Exhausted by epiphany and orgasm, she lost the rest of her afternoon to a nap.
The day arrived. Dina was literally dripping with excitement, but she still hadn’t figured out how to approach things. She again considered the most obvious method.
“Hey, what if we all went to bed together?” It didn’t feel right when Dina tried it on for size in front of the bathroom mirror. It might put someone on the spot . . . or sound like she was proposing just another slumber party. And “What if we all went to bed together and got it on?” definitely seemed heavy-handed.
She’d thought of approaching each of them separately, feeling them out privately. She realized that kind of “shuttle diplomacy” would probably be the safest approach. But Dina wanted magic, not diplomacy. Maybe this meant that the shortest distance between two points wouldn’t necessarily be a straight line.
The day waned, and, before she knew it, Dina’s over-taxed powers of analysis and decision-making were being called into service for selecting pizza toppings.
Sitting at the table with them, she reaffirmed her resolve to do something – even if it had to be something clumsy.
“Michael’s been working out, Charlotte – can you tell?”
Charlotte laughed, surprised in mid-pizza slice by the question. “Yeah, I guess.”
Dina was, in her own mind, committed now. She pulled Michael’s sweatshirt halfway up and ran her hand over his tight belly, for Charlotte’s benefit. She peppered the firm torso with hot little kisses, between and around the rubs.
“I’m trying to eat,” Michael complained with mock annoyance. Dina could tell that, beneath this show, he was actually loving it. Instead of ceasing, she redoubled the intensity of the massage.
She made direct eye contact with Charlotte as the belly-rubs became ever more sensuous. “I’m not embarrassing you, I hope.”
“No, no,” Charlotte said quickly. “I like seeing you . . .” Charlotte blushed “. . . enjoy yourself.”
Dina slipped a finger into Michael’s waistband. She noticed that Charlotte was wiggling a little bit in her chair and had, for the moment, lost interest in her food and her martini. With her free hand, Dina reached for Charlotte’s palm. It took her a second to find it, under the table, between Charlotte’s legs.
She gave Michael’s cock a feathery stroke with her finger before pulling her hand back out of his jeans. Then she left him to his pizza while she scooted over to straddle Charlotte’s lap. She kissed Charlotte fully on the lips.
Dina knew that Michael had seen her give Charlotte plenty of pecks and hugs, and the occasional fleeting bottom-squeeze. But she didn’t think he’d ever seen them really make out. So she ate Charlotte up for a minute or two, giving her mouth a drive-in-movie-style workout, running her hands up and down the length of Charlotte’s sleek, turtleneck-sheathed arms.
Then she turned to look at Michael. He was not eating pizza.
Charlotte was flushed. She was smiling, but she seemed disoriented. Dina saw her look at Michael, inquiringly, as if looking for guidance.
Michael shrugged. Then he spoke in a voice whose hoarseness belied his cool demeanor, talking as if Dina weren’t in the room. “She’s definitely up to something.”
The third-person judgment made Dina shiver with the reality of what she was embarking on. Where running her hands over Michael’s body in front of Charlotte had started to make her wet, and French-kissing Charlotte in front of Michael had made her clit tingle, she now felt a greedy wave of desire suffusing her from tip to toe.
Impulse served Dina where planning had come up short. She stood up, unbuttoned her blouse, and let the shirt and bra take over her empty chair.
“I’ll be in my room, if anyone wants me,” she said to the pizza platter. She left the kitchen, a one-woman parade of bare back, bare feet, and jeans, confident that she’d made her message clear: This ain’t no pajama party.
The way their heads peeked simultaneously through her open doorway was comical, even cartoonish.
“You okay, m’girl?” asked Michael tenderly.
“Oh yeah,” said Dina with a smile. Her hand was already in her pants. “A little lonely, though, over here.”
They shuffled in the way people might enter a room to observe a sleeping baby. Dina, who had carefully positioned herself in the very middle of the bed, spread her arms in an internationally recognized gesture of munificence. Even from her perspective, she could tell that the light fixture on her ceiling was doing something nice for her breasts, now that her arms were no longer blocking them.
It soon became clear that light fixtures weren’t the only ones who could do something nice for breasts. Charlotte could never resist them, and her hands were extended in a cupping position before she even reached the bed.
Charlotte’s position on the bed was a tentative one – legs dangling off the side, feet in shoes – but her interaction with Dina’s body was anything but tentative. The practiced, rolling pressure was as exquisite as it was comforting, and Dina closed her eyes in bliss, forgetting for the moment that she had any designs grander than this simple experience of perfect pleasure across her goddess globes.
She opened her eyes only to acknowledge a kiss. She knew whose lips were whose around here, so the fact that these lips were Michael’s delighted but did not surprise her. He was kneeling at her side, his eyes soft and milky.
“Undress me.” She whispered it, to no one and everyone.
Dina could imagine the shot as filmed from above in an old movie, Busby Berkeley style. The synchronized and symmetrical de-jeansing of the topless goddess, with each party grasping one flap of the conveniently already-unbuttoned fly, and the pants jerking down in fits and starts like an antique elevator.
She kicked to help them remove the obsolete garment from around her feet. The motion reminded her how wet she was, as moist panties shifted around her pussy.
“Oh, God,” she said simply.
It was funny – she had imagined them all being undressed. She’d envisioned three pairs of faded blue jeans flashing their insides from the floor, looking horny and honest.
But this felt just as honest and just as right, for now – her nakedness served up as a feast for the two of them. Maybe they were a little shy of each other. The bottom line for Dina was that this worked, and worked beautifully. So the lips sucking her right nipple were the lips of a fully clothed girlfriend, and the fingers teasing just inside the elastic of her panties were the fingers of a completely attired boyfriend. And, for the moment, only Dina was substantially nude, as befitted the individual whose greatest dream now was to be touched, caressed, and explored all over by the two people she loved so very much.
Michael slipped her panties off her. Charlotte snuck in to kiss her snatch, and Michael, gallant Michael, said, “After you,” like one of those courteous cartoon gophers.
Dina, who was usually so conscious of Charlotte’s heady aroma and Michael’s intoxicating scent, smelled herself in the air tonight. It smelled like truffle oil. The smell of the luckiest one in the world.
Maze
Erin Cashier
“Where does it go?” he’d asked her, the night before he left.
“What do you mean where does it go?” She pulled a pillow closer, propping up her head so she could see her tattoo herself. It was an old-fashioned labyrinth, occupying a space the size of a demitasse plate, between the cant of her hip and the divot of her navel.
He traced a finger along the path, in, and out again. “It just seems like it should go somewhere.”
She laughed. “It does. From here,” and she took his hand and made his finger jab at the entrance of it, “to here,” to touch its center. “From me, to me, and back again.”
He frowned at her. “Seems like there should be more to it.”
“It’s just a tattoo,” she explained, but his frown remained. “What if there was more to it?” she asked, rolling back on the bed, still holding his hand with its finger outstretched. She took his
finger into her mouth, and licked it, as she had licked other things, earlier that night, and felt down with one hand to see if such actions should be done again. Other parts of him agreed with her.
He hadn’t explained himself when he’d left. He’d just stopped returning calls. And she was used to this dance – while it wasn’t her favorite, it was her most familiar.
Maybe he was right, she thought, looking at herself in the mirror some days afterwards. The labyrinth was stagnant, had been so ever since she’d trapped it on herself years before, a small act of expensive rebellion before moving out in the world. She’d never wanted to get another tattoo, and could only vaguely remember getting this one – perhaps there’d been liquor involved. She covered it up with her palm, and in the mirror, her flesh was all flesh again, the color of a doll’s plastic skin. She moved her hand, revealing the labyrinth again to herself, and, and – maybe he was right. Maybe it should go somewhere. Maybe she should go, somewhere.
She dried off, got dressed, got into her car, and drove.
“I want it bigger,” she’d said, explaining herself to the tattoo artist. He was young and, judging from the flash in his portfolio, the lack of original works, inexperienced. But he was open that day, while other artists were booked.
He looked disappointed, when she took off her jeans to show him the pattern. “Just line work?” he asked. “I could shade some . . . and maybe put in some color around the edges—”
“Just line work,” she said. “That’s all I want.”
She wanted more than that, of course. She wanted new beginnings. And new endings. Nothing that a tattoo could give her. Still, sometimes even the acknowledgement that change should begin deserved commemoration. And what better way to remember, than to see it on herself in the mirror each morning?
The workmanlike way the artist knelt beside her, looking at the labyrinth’s pattern on her flesh, made her happy and sad both at once. Was this it, was this all there would be? She was a board to a carpenter, a tooth to a dentist – there was no love in his eyes, or his touch, and even though she could feel the heat from his breathing flow down the length of one naked thigh, the chill it left behind was more profound than alcohol evaporating.
“It’s going to take me a bit to draw the next piece. Then I’ll transfer it over and—”
She shook her head. “Don’t draw ahead of time. Don’t – don’t think about it. Just draw it.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I signed the papers,” she reminded him.
His lips curled into a grin. “You did, I was there.” He stroked the plane of her flesh, drawing out a pattern on her with a gloved forefinger. Drawing in spaces that didn’t exist yet, delineating them in his mind. In his touch now, in the freedom she’d granted him? Heat. He looked up at her, from his position by her hips.
“Are you sure?”
She saw what she felt in his eyes then. A piece. A piece of her path. And she wanted it, from him, on her. In, her.
“Yes.”
He smiled, and began.
Sweet singing stinging pain. The kind that every nerve in your body tells you to run away from. The kind that certain people can tolerate, and some few enjoy.
If you had asked her that morning, which category she would be in, she would have told you about the valium in her purse. If you had asked her now, behind his closed door, as he stroked across her stomach with the cleaner, her skin prickling with the touch, and how she’d tried to stop from moaning when the buzzing began and the needles did their work, and how the design he drew upon her pulled them both into it, drawing the spirals out, wider, longer, further, until the design now took up her whole right hip, and he had an excuse to slide his hand between her thighs to pull the skin taut and how her body ground against his hand there, wet against the latex of his gloves, and then the gun was forgotten, dropped to the floor, and a sudden silence followed, before he entered her and – well. You wouldn’t have to ask her. You would know.
“This is my number—” he said, and gave her a card, with handwritten digits on the back. She was sore, would be sore for days, in a multitude of places.
She smiled at him. She threw the card away outside.
There were other artists. Some were men, some were women, and she didn’t sleep with all of them. Just most of them. The labyrinth’s path extended out, twined around her body, all pieces of a path towards an unknown destination. Her own path now traveled over the southwest, as convoluted as her tattoo, from place to place, from person to person. Each of them added something to her, and she took it in, made it her own. A different woman might have lost herself on her travels, forgotten why she’d left, and why she was going. But not her.
Anytime she felt tired, or weak, or lonely – because sometimes she did feel lonely, still, but that was a part of life now, not something to be feared, not anymore – she could find her center, a point halfway between the cant of one hip and the divot of her navel.
Sometimes she would just let her fingers rest there, content to know herself in quiet silence. Other times, she would trace her own path out, remembering, finding herself in the curves, stroking around breasts, down her stomach, remembering the delicious redhead who’d done the lines alongside either edge of her labia, and who’d then given her clit a single, chaste, kiss.
Her torso was complete. One leg was finished, and then, the other.
What would happen when she was done? She wondered this sometimes as she drove along the interstate. Would she ever, really, be done? Was an end possible? Was it death, or worse than that, anathema to her now – stagnation? What would happen when she reached a point where all of her skin was covered, and no one would grant her sweet release?
If there was such a time, she thought, driving on one of the great flat expanses that stretched limitless from horizon’s edge to horizon’s edge – if there was such a time, may it be far off. As far off as I am from the edge of the world right now.
The edge of the world did really seem far, at that moment. But edges and endings both have a way of creeping nearer.
Soon, lines reached down both her arms like opera gloves, and arrowed down each finger in lightning bolts, before returning up again.
Even tattoo artists who have facial tattoos will not easily let you make that leap. To get a tattoo on your face is to mark yourself, more visibly than you ever have up until that point, as different. Until then, you could hide, with clothing and coats, tights and gloves. But after that, there is no shelter – you are exposed to the outside world, and chances are they will not like what they see.
She went from shop to shop, always feeling the space upon her neck where the labyrinth drew up short. So close to perfection, and yet she’d never felt further away. She would walk in, and sometimes even the people behind the counters would reel away in horror at the nature of her request.
But she could feel it. Every morning in the mirror, she could see it. Her whole body was covered in the labyrinth’s lines, a map of her life, the paths she had taken and the people she’d taken them with. All of them ended, here – she could point to the spot where, between collarbones and above her sternum, the last session had drawn to a close. If she’d known that that would have been her last one, she would have done something different, something to make it longer, harder, sweeter.
“Only one man’ll do that to you, girl,” said the flash-covered man from behind the counter. “Too many people are afraid of lawsuits these days to go there.”
She’d heard these stories before, of mythical brave men, and had seen them melt away in the sun. “And he’s not?”
“No. He’ll do it. He’s good, too.” He drew a map out on a card for her. “He doesn’t work much anymore. That’ll be the hard thing, getting him to do it. It won’t be because he’s scared, though.”
Something in this conversation had the taste of the real. She reached forward with a quivering hand to take the map away. “Will he be there?”
“I dunno. Might have move
d, even. But that’s the chance you have to take.”
She smiled at him. “I’m good at taking chances.”
He wasn’t there when she first got to his house. If it was his house. She sat outside in her car, idling, listening to the only radio station she could get reception to. Maybe he was on vacation? Or maybe a preacher’s family lived here now. She imagined them, him with a wide shouldered suit, his wife with a pillbox hat, two perfect children, and three perfect dogs. And when they all got home from the church potluck, they’d wonder who the hell the tattooed freak standing in front of their house was, before they routed her with pitchforks and lit torches.
She found that out of the two choices, she was more scared of the former.
Dusk came. She made herself a bed in the backseat of her car, and she slept.
There was a tapping on her window near dawn. A rugged man stood outside her car and she rolled the window down.
“I heard about you,” he said. “Come in.” And he turned, and walked away.
She gathered herself and patted down her hair, then walked down the dusty pathway to the door of his house. She let herself in, and found herself in a room with a tiled floor, a table, and two chairs. He sat in one of them, already.
“You’ve heard . . . about me?” She wanted to be flattered, but you never knew.
“On and off. I figured it’d be a matter of time.” He kicked the other chair out to her, and she sat down.
“So you’ll do—” and she left the phrase hanging, not sure of what verb to use, or what word could adequately express what she wanted.
“You need me to do it, don’t you?” he asked. She nodded, and so did he. “Show me what you’ve done so far.”
She stripped, and stood before him. Orange light filtered in through yellowed panes of glass. She turned in silence, so he could see the tracework of all the others, all additions to her path.
“Nice work, most of it,” he said, and, for the first time in a long time, she felt, maybe, deflated. Maybe, ashamed. Wasn’t this, the goal of her life’s work, valuable to him? Wasn’t she of value, to him?
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