Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica

by Tristan Taormino

  Unfinished Tattoo

  Gerry Gomez Pearlberg

  It was three A.M. and I was sound asleep when the doorbell rang. The candles in my room had almost melted down. It was dangerous, I knew, to doze in a room full of burning candles, but there seemed no other condition under which to wait for her.

  She wore eyeshadow and lipstick. A brown leather jacket. In her hand, a large paper bag. For the moment it took me to unhook the front gate, she lingered on the threshold of my stoop, part of her still belonging to the street, where desires linger unfulfilled, and part of her almost within my grasp. I relished the moment of that transition, of locking the door behind her, pocketing the key, and turning to kiss the evening, that other world, from her lips.

  When she came in, my dog knew exactly what it meant. He greeted her briefly, then scampered up the stairs to wait for us at the foot of the bed. He knew where we were headed and that we always went directly there.

  In my room she said, “I have a request.” She asked me to cut her clothing off with my knife, the one with the iridescent white pearl handle. It had once belonged to a famous star, a very famous star, a singer; I won’t say her name because you wouldn’t believe me anyway. The blade was blunt, so it took a while to slice away her dress, her slip, her fishnet stockings. It was more like sawing than slicing, which gave things a refreshing, amateurish tinge. I pressed my blue-jeaned knee against her mound. The slow, insistent sound of slashing cloth was like rain hitting the window: suspenseful and energizing but also somewhat sad. We were enraptured with the leisurely near-violence of it.

  When all her clothing lay in tatters on the floor, only the delicate gold chain with the sacred heart of Jesus adorned her body. That, and the half-finished tattoo on her inner thigh. It was a tattoo she had started—a small blue serpent—but had given up on when the pain of the needle’s repeated penetrations became too great. Something to do with accumulation of pressure, she said. Her thigh bore the coiled tail of a rattlesnake, half realized, whose front portion appeared to have slithered into her very flesh, or been absorbed by it, or simply slipped into a realm beyond that of skin and bone. I was fascinated with this unfinished tattoo. It meant the world to me.

  Back then, I thought she was so beautiful. Now, eons later, though we no longer speak, I still do. I don’t exactly want her again; what I want is even more improbable: to revisit that night with her, to remain in it as if it were a room. I want the sound of her satin slip rending apart while her blue lipsticked lips spread wide. For her to say to me again, “My mouth is a sex organ.” For the glint of candlelight, a knife blade, her dark, dark eyes, the ninth orgasm, and the sacred heart of Christ, that glorious, damaged metaphor. For rain the way it used to be when water was still free. For those first roiling sensations of love in spite of all the evidence—hard and soft—against it.

  In her nakedness, she eagerly undressed me. Everything but my belt fell to the floor: that she kept close at hand. Nude and kneeling, we held each other for a long time, breathing not speaking, our pubic hair sparking.

  Finally, she opened the paper bag she’d brought with her from the Metropolis. A rectangular Styrofoam container lay inside. She opened it like a jewelry box, and the candlelight glancing against the assortment of sushi seemed nearly divine. It transformed the deep red tuna into slabs of velveteen, soft steps to an ultimately unattainable altar. It illuminated the ginger slices like shards of stained glass the color of pink dog-wood blossoms. It made the wasabi gleam like club moss, and the scaly black-green nori almost translucent, at once stiff and yielding, a half-snake coiled in its den.

  “Where I come from,” she whispered, “when a woman is attracted to someone, she feeds them with her fingers.”

  She lifted a piece of yellowfin sushi, rubbed it lightly against the wasabi bulge, dipped it in the small plastic cup of soy sauce, and put it to my lips. We went on like that all night, fucking and feeding each other and playing with my belt, and with the chopsticks, experimenting with the wasabi’s steamy insinuations on mucous membranes. The room smelled like ginger, horseradish, salt—mouthwatering and clean.

  In the morning I awoke to gelatinous fish roe in the sheets. I looked for her, but she was gone. Something to do with the accumulation of pressure, I suppose.

  I still come upon remnants of roe from time to time when cleaning behind my bed. They have somehow retained their rubylike sheen, though desiccated now, weightless, and harder.

  Ariel

  Carol Queen

  The first time I visited the Black Rose, the Tenderloin bar where things are rarely what they seem, I was with Dave, a bisexual man with a taste for having it all wrapped up in one neat package. At the Rose he could find a beautiful woman, make an arrangement, and when he raised her glittery skirt, find a succulent cock to suck. The tits wouldn’t be fake, either, at least no more fake than you find on most porn stars these days, and Dave was happier with the divine androgynes he met at the Rose than he was with anyone else in his life.

  “Of course it’s hard to find a girlfriend there,” he said, “unless you have a lot of money, ’cause most of them are working to save up for their change. I always found it very hard to be lovers with a working girl. I have too much ego.”

  The first time I went to the Rose, on Dave’s arm, the bar was full of larger-than-life women who looked at me suspiciously, and only the ones who knew Dave came up to speak to us. The men in the bar didn’t give me a second look. It wasn’t that the queens didn’t look like women—most of them did—but that I didn’t look enough like them. If there was one thing the men at the Rose weren’t looking for, it was a woman in jeans with no makeup.

  Dave told me sometimes straight couples cruised the Rose together, but not often, so most of the girls who worked out of the bar ignored any potential I might have had to be a real pay-for-play client. I was only looking that night, anyway, and I wasn’t sure it was okay for me to do even that. The Black Rose was a mirror world, a deep secret, and the only safe space most of its habitués had. It wasn’t set up to welcome tourists, unless they had money to spend.

  The second time I visited the Rose, I went alone.

  I didn’t go there to cruise or to trick, exactly. I think I cabbed in to the Tenderloin because I knew I could get lost there, because in a weird way the Rose was a safe space for me too, a place where I was almost invisible. When the doorman looked askance at me I mentioned Dave’s name; that got me in without further hassle. I took a tiny table off to the side, where I could nurse a drink and see the stage. Sometime after ten o’clock the shiny strips of silver Mylar that curtained the back of the stage began to rustle, and seconds later the first of a dozen transsexuals came through to do her act, lip-synching and dancing to thirty years’ worth of diva tunes. As I swallowed stinging mouthfuls of a bad martini, I wondered if something about Judy Garland, Tina Turner, Madonna, Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox could lure boys away from being boys.

  It was like a gay drag show, but equally unlike—less campy by far, although some of the performers were so bad they were good. Huge happy girls towered in their high shoes, barely managing to walk. The Thais, Vietnamese and Filipinas—some of the Latinas too—passed flawlessly, smooth-skinned and no taller than me. Dave had told me that the biggest secret was to get on hormones before the end of puberty. Hardly any of them could do this. Some bore scars from inexpert electrolysis.

  She approached my miniature table with none of the attitude I’d gotten from the others. She stood over six feet tall in her heels—the girls at the Rose never, ever wore flats—and she was gorgeous in the bigger-than-life way I was still getting used to. Looking up at her I saw legs for miles, crazy with patterned black lace stockings, a short, shiny silver skirt topping them, and a loose, silky black tank top which didn’t quite expose her breasts but showed cleavage. A tattoo peeked out—a rose, probably red but appearing black in the bar’s low light. She walked easily in her high heels, had the milky baby breasts that hormones grow. The drink she br
ought with her was blue and shimmery. Leave it to a girl like this to drink Blue Moons. She put it down right next to my martini.

  “May I join you?” she said. Her smoky voice would, if heard over the phone, have given no clue as to her gender.

  “Please,” I replied, and scrambled to pull a chair from the next table over for her. She took a second to settle in. Close up I could see the brown roots showing in her cascade of honey-blond hair, could see her light lipstick carefully drawn on and the eyebrows plucked and shaped. Her skin was smoother than some of the others’ and her hands were long. Her nails were clipped short—she was the only one I’d seen without long nails, I realized—but polished red. On her left hand she wore a ruby ring. There were two old gold wedding bands on her right.

  “I’ve never seen you here before,” she said. “At first I thought you might be here to watch one of your friends perform, but you don’t seem to know anybody. Is this your first time?”

  “My second,” I said, and told her about Dave. She knew him, of course, and dropping his name had the same effect it had had with the doorman. It meant I was safe, in on the secret. Dave was one of the few guys a lot of the girls would date without exchanging money. I asked my new friend if she’d been out with him, mostly to make conversation. With a small smile, she shook her head.

  “I don’t date men,” she said. “I work them.”

  That’s how I met Ariel.

  Before long I wondered if she was working me too. She was seductive, touching me while we talked, looking right into my eyes while I answered her questions. I had a hundred dollar bill in my pocket and I began to think about giving it to her. What fraction of the money she needed would one hundred dollars be? What would she want to do with me in return? I had some things I was trying to stop myself from thinking about the night I went to the Rose, and Ariel began to seem like a perfect way to forget them, better by far than ordering another martini or even sitting through the rest of the stage show.

  “What are you thinking about, Miranda?”

  “My intentions are becoming indecent. You’re weaving quite a spell, Ariel.”

  “Oh, good.” Ariel’s hand, under the table, ranged up my thigh.

  “The thing that has me confused is, are you working tonight? I mean, I know this is a working bar.”

  “I told you, I work men,” said Ariel. She gestured around the bar, and indeed there were a lot of men there, all driven by their fascination with the queens. Some were dressed as workmen and some had on expensive suits; I remembered, as if I’d forgotten it, that I was the only one in the Rose who didn’t have or had never had a cock. Once, I’d have thought of it as a place for closeted gay men. Now I knew it was more complicated than that. How I fit in as a genetic woman, though, wasn’t at all clear to me.

  But it was to Ariel. “I don’t take money from women,” she said. “I already made enough today. If you’re feeling like a high-roller, you can buy me breakfast.”

  Ariel’s apartment was close by, one of those beautiful old Tenderloin studios that you’d never expect to find in a rundown building on a mean street. The walk home with her screwed up all my butch-femme cues. Usually I’m femme-of-center, if not aspiring to diva-hood, myself. Tonight, I think out of my desire to melt into the woodwork at The Black Rose, I’d butched it up a little—jeans and a leather jacket, flat shoes. Ariel was much more femme than me, yet she took up so much space. She strode up Jones like it belonged to her, and I felt small by her side, like I needed her protection. She held the door for me, and then I held the elevator for her. This walk wasn’t giving me any clues about who might do what to whom.

  Inside she bolted the door, kicked off her heels, and pushed me up against the hallway wall. She kissed me hard while she pulled my jacket off, leaving it in a heap on the floor. Her long hands unbuckled my belt and tugged up my shirt, mouth never leaving mine, and I touched her through the slippery, glossy fabric of the clothes she wore. When I got to her breasts I felt the firm enclosure of a push-up bra trapping them into cleavage—she moaned when I found the clasp and freed them, rubbing away the marks of the underwires, raising her nipples up with strokes of my palms. And still we kissed.

  Up ’til then it had been an experiment, but her kiss bought and sold me. I wondered how often she found women who wanted her, how long it had been since she’d brought someone home for play, not work, how many she had to convince and what she had to do to overcome the voices in their heads clamoring, “But she’s not really a…”

  That’s not exactly what my inner voices had been clamoring. Like I said, I had some things I was looking to forget. But five minutes into what felt like the sweetest, hungriest kiss I’d ever been lost in, still leaning together against the inside of her apartment door, I’d forgotten everything except this tall, sexy tornado who was sweeping me away from everything, whose small new breasts just filled my hands, who had my nipples between her fingers, pulling, while she devoured my mouth and my cunt got wetter and wetter.

  Her bed had red sheets. It glowed like a ruby in the pale room, and finally she led me there, pulled the rest of my clothes from me, and told me to put my hands over my head and hold onto the bars of the headboard. “I won’t need to tie you,” she purred, “if you’re a good girl and stay right there.” For an instant I wanted to disobey her—to feel her bind me, capture me, maybe get rough—but in the end I did what she said, wanting to please her, wanting to show her I was there, hot for her, there because I wanted to be.

  Now I knew why Ariel groomed herself differently from the long-nailed queens at the Rose. She spread my legs wide, pulled on a latex glove, reached across me to the nightstand for lube, and then began working fingers into my ass. “Don’t move your hands,” she whispered, while hers invaded me, one long finger at a time, first working in and then starting to fuck—repeating again and again until she had three up my ass and I was as stretched out and full as I’d ever been. Her other hand, ruby ring glinting in the low light from a streetlamp, lay splayed across my belly, holding me down, thumb slowly working my clit, while she fucked my ass with the other. I held the bars but soon writhed crazily with the sensation, and as she fucked me more and more fiercely I raised my legs to her shoulders, spreading my ass as wide to her as I could, wanting to let her get at me as deeply as possible. When she felt my body tighten up in an imminent come, she stopped playing with my clit altogether, pulled my nipple hard, and I orgasmed from her pumping hand alone, coming until I was curled up practically sobbing—but still holding the bars.

  “You’re so good!” I gasped when she was finally done with me, and she gave me that small smile again and said, “What I like about assholes is, everybody has one.”

  I still didn’t know if she had a cock. After she had my ass I lay panting and swimming in the afterglow of all the sensation, ’til finally I had recovered sufficiently to explore her. Her skin was soft, and she was an intriguing combination of curves and muscles, with a body that was not quite womanly.

  I pulled her skirt off, ran my hands all over the firm swell of her ass, which she raised so I could get her panties off. Underneath I found still more fabric, a dense shiny lycra clinging tightly to the curve of her crotch. Rubbing my hand across it, like I would any pussy, Ariel writhed from the pleasure, then whispered, “Go ahead, take it off too.”

  The lycra peeled away and revealed it, still soft, the hair compressed around it from the tight gaffe she wore to hide its bulge. Was this the moment men paid her for, to see the unimaginable—a cock on a woman? Was she ashamed of it?

  “Nice clit, girl,” I breathed, petting it top to bottom so it stayed, for the moment, in its tucked and flattened position. “Big.” Ariel’s laugh didn’t have any shame in it, and before long her big clit was in my mouth, getting only a little hard as I flicked my tongue across it. “Can you come this way?” I raised my head long enough to ask, and she nodded, gasped, “But I hardly ever ejaculate any more.” I worked a couple of fingers up her ass while I worked her c
lit, and I knew when she came because her hips rose up off the bed and her hands clutched at the red sheets.

  She came again, and so did I, over and over, when she rolled me onto the bottom and thrust against me like a classic tribade, her sex and mine rubbing ecstatically together. She got a little harder doing this, but not much, and it felt perfect, her ass in my hands, rocking and humping, while we kissed or sucked up red roses of blood nearly to the surface of each others’ necks.

  She brought me coffee in the morning. There she was in the light of day, makeup off, naked, still easily six feet tall, rangy and baby-titted like an adolescent. Gorgeous in a way I’d never seen anyone be gorgeous before. After only one night with her I was starting to see the world and its possibilities in a new way.

  “Ariel,” I began, “I’ve got a million questions to ask you…”

  “Don’t they all,” she said, but she kissed me.

  I started to ask them over breakfast.

  When He Was Mary

  Heather Seggel

  Once upon a time, there was something in her that called out directly to my cunt and said open-open-open as if it were a department store on sale day. She was the salty sweat-tang of the Pacific, my California girl. When we fucked, I took her whole fist in me and I would rock and squeal and squirm, open, open, open to her, and mostly I would look into her coffee-brown eyes and say, “Oh, girl, oh, my girl,” her hunger feeding my own until we would both die from excitement and I’d curl myself around her, still shuddering in orgasm, and kiss the back of her neck, pressing my smile into her. I was in love, her little steamed dumpling, needed and content.