Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica

by Tristan Taormino

  “Six is fine,” I said. “I have some things to do, too,” and I didn’t know why I said this last thing and wished I hadn’t.

  “Oh,” she said. “All right. Six, then.” And I felt her lingering and it felt brutish to edge toward hanging up, but in another awful way it seemed to be working in my favor.

  “Okay, I’ll see you then,” I said. And then I hung up the phone and went back to Ingrid.

  She still sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, staring at her drink on the coffee table.

  “Who was that?” she asked like she’d had years of practice, which of course she had.

  It startled us both though. Her more than me because she quickly said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. It’s none of my business.”

  I didn’t attempt to explain, though a part of me wanted to. Here I was again with all this inside me I wanted to tell but with the absolute wrong person to tell it to.

  Instead I held out my hand and she took it. We went into the bedroom, me not knowing who I wanted exactly, only knowing too clearly it was Beth who’d started me needing someone.

  Ingrid and I lay down together, and it seemed at first it might be like last night, with us just lying around, and, in a funny way, recognizing that this was maybe most what I wanted from Beth, or would’ve tonight anyway, this drove me past it. I couldn’t lie there thinking about her. If I did, it might start me crying again, from that same place I didn’t understand, and that’d give Ingrid all the wrong sorts of ideas of me. I’d be the last thing she’d want.

  I undressed her and then undressed myself and she turned the covers down on the bed she must’ve made and I wondered at what I was doing, not just this minute but with the whole of my life. Wondered how I’d come here and from where.

  These thoughts must’ve stopped me entirely because I heard Ingrid’s voice. Heard her say, “Nina, what is it? What’s the matter?”

  And I discovered myself standing stock still by the bed, but breathing hard and what I was wishing was that I’d told her my real name because maybe then I’d feel like we knew each other.

  “Nothing,” I said as I got under the covers with her. But it wasn’t going to work. I could tell this already; couldn’t get rid of all the things I was thinking and when she began to touch me, at first just my neck, stroking a line under my jaw, then I knew I’d never keep from the feelings either. And so with neither my mind or my body a safe place to be I looked to her body. Turned toward her and began touching her in return and for a short while this worked.

  I kissed her shoulders and then her breasts. Did these things until all I felt anymore was her and not me. And this lasted until I pulled the covers back, saw the bruises on her side, by now purpley and still reddish.

  The sight of them caught me up, nearly stopped me, and for an instant it ran through my mind to ask her how it’d happened. But I knew this too was about me. About keeping me from myself and I knew it wouldn’t work and besides I knew exactly how she’d come to be hurt in this way. Could see it all—her on the floor and him kicking her—and I knew that the one or two times I’d had this done to me I’d felt the least human of all.

  To make her revisit this just to spare myself, this seemed close to something he’d do. Instead I put a pillow behind her so she wouldn’t have to lie flat, and she sank against it while I wrapped my arm around her thigh.

  I kissed her forever—her belly, her thighs—and I felt her hands in my hair, heard her saying little things, murmuring in a way I couldn’t make out and didn’t quite want to, afraid it might sound too much like what Beth said. And if they were both saying the same kinds of things, how could I believe either one of them? How could it be any more than the things people say when they’re together like this? And this was made all the more tangled by my wanting to believe Beth but not Ingrid.

  So in this way I came back to Beth just as I got inside Ingrid. And I listened to Ingrid now because it was only sounds and breaths and my own breathing was changing but not in the right way. In a way that forced me to take my mouth from her and just fuck her and try to choke off my own sounds, which might end up in sobs if I didn’t get hold of myself.

  Ingrid tried to turn—first toward her bruises but crying out when that hurt, and so she turned toward me. I pulled another pillow, let her onto her stomach, got myself up and behind her, got my hand back inside her, with her asking all this time now for more of me, of my hand.

  I grew afraid of myself in this, afraid I’d get carried away, carried off to where she wanted me to go and then I stopped worrying this.

  I fucked her until she was the one crying—out of a place I both knew and didn’t because usually when she got here she stayed silent and away from me. But this time, when I was starting to stop, she cried at me to keep on. She said, “Please, don’t. Please don’t leave me.”

  She’d never said anything like this and so I listened. I put my hand further into her and held it there, tried to get further inside and she held herself very still and then I did this too, I held her, still with my hand there, stayed just this way until she turned again, toward me, and her face looked a way I’d never seen. She looked young and afraid and I opened my arms and she held on.

  It was a long time before she quieted. I felt helpless. Thought of all the stupid things to do—bring her a drink, a cigarette. I kept myself from doing these things until she got to the place of asking me to, and then I was glad to have actual tasks. To be able to get up from that bed.

  I brought these things back with me—the bottle, our glasses. Made a separate trip for the cigarettes just to have more time with myself. I tried to drink the way she did—in the long swallows that were helping her—but for me it just brought back the choking, and the cigarette I tried did this too, even more. I stubbed it out halfway finished and that’s when she noticed me.

  She curled up near me and put her hand between my legs and I lay back, opened my legs because she told me to, and it felt like what I wanted.

  She stroked me and stroked me and I felt a calmness begin near her hand and then follow it. She trailed her fingers up my body to my throat and back down, and I couldn’t not know Beth had done this too, and not so long ago. And so I wondered, what is it about me that lets women know to do this?

  My breathing grew steadier and deeper and she talked to me in a way that said nothing. She said things like, “There, now. You’re all right. Sweetheart, everything’s all right.” And I could see how it wasn’t because I’d begun to believe her and when she put her hand in me I couldn’t be anywhere else but with her. Couldn’t do anything but feel what she was doing. And it was all slow and gentle and I wanted more of her than I could take. Tried hard to ask for her but now I was the one who could only make sounds and cries.

  She knew anyway. We were enough alike in these ways and so I felt her get very far into me and felt myself close around her, wanted to put my legs around her too but couldn’t move them. I felt limp and wonderfully exhausted, so slack and peaceful and she seemed to find comfort in this because when I looked she was smiling. Not in a large way, but this small change in her face that I hadn’t seen in a long while, or maybe ever.

  She took her hand from me slowly, let it stay underneath her when she sank into me. And I felt her hand and the weight of her body as indistinguishable things. And I came in this way,

  Trade

  Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  I dragged the ringing phone, along with my cold brew, out to the front porch. Sometimes I don’t answer the phone, I just listen to it ring. A ringing phone is kind of like a vibrator up against the ache in my chest. It’s like holding possibility up against hope. And not answering the phone is sort of like masturbating instead of having sex with someone. If you answer the phone, or if you take a real partner in sex, you got to deal with who it is. But if you don’t answer the phone, and if your partner is in your head, it could be Marlene Dietrich.

  It was one of those long mild Portland evenings and my lilacs were in
full bloom. I settled into the porch swing and popped open the beer. The phone continued to ring. Down the street I heard a couple of kids arguing over some dumb game. Across the street a woman was mowing her lawn. I like having folks around. Just not too close. I took the first long swallow of my brew. Then I addressed the ringing phone.

  “I’m busy, Marlene,” I said out loud. Then I called my handy boy. “James? Fax a mess of these lilacs to Ms. Dietrich for me. Thanks, doll.”

  I took a slug of my beer. Nothing could make me believe there was anyone on the other end of that ringing phone but Ma. Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother. But she was getting to the age where I should be calling her every night to see how she was doing, not the other way around. Ma didn’t realize that calling me every night was like sky-writing, “You have no lover, Esther. You’re all alone.”

  I picked a lilac and stuck it behind my ear so that its fragrance assaulted my nose. Then I answered the phone. “Hi, Ma.”

  “Esther.” The sultry voice spoke my name as if it were sweet fruit. “Do you remember me?”

  I sat up straight. “Who is this?”

  “Big old bulldagger like you, and you don’t have no memory?”

  A big old bulldagger? Well, I liked that. I waited for the woman to speak again.

  “This is Sherry, from ten years ago exactly, this summer.”

  “Sherry…?” I was still adjusting to this not being Ma.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me?”

  “No, wait a minute. I got it. Sherry from the trail crew. Where are you?”

  “Chowchilla, baby. Doin’ time.”

  I couldn’t believe her voice, so low and seductive. I’d worked that summer as a trail crew supervisor for the county. My crew was made up of juvenile delinquents from girls’ and boys’ homes. Besides building trails in parks, I was supposed to teach those hoods job skills. Sherry had been a fourteen-year-old kid with a blond pony-tail and crooked teeth. She had those long colt legs of a barely adolescent girl, and her arms were always bruised and scratched as if she spent her days pushing through blackberry brambles. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Me, too, honey!” Her rich smoker’s laugh sounded much more mature than the dirty, brash mouth I remembered. “Truth, though, it ain’t any different from the girls’ homes. It’s what I’m used to. Got me a woman to look after me, too. She’s cute but she don’t have no money.”

  So she came out. Or maybe this was just a prison thing. I opened my mouth to speak, but Sherry went right ahead.

  “You ever hear from that fag?”

  She meant Arthur. “No. I never heard from him after the summer.”

  “He’s probably inside, too. I don’t think you ever realized how deep that kid was. Into all kinds of shit even back then. Don’t matter how many books he read.” She laughed. “I know you liked him better than me, the whole summer, but I was a lot more honest with you than him. You know, I’d give anything to go back to that summer.”

  There, in that last sentence I heard the voice of the Sherry I remembered, the fourteen-year-old kid. I’d thought of her a lot over the years, convinced that she’d made it. I liked to think of her as a take-no-shit lawyer or doctor somewhere. To be honest, I counted her as one of my few successes. Even if I hadn’t done much with my own life, I’d helped that kid back then.

  “Do you remember,” she asked, “that time by the river?”

  “Sure.” My voice cracked. “I remember.”

  “I guess you knew I was jailbait, huh.”

  “Well, I…uh, yeah.”

  “Or didn’t you want none. Too knock-kneed for you? You probably had your pick of the girls. Grown ones, I mean. My, you were handsome. Bet you still are. What do you look like, Esther? Still tall? Still have those deep brown eyes? Still passing?”

  I snorted into the receiver. “Come off it, Sherry.”

  “Give a girl a break. Tell me. What do you look like?”

  “I’m the same. Six foot. Yeah, same eyes. Got some lines around them now. People still take me for a guy all the time, but I can’t say I’m intentionally passing anymore. I’ve gained a little weight.”

  “Mm hmm.” She said this like she’d just taken a bite out of a thick steak and her mouth was still full. “I bet it looks good on you, too.”

  “Why’re you calling?” I asked.

  I could tell I’d been too brusque because her voice got small. “I don’t know. I just thought of you.”

  “They let you make phone calls from prison?”

  Sherry didn’t answer my question for a long time and in that pause, I remembered the real Sherry. She was an accomplished and frequent liar. But when you caught her in a lie, there was this grace period where she’d tell you the full truth. First, she’d be silent for a long time like this. I always figured she was planning her next lie, then she would surprise me. Her voice would open up, her demeanor would loosen, and you could just tell she was telling the truth. Those post-lie grace periods always softened me.

  “Actually,” she said slowly. “I just got out.”

  “Congratulations.” My voice was taut as I pulled in the reins, tightened my control of the exchange. I guess it was the butch in me getting off on orchestrating that resignation in her.

  “Well, my girlfriend’s still in. She’s doin’ a life sentence. Killed a john. So, I’m sort of free.” The tears in her voice shook me. I bet she ran her tongue over those crooked teeth, just like she used to. And probably twisted a clump of that blond hair around her finger.

  “You’ll do fine,” I said perfunctorily. This thing was going too far. What if she was in a pay phone down the block?

  “Do you think so?” she asked in a voice that was more than manipulative. She wanted a real answer. “I guess I called you first because you gave me that second chance.”

  “What are you talking about?” Very gruff.

  “The first day on the trail crew. You found me in the bushes fucking that kid.”

  “Sherry.” She was reaching now.

  “Yeah. He was definitely a bad fuck.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I still remember the look on your face when I told you why I fucked him.”

  The sky was thickening with the purple of dusk. Someone passing in the street was smoking a cigarette. Crickets were making a racket. And I felt as if the telephone were a giant suction cup. Like I could be slurped up into the receiver and through the telephone lines to wherever Sherry was. Part of why she felt so immediate was that not much had changed for me since that summer. I do better at holding down jobs. I’ve managed to buy this little house. But, as I’ve paid two shrinks small fortunes to tell me, I’ve got intimacy problems. Like, I can’t seem to sleep with the same woman more than two times. Sherry was the opposite. She marketed intimacy like it was stock. Still, loneliness looks the same from either end of the pole. I guess we recognized that in each other, even back then, even with twenty years difference between us.

  “Talk to me,” Sherry begged. “Jesus Christ, Esther. I just got out of prison. I’m here on a goddamned street corner in goddamned Chowchilla, California and you’re going silent on me. Talk.”

  She sounded like somebody’s femme, all right.

  “What do you want me to talk about?” I could hear the resignation in my own voice.

  “Me. Tell me what you thought of me that first day. The truth.” I was silent and she said, “Please.”

  I tried to sound indulgent. “I knew you were trouble right away. At lunch that first day you worked all the other kids on the crew. Loud-mouthing, flirting, demanding attention.” I paused, reminded myself that Sherry was a whole state away, then said, “You had more sexual savvy at fourteen than I had at thirty-four.”

  Sherry giggled. She liked that.

  I went on. “I remember that first lunch real well. Arthur was sitting away from the group, reading. He never ate lunch. It was like the books nourished him.”

  “Bullshit,
” Sherry interrupted. “He was fat. He probably stuffed his face before and after work.”

  “He wasn’t fat.” I enjoyed Sherry’s jealousy. “He was chunky. And he had that mess of brown curls. With his chubby cheeks he looked like a cherub. Sure, I liked him. I liked that he did all that reading. He was a smart kid.”

  “He was a kiss-ass. I’m telling you, he’s doin’ time right now. You bet your ass. Intelligence don’t have nothing to do with staying out of trouble.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  “It is true. And Arthur was a kiss-ass. He always acted like he was your assistant and you fell for it. Oh, he’d pass out the tools or he’d run that little errand. Shit, he was just getting off to smoke a joint. He was selling dope to all the kids.”

  “No he wasn’t.”

  “He was, Esther. But I don’t want to talk about that fag. Talk about me.”

  “Okay, so I’m telling you about that first lunch. I was dead broke. I remember exactly how my peanut butter sandwich tasted—like sawdust. And it was all I was going to have until my first paycheck. So after I finished it, I lay back in the sun—right there in the forest dirt—and thought about buying a mess of sliced turkey, dill pickles, mayonnaise, mustard, dark rye bread. I was gonna make my future lunches feasts. Fresh peaches and slices of watermelon.”

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “Everything.”

  She giggled. “Okay, go on.”

  “So when it was time to go back to work, I realized that you weren’t around anymore.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought, shit. I’ve already lost a kid.”

  “Yeah, but did you worry extra because it was me?”

  “No, Sherry. I’d known you about four hours.”

  “Mm,” she said. “Go on.”

  “I went back to the van. You weren’t there. So I started crashing around in the woods until I came to this pretty little meadow. And there you were.” I remembered seeing her two bare bony knees pointing to the sky. Humping away between them was a thirteen-year-old boy with his jeans bunched around his ankles.