Then, just as I was thinking it, she said: “I am yours.” And, if it is possible to whisper a command, that is what Erica did, right into my ear.
“You. Are. Mine.”
Since she had possession of both my breasts, with such a remarkable grip, a bizarre thought occurred to me, something that I’d learned when I was quite young: Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
I. Was. Hers.
I blocked out everything but the feel of her, otherwise I could never have reached under her sweater, then under her bra to climb along the front of her like a teenage boy in the back seat of a car. I was racing the clock, expecting to get a flashlight in eyes from some cop at a make-out spot. There were moments I was in total denial of what I was doing, and it made my mind spin off into bizarre directions. My mind raced from being grateful I had a ridiculously large rack of boob to offer a woman as spectacularly attractive as Erica—and, oddly, like I often do at the most inappropriate moments, I escaped to a vivid memory of my last trip to a department store to buy bras.
I was in the lingerie department and asked a size question to the young woman working there. She took one look at my giant jugs (with a half angry/half frightened look that said: Hell, no, if I am working overtime, bitch) then she said, in a voice that could only be described as terrified, “I have to call my boss.” Minutes later, after placing the call for help over a Madonna-style headset, the lingerie boss arrived with such an air of importance, hair fashionably disheveled, that I wondered if they had flown her in via a helipad on the Macy’s department store roof.
The boss was a fantastically attractive, tall, rail-thin African American woman who strode toward me confidently, with a practiced look of You don’t scare me arranged on her face, like that of a doctor who has to face (with no detectible alarm) the worst cases of skin disease, giant tumors, or alarmingly giant jugs that need measuring. I watched her eyes for changes as my boobs came into alarmingly clearer view. Oh, this woman was good at hiding fear. The lingerie boss’s ridiculously long cloth tape measure was draped around her neck with the fashion sense of an orange scarf but the importance of a stethoscope, the ends fluttering behind her armpits as she strode toward me. If she had been my height, that tape measure would have dragged on the floor.
Was this really necessary?
She directed me to go in the fitting room, where she proceeded to take three lightning fast measurements, with knuckles boob-grazing me in a professional carelessness that I didn’t doubt, while I babbled how I knew the Wal-Mart bra I was wearing was probably incorrect at a size D, and that I might actually a be a double or (giggle) possibly a triple D—she interrupted my pre-teen banter to diagnose me a “G.”
My response: “Um, as in A, B, C, D, E, F, G?”
She said, “Yup. Small frame, but very big ones.”
But I dyke-gress.
I was pleased about my big ones now, as I was ripped from my Macy’s lingerie memory by Erica’s stirring responses as she attempted to get her hands around my most pronounced feature. Good luck, honey.
Meanwhile, I only thought I was lost in the woods before, because I had her breasts in my hands too, and Erica’s nipples were hard and pressed against the center of my palms as I held on, a feeling so distracting it was nearly impossible to touch her and kiss her at the same time.
“Please,” Erica said against my lips, “you have no idea how much I need you.”
If I could have spoken, I might have said she was the one that had no friggin’ idea, since the woods were spinning around me and I felt I was plunging through this delicious hell I had chosen to dive into.
“Please, take me,” she said against my mouth, and when I didn’t move right then, shocked from her words, she grabbed one of my hands and pushed it down the front of her jeans. If that had not been instruction enough (and it may not have been, since I was in the middle of having my mind completely blown), she whispered into my ear, “I need you. Now,” and I thought, Erica was always at her best when was she was telling me what to do.
If I had been weak from crying, her words erased this now, and I wrapped my other arm around her, leaning against her until I pushed her flat onto the ground. Something, maybe a button, tore off her jeans as I slid my hand inside her. She cried out, I think, but I was a total animal by now, and, actually, the cry might have been mine. When she whispered hoarsely, “Yes, more of you, please—” I once again did what I was told, but then she said “Oh fuck” as if it had not been her idea at all, and this is when I found out that three was Erica’s lucky number.
So this was what it was like to be with a contractor. Take this, put it there, now. More. Harder. Yes. No. Yes. Just like that . . . faster, please, yes, right now. She may have cried out when she came, and this time it really may have been her, because I was watching her face, and in the dim moonlight I could see her cheeks flood with color, and her mouth open as I heard a cry. Or maybe it was me, because when you were doing something perfectly, the beautiful contractor says nothing at all.
Her orgasm served only to make us more desperate, so I roughly pulled her sweater off so my mouth could feast on her breast (why had I waited?), sucking and opening wider until I had most of her in my mouth. When I released her nipple, she clutched me so I wouldn’t let her go, and she let me apart only enough to trail my mouth across her chest to feed on her from the other side. The whole time I kept my hand buried inside her and she kept pushing against me, getting so insanely wet that I could barely feel her. Stupidly, I thought: No going back now. It was stupid because I knew that point had come at our first kiss, on top of a roof.
I felt Erica dig her nails into my back as I put my mouth against her ear and informed her in great detail about how very wet she was, in case she wasn’t aware. I told her if I could bear to pull my hand out of her, ever, I would rather die than never get the chance to taste her. While I was doing all the talking, continuing to say much more dirty things, Erica took me by surprise. Whatever I said, had excited her so that she put her hand on mine and joined her fingers with mine to push me deeper and take her harder, just in case it didn’t occur to me to do so. She came with a series of unfeminine growls behind clenched teeth, and I was certain I couldn’t have lived a lifetime long enough to imagine anything hotter than this—except that we kept intense eye contact the whole time, and while it is thrilling to see a woman’s eyes roll back in her head from pleasure, the eye contact with her during all of this was almost too much to bear.
When she finally asked me stop, I did as directed, but we continued to kiss, more slowly and deeply. Erica rolled out from under me, and got me laying on my side next to her, our mouths never leaving each other, except when she told me her plans for me. I wondered if two such very dirty girls actually got together, could they survive the explosion? I was betting no, and it seemed such a perfect solution, the two of us fucking each other to death in the woods. Could anyone blame us if we were dead from it? Everyone would see it couldn’t have been helped, and that in the end (pardon the pun) we got what we deserved: fucking death.
Erica got me off this track by whispering against my mouth, “I’m completely in love with you. You know this, right?”
I nodded my head. I knew this.
But her saying it made me think of why we couldn’t be together, and I would have gotten stuck on this thought if only she hadn’t touched me then, slipping inside, to fuck away the last of my thoughts with her unreasonably strong hand. (There are such advantages to a woman’s hand, to be able to go where no man could ever reach. Oh, yes, size does matter.) And, I was thinking now for the first time, there are advantages to a woman who can pound nails with a beautiful rhythm. And if she hadn’t done it just right, taken me just that way, making me come so hard, just like that, I might not have lost my mind and said, “Erica . . . I love you. Of course I love you.” And if I hadn’t said that, then she might not have kissed me harder, still, and I might not have had to take her once again.
After, when we had both
come back down to the earth that noticeably prickled with pine needles beneath us, I noticed the bonfire flickering far behind her had grown much smaller. I also had my first sane thought since she found me here, falling apart in the woods. I was so much saner then.
The bonfire was fading, but would this fire between us ever go out? Never. Not for me. Especially not now, not after this. Erica searched my eyes, and I could tell she was reading my thoughts. We would not die here, we would live, and in our lives was my brother, who I loved as much as life, easily as much as I loved Erica.
Oh fuck.
When she saw the flicker of fresh tears in my eyes and then I saw them on hers, I wondered if she had read all my thoughts. Erica proved she had by whispering, “I can’t love anyone else. It will always be you.” If she did read my thoughts, she would have known how thrilled this made me feel—but she would also have known how it didn’t matter, not at all.
Twenty-Nine
Nobody Wants To Talk About The Pink Labia In The Room
When Lisa was in college, she saw a demonstration happening on the campus grounds. About seventy students, mostly female, were enthusiastically wielding protest signs and chanting, “Spread the word to end the word!” Not one to miss an opportunity to skip class (and possibly pick up a cute co-ed with perky breasts that bounced lightly in protest as she marched) Lisa worked the perimeter of the crowd like a Boarder Collie with an over-achievement complex.
Lisa’s first move was to select what she deemed to be the weakest link and lure a blond girl away from her pack of friends. Who would expect a well-fed Border Collie with a big smile to be any kind of threat?
The girl, happy to have gained a new recruit, stepped aside to speak to Lisa, but not before Lisa showed her commitment by bellowing at the top of her lungs: “Spread the word to end the word! Spread the word to end the word!” Lisa was convinced her commitment to a cause, any cause, would be foreplay to do-gooder chicks. She poured on the charm with a fake-shy chuckle as she asked the girl, “I’m sorry, I’m going to sound retarded, but what’s the word we’re trying to end?”
The girl’s smile faded as she said, “We are trying to end the word retarded.”
Another time, when I made the tragic mistake of inviting Lisa to meet some of my work friends for a drink, she launched into a full-scale anatomy lesson with one of my older co-workers. The evening started out innocent enough. We were all enjoying our cocktails and getting a little loose, and of course Lisa had targeted the best looking of my straight co-workers: Sharon, a married lady, Catholic, with three children. At first I wasn’t too worried, since I had taken the proper precautions and warned all the women before we ever got to the bar. They’d heard stories about Vince and Lisa, and encouraged me to invite them both. In fact, the women seemed to get a kick out of being openly flirted with by a potty-mouth butchy lesbian who knew no boundaries. It seemed innocent enough, but I kept an ear to Lisa’s conversations, just in case she went to far.
The following is how the evening unraveled:
LISA: So, Sharon, tell me, ever experiment with women?
MARIE: Lisa . . .
SHARON (laughing): Can’t say that I have. Might be too late for me.
LISA: It’s only eight-thirty.
MARIE: Lisa.
SHARON (squirming in her seat, laughing): It’s OK, Marie, I think your sister’s a riot.
LISA: I’m dead serious. Why are you squirming like that, Sharon?
SHARON: I . . . didn’t know I was.
LISA: Well, either you’re getting all excited by the question, or you have something under your hood.
MARIE: Lisa!
SHARON: Under my, what?
MARIE: Lisa, shut it! Sharon, don’t ask, I’m begging you.
LISA: Well, you should know when you get something trapped under your hood.
SHARON: Under my hood? I don’t get it.
MARIE: Lisa, I swear, I’ll kill you.
LISA: She needs to know this in order to avert a medical emergency.
VINCE: Oh God, you’re not talking about—
LISA: Vince, don’t you think Sharon needs to know?
VINCE: It won’t make any difference what I think.
SHARON: My hood? You mean like, on my car?
MARIE: Lisa, seriously, I’m warning you.
SHARON: Or, like, a sweatshirt?
LISA: No, silly. Under your hood, where your clit lives.
MARIE: Lisa!
VINCE: I don’t feel well. I want out.
SHARON (horrified): Can that happen?
LISA: Maybe you have a super-tight hood. Good for you. You sure that hasn’t happened to you?
SHARON: Would I know?
LISA: Oh, you’d know. (Lisa elbows me and nods, as if we are drinking buddies in total agreement to get plastered and cheat on our wives.) How old is she?
MARIE: Lisa, I swear to God . . .
SHARON (faintly): I’m thirty-three . . .
LISA: It can happen when a pube goes rogue. So painful! Though I know most of you straight girls go completely shaved, so maybe you don’t ever—
SHARON: I don’t—
LISA: I’m glad to hear that, Sharon. Kind of creepy that little girl shaved look, if you ask me. That was started by the porn industry, you know. I think a woman is supposed to have a bit of hair down there.
MARIE: Lisa, I’m really gonna kill you.
LISA: Look, Sharon, I like you, and I can tell you’re confused, so, I’ll explain: A pube can get trapped under your hood and at first it might just make you squirm, like you’re doing now, but then: Ouchie.
MARIE: Lisa, I work with these people!
LISA: It’s kind of like how a clam makes a pearl, which is friggin’ irritating to the poor clam. (Lisa laughs.) The worst is when you have to go clam digging to get it out.
SHARON (more horrified): Clam digging?
LISA: It might be the only thing women don’t ever talk about with each other.
VINCE: Not anymore.
LISA: Nobody wants to talk about the pink labia in the room . . .
MARIE: Lisa, you’re leaving—now!
LISA: Sharon, you just give me a call if you ever need any help—
MARIE: Vince, get her out of here!
Lisa couldn’t help herself. Inappropriate comments flew freely from her filter-free mouth, never failing to reach impact against the most damaging targets. That’s why I avoided my sister after my confession about Erica. To limit the risk of running into her the next morning, I avoided the Dove restaurant by taking a long walk around the campground to get a count of still-occupied campsites.
It was early morning, and the thick mist was crawling low to the ground, imitating Lisa’s mist machine after the last dinner seating. When I turned the corner near the safari field, I saw Erica and Uncle Freddie on a distant roof. Instead of approaching, I sat down at the base of a tree so I could watch them undetected. By her pose, hand on her hip, head cocked to the side, I could tell Erica was evaluating Uncle Freddie’s roofing shingles, and by his pose, curled back, head lowered, arm pounding nails with a growing, steady rhythm, I could see he was trying to impress her. He finished and looked up at her, more like the silhouette of an awkward teenage boy than that of an elderly uncle. Erica crouched down to inspect his work. A shiver ran up my back as I imagined the view from above her as she crouched.
For a few tense seconds, my Uncle’s frozen and hopeful pose stayed motionless. She popped back up and gave a quick nod of her head as Uncle Freddie slapped his leg in attaboy recognition of his own accomplishment. By Erica’s tone, I knew she was warning him not to get cocky, and this was confirmed when Uncle Freddie’s wheezy laugh floated across the field.
They talked a bit more and Uncle Freddie said something that made Erica laugh, and I wished I was closer, to hear the sound more clearly. When she affectionately slapped him on the back and left her hand on his shoulder, my throat tightened with the (lately, familiar) feeling I might burst into tears. Images of
last night flooded over me again, leaving me too weak to be on my way, so I leaned back against the base of the tree and let the sight of her pull me further apart.
After Uncle Freddie climbed down from the rooftop, I waited for Erica to do the same. I wondered if she would bother with the ladder at all, as was her habit if at all possible. But Erica didn’t leave the roof. Instead she stood, silhouetted in the early sun, looking over the horizon at the woods surrounding the camp, and then she looked down. I wondered if she thought of our kiss when she was on a roof, but dismissed this, knowing she was on many roofs. Then I wondered if she was checking Uncle Freddie’s work again, but when she crouched low, finally sitting on the roof with her back still to me, she was not checking the roof. She hung her head lower, then cradled her face in her knees. From a distance I could see her back moving sharply and my heart ached, knowing she was crying. Tears filled my eyes, turning her silhouette into a shimmering watercolor painting, against the red sunrise. More than anything, I wanted to go to her.
I wanted to climb the ladder, walk across the rooftop, and lift her face to kiss her until all her tears were gone. But I didn’t allow myself to move a muscle, not even to brush the tears that rolled down my cheeks. I sat on the ground, pulling my legs up just as she was, hugging them tightly with my knees under my chin. Erica, please stop crying, I begged her silently, please. Then Erica lifted her head, as if someone had called out to her. She slowly twisted her body around, until she was turned toward me. Had she felt me? Now she saw me, but neither of us moved. All that space between us, but we didn’t move because there was nowhere for us to go. I stayed watching her, my heart pounding loudly in my chest, screaming at me to get closer to her, until a member of her crew called her away, leaving an empty roof, and my empty heart.
Camptown Ladies Page 24