“I think,” says Eva, “mm-hmm, I think he likes your Christmas present.”
“Epiphany,” says Jamie. And then they’re reaching for me, Eva’s tugging on my sweater, Jamie’s unbuttoning my jeans, and between the two of them and me I’m laid out in short order naked on the futon that takes up half the floor. They knelt on either side of me, grinning, and on their elbows took turns licking up and down my cock and each other’s mouths, my hands stroking lace and skin and long heavy curls and short, short hair like seal’s fur. I start laughing.
“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” growls Eva, biting my thumb.
“It’s a straight-boy thing,” I say, giggling. “Y’all wouldn’t understand. Ow!”
Eva stumbles down the steep slope into the dim little bower, already soaked in twilight. I follow, perch myself maybe halfway down the slope, my skin tingling with inevitability. I reach up and catch Jamie’s fingers and I hand her partway down the slope into Eva’s arms.
It’s already begun.
They tumble back together into the grass, all the green in it washing away into night, and they’re kissing like no one else has ever been in the world. Jamie already has her hand up under Eva’s kilt, has yanked those underpants, pulled them down to her knees.
I stand there on the slope above them, wishing absurdly for another hit of hash smoke, thick and harsh. The first stars are coming out above us.
“It’s not,” says Jamie, lying back in my arms, “like that. No. But Eva . . .”
She’s wet with cold rain still, the winter’s morning rain that’s lashing at my window.
“Eva was in my room last night. All night.”
“I guessed,” I say.
“You’re not mad.”
“I’m not mad.”
“You’re not jealous.”
“I told you. It’s just not in me.”
“Because, I mean, we haven’t really talked about this. At all. And to be fair it ought to just be the three of us, all together, you know? But.”
“But.”
“It was like,” she says, squirming closer to me, “it was like I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop, you know. Coming. I mean, she would kiss me, and blam! Or I’d just be lying back on her bed, and she was lying there, half-asleep, and she would breathe on me, and I’d start to whimper. My legs, my legs were still quivering when I walked over here . . .”
I kiss the back of her head. “Should I call her?”
She tenses a little. “Why?”
“You said. It ought to be the three of us, or.”
“That’s different,” she says. “You get that, don’t you? This, this is just the two of us. We’re still? – I meant, her. Anything with her. Except, last night.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t. And that’s okay?”
“Yes,” I said, kissing the back of her head again. “It’s okay.”
And I hold her there, as she falls into a shallow sleep, and I hold her, not moving, for two, maybe three hours, till she wakes up, wanting coffee.
“Oh, fuck,” says Eva, her knees up, one now-bare foot planted on Jamie’s blue-jeaned ass bobbing as Jamie’s mouth works its magic on Eva’s cunt. “Oh, fuck. Hey. Unh.” She hooks her glasses off, her eyes quizzical and blue, tiny now atop those cheekbones. “Straight boy. Get your skinny ass down here.”
She’s not the best kisser in the world, Eva. Too aggressive, too pushy, too straightforward with her tongue trying to climb between my teeth. Maybe she kisses girls differently, I don’t know. Her tits are bigger than Jamie’s and absurdly soft, like slowly deflating balloons. She shivers as I brush a nipple with my hand, and then I’m tugging her T-shirt up and over her head. Eva’s lying back in the dark, color-leached grass, and I’m sucking one of those nipples cool and pebble-hard into my mouth, and Jamie is swarming up her body next to me, taking charge of the other breast. I reach down past Eva’s rumpled skirt and stumble into Jamie’s hand there. Our fingers tangle together, slicking themselves as they slip along the lips of Eva’s cunt.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, fuck.”
It lasts, what, most of January? And on into February, too. We all three of us went to the GLBT Valentine’s Dance, Jamie femmed to the nines in a slinky black minidress and fishnets and heels you could kill somebody with, and Eva crossing more than a couple of lines with her engineer’s boots and her tight black jeans and her “Some of my best friends are gay” T-shirt that gets stripped off almost immediately once we’re inside, leaving her in a black satin bra with straps as wide as a thumb. A black heart’s painted on her belly, dripping black tears past her navel to her big silver belt buckle. Me, I’m doing the delicate pretty-boy goth thing: black jeans and black Chuck Taylors and a black poet’s shirt – yes, black; pride of my wardrobe – hair hanging loose, face paled with powder, lips lipsticked black, eyes rimmed with mascara by Jamie, who giggled at how squeamish I am about people poking about my eyes and cursed how thick my lashes are. “You don’t need this shit,” she said. “You lucky bastard.” The music loud and fast and thick, Jimmy Somerville singing that unreal falsetto over pounding gospel pianos, girls dancing with girls, boys with boys, colored lights flickering and flashing everywhere in the dark basement. But girls were dancing with boys, too, and boys with girls, of course, and none of it mattered at all, we didn’t think, we just did. It was Eva danced up to unlace my shirt, it was Jamie stood behind her, grinding against her, cupping her crotch. It was me between the two of them, humping to some dusty disco hit, it was some random stranger, boy or girl, nibbling my ear as I watched the two of them dancing slow, stumbling drunk, Jamie’s hands wedged into Eva’s back pockets. It was some boy named Craig or maybe it was Frank I danced with, his butt in my crotch, my hands snaking along his shirtless chest, skin stretched thin over hard ribs, tough tight muscles with no soft tits anywhere to be found. His cigarette-smokey mouth I kissed, narrow little lips nibbling at my tongue, as Jamie and Eva cheered.
“Ah,” says Jamie, “all he needs is a good fuck.”
“And I’m just the man to do it,” says Frank, or maybe Craig, and what the hell, right?
Like now: like now, we aren’t thinking, I didn’t consciously plan to be lying back in the cold grass, kissing Eva as she lies back against me, she didn’t have to think to sit in my lap, lie back in my arms, Jamie isn’t thinking as she kneels again to finish what she started, her shirt’s gone, her bra’s gone, and she didn’t care about how her bare ass would be hanging out in the night air like it is now when she unbuttoned her jeans and shoved them over her hips so that I or Eva, I forget which, could ease a finger into her cunt. Jamie’s curls spill madly down her back, glowing in the eerie twilight, and I’m not thinking about how Eva must taste to her or what her knees must feel like wedged into the not exactly muddy ground. I don’t care that one of my wingtips has already fallen off, that burrs have snagged the sleeve of my jacket. As Eva begins to shudder and come, one hand pulling out a clump of grass, her head tossed back as I nibble her throat, as I look down across her heaving belly to see Jamie’s eyes peering up at me over the sparse dark hatching of Eva’s pubic hair, as Jamie’s eyes crinkle in a smile buried between Eva’s legs, as all of this is happening at once all I’m thinking, I think, is now, and now, and now?
Me and Eva, hanging out alone, sitting on the fire escape outside the old Finney building, smoking cloves and drinking Jenny Creams. It’s March, and unseasonably warm, and Jamie isn’t feeling too well, so we aren’t doing what we’d thought we’d be doing, which was seeing the 9:30 showing of The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T.
“Hey,” says Eva, and I pretty much know what she means, so I kiss her.
We don’t turn on the lights in her room and it’s like it’s the first time all over again, getting nervous as we undress each other with fumbling, frantic fingers. It is the first time, really. Because, you see?
“Did you bring a condom?” she asks, in my ear. “Christ.” She snorts. “I never have to think ab
out that crap.”
. . . in all we’d done, I’d never actually, well. Not with her.
Lying back, half-lit by the lights out on the quad, glasses gone, vulnerable and delicate and – fuck! – scared, even, this amazing lanky force of nature, waiting for me, hunched over her, suddenly ashamed of my burning cock, shoved into a latex sleeve and pointed at her like a sneer. “Hey,” she says. “Hey. You chickening out on me?”
She was hot and wet and I slipped so easily into her. She wrapped her legs around my butt and her arms around my back and said, “Just hold it here, a minute, just a minute,” into my ear, and we lay there until it got to be too much, and I started to pull and push even as she started to buck under me. And then I was fucking her in a frenzy, slamming into her over and over and over again, her thrashing there on her futon, throwing her head back, growling and gasping and bellowing, raking my butt and my shoulders with her short and stubby fingernails, pulling my hair, me working one arm and then the other under her legs, lifting them up until her thighs were pressed against my chest, her knees over my elbows, her eyes wide open and stunned and grey in the dim light, my cock sliding in and out and in again, smooth, well-oiled, stroking deep and out again, and again, and again – I felt it, the orgasm, starting to build a wave in the back of my head, in my butt, in my ankles, and like a surfer I tried to swim out to meet it, not caring about where she was, what she was doing, trusting her to look out for herself, but something – the angle, the mechanics, the light, the moment, something – something went awry. The wave washed past me and left me flickering in its wake. As I slowed, dulling, Eva began to thrash wildly under me, grabbing the sheets, bucking as she yelled incoherently about something, fuck, fuck, goddamn, goddammit all to fucking hell. Hot pain lanced the head of my cock. I pulled out, and she nearly hit me. I caught her wrist.
“Fuck,” she said, trying to yank her wrist free. Panting harshly. “Fucker.”
“It hurts,” I said, clipped. Holding her wrist. She trembled, and hearing that, her face softened suddenly, the scowl melting away.
“You didn’t,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“Oh,” she said, and I let go. “Oh. I couldn’t. Either.”
“We could,” I said, and she nodded, “Maybe later.” But we fell asleep and didn’t wake up till morning, and Jamie had been calling my room all night, looking for me.
But now, now, now Jamie lies back in the grass, naked, breathing so carefully, very carefully so as not to disturb the orgasm we’re building within her, patient tinkerers that we are, our fingers and our tongues playing together on the lips of her cunt, the tense little bud of her clit, the edges of her nipples, the rippling skin along her flanks, the shivering gooseflesh of her arms and thighs, the whorled pucker of her ass, the humid cups behind her knees. I can feel it, what we’re building within her, me and Eva: delicate, intricate, interlocking crystals full of light, shutting out the night around us, swallowing us all inside it, this inhuman thing that doubles and redoubles itself, as shivery cold as the night breeze that runs over my bare back, growing on its own now with no help from us, spiking into her like salt, seen through a microscope, and she trembles at the hugeness of it all, oh, oh – and as she comes, her mouth is open, just, her eyes are shuttered, and as she comes, I look to Eva, who built all this with me, but she is looking at Jamie, and her face is closed, sealed up, unreadable in the light of this wondrous thing we’ve made.
The moon. If you stare at the moon, if you fix something, a tree branch that isn’t moving in a breeze, that’s still and hanging there, between you and the moon, if you fix your eyes on that, and concentrate, you can just barely see the moon move. The rotation of the earth under you, spinning you away from it, slowly but inevitably. You can see it, and feel it all. The stars, wheeling ponderously away.
“Did you bring any condoms?” asks Jamie.
But I’ve already come, I don’t say. Standing, my pants around my knees, the head of my cock rolling on Jamie’s lips, hot and wet, Eva behind me, her hands, only, cupping my ass, one spit-slick finger sliding inside, oh shit, oh. The come lost in the darkness. But I had brought them. Maybe John hadn’t seen me slip them into my jacket pocket, but I had. I’d known. I fish one out, my lazing cock slowly shaking off its stupor. Eva chuckles there in the darkness, her hair silvered in the moonlight.
Jamie takes the packet from me and rips it open with her teeth, squats over me, unrolls it carefully down the length of my half-stiff cock, which is more than half stiff when she’s done. I reach for her, my hand tingling, and she shakes her head, almost as if I’d known she would. And, “No,” she says, before any of us can say anything else, “not me.”
Eva sits up, in the grass. “I,” she starts to say, but doesn’t finish whatever it was.
Jamie sits beside her, and kisses her, gently, and they lie down together, Eva on her back, and Jamie beside her, stroking her thigh. Beckoning. I stand, lightheaded, as if the air at the bottom of that bower is richer somehow, funkier, as if I’ve suddenly been shot to the top of a mountain. But I can’t see anything. It’s dark.
“Here,” says Eva, or maybe Jamie. “Come on,” says Jamie. I’m pretty sure.
I kneel there, between her knees. I kiss her. She kisses me. Then Jamie kisses her as I feel for her cunt, where it is, where I am. Jamie’s hand meets mine, and then Jamie’s hand is on my cock as Eva’s hands spread herself and I plant my own hands to either side of Eva, my arm brushing Jamie’s belly, Jamie guiding me inside.
Someone starts to say something, someone else stops their mouth with a kiss. Someone’s fingers are in my mouth and they have that tang, that musk, but for the life of me I can’t tell whose, whose fingers, whose cunt. My legs, Eva’s legs, Jamie’s legs all tangled together, I can’t tell whose is whose. Whose hand is clenched around my butt, whose breath is hot and thick in my ear. I’m kissing someone, and I don’t know who it is.
But I know whose cunt surrounds me. I know where my cock is.
I try to find Jamie’s cunt, try to reach for it with my fingers, to be inside her, too, but it’s too awkward. I can’t. Eva is moving under me, I catch myself, dig my knees into the ground I suddenly notice is cold and damp. Dirt grits under the heel of my hand. It’s Jamie stroking my back, murmuring something I can’t make out. It’s Eva, moaning. Coming. Coming, even as I feel it swarm up from behind me and pounce, my muscles jerking as it all comes pouring cleanly out of me. It’s over, all over. Almost before I knew it had begun.
March, and we’re walking through the Arb, Jamie and me, along the narrow path between the two reservoirs, random wisps of fog steaming up from the grey unruffled water. Our winter coats hanging still in the still air.
“We can’t,” she says, resting her head against me. “Not any more, okay?” And I want to ask her why she’s looking for my approval. None of this had ever been my idea, after all.
But I don’t.
“It’s just,” she says, “it’s so confusing. When it’s just you, and just me, I know. You know? I know what you want. I know what I want.”
I stoop down, pick up a rock, utterly fail to send it skipping across the lake. It sinks, and the ripples are swallowed in the slowly seeping fog.
“They say,” I tell her, “that the triangle is the most stable shape there is.”
“That’s horseshit,” she says.
“That’s geometry,” I say.
Eva ungainly, pulling up her underpants, her glasses already back on her face, a silvery sheen of moonlight masking her eyes. Jamie, naked, holding up Eva’s kilt.
“That’s it, then,” says Jamie, as if answering a question.
Eva freezes. Then slowly takes the kilt and wraps it around her waist. Buttons it. “Well?” she says. “What do you have to say about it?”
And I realize with no little astonishment it’s me she’s talking to.
“Anything?” she says.
And I open my mouth and realize I have no idea wh
at she’s talking about.
“Shit,” says Eva, to Jamie now. “It was never him, you know. I mean?”
“That doesn’t matter,” says Jamie. And I’m starting to think maybe none of us has any idea what any of us is saying. Or thinking.
Eva pulls her T-shirt over her head. I am uncomfortably aware that I am naked, and it is chilly outside in Ohio in early May, at night. She shrugs into her cardigan, kicks a foot into a boot. “Well?” she says, to me again. “Is this it?”
“It’s not up to me,” is what I say.
And Eva says, “All right.”
And she walks away.
Back at the end of October, and what’s trying to pass for a homecoming party is too loud and trying too hard and there’s a whole bunch of white kids in expensive clothes dancing to “Fight the Power” and even though me and Eva are both white, and her jeans were probably a pretty penny at Unique Boutique, and I was wearing my magic four-button black-and-green check jacket, we’re both sniggering at them. That’s when the “Most Amazing Girl in the World” comes back from the bathroom, and shit, would you look at that? She brought me a fresh cup of beer. Damn.
“Look at you,” she says, but I can’t stop looking at her, those amazing blue eyes, that hair, that unbelievable head of shaggy gold. “I leave you for a minute and you’re already macking on somebody else,” she says. You hear that? She says “macking on.” Is that not Amazing?
“Naw,” I say, “you don’t get it. This is Eva, she’s like, one of my best friends. She’s a lady-killer, like me. Eva, this is Jamie, and I saw her first.”
“You wanna fuck anyway?” says Eva, grinning sharply.
“Some other time, maybe,” says Jamie, and that was that.
The Key
Sage Vivant
Of all the tourists who invade Santorini each summer, Americans are my favorite. They don’t bother to learn much Greek before they get here, but they are friendly enough to make you forgive them.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4 Page 42