scratch, to pick her teeth in public—with her fingernail yet—liked to belch and never say excuse me. Cleo was the kind of child that Mama would feel sorry for, would shake her head and softly suck her teeth over.

  “Think I got some matches.” She was searching through her pants pockets—though I couldn’t see, with those jeans tight as they were, how she could’ve fit a thing much thicker than a folded piece of paper into those pockets.

  “Look inside your jacket, Cleo,” I suggested. The first time I’d seen Cleo high, she couldn’t do nothing but laugh and dance and suck the popsicles she’d gotten me to buy for her. When she wasn’t high, Cleo made me tense and flushed every time she touched herself. Now she stroked one hand along her pants front, while groping through her jacket pocket with her other hand, and it made my neck tingle. It made me curious, how could one of Cleo’s hands be scrabbling even as the other one so casually, so smoothly, was taking care of yet another kind of business? Was it true a person could be born with hands belonging to a criminal? Secretly, I shivered.

  “Here it go,” she said, pulling out a book of matches. “You ready?” She grinned, whipping that weed cigarette from behind her ear and holding it so I could see it.

  “I am a big girl now, for your information,” I said out loud, to whom I wasn’t sure.

  Cleo raised her eyebrow, struck the match, and grinned her sharp-toothed grin. “What you gonna do, babe, when I—” but she’d stopped to breathe smoke in, pulling wisps of it into her nostrils.

  When you do what, Cleo? Like you the one invented the idea of getting next to me? Now she was handing it to me, it was smoking, and she was grinning back at me grinning back at her.

  I reached out for the cigarette and put it to my lips and drew it in, keeping both my eyes closed tight. I drew it in and—coughed and heaved, but somehow kept my lips together tight enough to keep the smoke inside. Even I knew that was what you had to do. When I opened my eyes, still holding my breath, the world outside still looked the same. Somehow I had thought it wouldn’t.

  “You ain’t high yet, baby sis,” Cleo said, watching me while I looked around and waited. I guess I ain’t, I thought, but how’m I gon’ know it when...when suddenly I felt it—like something pulling out away from me, slow-motion out from under me. And all this heat, this depth and color rushing in at me.

  “Wo-ow,” I heard myself sigh. In a way, my own sounds I made, my own thoughts I had, seemed like something I was hearing from outside myself. And the scene I was in seemed more like something I was looking at. It was like another depth to my perception.

  “You like this, babe?” Naturally I thought she was talking ’bout the weed, until I looked down at her long hand and her longer fingers creeping all along my thigh. “Poppety pop,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “Poppety pop my finger pop.”

  “Mmmm,” I said.

  Cleo’s hand was moving, quivering on me. “You untouched, baby sis?” she asked.

  What difference could it make to her? I mean, God knew she wasn’t.

  “Sam,” was what I said. Funny, I had gotten through the summer without so much as thinking about that ex-man of mine, and here I’d gone and mentioned him. At a very inconvenient moment too.

  She snatched back as though my leg had stuck her with a splinter. “Who the hell is Sam?”

  “Oh,” I waved my hand to show how bored I was with this topic. “This man I used to know.” Used to know. I didn’t like to lie like that.

  “You know that man good as I know Cynamon?” Cleo asked. “Know that man all the ways I be knowing her?”

  Cynamon? Was I hearing right? Cynamon was the Lady Panthers’ center, who had a twitchy booty and not a whole lot more. What-all could anyone find to know about somebody like Cynamon? Cynamon painted her nails bright orange and looked at stories on TV, those times she wasn’t making up no even-more-stupid stories of her own about the boys she knew, away now in the army or sometimes the Marines, and the presents they bought or were going to buy for her. Not that I ever laid my eyes on present one:

  “My baby Wally go’ buy me a microwave and eelskin shoes and satin underthings.”

  Now who was going to believe that, and who was going to care enough to tell her she was clear and plain a liar?

  “Cynamon?” I wanted to know what Cleo knew about girls, every little bit of it, but I didn’t care to hear about Cynamon. “She likes boys, Cleo.”

  Cleo grinned. “Not no mo’ she don’t. Least not since I turnt her out, so’s to speak.”

  Turnt her out? I never had understood just what “turnt out” meant, but I’d never had known how to ask without seeming too sweet and churched and babyish.

  “How’d you do that, Cleo?” I heard myself ask, despite the fact of it including Cynamon.

  Cleo tap-rubbed at my leg. “Turnt her inside out, I mean. Made her river run the uphill way.” Cleo moved in a li’l bit closer to me. Even with my eyes closed I could feel her, hear her jacket leather squeaking while she shifted.

  “You wanting me tell you ’bout it, sis, or you wanting me to show you?”

  “Mmm, tell me first.” Eyes closed, I leaned back all ready to be told. I was feeling very lazy, floating away out in the middle of a drowsy, sleepy sea.

  “Then show me too,” I actually said. I pictured me and Cleo, floating arm in arm up to the sky on a natural high.

  “Yeah...” Cleo’s voice had deepened. “Yeah—I like to ease on back and watch whiles I be poppin’ ’um, watch ’em knot their brows like they in pain, then smile as though they ain’t, and I like to hear ’em grunt and cry and moan an’ squeak and beg like how the ladies do once you got them goin’ good, got ’em good and sweet and greezed.”

  Ooh my goodness, that was nasty, nastier than I’d ever heard her be. What would Marla say and do? I couldn’t exactly see Cleo lying slapped-down on her back, but I couldn’t see Marla doing anything less.

  “Know how I picked that fist girl I ever really wanted?” Cleo asked.

  “Who was that, Cleo?” I noticed I had caught my breath, the way I do whenever I feel jealous. Me, having to be jealous of a simple-face like Cynamon.

  “What I mean, li’l sis, is that usually they’s the ones be wantin’ me, and I just goes along just for the ride, so’s to speak.”

  “Just for the ride?” Was it the weed, or was it something else that was making my arms and legs feel so l
imp and weak and warm? And making me sound so very young and stupid?

  “Mm—mmm tha’s right. Mmm…hmm. But you want to know how I picked that first girl I ever really wanted?”

  “How?” I obliged by asking. How could a person tell, ever, what it was they really wanted?

  “You mean, how’d I find that girl I wanted? That’s the question that I’m tryin’ to answer you with, now. If I went ahead and answered it, I might be tellin’ you about this party I had went to, deep down in the East Bee-mo’ jungle, way way late at night, so late it was getting on toward early. That blue lightbulb had been burning for a good long while by the time Cool Cleo finally got there.

  “So then I walks right in, real sharp, wid my cap politely in my hands ’cause I know it’s go’ be ladies there—I walks on in, and ooh wee, what right off do I see?”

  I opened my eyes, and I leaned so far forward, I almost fell. I propped myself on both my hands. “What did you see, Cleo?”

  “I saw one whole line of ladies, baby sister, all preening and a-strolling that old hip-grind booty-shake they be using on the street, and all of it is just for me, Cool Cleo.

  “Then up to me, comes a lay-dee,” Cleo sang it. “This long-haired light-skin lady in a evening gown with some silvery tinselish fringe along its front come strolling up to me, hip-grinding booty-shaking right up to me, and ask me would I like a glass of wine. Which you already know, Cleo isn’t go’ refuse.

  “So I sits there sipping—the lady done provided me a seat—and lookin’ all these ladies over, all of which is wanting me, waiting just to do whatever I be wanting them to do for me, when I sees this one in back?”

  “Uh huh?” I nodded with my eyes closed, thinking all of this was sounding too wild even for a life like Cleo’s.