Best Lesbian Erotica 2015

by Laura Antoniou

  How did we meet? How does fate decide to roll her dice? Was it at the park, commiserating over fawn-colored pigeons fighting for brioche crumbs at our feet, while the ginkgo trees shed golden, fan-shaped leaves on the park bench? Was it in an airport while listening to the murky flight update announcements, wondering if we should grab an overpriced stale croissant and latte before our flight, and finally reaching for our lattes at the same time, our fingers touching over scattered copies of USA Today. Maybe it was at work, sighing and rolling our eyes over gum-snapping coworkers, discovering mutual tastes in movies and politics in the lunchroom, meeting outside of the office on the sly and texting filthy thoughts to each other across the table during meetings.

  In reality, we met prosaically. Lacking a noisy yet accurate village matchmaker, we filled out our profiles on OK Cupid, rolled our mutual eyes at the idiocy of naming the five things one could never do without and updated our profiles earnestly and regularly. I worried about whether I sounded too shallow, and you fretted about sounding too serious. We both were annoyed at OK Cupid’s lack of queer identity choices. I changed my sex from male to female and back again monthly, while you identified as bisexual so as not to leave out possible FTM matches. You put up an out-of-focus picture of you repotting plants, said you spoke French and ironed and starched your sheets, didn’t mention your sexual proclivities at all. I mentioned flagging red, gray, black and navy right in the first paragraph, said that I cooked Persian food and collected bird skulls, put up a photo of myself half-dressed and playing an accordion and said that only butch dykes need apply. You were eleven years younger than I was, a rough-hewn-looking butch, and gave me five stars, which made my heart flutter and my cunt get wet in anticipation. I rated you five stars back, and nervously sent you a short, overly edited but carefully flirtatious email suggesting that we meet for tea and conversation. Then I heard nothing for five months. In the interlude I went on a series of fruitless first dates, but I had not forgotten you. In spring you finally wrote back, suggesting that we meet for coffee. Your name was not Amber or Dixie or Tyler, but Lucky. And I wrote to you, signing my name Behrouz, which means lucky in Farsi.

  We met at Cafe Flore, the classic rendezvous for queer blind dating in the Castro. Public transportation was two steps away, so it was easy to flee from the date if it was awful. Cafe Flore was loud and gay as fuck, with mediocre food and sweet servers. We were both on time. I wore pleated gray flannel pants, a white shirt with a Campbell clan wool necktie, my tattered gray Brooks Brothers jacket, purple silk socks with striped garters, horn-rims, my hair slicked to one side and my favorite butterscotch-colored brogues. You wore a stately pompadour, a red, ribbed, wool sweater with frayed cuffs over a white Oxford shirt, black 501 button-fly jeans, three gold rings on your right hand and harness boots. You were stocky and muscular, a little shorter than my five-eight, had deep-brown hair threaded with gray, small breasts, olive skin, a chipped front tooth, hazel eyes, a large aristocratic nose with tiny nostrils, and a beguiling swagger. You drank black coffee, and I sipped sticky sweet soy chai latte.

  I was immediately turned on by you, trying not to look too eager as I glanced at your rough-hewn gardener’s hands, evaluating them for size and dexterity. I was nervous and unsure if you liked me back. I was never good at reading signs and knew that my reserve was often read as disinterest. I wanted to feel your hand in my cunt. We started slowly; we talked about our cats, the general state of classism and disrepair in San Francisco, our jobs, food, and our upbringings. Your tuxedo cat, Elmer, had died two months ago, after living a long and productive life of catching mice, napping in your oval, vintage, pink porcelain bathroom sink and skulking on bookshelves. My ginger cat, Francy, had one bronze eye, a puffed out tail that was longer than her body, and liked to pee with me when I came home from work.

  I told you about my love of books, organization and social service, which led to the good fortune of a job at the San Francisco Public Library. After studying biology, you’d fallen into gardening, and spent your days planning gardens and fondling manure and plants. We agreed that the recent invasion of stealthy, gleaming-white Google buses with black-tinted windows that transported entitled tech workers from their cubicle penthouses in San Francisco to their jobs in Mountain View were shark like, and wondered why they hadn’t been violently defaced yet. We mourned the loss of Plant It Earth, Osento bathhouse, Faerie Queene Chocolates, the dimly lit Mediterranean place on Valencia with Fat Chance belly dancers swiveling sensuously around the tables, The Red Vic Movie House, and Marlene’s drag bar on Hayes Street…and then we sighed like curmudgeonly old farts wondering where the past had disappeared.

  You were raised Jewish in Columbus, Ohio, a hotbed of Republican ideology and Christian intolerance, graduated a year early from Bexley School for Girls and then fled to UC Berkeley for sexual and intellectual freedom. Your dad was an insurance adjustor and your mom worked part-time in the ladies’ undergarments section of Lazarus department store. Your father worked late hours and fancied himself a suave businessman, leaving the house each morning awash in citrusy Spanish cologne and cigarette smoke, and sporting a flashy gold Rolex wristwatch that he won while playing cards. Your mom was bitter around the corners and sentential in the middle: a brunette in turquoise double-knit pants suits and the sweetly floral scent of Chanel No 22. You told me about coming home to find your mom drinking endless goblets of chardonnay while listening half-cocked for the metallic sound of your father’s key in the front door, and the sneaky shuffle that announced his belated presence home. You were an only child, but lived in the same Tudor-style home in the same quiet middle-class neighborhood your entire childhood, the oak-lined streets, your aunts, uncles and cousins, and your friends and their families protecting and loving you even when your folks were distracted. Our family had moved every two years, from state to state, country to country, and continent to continent. I found your childhood geographic stability both exotic and enviable. At age seven, you decided you wanted to be a boy. Each night you’d stare dreamily out of your bedroom window while stroking the faint down on your upper lip to wish a mustache into existence. Wryly, you told me that it didn’t work, but now you’re content with your hard-earned butchness. As a child, you escaped into books, and spent hours in the Bexley Public Library, scouring the shelves for anything related to sexuality and gender, which wasn’t much in the 1960s. Your curiosity and scholastic diligence paid off with a full university scholarship and an early release from Ohio. I’d also grown up immersed in books, hiding in odd corners of the home with a stack of paperbacks and a pocket full of raisins. I related to the escapism that they provided to desperate kids like us, junior outsiders and renegades.

  After three hours of exchanging stories and too much coffee and chai, we started to talk about sex and desire. Our drinks cooled as our temperatures heated. We both lived in San Francisco, home to sexual freedom and excess, with everything from International Ms. Leather, to the Eagle, Mr. S, the 15 Association, the Exiles, regular play parties for every identity and orientation, BDSM coffee houses and more. One-time hookups, public play and casual sex were easily obtainable, but I was embarrassed to admit to you that in my midfifties I’d grown out of the ability to do casual play and sex. It didn’t work for me anymore, and although I missed the immediacy and physical relief of instant sex, I needed lovers, continuity and intimacy. You commiserated, and said that you’d felt the same ever since turning forty-three. Even though we agreed that we both wanted love and deeper intimacy, everything felt dangerous and forbidding—like we were getting ready to foolishly leap off an emotional cliff, our hearts potentially shattering on the shoals below.

  I flushed as our eyes met. We both stopped breathing for a second, unsure if we wanted to continue. Finally, you inhaled, leaned forward, pierced me with the possibility of a future, and murmured, “Tell me. What do you want? What do you need?”

  I blushed, my eyes widening and quickly looking down, and my cunt tingling. I admitted to wear
ing my hankies on the right, and a proclivity for getting fisted, giving head, ass-fucking, bondage and getting beaten. You reached across the table and held my hand with my palm facing up and your calloused hand beneath mine, leaving me feeling exposed, trapped and cradled all at once. I swooned a little at your touch. You smiled a lopsided, sweetly sly smirk, and I imagined one pointed incisor sharply peeking through your lips, your teeth hard against my neck and biting my flesh. You told me you were a top and a sadist, and had been that way since you were a baby dyke in plaid flannel shirts, Frye boots and Carhartts. I blushed again, and felt my nipples harden painfully in the tight confines of my binder, as I whispered through dry lips that although there was no accounting for chemistry, thus far we seemed to have chemistry just fine. I told you that I had simple tastes really, all I wanted was to suck you off, then be beaten and fisted until we were swimming in a pool of come.

  You said, “And what do you call your top? Daddy or Sir?”

  And I answered, “I call my top, baby.”

  You looked at me with your hazel eyes turning green like polished sea glass. You leaned closer, took my hand and bit the side of my palm while looking into my eyes. As you bit harder, my hips lifted, and I groaned. I wanted your teeth on my neck, my breast, my ass. There is a vulnerability to a hand’s underbelly. It is my favorite place to be bitten, so tender and so blatant—I melted. I wanted you to read my desire with your mouth, you hurting me because you need to, and me letting the sharp sensations course through forming a loop of desire between us.

  “Baby,” you said, managing to draw the word out like we’d already taken our clothes off and were lying hip to hip. You didn’t huff up in toppish indignation, weren’t quizzical or offended, but you understood that “baby” was my code for hotness, tenderness and love.

  After four hours at Cafe Flore you murmured, “Let’s go.”

  You stumbled lightly over the shallow steps leading down to the sidewalk, exclaiming that your new bifocals were a bear to get accustomed to, then leaned in to kiss me good-bye on the sidewalk in front of a gaggle of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and next to the organic stone-fruit stand at the farmers market. “It’s Raining Men” was playing tinnily through Cafe Flore’s speakers. You kissed exactly correctly…and if that sounds dry, it isn’t meant to be so. Your lips were firm and pliant, and fit mine like a T-shirt on a teenager. You’d mastered the art of the tender lower lip bite, and as I delicately licked the corners of your lips, we quickly became breathless. We pulled away a quarter of an inch to prolong the anticipation and fell onto each other after five seconds. I pulled you closer as a Sister with a violet Marie Antoinette wig wolf-whistled in our direction. You slipped one muscular thigh between my legs as my cunt melted and throbbed. I moaned into your mouth as your wide palm smoothed my back under my jacket, and I whispered that I wanted your hand inside of me. Now. You growled—a low sound from deep in the back of your throat. I know that the Sister with the lime-green boa passed us a fistful of condoms. I was starry-eyed and damp as we stumbled to my apartment near Duboce Park on Steiner.

  It was dusk, that magical time where the day ends and night begins, when responsibilities dissipate, and mystery and longing fill our hearts. The evening air smelled of jasmine, anticipation and piss—the violent and sweet scents circling us as we walked. The moon was rising as bright as a streetlight, and the sidewalks were full of early evening dog-walkers, with their pups tarrying by trees and potted plants while the owners peered into their palms at their phones. We barely talked. We’d talked through an entire afternoon. Words mean something, but I needed to know how you tasted, how you touched, how we smelled together as we heated up. All I could think of in that fifteen-minute walk was your hand in my cunt, your gardener’s fingers entering one by one, packing me full of you. Anything else was gravy on the cake. You knew.

  By the time I unlocked the door to my flat, it was dark and the full moon watched us. The streetlights had followed us home, lighting one by one as night fell and we were closer to my apartment. I unlocked the top bolt, and then struggled with the pesky bottom one, trying to make the stuck key turn. As I jiggled the lock in the dark hallway, you pressed your body against mine from behind, rubbing your cock against my ass, and reached around to untuck my shirt and run your hands up toward my nipples. I moaned, humping the doorknob with my clit and almost dropping the key. Finally the brass key turned, and the door flew open under our weight. You pushed me suddenly through the dim foyer, down the hallway and into the sandalwood-scented living room, then to the floor. I wasn’t expecting the quickness, and fell to the Persian carpet, my jacket still on and my shirt half-untucked. You stood over me, unbuckled your black leather belt, threw off your sweater, unbuttoned your jeans, pulled out your dick and started stroking it with your hips insolently cocked forward.

  “On your knees. I want you to suck my cock. Now.”

  I crawled over, leaned forward and opened my mouth. I loved filling my mouth with stuff, whether it was cock, chains or fingers. My cunt was soaked, my dick was throbbing and I wanted nothing more than to suck your cock. I wrapped my lips around the black silicone and took it to the hilt while looking up greedily at you. You thrust your hips forward, then drew away, teasing me with just the head until you roughly pushed it all the way in again, banging my throat rudely. I could smell your cunt heating up and sucked your cock, pushing it hard against your cunt, then letting up, and pushing it in again. I was lost in the rhythm, smells and sounds of cocksucking, feeling my cunt muscles spasm the more turned on I became by your moans and growls, and the feeling of my mouth being stuffed.

  You grabbed my head, shoving me harder into your groin while letting loose with a stream of fuck noises and words: “I’m gonna fuck your mouth until I come. Suck me, my little invert.”

  I was slobbering down the sides of my mouth and making slurping and snorting noises as you pulled my hair and fucked my mouth. I desperately wanted to jack off but even more desperately wanted to suck you dry. I wanted you to come down my throat and out my asshole, your heat burrowing into my body. I wanted you to come like lightning through my cunt. I fucked your cock harder with my hot mouth, until with a tremendous series of guttural grunts you came, my swollen lips wrapped around you.

  Your hand loosened on my hair for a minute, then you pushed me backward on the rug. I fell awkwardly on my back, supported by my elbows and looking up at you dazedly. You kneeled over me, your pompadour disheveled, your cheeks flushed, your eyes half-closed and blazing, and then took my face between your calloused hands and we kissed, a long luxurious smooch, full of promise. I shrugged off my jacket as you did the same. As I was unknotting my necktie, I heard the swooshing sound of your leather belt being jerked rapidly through your belt loops and looked up to see that you’d doubled it up and were grinning at me evilly.

  You shoved me sideways. “Bend over the ottoman.”

  I kneeled over the high Moroccan-leather ottoman, as you yanked my flannel trousers and my briefs down to my knees. Your hand reached between my thighs, cupping my cunt, then withdrawing slowly, your fingers separating my labia and running from my cock to my cunt to my asshole. I could feel salty-sweet precome drip down my thighs. I moaned and pushed back, trying to draw you inside. I didn’t care where, I just needed your fingers inside of me pumping and rolling and fucking…filling my hungry holes. Instead, you stood up, hovering over me, letting the heat between us build. Suddenly you drew back and went at me with your belt against my ass. The first hit was a kiss. My cunt was slammed into the ottoman, and my ass reached up for you. You hit me harder the second and third times. I still wanted to jerk off, but didn’t want to come yet, so I shoved my clit into the side of the leather, forgetting about the belt and spreading my legs to expose my cunt to your touch, then closing them rapidly as I remembered and the leather flew through the air. The next hits were harder and faster, and I could feel your grin and your hard-on behind each swoop of the belt as it thumped my ass. I was making whimpering nois
es, and each time your belt hit me, it drove my chest forward, pushing the air out of my lungs with a whoosh. My ass was on fire and my cunt felt hollow. Suddenly, I heard the snap of latex. You dropped to your knees and started grabbing my burning ass, twisting my newly bruised, tender flesh. I moaned at the fresh pain. Then there was a cold slurp of lube and one finger circling my hole. I was frantic for it and bucked, trying to suck you in, but you slapped my ass with your free hand. One finger, a second finger and finally a third, with your thumb rubbing against the side of my engorged, stiffened clit.

  “Please fuck me. Please! I need your hand inside my cunt,” I begged.

  You groaned, but pulled out, prolonging my agony as you teased my cunt by barely dipping your fingers inside of me. I sobbed as you finally started pushing four fingers into my cunt while biting my shoulder with your pointy teeth. By now I was inarticulate with wanting to get fucked; the world had shrunken to your hand in my cunt and your breath on my neck. Then you were twisting your hand inside, I opened to you, pushing back, and we were fucking—your gardener’s hand in my cunt, the wettest nest, everything swollen and rippling. Your mouth. My cunt. Your cunt. My cock. Your cock. I was fucking you back and you were growling. I was making noises that said, “Fuck me fast and hard.” I could feel my orgasm start in my belly—a heavy roll undulating from my chest down to my cunt as I shot out a gush of come, my cock swelling and my cunt clenching around your fist. You were shouting as I sputtered hoarsely, my salty come squirting out a second time, soaking us both.

  I slid off the ottoman to the carpet, panting, my pants tangled around my calves and come dripping down to my knees. You fell down to the floor and we held each other close until our breathing slowed down. We were still mostly dressed, our clothing soaked with sex and sweat. I tried to get up, and my knees creaked as I stumbled over my twisted and damp trousers. I tipped over onto the floor laughing. You were in better shape, but your wrist joint ached, your shirt was wet up to the armhole with my come and your cock was listing perilously to the left. I sat you down on the olive mohair sofa, put Eartha Kitt crooning “C’est Si Bon” on the stereo, poured you a snifter of cognac and hung up our jackets. Woozily, I staggered into my bedroom, fetched you a fresh shirt from my cedar-lined wardrobe, changed into a dry pair of pants, and made my way to the kitchen to fix us a postcoital snack of a simple omelet, à la Alice B. Toklas.