There is still electricity.
When I’m ready, it takes only the smallest movement to start her withdrawal. She unbelts the harness, lays it on the bed and comes to stretch out next to me.
I wake up freezing from the open window a short time later. Laurie is breathing softly next to me, and the sight of her warms me. I can’t resist running my hand over her body. Featherlight, I let my hand wander across the hills and valleys of her skin.
Tanned hands and arms give way to pale breasts with dark nipples. Her stomach is soft, but flatter than I thought it might be. Her pubic hair is in tight, still-damp curls. I hear her breathing change as my hand explores, and then it catches as I touch those curls.
When I get a positive reaction, I do more. So I tickle the curls. Run my hand along the crease where thigh meets mons. I leave the area to run my palm over the curve of her hip before returning to repeat the movements.
She rolls, or rather lets herself relax, onto her back and spreads her legs ever so slightly. I repeat my gentle exploration, then run only the barest tip of my finger along the cleft between her lips. She moans. I watch her as I do it all over again. Her eyes are closed, her lips parted, her hands completely relaxed.
She spreads her legs wider and bends her knees, giving me open access. Somehow I know if I dive in, she will retreat. So I tickle, and lightly run my fingertips over sensitive skin. With each repetition, I part her lips a tiny bit farther until finally, I bare her clit. I stick my finger in my mouth and then barely touch the tip of that wet finger to her already glistening clit. She pushes her head back into the pillows, arches her hips up toward my finger and lets out the most satisfying moan. And so I continue, with every touch as soft as the first. My fingers explore every moist fold. And when they are just at her opening, she thrusts her hips up to take them into her.
My body lurches with desire. I want to fuck her. She is so wide open. So wanting. So ready.
Maybe she does want it. Maybe, being a real butch, she can’t ask for it. Won’t ask for it. But maybe, just maybe, she wants it as much as I want to give it.
I continue with my fingers for a minute, taking them out to play with her clit, putting two fingers inside her. She is so wet.
“Stay. Wait. Trust me.” I implore her as I quickly move away from her, retrieve the dildo and harness, and strap myself in.
She has to hear what I’m doing, yet she stays just as she is, eyes closed, hands relaxed, hips gently rocking. I mean to mount her, but the sight of her wetness makes my mouth water, and I have to taste her. She is sweet and salty and positively dripping. She keeps thrusting her hips up for something that’s not yet there. So I kneel between her legs and place the head of the dildo on her clit.
I want to tease her. I want to make sure she’s ready and willing. And she is. She moves her hips in such a way that I have no choice but to enter her. She wraps her legs around me and makes it clear, although she never says a word, that she wants to be fucked. Properly. Forcefully. Now.
I never thought I would have the honor of fucking a butch. I’ve had my fantasies. This is so much better. After I am inside her, she opens her eyes and looks directly at me. I know she wants it. I know she’s all here with me.
I fuck her. And she takes it beautifully. Her legs wrapped around my hips, her hands reaching up to pinch one of my nipples, her hips rising to meet my every thrust.
Through all the thrusting and moaning and sweating, I keep a tight rein on myself. I could cum any minute. Only when her hands clutch the sheets, and she says “Yes,” just once, do I allow myself to cum in time with her orgasm.
There’s something about having an orgasm while fucking your lover. It’s like there’s a tunnel from my cunt straight through the middle of me, and the orgasm fills that whole inside space. The sensation takes over for a moment. It feels like forever, but it’s only a fraction of a second.
When I return to myself, Laurie is letting out the last little moan from her orgasm.
As soon as she stops rocking, I withdraw, unhook the harness and let it drop to the floor, and then lie back down on top of her. I want to protect her from whatever misgivings she might have. But she’s fine.
She smiles up at me, kisses me, and then moves me to lie next to her. “I didn’t know you could do that. Did you cum?”
I nod. “Was it okay that I…?” I let the sentence die out.
She nods. “More than okay. You’re quite talented.”
I smile.
We fall asleep until sometime in the early morning when the sky first turns gray. I wake to find her sitting on the edge of the bed. I can tell she wants to go back to her room, and I tell her that’s okay. We both know this encounter isn’t going to lead to anything more permanent. Well, except for perhaps a repeat performance in six months.
Did I tell you I have a thing for butches?
LA CAÍDA
Anna Meadows
When I was seven years old, I caught a monarch butterfly off the fruit trees in my grandmother’s backyard. It had perched on a pear blossom, its wire tongue probing the center for nectar, and I trapped it in one of the blue mason jars Abuelita had once used to can cactus-flower jam. I watched it flutter against the aqua glass, its wings a flash of marigolds and obsidian.
“Let it go, m’ija,” my grandmother said, pausing from her work in the herb patch.
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s hungry.”
“But so am I.”
Worry crossed her face. Even after years of watching her granddaughters turn eighteen, when a hunger for salt and iron filled their mouths, she didn’t know why I would want to eat the winged creature. My older sisters and cousins craved blood, only blood. Naguales never wanted anything else.
“Let it go, m’ija,” she said again.
“Why?”
“He could be a warrior,” she said, reminding me of the legend that said fallen Aztec soldiers were reborn as monarchs. “He could be your ancestor.” She picked a handful of marjoram leaves. “And even if he’s not, he could be un ángel caído.”
“A what?” I asked. I knew as little Spanish as my mother; she’d forgotten all but the Lord’s Prayer since her family moved to Luna Anaranjada when she was five.
“A fallen one,” my grandmother said. “Sometimes God takes pity on them, depending on what they’ve done. An angel who rebels against Him will see no mercy. He’ll be thrown to the Earth and vanish before he hits the ground.” She pointed up toward the Milky Way, coming into focus and banding the sky as it darkened. “Como un meteoro.” She took the jar in her hands. “But for the lesser sins, he might turn the angel into a monarch on its way down, so it can float to Earth. Its wings turn to limbs only when they touch the ground.” She eased the jar back between my palms. “Do you see, m’ija?”
I nodded, my eyes down, and unscrewed the lid. The monarch hesitated, crawling along the inside lip, but I shook the jar and it fluttered out.
I didn’t hunger for another butterfly until after my eighteenth birthday, when I wanted blood so badly I was ready to bite into my own arm. My sisters waited out their cravings as my family had for generations, eating raw, bloody meat from a cousin’s shop, biding their time until they heard about a man who raped a woman or beat his wife. They would surround him in one of the fallow wheat fields outside town and share the meal like guests at a wedding feast. When a village was rid of such men, we moved on.
They always invited me. I rarely came. The man’s screams and the sound of my sisters’ teeth tearing into his muscle turned my stomach.
Carmen made fun of me. “Little sister is hungry, but can’t eat. She doesn’t want to work for it. She wants to buy it in cartons at the store like orange juice.”
I didn’t hold it against her. She often led my sisters to their next meal, and because of our family, the talk about our kind, los naguales, was changing. Villages used to fear naguales. They called us witches, and whispered that at night we turned to cats and wild dogs to commit our
crimes. They said we were why children became sick and crops withered. They blamed murders and missing livestock on our taste for blood.
Thanks to my family’s penchant for the blood of men so evil no one missed them, wives and mothers now spoke of us as guardians. Good men used us as warnings to their sons and brothers. If they guessed who we were, they did not tell, fearing we would flee before we had rid their village of the kind of men we fed on. If one of those men found us out, he never lived to expose us.
No one ever found the bodies. My mother and Carmen never told me how they managed that. Once I asked them if it was the graveyards; two of my uncles ran a funeral home the next county over, and a few of my cousins worked as undertakers. But my mother only looked horrified and told me they’d never defile good men’s tombs with the bodies of the depraved.
Depraved or not, I couldn’t feed on them. My sisters had grown tall and lean on their diet. I’d gained ten pounds trying to fill the gnawing in my stomach with the olive oil cookies and chiles en nogada that were once my favorites. My breasts had bloomed a full cup size. My thighs had softened and widened, and I carried a little pouch of extra fat below my belly button that strangers mistook for baby fat, thinking I was still thirteen. I ate, and ate because I couldn’t stomach what I needed. It wasn’t that I objected to what my sisters were doing, to what my family had done for a hundred years. But my body rebelled against the nourishment. Carmen, for all her mocking, had brought me a glass of it once. But I heard the cries of the guilty man and their teeth puncturing his ligaments as surely as if I’d been in that fallow field, and I couldn’t keep it down. I was eating myself into the next dress size, and I was still starving.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that the next time I saw a monarch butterfly floating past a pitaya flower, I imagined its powdered wings on my tongue.
It was the night Hector Salazar stormed onto our front lawn, stinking of cheap mezcal and crushing the datura under his boots, and waking the whole neighborhood. “Get out here, putas! You filthy, murdering whores! You killed my brother!”
Carmen strolled onto the front porch, our grandmother’s pearl-handled pistol tucked into her skirt. “Your brother tried to rape another man’s wife.” She cleared flakes of dried oregano from under her fingers, and tossed her head at Adriana, Lucia, and me to tell us to stay back. “God brings swift justice sometimes. It’s not our place to question His ways.”
He spat on our statue of la virgen. “I’ll kill all of you.” He waggled an unsteady finger at Carmen. “The sheriff thinks you’re pretty. That’s the only reason you’re not in the jail. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll kill all of you myself.” He stumbled over the brick planter border.
Lucia, pure soul as she is, stepped forward to keep him from falling, but Adriana held her back, and Hector fell into the weeds.
“Not tonight. I’ll let you putas wait and wonder when I’ll get you.” He staggered to his feet, his knees and elbows coated in mud, and out toward the main road.
Adriana fumed. I gripped the porch railing so I didn’t tremble. When Lucia caught her breath, she cleaned la virgen with her skirt.
“Don’t worry,” said Carmen. “He knows what his brother did, and he knows he has nothing to threaten us with. Go to bed.”
Carmen slept like a cat in sunlight, and Adriana and Lucia turned over in their beds until they wore themselves out.
I knew I wouldn’t sleep until dawn, so I took a walk in the desert behind our house. That was when I saw the butterfly.
It looked already dead as it was falling. It flapped its wings no more than the wind would have done for it, and it tumbled toward the ground without riding the updraft. I lost sight of it and found it again, its path swirling through the dust that clouded the air.
I knew my grandmother couldn’t see me. She’d settled with my mother in Cachcaba, thirty-seven miles away; we brought them blood in blown-glass jars on the weekends. But I searched the dark anyway, just in case. No one would ever know. If it was already dead, it couldn’t be one of my Aztec ancestors, so what could be the harm? Birds ate butterflies every day.
A last gust of wind swept it up before its body weighted down its wings and pulled it to the Earth. I tried to follow it, but it vanished in the dull gold of blowing dust.
When the thin dirt settled, the butterfly was gone. In its place, a human body lay curled on its side.
I gasped. I didn’t know how I’d missed it or how long it had been there. It looked dead, at first. From the cropped hair and straight hips, I thought it was a boy. Then I noticed the slight curve of her breast. She was naked except for bruising that darkened her back.
She was breathing.
I knelt behind her. I reached out to see if she was really there. My fingers barely grazed the fine, peach-fuzz hairs on her back, but her shoulder blades pinched, her eyes snapping open. She struggled for breath like I’d just pulled her out of water.
“Shh.” I stroked her back.
“Leave me alone,” she said, her voice young, but low.
“You’re hurt,” I whispered.
“I’m all right.”
“You need help.”
She shivered, though the day’s heat had barely faded with the dark; she must have had a fever. “Please leave me alone.”
“I won’t hurt you,” I said. “I’ll take you to the doctor. He’s not far.”
“No,” she said. “Please. Don’t let anyone see me like this.”
I took my shawl from my shoulders.
It was light, just enough to guard against the chill that settled over the desert at night, but I draped it over her waist, using some of the slack to cover her breasts.
I caught another glimpse of the bruising on her back. It wasn’t indigo or violet, shadowed in yellow. It was veined in black, and filled in with orange. Two great, bruised wings, like a monarch’s, but out of focus, spread across her back.
I wanted to touch them. I didn’t.
“Are you a warrior?” I asked, even though I doubted it; her hair was gold as new corn silk, and the tan of her skin looked dirty, not coppery like the raw sienna that ran in my family.
“No,” she said.
“Are you one of them?” I asked. “Un ángel caído?”
She winced. It was as close to a nod as I’d get.
I took her in my arms. She was light, lighter than she should have been even with how thin she was, but she grew heavier as I came closer to our back door, like she was becoming solid and human. She fell in and out of waking, asking me over and over again to leave her alone, leave her out there. But when I put her in my bed and wrapped her in my grandmother’s ojo blanket, she slept.
I needed clothes. She might let me touch her if I gave her clothes. The shops in town wouldn’t open until morning, and the skirts Carmen, Lucia, and I wore would look strange on the ángel’s boyish body, with her short, messy hair. Adriana’s dresser was my only choice.
She was the heaviest sleeper of all of us. I eased her door open and snuck toward the heavy dresser. But my foot hit the only board in her room that creaked, and she started awake.
“Little sister?” She sat up in bed, groggy. “What are you doing?”
“Could I borrow some of your clothes?”
“Why would you want to borrow clothes from me? You never wear pants. Besides, they wouldn’t fit you.”
“Please?” I said. “I’ll explain in the morning.”
“Is there a man in your room?”
“Of course not.”
She got out of bed, pushed past me, and slipped toward my room.
I followed after her, but I had to slow as I passed the hallway mirror and the side table I always ran into if I wasn’t careful; my hip hitting its corner would wake my sisters for sure, especially if one of the earthen jars fell to the tile and shattered.
Adriana threw my door open and saw the black and orange bruising on the ángel’s back. “You brought home una caída?”
I shut the door behind us. �
��She needed help.”
“Carmen will have a fit when she finds out. She doesn’t even like me going around with women. If she finds out you have one in your bed…”
“Then don’t tell her.”
She clicked her tongue all the way down the hallway and came back with trousers and a collared shirt. “These might be a little big and too long.” She left them on the dresser and nodded toward the ángel. “She’s cute. I can see why you like her.”
“Adriana!”
“Don’t worry, little sister.” She eased the door shut as she left. “She’s not the kind I like.”
I dressed the ángel in Adriana’s trousers while she slept. The shirt I’d let her put on herself. When she woke just after midnight, I heated a chile relleno in the oven and tried to get her to eat.
“I’m not hungry,” she said, still a little asleep.
I looked over her bony frame. “You look hungry.”
“So do you,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said.
“You still look hungry.” She turned over, sucking air in through her teeth at the sudden pain.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re hurt. I knew it.” I pulled the quilt from her shoulders, freezing when I saw the scrape on her shoulder, the one that had been against the ground. It glistened like liquid garnet, warm and alive, the blood of a living woman, not a dead man.
I caught myself biting my lip.
Even in the dim room, I saw the flicker of understanding in la caída’s face. “You’re a salt girl,” she said.
“What?”
“We call you salt girls, because you want the salt in the blood.” I swallowed to keep from crying. I wanted her warmth, and to run my tongue over that slick of blood so badly it was driving me to sobs. “I don’t know why. We’ve been this way for a hundred years. Maybe more.”
“Even we’re not told why things are the way they are.” She lowered her gaze, like shame was weighing it down. “Why we want what we want.”
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