Best of Best Lesbian Erotica 2

by Tristan Taormino

  “I was embarrassed bringing in the job before,” she said. “I wanted you to do it.”

  “But you could have been home already.”

  “I’m like you, a night owl,” she said, hand still on her hip, snugly encased in tight gray trousers. Ever since the company went business-casual, her clothing had been shrinking. While the men dressed down to comfortable khakis and polo shirts, and the women into flat loafers, she’d gone more contemporary— synthetic skins and form-fitting blouses, patent-leather platform shoes, as if she’d walked off the pages of a fashion magazine. It was her battle against the corporate culture and she waged it valiantly.

  I told her not to worry. We would give her boss what he wanted.

  When she came back a few hours later, I handed her the page and she burst out laughing. In her absence, I’d dug up an image of a U.S. army tank and pointed the cannon directly at the reindeer.

  “Poor bastard,” she said.

  “A hunter never questions his weapons,” I responded.

  “I meant the reindeer.”

  “It’s a she.”

  “But it’s got antlers. Only males have antlers.”

  “Reindeer aren’t like other deer, they both have them.”

  “Cool,” she smiled. “I wonder if it makes them any less sexist.”

  I laughed, bemused by her twisted-rebel stance and ruthless determination. My students were usually shy in their flirtations, stammering bunnies afraid to stand too close or look me in the eye. But this kid was unflinching. She smiled as if she had me where she wanted me, and what killed me was we both knew it was true. I wanted to pin her down right there on my desk in the awful fluorescent lighting with an annoying pop song playing and make her put up or shut up. But my two colleagues were tapping away at their computers and there were other jobs in the rack. I handed her the real document with the bow and arrow, and when she took it her hand brushed against mine. As she left the word-processing center, the hand she’d touched started stinging. I looked down and saw my forefinger was bleeding. The little raider had given me a paper cut.

  In the bathroom, I ran my finger under the tap. The warm water was soothing, but I couldn’t stop laughing at myself. Flirting was an occupational hazard.

  I never heard the door click open, had no idea I wasn’t alone until I saw her face materialize in the mirror in front of me. She asked what happened and I told her she’d wounded me. I moved my finger from the water and held it in front of her. A few drops of blood seeped through the scratch.

  “A paper cut,” she said.

  I nodded.

  She took my hand in hers, and I felt as if I were being sub- merged in the gushing warm tap. Slowly, without taking her eyes from mine, she lifted my finger and kissed it lightly before opening her lips around the cut and sucking as if I’d been bitten by a snake. I slipped back against the sink, letting my skin melt with every stroke of her tongue on my finger. She kept her eyes open, staring at me.

  I took a deep breath. “Do they know about you out there?”

  For a second, she stopped sucking and shook her head, then took my entire finger in her mouth. “Oh fuck,” I said. “Fuck.”

  I grabbed her by the cheeks and pulled up her head. My wounded finger throbbed against her skin. She cupped her hands over mine and we stared in the rushed and inexorable manner of lovers on the precipice. Her eyes were engorged, pitch-black catacombs of desire. A reflection of my own. I pressed her back against the tiles and kissed her in the bright light. She grabbed my neck. I slid my hands down to her breasts, felt her squirm beneath me. Our kissing was ferocious. Suddenly she pulled away. “Not here,” she said.

  “Then where?”

  “I know a place.”

  Ours was a sick building. With its windows sealed shut, the same fetid air circulated through every crevice day in and day out. She got colds all winter long. I brought her echinacea tea and zinc drops, held her head in my lap in the secret room we found off the foyer on the eighteenth floor. It was like something out of an old movie. You pushed the wall and it revolved backward. Inside was a metal desk with a small painting above it. The painting was by one of my favorite artists, an innovator of the New York school. It was pristine in its simplicity. A few colored boxes—red, yellow, blue, nothing exotic—with frayed edges bouncing off each other, as if ener- gized by the magnetic fields between them. She said someone had left it there for us.

  At last unfettered, she cried about not sleeping, about missing the gym, traveling too much, and not seeing me for days. She was being pressured to take on more clients, and with every deal she grew sicker of her own deferential conformity, her uncanny ability to make money for a system she despised. I found her moral conflict absurd, if not a bit youthful. She was playing dress-up in the last bastion of white-collar patriarchy. Though the collars were less constricting, the roles were still clearly defined. You couldn’t get any further from the reindeer, I said. She cried harder.

  I told her she was my baby, promising everything would be okay, and although the banalities slipping from my lips alarmed me, I knew it was what she wanted to hear. I knew it as instinctively as if she were my child. We rocked gently, her face against my breasts until longing usurped comfort and I wanted to fuck her as much as I needed to protect her. I didn’t have to say it. She’d learned to read my rhythm, my body, my breath, and she was a quick study. She ripped open my shirt and played with my nipples. She adored my nipples, loved burying her face between my breasts, which made me feel more maternal and at the same time brought me to my knees in delirium, if only for a few minutes in our hidden cavern before we returned unsuspected, though a bit rumpled, to our desks.

  My supervisor never questioned me. Those of us who worked grave had a tacit understanding that anyone might disappear for a while. Some people paced the halls or hiked up and down the carpeted stairwells; others, swamped by their circadian clocks, napped on the plush couches in one of the more deserted lobbies. Whatever it took to make it to sunrise. She left before the sun came up, often skipping out just after we parted as if our assignation had been her reward for making it through another sixteen-hour day, but not without an email saying, “goodnight” or “miss you.” In her emails she called me Rembrandt. She said I was the only person she could talk to. The only one who understood her. She never used the word love.

  After being together, I was bombarded by the adrenaline of our interlocked bodies, her teeth on my nipples as she shoved her entire hand inside me. You take so much so fast, she said, as amazed by the dexterity of my cunt as I was by her ability to get me there so quickly. I never told her how good she was. I didn’t have to. With her hand inside me we were both acutely aware of her cutthroat ambition. “Did you come?” she asked. “Did you really?”

  “You were here.”

  “We can do better.”

  “I have to get back.”

  “Please, one more time. I really want to see you.”

  She would arrive even earlier the next morning to finish the work she’d forsaken. I would claim another migraine had kept me from my desk. Never in my life had I been such a bottom, and without an ounce of guilt.

  What can I say? The kid knew how to fuck.

  I blushed remembering every twist and permutation of her hand as if it were still there, like a severed limb that leaves its ghosted particles behind. The energy could remain for hours, days, even weeks.

  Occasionally I went to the bathroom, turned on all the taps, and masturbated in one of the stalls, but mostly after she left I became so morose I put on my headphones and listened to country music until I cried.

  At dawn I stumbled out into the cold quiet mornings and by rote ambled to the subway station. Staring at the freshly scrubbed faces, I wanted to embrace them for their tenacity. Up so early pursuing their dreams. Like her parents. I became an ethnic detective, dissecting skin color and bone structure to determine if anyone was from her country, desperate to see how she might look in daylight. I imagined her at ho
me in bed, buried beneath the pale orange comforter she talked about. We romanticized her bed with its billowing canopy, the hotels she frequented that had two king-size beds and cable TV. She said she always ordered a porno film and charged it to the company because she knew it was what guys did on the road.

  I saw her in a hotel room, lights dimmed, misty blue streams of television caressing her limbs. I saw her in the boardroom, the only woman at a table full of suits as titillated by her professional machinations as I was by her hand inside me. I saw her next to me on the walk from the subway to my apartment, promising to make me scrambled eggs with avocado slices for breakfast.

  Alone in my apartment I poured a bowl of cold cereal and realized I didn’t even know her phone number.

  Before her I had a girlfriend. We had been dating almost a year when my affair with the investment banker began. My girlfriend was kind, beautiful, and wildly intelligent. She was a serial monogamist who fell in love with people the way she fell in love with authors, deeply and chauvinistically, devouring every sentence she could find by and about the enamored scribe, her fingers smeared with ink from rare books, diaries, and Xeroxes of academic journals. But unlike scholars who could make a life’s work out of one writer, my girlfriend eventually got bored. The signs were subtle. She carried fewer titles to work, kept a bookmark on the same page for weeks, stopped visiting the library, and eventually found some nugget of betrayal she could not overlook.

  The email had been on my night table. It wasn’t incriminating, but would have been enough to rouse the dander of any lover. When she asked who, it seemed pointless to lie. My girlfriend had fallen out of love; I’d never really been there. She called me a cheater, said I had no respect for her, and questioned my sanity in having an affair with someone at work—someone so young and wrongfully employed. I stopped listening, and instead remembered my girlfriend’s wet tongue traveling from my hipbone to that spot in the back of my neck where all the nerves met, and kissing me there as if I’d grown another set of lips. We’d spent hours on her couch making out like teenagers before ever touching a button, waistband, or zipper where underneath lay another treat. My bookish girlfriend had wonderful taste in lingerie. How she could wear corsets, garters, red stockings, and lacy bras without ever looking tacky amazed me. Then again, she was the first lover whom I let light candles and rub scented oils into the crevices behind my kneecaps, the first whose pussy I lapped wholeheartedly as she mimicked on mine and somehow it never felt stereotypical. She knew how sexy tenderness could be in the right hands. She also knew how easily it could evaporate.

  After my confession, she saw me as she saw her once-revered politically oppressed writer who left his wife and children for a woman half his age, moved to another country, and had cosmetic surgery, becoming a painful joke to those who believed the intellect should rule matters of the heart. Those like my girlfriend. I let her believe my moral failings had sunk our relationship. A few months later, I heard she’d moved on to her next lover. The news made me neither happy nor sad.

  I stopped seeing most of my friends and started picking up extra shifts at work to increase the odds of bumping into my little banker. Insomnia set in. Even the eye masks and sandalwood I burned no longer worked. I drank red wine and watched morning talk shows, the soaps, cooking shows, and reruns of old cartoons—whatever it took to disappear inside the screen.

  Then one day at the onset of spring, when sun-drenched mornings brought the rush of children lining up outside before school and dogs dragging their heavy-eyed owners through the streets, after work I went to my studio instead of going home. The last time I’d been there I was so frustrated that I hadn’t cleaned anything. Most of my brushes had hardened. Paint was splattered on the walls and floor. The sink was clogged. I dug up an old canvas and whitewashed it with a roller. Then I mopped, wiped down the walls, opened all the windows, and sat silently while the canvas dried, thinking about suspended color boxes, prisms of static, and the electrified fields sustaining us.

  I thought I was sick with love, sleeping as little as she did so we’d be on the same time clock. It took me weeks to see it wasn’t only her cycle I was emulating. I had begun to worship productivity, becoming devout in my routine, unflagging in my work ethic, greedy in my pleasures. Unlike her, I was pleased with the fruits of my labor.

  Each night in the car on the way to work I wondered whether it was a good day or a bad day, or if she’d be there at all when I arrived at the office. Her career was blossoming. Throughout the spring, they sent her on whirlwind road shows that kept her out of town for weeks, and spoke about transferring her to one of the firm’s European satellites in June. When she returned, often for one or two nights before they shipped her off again, she was so worn out she could barely wheel her suitcase down the hall. She set the alarm on her watch to remind her what time it was, and swallowed antihistamines by the handful, craving the speediness as much as relief from her allergies.

  One night she begged me three times to meet her in the anemic yellow stairwell, where she clung to me as if we might never see each other again. The next night she simply nodded hello, as if I were just another company perk like the twenty-dollar dinner allowances or strip clubs her male colleagues frequented on expense accounts. It amazed me how readily she could liquidate her sexuality, and how obsequiously I’d relinquished mine to the vagaries of her profession.

  When she was away, I sulked through my shift, drinking stale coffee in big Styrofoam cups until I fled in the mornings, pumped-up and aggressive, ready to attack the canvases I’d carted to my studio. I was monopolized by huge territories of color, returning to the most primary forms to see how I’d slipped so far away. It had been years since I’d felt so unburdened.

  At night I was still chained to her. My mind oscillated between rapturous sparks of memory and the most painful longing I’d ever experienced. Did she really stop the elevator midstream and drop to her knees in front of me with the security guard intoning through speakers Hello, is there anybody in there? What’s going on? Did she come up behind me at the printer bay, sink her entire body into mine, hands on my tits and cunt grinding to the beat of the lasers? Did she whimper and call out my name as if our meeting were a hallowed exercise? Did she say I was the only one? Grieve in anticipation? Make me shudder with joy? The night she flew in from Tokyo, her voice cracked as she carted an armful of documents into the word-processing center and pleaded that all work be done immediately. She had to catch the shuttle to D.C. the next day. She kept her head down as she spoke and her voice in its professional guise made me cringe, her breakneck itinerary a personal rejection. My heart collapsed, at the same time increasing its missionary task, and I wondered if that was what a heart attack felt like—that sinking, speeding feeling. I brushed past her and smelled her unkempt scent, less perfumed, more doughy. She stepped one leg back as if she were trying to trip me. I wanted to smack her.

  She found me in the bathroom and told me she missed me. I didn’t respond. Through a series of yawns, she said she was totally spent. That earlier she’d fallen asleep on the toilet seat, and her allergies were raging. She hadn’t even been home to shower or change clothes, although she’d substituted for her silk blouse an oversized company T-shirt that tucked into her skirt in the front and made her look like a feminized Minotaur, half bull, half sorority girl. I wondered how many before me had been sacrificed at her profiteering hands.

  Though I knew she craved the warmth of our secret room, I took her to the thirty-sixth floor, and without a word shoved her face against the windowpane. I ran my hand along the backs of her thighs, finding the rim of her hose beneath her skirt and pulling it down, my mouth next to her ear, hers open against the window steamed up in front of us, obscuring the buildings with their insolent white lights. I whispered in her ear, “Tell me you missed me, tell me,” and she moaned, thrusting her head sideways. I pushed it back to the window so she could see the dark alleyways and slick buildings, the toxic black river beneath us. I wan
ted her to imagine what it might be like to fall.

  She tried to break free and turn around. I pinned all of my weight against her, spreading her legs from behind with one hand and rimming her with my thumb. I talked into her ear, called her a horny little fuck, a capitalist tool, a spy. She slipped back against me, and sighed. I knew she’d shut her eyes. “That’s it, baby,” I whispered. “Come to me. Come home.”

  “I’m yours.”

  “Tell me again.” I slipped a couple of fingers inside her cunt, still massaging her asshole with my thumb. By that time, having given over completely, she’d thrown her weight against the window, eyes tightly shut as I brought my other hand to her clit. She moaned again, said she was all mine. Told me to do whatever I wanted.

  I fucked her harder than she’d ever fucked me, so forcefully she fell into a trance, enveloped by the field between us, the streaming lights against the windowpane. She wailed, cursing as she writhed beneath me, and with her every word I grew larger, more powerful. Her screams echoed in the steely canyons beneath us. I quickly covered her mouth as we fell to the floor, and, more determined than ever—as if my taking her demanded she come back with full force—she climbed on top of me and kissed all the way down my stomach, undoing my zipper with her teeth.

  It was a careless move after her scream, but I didn’t care. My body had disintegrated into the resistance of our rhythm, the energy of her tongue in my cunt, and I saw myself suspended above the city with its millions of colored boxes and white lights, the iron claw of her mouth beneath me. I leaned my head back into the carpet and came quietly, pushing her head away. She slithered up my body and was about to speak when I covered her mouth again. I wanted to remember her without words.