Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica

by Tristan Taormino

  The darkly wavering orange fingered its bloody way deeper into dusk. I raised my right hand to press the bruise just beside my temple, knowing it was the same color as the sky there, behind me, in the already-dark; a baby eggplant withered in an unforeseen, early frost. Unable to make sense of how such a mark might belong to me, I instead found myself thinking that nature raises the same questions to each of us over and over. That night my question was: Do people respond only to victims? Always sunsets and never sunrise. Several terns had wheeled and wailed as Helen and I had approached. There is no way for us to empathize with cruelty. Human cruelty has its rewards, and as such it doesn’t require empathy. The same can be said of success, or of winning. It is its own reward, to do something well. Cruelty is what sets the gods apart.

  The simmering scent of bayberry leaves shifted around us. I had lost myself in these thoughts, during which time, Helen had left my side and settled herself upon the shoulder of a dune where the sand retained some warmth. She gazed out past me toward where the swells had sharpened and looked like sailors saluting and curtsying, dopey white caps askew across their crewcut foreheads. Her hazel eyes. The poems she carries with her, reciting stanzas from memory beneath her breath. All the reasons that I love her.

  III.

  She gets soaking wet, and then begins to hit herself.

  The minute I touch her I feel it too. She’s a swamp, sweaty, moldering, the kind in which you can lose your way, dizzy in the stench. The heat of decay just beneath layers of insects and leaves. Watching closely, I can see the surface shift, her pores open, peat exposed. A chemical odor rises off her like steam.

  It’s this, the scent, that stops me, even though she is so easy to slide into. She thrusts her hips toward my face, her wrists so thin, so much more fragile than mine as she tries to force my mouth to her gaping flooded center, but I don’t allow this. In order to avoid giving her what I know she wants, to staunch the bile leaching from the back of my throat, I quickly—too quickly—thrust my hand inside her. She tears as I enter.

  This is one of the ways I surprise people, including myself: who would have thought I’d be the one to lure Helen from Paris? It wasn’t easy to break her family’s hold. I had to go in the middle of the night, wearing my black peaked cloak, hoping my pale face would not cast too great a reflection upon the windows. They lived high above the city in the manner of falcons, in a penthouse looking across the Seine. I gagged her, grabbed her by the wrists, and pushed her down through the stairwells in front of me, thirty-six of them switchbacking left and right, her white nightshirt billowing behind her like a shroud.

  I’m tall and strong; I used to be a basketball player. Once, when I was in high school, stoned on acid and Jack Daniels mixed with grape soda, I knocked out three cops who were trying to catch me.

  They’d have locked me away for good, and I couldn’t have that.

  And all I know, even now, is that I must keep moving forward. There is nothing else I can do, with her crying and pushing against me at the same time. The blood, the tearing, her fists beating at my back, none of this matters. The only way a ballplayer keeps going, past the nausea, when muscles become one’s own worst enemy, is to focus on bringing each heavy quad forward, forcing sneaker to grab waxed floor, down and turn and stop, up, stop, up one more time, up. Up. Up and in.

  IV.

  I only fuck the ones I can’t put my mouth to. As if to carve out a mouth that someday I will find kissable.

  Helen awakes every morning to a chorus of demonic mothers, hunched, crippled, angry old women telling her a woman is a cunt and nothing more, and our first morning in camp was no exception. And so having unraveled myself from the tent I drew water for coffee, water I’d been sure to fetch the night before while Helen scowled at me, wanting me to ignore my errands, to take her immediately to bed. I had sat her down on the bench by the gravel pathway and explained to her about hypothermia, and bears, and giardia, and dehydration; all the common, natural things that can kill a human being outside the city. By the time the water boiled above the unearthly blue flame, a gray light had seeped through the crack between earth and sky. The ponies, the rustling spartina made me restless. I had dreamed of listening to exotic ducks in the reeds plotting revolution over the tyranny of mallards.

  Out there, far from cement brick crowds, the bodies pressed and rubbing against strangers all day long, a place inside me opens in just the way the water’s surface becomes luminescent green and blue as if lit from within as the sky darkens. Only the wind relentlessly working at my skin and hair, employing sand and heat and hail and thorns as its weapons, can satisfy the ferocity of my desires; my lungs expand in the complexity of such air. Out there I can sit still for hours, my haunches taut upon packed sand, rhapsodizing.

  In other words, I become romantic in the Great Outdoors.

  It was in this way I discovered the ghost crab.

  When neither the hot sweet mush I cooked nor the black coffee nor my insistent kisses could rouse Helen, I set out by myself.

  I walked. Shuffling my feet ankle deep amid oyster and horseshoe crab shells. With my binoculars I could see hotels, aqua swimming pool slides, boardwalks and a ferris wheel at the north end of the barrier island which we’d chosen to explore, a thin sandy strip cut off from the mainland by a storm in ’33. Like nearly all American places, it was named for the Indians who were resident when British colonists arrived to cheat and beat them out of land and food. As I stared through the binoculars at the resort, abandoned and boarded up for the winter, I was filled with fear. A fear of myself. A fear that I, like the British, will pursue all that I love and love it with great intensity to its extinction.

  A scuttling just to my left caught my attention. There was a small hole there, a channel of sliding, glistening sand.

  I watched the hole patiently. I had to know what it was, wanting, as always, to know by what creatures, friends and foes, I was surrounded. The creature, however, had noticed the jerk of my head in its direction and was refusing to resurface. Had I been a dog, I simply would have shoved my muzzle into its hole, scratching at the tenuously constructed abode with strong claws. But I was patient. Eventually the creature—my creature—reappeared.

  Carefully, a fraction at a time, it emerged, hauling more sand with it. It was yellow—more yellow than a gold finch, a lemon, a tennis ball—yet translucent. I’d never seen anything like it, and still couldn’t be sure I’d seen anything at all. As I watched it, counting its brown spots, I remembered John Audubon, who loved his intimate knowledge of wild birds so much that he trapped and killed one from each species, stuffed it, preserved it, named it. Measured and recorded each one for all time, to leave his imprint upon it, to create his own legacy.

  I watched. It moved sideways. The way it slithered from under earth so dry as to make its legs seem viscous. Suddenly it appeared to be dragging a round, soft white belly, and I realized with horror that it was a giant spider. A creature spinning its sticky web around me.

  I imagined the magnificent, ghostly thing turning swiftly and without warning in my direction; crawling, crawling, crawling on me. I forced myself to remain still. The next time it appeared I could see a large claw on its front left side, eye stalks raised to face me. Thank god it had eye stalks. It was some sort of crab, but I’d have to look up the name.

  The power of knowledge. As I felt my breath growing more even, I looked up and saw Helen, angling each narrow shoulder forward as she lifted the corresponding leg, moving toward me. Her white blond hair was cropped close to her skull and she is so fine-boned she appeared to be a fledgling, a thin black shadow in the sun. Her blue jacket was zipped up completely beneath her chin. The power of all that I know. I looked up at Helen, the abrasions on her chin and brow, the scabbed over places where she did to herself what she would have me do to her. Her lips were slightly parted, looking at me, wanting forgiveness, and I remembered the night I pushed my fingers down her throat, thrilled at the way she tried and tried to swallow me,
until she choked; her head moving forward to take more of me down her unwilling orifice, my fingers controlling and filling a space never meant for this. She allowed me. Ramming first my fingers and then my cock down her throat, I had come, and come again, fucking her head, her face, this part of her so much her personality, so public.

  Helen fell heavily beside me and began to sob. I can’t believe I found you, I wasn’t looking for you, she said while I froze, loving her fragility and hating that she couldn’t see: my solitary observation of something rare, something difficult. Something so in tune with its habitat you couldn’t be sure you’d ever seen it. I wasn’t looking for you, she repeats. What if I was meant to find you! What if I am meant to find you, she muttered. Then she got up and looked down at the hole. Oh, a ghost crab, she said, and moved away without realizing she had pushed sand into the hole with the heel of her boot.

  V.

  I let her take my hand in her damp one and lead me back to camp.

  Once there, however, Helen began to move with jerky, exaggerated motions around the picnic table. I recognized the actions, but could not think of how to stop what I knew to be coming. As fast as the tiny juncos flitting from bush to bush, she was over at my truck, pounding her fist into its side.

  I watched as she ripped off her expensive waterproof wind breaker and hurled it down onto the rough pavement of the road.

  I’m feeling hideously well-disposed toward you, she said. I thought she was perhaps baring her teeth. It was certainly a grimace. Hideously well-disposed, she repeated, which makes me circle myself in fear. I’ll try not to make these feelings of affection dangerous.

  I wanted to hit her then, and she wanted me to. She’d dented my car. Ruined the tunnel of the ghost crab. But I couldn’t. To hit her would be to return myself to the sixteen-year-old I was before I became clever enough to assume the guise of bohemian artiste: strong and vicious and victorious; a welder of eighteen-story nuclear submarines; a cop beater. I couldn’t put myself back in those ignorant hands. Yet the main reason I have never been able to hit Helen, my glorious, my beloved, is precisely because she wants it so badly. I consider it a form of noble cruelty to rise above this, to be withholding and self-righteous in the face of another’s need.

  Sometimes, during sex, I think perhaps I am your garden variety rapist. The woman shouts No, No, and I insist I know she means Yes. Because, of course, I know better than she what it is she wants.

  It’s my job to know.

  And it’s a rhythm, you see, and, as with anything one does well, with practice one hits that place, the sweet spot, where you no longer think of the ball as a hard orange shape rough and too large for your hands, or of the rim as an obstacle through which you must force the ball. In the sweet spot everything disappears but you, becoming part of the swelling roar which is crowd and praise and promise which is body which is high which is god. Which is you.

  I left her by the truck and walked back to the table. She stood watching as I poured the morning coffee from a thermos, her beautiful golden hair brighter at this hour than the sun, a helmet of gold; little wonder we all want to possess her. Then she snarled at me, gyrating hips she says are too wide, one hand upon them, the other held out in vicious enticement. C’mon fuck me, fuck me baby, she crooned raspily. Fuck me, Jack. That’s what a woman’s for, isn’t that why you won’t call yourself one? Isn’t that why you fall in love with women like me, and then leave?

  She was hideous and she knew it. I knew what she wanted: for me to fuck her hole and turn her inside out through it, pushing myself through the other side of that waiting hole, that empty hole, that messy slimy leaky hole into the past, into a prehistoric burning place where we were all lizards, all water breathers, all equally dangerous.

  I couldn’t. The more she wanted me to hit her the more my skin pulled back to cling to bone, leaving only a warm spot hanging in the air between us. Three steps away, I watched as she balled her fingers into a fist. Her hands were red, raw looking, the way my mother’s looked in the winter when she hung the laundry from ice-coated rope. Helen’s hand rose. I thought she was going to hit me and I didn’t know what I’d do. I learned to hit to kill, to punish, to escape. I don’t know how to hit softly; there’s no in between for me. You don’t know how strong I am, I said, not for the first time. None of it was for the first time, and I couldn’t tell whether she’d heard me. I was afraid of killing her with my fists in a way I’d never been afraid when fucking her.

  The hand—could it have been her hand?—came up higher, its shadow ridiculously huge. Helen moved it as far from her body as it would go as if she was signaling something in to home, an airplane or a base runner or a puppy. It’s such a welcoming gesture, this stretching out of a beloved’s arms. It left the shadow of crucifixion painted long on the stones between us. Then she crooked her elbow slightly, as if to mimic a boxer’s pose; I saw the fist accelerate, but not at me. It skipped against her jaw and slid off in the opposite direction and I thought oh, it’s hard to hit yourself. You know it’s coming.

  VI.

  I’ve never been fucked.

  That was all she’d said to me our first night.

  I’ve never been fucked before.

  Which made me realize, albeit in my slow, circular way—since I’m not one to dwell on other’s psychological motives—that this wasn’t about horses or dogs or men or women. For years I had known this but never seen it, until that day of the ghost crab. That what I’d been after all along was to fuck the hideous into the beautiful, to use my fist to break apart the bonds of consciousness, to transform us from the limited flesh-eating creatures we are into something more grand. I longed for someone to take me there, to fuck me out of my head and make me theirs and, failing that, I offered it instead to each of my lovers. Always waiting in the alley, off to a side where they can’t touch me, masquerading as a sailor, chinos tight to my muscled hips and flaring out at my ankles, whirling as I crank the chain tighter, setting out the anchor and reeling it in.

  It’s never about horses or dogs, men or women.

  It’s about the nature of being fucked.

  Behold the Burning Bush

  María Helena Dolan

  Sex. Succulent, steamy, absolutely devouring and annihilating sex. That’s what María Isabella had been giving me. That’s what drove me absolutely insane.

  And that’s what she is withholding now, in order to make her little prophetic pronouncement come true.

  See, when I first spied her dancing to the hot salsero band in the tiny Cubana dyke club on the South Shore, I knew I just had to have her.

  I thought, “Tan caliente.” And then, “Mujer, estás tan caliente. Y estoy caliente tambien.” This dark, full-figured beauty simply radiated heat, even in the midst of heatedly tropical surroundings. She moved with an internal rhythm that flowed out through her hips, traveled through space, and then sent shock waves through me.

  As if we were characters in a bad novel, our eyes met across the dingy little dance floor, and without exchanging words, we knew we’d be sharing fruits from the garden of earthly delights before the night was out.

  And so we did. And did again. And again. And again, for three months. But that was her limit. She told me after the first week, “No puedo ver nadie más que tres meses.” I wasn’t to take it personally. She just never could handle being with someone beyond this very set, defined time limit.

  Unfortunately, I did take it personally! Everything we did, everything we felt. And, wonder of wonders, after a while, the unbelievably intense sex got to her, too. And it just fried her ass that I’d actually made her feel something.

  So, I had to go—despite her telling me over and over as we fucked our brains out:

  “¡A! Mamita, tú eres lo mejor, lo mejor! Hay que hacerme. Fuck me and make me come all over your face. ¡Ahora mismo!”

  The best. Yeah, I’m the best. But here I am, riding the rails to work in my little tan uniform, and the woman who’s driving me crazy has already g
ot another fool to replace me.

  You want to talk bad mood? You want to talk last straw? Man, I could get fired from all the attitude I’ve been throwing out to the riding public. A guy bumps into me on the platform, and it ain’t “Perdóname.” No, it’s “No me jódas, pendejo!”

  My bipiaso starts beeping, and I loudly cuss out my chipero neighbor who undoubtedly wants me to do something for him again. And all the time, I’m wearing that unmistakable “City of Miami Transit System Electronic Technician” patch on my shirt.

  Carájo! Fuck customer service, fuck these hijos de putas who are always whining about losing their fucking fares in the gate, when you know good and goddamn well that they never put the fucking money in the turnstile in the first fuckin’ place!

  As these and other, less charitable, ruminations course through my preoccupied mind, I feel a light touch against my fingers, which are curled along the smooth chrome surface of the train car’s hand rail. Startled, I snatch my hand back and look up into the deepest, darkest pools of ebony ever to grace a woman’s face.

  You could get lost inside those, I realize with a sharp inhalation. In a milky, melodious voice, with just a hint of an accent, she asks, “Are you troubled, sister? Is there something I can help you with?”