I take a while. I always do; it’s no reflection on her skills. On the way she devours me. She doesn’t seem to mind. She lets me build slow—and when I start to get close, she slows down even more. I get the feeling I could take three days longer than eternity to come and she’d see me through.
And that thought alone is enough to send me spinning over the edge into release. It’s one of those lit-fuse orgasms. The ones you can see coming from a mile off, and I have to remind myself to keep breathing because holding my breath in anticipation only makes me dizzy and my ears buzz. Then it’s there and it’s inevitable, and I gasp great honking chunks of air that almost seem to catch in my throat. It’s not a pretty climax, none of those soft moans that signify delicacy. I’m hissing and nearly choking. I can’t turn it off.
I don’t want to.
Pari doesn’t try to shut me down, either. She opens her lips over the tip of my breast. Her mouth dampens the lace, and the combination of scratchy and slick adds an extra layer of sensation to everything. I want to drop away. It’s all overwhelming.
Pari gentles me through the final peak as I clench over her fingers. My back bows and grinds my shoulders across the rough nap of the carpet. Pari finally stills, slowing the way she’s teasing me, holding the center of my body in a cupped hand. She’s soaked, which means I’m soaked, because it all came from me.
I turn my head and try to bury my face in her shoulder. She’s still dressed. Her V-neck T-shirt is washed soft, the cotton scented with laundry detergent and the heady spice of whatever she’d been cooking with. I don’t think I’m crying. I think that’s just the way I’m breathing, still in shaky sobs. Except there’s a sting in my nose, and my eyes are leaking just a little bit.
I turn away from her and put my arm over my eyes.
“Look at me,” she says.
I should have known that Pari wouldn’t let me hide. I take my arm down, but I still can’t look at her. I stare up at the ceiling instead. “I guess we have to talk about this?”
Her hand is still curled over my pussy. She pets my underwear back into place. I’m not sure what good they’ll do. I’m going to have to change since they’re so wet, they’re unusable. “We should.”
I turn my whole body into her until we’re curled forehead to forehead and knees to knees and toes to toes. It makes Pari stop touching my pussy. I’m a little relieved. I don’t like knowing that someone else seems to understand my body better than I do. Her hand comes to rest on my hip instead. Her thumb traces patterns in the hollow next to my hip bone. I don’t think she realizes what she’s doing. I’m afraid of saying anything because she might stop.
“It was good. Really, really good.”
Her smile turns smug enough to make me squeeze my knees together again. “I know.”
“But it doesn’t have to be anything more than that.” Liar, liar, liar. But it’s safer this way. “We’re becoming friends. Right?”
“Right.”
“Then we’re just really close friends.”
“With benefits?”
“Maybe once or twice.” I trace the shape of her bottom lip with a fingertip. Her mouth is always full, but right now it seems nearly swollen. From kissing me and sucking on my flesh. The truth of that sends a wicked thrill through me. “I owe you, for one thing.”
“You don’t. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“I want to,” I say, and it’s more true than any of the other times. Than any of the guys.
When I was sick and desperate, there were a lot of them, and I did want to, but not in the same way I do now. I knew it would make them like me.
This time, I’m not sure that doing for Pari will make her like me at all. If I seem like another woman who’s using her for experimentation, it might push her further away. But it would make me happy to have my hands on her body. So I will.
All I have to do is talk her into it.
“I think she’s avoiding me.”
“You live together,” Nikki replies. “How good can she be at it?”
We’re in Belladonna Ink, the tattoo parlor managed by Nikki’s girlfriend. Skylar is at her booth, cleaning and preparing for opening later in the day, but at nine in the morning, a tattoo parlor isn’t exactly a happening place. It’s just the three of us.
I’m lying on a bench in the reception area. It was upcycled from a church pew, except Skylar’s business partner reupholstered the cushion with striped, candy-colored fabric. I have my feet on the wood and one arm hanging loosely over the edge. Nikki is sitting on the receptionist’s stool.
“Better than you think,” I answer her.
She spins as she considers my case. “But you’re still sleeping in the same bed?”
I nod, then have to use my words like a grown-up would. “Yeah. But she hangs out with her mom constantly unless she’s at work. I can’t get them apart. I thought about pitching sex as another thing we could chat up at the DHS interview, but maybe that’s not a great idea.”
“Wake her up with oral sex,” Nikki says simply.
Skylar’s head comes up. “That’s a consent violation.”
“You’re not supposed to be paying attention to our conversation.”
“I can’t believe you told her,” I say to Nikki.
She has the good grace to look ashamed. “I’m sorry. But she’s bae. We’re, like, joined.”
Skylar snorts a little. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Love you too,” Nikki says before blowing a kiss toward her girlfriend.
I half expect Skylar to ignore Nikki, because the blown kiss is obviously a joke. Skylar is always a badass, but she melts toward her surfer girl and smiles. “Love you too. Bae.”
“Does this make me gay? I know this is dumb, but I don’t know how I didn’t notice, you know? I grew up here.” I throw my arms wide. “San Sebastian cares more if you buy organic produce than it does if you’re a lesbian.”
“Do you think I’m hot?” Nikki asks.
I give it a little consideration. Nikki has very long, very straight brown hair that she perpetually kept up in a ponytail until she met Skylar. Now she wears it down occasionally. She’s a professional surfer, so her build is pretty athletic from all the hours she spends in the water. Right now she’s wearing shorts that show off her long, tanned legs, and her feet are crossed at the ankles in a pose that’s unintentionally pinup-like.
I met Nikki years ago when we were both in middle school. Our bond became unbreakable over our mutual slutty phases. Nikki kind of outgrew it when she realized she was gay, though she used to make regular pilgrimages to dive bars outside town to get laid. She was one of the few friends who kept putting in the effort to keep in touch with me when I was my sickest and trying to cut away the world so I’d be free to go away.
Three days after my graduation from my master’s program, she took me for a drive. We stopped at an anonymous building in the middle of downtown Costa Mesa. She’d told me it was a rehab. And that I needed to go.
And yet … “Nope.”
“How ’bout her?” She points at Skylar.
Skylar looks up from the pieces she’s been loading into the autoclave. She’s an entirely different type from Nikki. Her hair is very dark, but clipped short around her ears in an asymmetrical boys’ cut with edgy stripes razored above her left temple. Today she has on a plain white T-shirt over straight-cut jeans, which is kind of the most feminine outfit I’ve ever seen her in. And she’s covered from the neck down in ink.
“Nope. Sorry.”
Skylar tips a wink at me. “No harm done. I’m taken anyway.”
“Damn right.” Nikki spins again. “Do you ever see anyone, boy or girl, walking down the street and think, ‘Gee, I’d like to bone them’?”
“Thanks for that descriptive phrase, but no. I don’t.” I bounce my knees. “I think my sex drive is defective.”
“It’s not defective to be demisexual,” Skylar offers.
“What?” I sit u
p. “What is that?”
She stops what she’s doing with the autoclave and looks at Nikki. “I thought you were going to talk to her?”
“What?” Nikki’s eyes are big, and she throws her hands up. “It’s not my job to be her sexual counselor.”
“Um, yes, it is.” I wish I had something to throw at her. Just like pillow level or something though. I’m annoyed, but not murderous. “It’s in the ‘best friend’ description.”
“I missed the description. Was that in a memo?”
“It was carved on the back of the locket I gave you. You know, the one that was half a heart?”
“Didn’t happen. You’re making things up again.”
“Maybe.” I look at Skylar instead. “What is a demisexual?”
“It’s a descriptor. Like queer or bi, except this one means on the sexual to asexual spectrum. You’re somewhere closer to asexual, but not all the way there. Demisexuals usually only want a sexual relationship with someone they already have an emotional connection with.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Totally isn’t,” Nikki says. “And I didn’t tell you because it’s just a word. You do you, ya know? But it seems like maybe that’s you. I mean, I can’t remember you ever just locking eyes with anyone and thinking they’re droolworthy.”
“No, that doesn’t sound like me.” Part of that’s because I start worrying that sex would mean them seeing me at my ickiest, though.
I didn’t think that about Pari. I wasn’t worried at all. I lie back down on the bench with a sigh. “I don’t think that solves my current dilemma though.”
“How to get your fiancée to bone you.”
I cover my face with my hands. “You don’t have to say it like that.”
“How to get your fiancée to make sweet, sweet love with you?”
“That sounds even worse.”
Nikki grins with self-satisfaction. “I know.”
“When’s the wedding?” Skylar has a bottle of distilled water in her hand as she fusses around with her cleaning. I wouldn’t tell her, but it’s kind of amusing how particular she is about her studio when she looks like such a rebel badass.
“One week from today. Which I should fucking hope you two would know, because you’re invited. And I have like eighteen people coming, so you have to come.” I rub my eyes with the base of my palms. “I think Pari has over three hundred. They’re all family from what I understand. Or friends of the family. Or friends of friends.”
“She knows,” Nikki says in assurance. “Well, her phone knows. I marked it off on her calendar, and I’ll drag her there.”
“I have a suit,” Skylar offers. “Looks damn good.”
“I have a dress. A white dress. Can you fucking believe it?” I shake my head. If you’d asked me five years ago, this scenario would never, ever have turned up on my list of possibilities. “If I don’t figure something out, I’ll be going to the altar without ever having slept with my future wife.”
“That was the original plan.” Nikki leans back against the counter. Her feet swing free. “Unless you’ve forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten anything. I don’t know why it’s driving me so damn crazy.”
“Coz you got a case of the hot pants for the first time in your life.”
“Hot pants?” I laugh. “What’s the cure?”
Skylar leaves her tattoo booth and strolls toward her girlfriend. She catches Nikki’s face between both her hands. The ink tattooed across her knuckles next to Nikki’s delicately tanned, pure complexion looks faintly obscene in a way that makes me squirm. I’m thinking about the way my skin and Pari’s skin looks side by side.
It only gets worse when Skylar kisses Nikki deeply. I can see their jaws move, see the way their lips cling. As they separate, Nikki’s tongue darts out for one last taste of Skylar, as if she can’t bear to be separated.
Skylar’s gaze finds me first, from the corner of her eyes. She leans her forehead against Nikki’s, and I realize they’re both breathing hard. That easily. That quickly. Skylar looks at me, but Nikki is still looking at her. Completely bound up in whatever dirty thing has caught her attention.
“The cure is to find someone who wants in your pants exactly as badly as you want in theirs.”
“I don’t know if that’s Pari.” She’s closed off from me. I can’t get inside her head. Is it about me, or is it about her? Sometimes I can’t tell. She’s so driven, so perfectly contained.
“Then you need to find out. And if it’s not, you two stay friends. Not friends with benefits. Because you’ll need time to yourself to go out and start again.”
Nikki’s hand is at the back of Skylar’s neck. She’s stroking her girlfriend almost absentmindedly, but the look she turns on me is fierce. “Because you deserve it, Rachel. You deserve someone who wants you just as you are.”
I leave them before the shop actually opens. Nikki will probably hang out for a while before leaving to catch the afternoon tide. She heads out for a competition in Brazil the day after my wedding, so she has to be prepared.
I go back to the apartment, but it’s empty. There’s a note on the fridge, scribbled in Pari’s writing. Went to office. Amma is at cousin Sunil’s.
The paper is smooth under my touch, but she wrote firmly enough that I can feel the indent of each letter. She sneaks in work here and there, around Niharika’s planning and visiting. She’s the best daughter I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t do the same thing for my mom, but I think that’s maybe because she trained me that way. Why should I give her what she doesn’t give me?
Pari’s office is in downtown LA, in the financial district. On weekday mornings, it’s a hell of a commute, but it shouldn’t be too bad at this hour. It would probably only take me an hour to get there. That would leave me plenty of time to Yelp the best lunch place around and pick up a takeout order.
Impulsively, I change my clothes. I throw on a sundress and pull my hair up into a French braid. I pretend I don’t know what I’m doing, because it’s easier that way. It’s so easy to pretend too. I shove all the other thoughts in a little box. I listen to Lana Del Rey once I’m in my car. Singing along helps me clear it all out even more.
I’m just being nice. I’m just taking lunch to my friend. I’m just, I’m just, I’m just …
I’m just sliding through my life, trying to avoid the fact that I exist.
The thought hits me like a hard bolt upside the head as I turn into a parking garage less than a block from Pari’s office building. By the time I’m pulling into a slot, I’ve wiped it out of my head again, because I’m good like that. A queen at compartmentalizing.
The Mediterranean bistro I find nearby has great reviews. I place an order for a layered, intricate salad and a combination plate of falafel and roasted veggies. They box it up quickly, and before I know it, I’m standing on the Los Angeles sidewalk, staring up at a skyscraper. The black-glass lobby door is locked. There’s a keypad next to the far-right door, but of course I don’t know the code. Duh. With all my shoving thoughts into little boxes, I hadn’t managed to pick this thought out.
I back up until I’m leaning against a parking meter, and then I pull out my phone. I’m still watching the mirrored glass above me as I dial Pari’s cell phone number. “Pick up, pick up,” I mutter.
“Hello?”
“What’s the code to get into your building?”
“What?”
I hold back a burble of laughter that would be somewhere between hysterical and nervous. This is such a stupid idea. The afternoon sun slants between buildings to lance across my already-hot neck. My fingers are starting to sting like hell where the bag of food is cutting into them. Plus it’s probably all getting cold. “I’m outside. Like, on the sidewalk.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I brought you lunch?” Even I can hear the weird uplift my voice takes at the end of the sentence. I try again. “I brought you lunch.”
Silence hisse
s on the line for an uncomfortable moment. “From San Sebastian?”
“No, from a place around the corner. So, you know, you could have totally gotten it yourself. But I drove an hour and fifteen minutes for no real reason, just so I can stand on the sidewalk with a homeless guy staring at my legs.” I turned slightly away from the crusty old guy with a Vietnam vet ball cap smashed down over his ears sitting one parking meter down. “Please let me in?”
She tells me the floor and buzzes me in. I pass the homeless guy a weak smile that’s probably not enough of an apology, because even though he really was looking at my legs with the fascination of a kid at a magic show, that’s no reason for me to feel uncomfortable. I don’t think.
I’m swept upward by the elevator. As each floor flips by on the display, I get more and more nervous. If Pari isn’t happy to see me, I’m not really sure what I’m going to do. Hand her a bag of food and turn right around again? Sounds like the most socially ill-adjusted thing I’ve ever done in my life. Perfect.
When the doors start to open, my throat is locked tight.
Pari is smiling.
I can breathe.
It’s a gentle smile, and her head’s tilted curiously. She’s wearing designer jeans and a loose silk tunic. Her killer spike-heel orange pumps make the outfit. She looks absolutely stunning. I want to touch her hair, feel it slip through my fingers.
“I brought you food,” I offer instead as I hold the bag out.
She takes it, cradling the Styrofoam containers in both hands. “It smells fabulous.”
“I hope it’s good.”
Small talk. As if small talk isn’t bad enough, it’s awkward too. Lovely.
I follow her down the hall to her door. The carpet is plush, and the walls are studded with dramatic abstract art at regular intervals. She’s left her door open, and calming classical music reaches toward us.
It’s not a corner office, but the wall of windows is still pretty good. She has space enough for a small sitting area with a love seat and a cushioned chair on one side, and her expansive L-shaped desk on the other side.
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