by Rachel Gold
I had to stop after a minute and go find a tissue to blow my nose. When I came back from the bathroom, Tucker had moved the laptop off to one side. The screensaver was playing. That and the dim light from the windows was the only illumination in the room, giving everything a ghostly look. Tucker ran a hand through her hair, settling it all to the right, and patted the mattress next to her.
I wasn’t sure how close to sit now. Most of my previous makeout sessions ended with someone saying they had to get home or get back to studying, not with me bursting into tears. I sat close enough that we could touch, but not so close that we actually were.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked.
“Everything.”
“Even kissing?”
“Well, no. I like that part,” I admitted.
“Touching?” she asked.
“No. I mean, not the general kind.”
“There’s a specific kind?” she asked and then said, “Oh. There is, isn’t there?”
I nodded.
“If I promise no specific touching, can I kiss you again?”
I nodded again and she closed the distance between us.
* * *
On Saturday, Tucker was a lot more talkative and I was a lot more tired. We’d been up just kissing until about two a.m. and then I lay awake in my bed for at least another hour thinking about it. And just so nothing would look suspicious, I got up early with Mom to chat and help make breakfast, so by noon my eyeballs felt gritty.
We went out shopping with Mom. She and Tucker had a lively conversation about the nutritional value of organic produce, while I mostly smiled from my seat on the passenger’s side.
My parents know better than to have a drawn-out conversation with me about genetically modified food, but Tucker didn’t. It’s one of those topics that I’ve read about a lot but actually haven’t formed a strong opinion on yet—at least not until I’ve had some time in a lab and can understand that level of the science. Not having a strong opinion means I can get pretty silly in an argument and it took Tucker a while to realize I was winding her up.
She caught on while we were at the big farmers’ market. It’s a huge building that fills up with vendors every weekend and Mom likes it because she can find weird spices there—most of which she never uses. I think seeing them on her shelves makes her happy. The most arcane and esoteric of the spices aren’t found in the nice heated building, though; they’re outside in the back parking lot where people are selling out of their cars.
It wasn’t quite freezing, but it was a damp, chilly day and I shifted from foot to foot trying to warm up.
“How many languages does your mom know?” Tucker asked as Mom switched from English to Hindi to barter about a price.
“She’s only fluent in three,” I said. “But she has a smattering of a few others and I think she’s been working on her Farsi.”
“Wow. What’s that like?”
“I suck at languages,” I said.
“I mean having educated parents?”
I tried to see the expression on her face without turning my head noticeably. Her eyes stared at something far away. I moved a step closer to her so that our shoulders touched.
“It’s great,” I admitted. She would know if I lied about it. “I mean, it’s tough to win an argument with them, but I wouldn’t trade it. I think if Mom didn’t know so much about other cultures…coming out would have been so much harder. But your mom—”
“Dropped out of high school because she was pregnant with the twins,” Tucker said flatly.
She didn’t talk about her family much so I just kept quiet to see if she’d say more.
“And then when she got pregnant with me, my dad just split.” She paused for a long time before she added, “Mari’s dad isn’t the same as mine, but she’s my favorite sister. I tell her that all the time and that she looks like me, only prettier. She’ll be fourteen soon and I worry about her so much. I think seeing our mother’s life scared her—she says she’s sworn off boys until she’s graduated and got a job.”
“We kind of lucked out,” I said and Tucker gave me a questioning look. “Neither of us is going to accidentally get pregnant.”
She laughed and pressed her shoulder closer to mine. “You’re shivering,” she said.
“I should’ve worn my winter coat.”
She unzipped the front of her heavy army surplus-style jacket and held it open. I didn’t move but I smiled a little. She stepped behind me and wrapped her jacket around both of us.
“Put your hands in my pockets,” she said.
I did and she put her hands over mine. They were like generators throwing off heat.
“Do you wish you could get pregnant?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said and tried to keep my voice light. It was hard to voice what I actually wished, even to myself, because that part was all so complicated.
“Me either,” she said.
“Will you someday? Do you think?”
“I have no idea. Maybe when I’m older and if I have money. I don’t want to have a kid if I don’t have money,” Tucker said. “Any kid of mine, I want to be able to give her everything.”
Mom had moved on from the open hatchback of the Honda to another car where a wizened-looking woman was selling plastic baggies of who knows what ground powders. Even though Mom wasn’t wearing a hat and had on only her fall coat, she didn’t seem to feel the cold the way I did.
I lowered my voice to a near whisper. “Before…Mom wanted me to freeze some of my, you know, guy genetic stuff. Just in case someday I wanted to have kids of my own.”
“Damn,” Tucker said.
“I wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to be someone’s worthless Y chromosome,” I said and had to stop talking because I was a lot closer to crying than I expected.
Tucker hugged me hard and didn’t say anything.
* * *
Saturday night I was exhausted, but that didn’t prevent another, shorter span of kissing Tucker. I felt like it brought up more questions than it answered, but I wasn’t in any mood to argue since she was a great kisser. It was hard for me to tell if I liked it so much because of how much I liked her, or if she had a lot of natural talent, or if this was some clue about liking girls or boys or both.
On Sunday we took her out to a fancy brunch for her birthday and then Mom dropped us off at the mall and I took her shopping. She got herself a new pair of jeans with a gift card her aunt sent her, and I insisted she let me buy her an HD eReader.
“You’ll really like how you can save your highlights, trust me,” I told her.
We ended the day reading and Tucker surprised me by saying she was going to head to bed early. My parents did the same and then I went up and got into bed to do more reading since I wasn’t tired. After about a half hour, I heard a quiet knock on my door. Tucker grinned at me and I smiled back and motioned her into the room.
She climbed into my bed. We kissed for a while and then she tugged at my shirt.
“Can we take this off?” she asked.
“You first,” I said.
She stripped her shirt off in one quick motion. In the moonlight her normally tan skin looked golden, as if she were a painting of herself, with her broad shoulders and her large breasts perfectly balancing each other.
I pulled my shirt off and only tangled it on my elbow for a moment due to nerves. I felt extra self-conscious because everything about me was smaller than Tucker. Had the hormones done everything they needed to do to make me enough of a woman for her?
She put her hands on my waist, both of us kneeling on the bed, and kissed me again as she pulled our bodies together. My fear cracked like ice and started floating apart as soon as her skin met mine.
Later when we were lying down and stopping to catch our breath, she said, “We should take these off,” and gestured at her boxer briefs and my pajama bottoms.
“I think I’d like that,” I said. “But I’m not ready to…I mean, would we be girl
friends and stuff?”
“Mostly stuff,” she said with a little laugh. “Do you want to be girlfriends?”
“Would it be okay if I didn’t?”
“Yes,” Tucker answered in a long sigh. “I might still be with Lindy when we get back.”
“I don’t like her,” I whispered.
“But you like me,” Tucker said.
“Oh yes, I just don’t know—” She cut me off with a kiss.
I didn’t know how many women Tucker had been with, but it was plenty more than my zero.
She leaned on one elbow and traced fingertips down my collarbones and around my chest. It tickled and felt great and strange all at the same time because she was looking at me and the expression on her face was really happy. I tried to just lie still but I couldn’t stop touching her also.
Her hands cupped my breasts and then she bent down to kiss all over them. I felt the velvet of her lips, moments of quick suction, and the heavy press of her breasts against my ribs.
She scooted down and put her fingers on the waistband of my pajama bottoms, then looked at me.
“Is this okay?”
“I don’t know.” The fear was surfacing again, iceberg-style, with more underneath.
She put her hands on my thighs and electric currents shot up and down my legs, but mostly up.
“I want you,” she said. “Do you…?”
I slid my pajama bottoms over my hips and kicked them off under the sheets. I wanted this with Tucker and I also wanted to get it over with.
“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” Tucker whispered.
“As beautiful as science can make me?” I offered and immediately regretted it. I shouldn’t be reminding her that I was different. Not now. What if she decided she didn’t want this?
She laughed. “I love science.” Her fingers started touching me so gently I almost couldn’t feel them at first. “You have to tell me if I do something you don’t like,” she said. “Or something you really do. Okay?”
I nodded but I was too scared and keyed up to be able to say anything. She crawled back up the bed and held me and kissed me again until I started to relax, and then made her way back down.
Her fingers were too light still; I could barely feel them and it brought the edge of panic into my gut. After the surgery, for months I was afraid to touch myself. I mean not just touch but try to orgasm. I knew there could be nerve damage. Not so much these days, but it can happen—and I tried to be brave and tell myself it would be okay, but I didn’t want a sex life that was just okay.
And I could, that was the great thing, but could I have an orgasm with another person? Was I like the other girls Tucker had been with? How stupid was I to pick a lesbian for my first—at least with a guy he wouldn’t pay that much attention, but then that had its own issues. I mean, what if he plain didn’t fit?
Tucker’s fingers shifted, pressed harder and I gasped. She stopped.
“Good or bad?” she asked.
“Good,” I breathed.
She grinned and kept changing the angle and pressure of her touch until my brain stopped its crazy spinning. I held onto her shoulders and gave in to the sensations she created for me.
Chapter Fourteen
Tucker
On the bus ride back to campus, Tucker watched Ella doze. They’d been up most of the night and she felt weightless with happiness and lack of sleep. This wasn’t the first time that Tucker was another girl’s first, and she knew it took some trial and error to find out what someone liked when they didn’t know themselves. She’d been afraid that she wasn’t going to do it right—that the techniques she’d learned with the other women in her life wouldn’t apply to Ella. But they did.
Ella was the fifth woman she’d been with and even in that small sampling there was considerable variation in what each liked. And although, as Ella said, she’d been surgically constructed…well, Tucker thought she’d like to send that surgeon a huge thank-you card. The most impressive part for her was how much it wasn’t really any different from the other women she’d had sex with. Actually the most different experience she’d had was with a cisgender woman who was just really big down there in every dimension and got even bigger when she was turned on; Tucker never quite knew how to navigate around all that enlarged geography. Compared to that, Tucker felt really grateful that they lived in a time and a place where someone had the resources and expertise to help Ella fully grow into herself.
Now Ella’s bottom lip still looked redder than usual from where she’d bit it to keep from making noise and Tucker wanted to brush it with her own lips, but instead she just settled back in her seat.
Ella was amazing and compelling and by far the most enticing girl Tucker had met since school started, but that didn’t erase her history with Lindy. She’d told Lindy things she’d never told anyone before and felt closer to her than most members of her family. This weekend was a blessed vacation from her complicated life, but when she got back to school it was going to be time to talk.
On top of that, she had the feeling that Ella wasn’t ready to settle into a relationship. Maybe she would be soon. Maybe she had to try a few options. It was easy to mistake her coolness for self-assurance, but she was a year younger and in terms of relationships, much younger than that. Tucker had been sleeping with women since she was fifteen, and Ella…well she’d made a darned fine start but it was just a start.
Tucker had thoroughly enjoyed herself. She adored Ella’s sweetness and innocence, but she also ached for the electricity she had with Lindy. Being with Ella was still in many ways like being with a friend.
She remembered the time last spring when she and Lindy had sex halfway up the stairs to her apartment because they just couldn’t make it to the door. And then they’d staggered, laughing in their half undone clothing, into the apartment and fallen together on the couch where they snuggled and talked about Wittig and Winterson for hours.
Lindy always listened to her ideas and she didn’t always agree with them, but she’d say when she thought Tucker had a great idea and encourage her to pursue it.
“What are you thinking?” Ella asked. She was still slumped in the seat the way she’d been as she slept, but her eyes were open and clear.
“Just stuff,” Tucker told her.
“What are you going to tell Lindy?”
“Nothing,” she said. “But I’m going to talk to her about everything and see. I’m not telling her about this weekend.”
“Good,” Ella said. She turned away and looked out the window.
“Are you upset?” Tucker asked.
Ella shook her head. “I don’t want to complicate things.”
Tucker didn’t know what that meant, but maybe Ella felt like she did: that their night together should exist apart from day-to-day reality and talking about it would only drag it into the middle of Tucker’s messy life.
The bus pulled into the campus stop in the midafternoon and she and Ella carried their bags back to the dorm. In her room, Tucker unpacked her bag and then, with a mix of regret and anticipation, turned on her cell phone. There were four texts from Lindy, increasingly apologetic in nature.
The last one said: Come over when you get back, no matter how late. I want to see you. I have something for you.
Tucker texted back: Just got in. Sorry, had my phone off. Needed a break.
She wondered if Lindy knew she’d spent the weekend at Ella’s house. If no one else from the LGBTQIA group mentioned it, Lindy would probably think she’d just stayed at her mom’s house and worked at the hardware store as usual when she wasn’t on campus for a weekend. She wasn’t going to say anything to change that assumption.
Can you come over or are you busy? Lindy texted back. It was unusually polite and respectful compared to the last month. Did this mean things were changing? Would she get the old Lindy back? The one who was wickedly funny and fascinating?
I’m on my way, Tucker responded.
* * *
&n
bsp; “Do you love it?” Lindy asked. She was holding up a thick gray sweatshirt with the wor d “DYKE” in a college font across the front.
Tucker thought it was adorable. She unbuttoned her overshirt and shrugged out of it, then pulled the sweatshirt on over her head. It fit perfectly. The material was heavy and warm but super soft on the inside.
“This is great,” she said.
“The best thing is that there actually used to be Dyke College in Cleveland,” Lindy said. “They changed the name like twenty years ago, but for about fifty years it was called Dyke College and for a while it was women-only.”
She rubbed the thumb of one hand across the palm of the other and bounced on her heels like it was too hard to stay still, but her eyes held Tucker’s evenly with her old humor in them.
“Wow, I’d love to see that,” Tucker said.
“Yeah, too bad they renamed it, huh? That looks really great on you.”
Tucker grinned and Lindy leaned in and kissed her in a way that was intricate but soft. When she pulled away, Tucker wanted more.
“I’m sorry about the last few weeks,” Lindy said. “I just had to get some space and clear my head. It’s just, last spring I felt like I was on top of the world with that presentation and then, you don’t really know how academia is until there’s all this pressure. It’s like: what have you done for me lately? The semester started and nobody cared what I’d done last year, they just wanted the next big thing from me and I didn’t have anything and I freaked out. It was like I couldn’t catch my breath but it went on for weeks and weeks.”
She paused and reached out to stroke her finger gently along Tucker’s cheek. “I’m really sorry I pushed you away like that.”
Tucker didn’t know what to say so she curled forward into Lindy’s lap and wrapped her arms around Lindy’s waist. Lindy laughed and bent down and kissed the side of Tucker’s face. She planted little kisses from Tucker’s ear down the side of her jaw.
“You missed me,” Lindy said.
“Yeah. It was like you were there but you weren’t.”
“I’m here now,” she said.