Tommy was the kind of guy all mothers want to see their daughters bring home. He was good natured, funny, and handsome. He gave up his seat on the bus for little old ladies. He carved turkey at the homeless shelter downtown every Thanksgiving. He sighed heavily every time after he laughed. He liked movies and he liked me. This was our fourth date.
Maybe this time it would work.
“You look really beautiful tonight.” He cooked me dinner and decorated the table with candles and a vase of flowers. He was still under the impression that he had to seduce me. I don’t know why. I’d slept with him on our first date already.
“Thanks.” I said with a mouthful of tuna casserole. I finished my meal and placed my fork and knife on the plate just like my mother had taught me.
I sat quietly with my hands in my lap. I felt him studying me, some bewildering puzzle he had yet to figure out. He drank the last of his wine and got up to increase the volume on the stereo. It was tuned to his favorite light jazz radio station.
“Do you want to dance with me?”
I took his hand and walked with him to the middle of the living room. He held me close as our bodies swayed to the music. I focused on the contours I had come to know, those that were hidden under two layers of clothing between us and I berated myself for feeling little, if anything at all.
“You smell so good.” He mumbled against my ear with his nose nestled in my hair. I examined the panoramic view of his apartment from the slow circles we made as our feet shuffled against the floor. The candles had died down in the past hour. The plates on the table were empty and forgotten for the time being. The chairs were pulled out and neglected as if the occupants had left in a hurry.
My patience paid off, a song and a half later his lips found the soft part of my neck underneath my earlobe. My attention centered on his pelvis pressing against mine and I detected it, his excitement for me, a natural thing, a hardness that wanted my softness. It aimed to penetrate, to feel me yielding. My hand cupped the long curvature and squeezed.
“So sweet.” His tongue darted into my navel as I lay on my back on his bed. He pulled at the elastic waistline of my panties, struggling to pull them down my thighs that angled to accommodate him.
The garment was successfully pulled off one foot but bunched around the other in a comical roll that I shook and kicked to the floor. I waited as he fumbled through a drawer next to his bed for a condom. His cock was long and thin, it reminded me of white asparagus from Schwetzingen. I tracked its movements back and forth in the air like the long, swinging pendulum of a grandfather clock, back and forth, back and forth. I looked at the little hole in the tip and wanted to stick my tongue into it.
The condom was on the pillow next to my head and slid to the mattress when he pressed his weight on top of me, kissing me, his hand diving between us and rubbing about twenty miles away from my clit.
“Do you like that?”
“Oh yes.” I groaned with manufactured enthusiasm.
“I want you to come for me. Let me see you come, Emily.”
Already?
“Yes, I’m going to. I’m going to.”
I wanted to slap the precious look of love right off his face.
He rubbed me until I thought he’d wear a hole through my skin, then I held my breath for as long as I could, letting it out finally with a cry and a little bucking added for effect.
Tommy wiggled into the condom and poked me three times before sliding in. He started kissing me again as he aimed his pleasure. I tore my face away from the irritation that pricked like needles down my spine.
“Yes!” I gasped to endure the contracting pain in my abdomen as his prick drove my bowels into my chest cavity.
He whimpered against my shoulder and with three hard thrusts that pushed my head against the wall, he grunted and froze against me. I stared over his shoulder at the cracks in the ceiling that looked like rivers on a map.
Jo was in bed when I got home.
“How did it go?” She asked, her eyes focused on a porn movie on the television screen. I removed my jacket and scarf in the hallway next to her bedroom door and didn’t say anything. She paused the film and looked over at me from the pillows.
“Well?”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head.
“Why do you bother?” She asked with a disgusted quality and watched me take off my shoes.
The repeating image of my parent’s happy, loving marriage, their elation over the announcement of my brother’s engagement, the constant inquiry of whether or not I had met anyone new, anyone nice, flashed through my thoughts. I shrugged at Jo and sat on the edge of the bed next to her.
“Did you fuck?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you come?”
“What do you think?”
She snorted and brought her hand out from under the covers to hold up to my face.
“Smell this.”
I brought my nose to her fingertips and there it was. She had been finger fucking herself under the sheets before I got there. I wondered if she was wearing anything at all below the waist.
“Will you make me come tonight?” I asked, looking at the suspended animation on the screen of a man bending a big breasted woman over a couch. He was spreading her ass cheeks with his fat hands and snarling like a wolf.
“Maybe if you beg me.”
“Shut up.” I yanked at the band holding my hair together in the back and shot it across the room with my finger.
“You look really beautiful tonight.” She whispered while playing with the bottom hem of my skirt. I stared at the far corner of the room and felt my mouth twitch and curve up into a smile.
Jo leaned forward and placed her head in my lap. The sheets pulled away and I looked down. I could see the crack of her ass where it started at the bottom end of her t-shirt. The skin was smooth under my hand. The vertebrae knocked against my fingers and I counted each one of the hard bones to the two dimples on the flat of her lower back. I spread my legs slightly so she could fit her hand between them.
“Do you want to dance with me?” She asked and bit my thigh through the material of my skirt.
I groaned and nodded as her fingers pushed aside the crotch of my panties and began exploring through the pubic hair.
“I love the wetness.” She said the first time I had lay down with her. Innocently curling up to her in her bed for a movie, I didn’t stop her when her good natured caresses, those of a friend, those of a roommate, those of another woman began their wandering.
“You smell so good.” Her face had traveled up my thigh and buried itself between my legs. She took loud, deep breaths and lifted her head to suck the finger she had been probing in and out. “So sweet.”
Jo crawled to her knees and lifted off her shirt. I locked my lips on a breast and tenderly rolled a pert nipple between my teeth. Jo had fine, wispy hair between her legs, a strange contrast to that on her head that was thick and full. It curled midnight black down her shoulders and closed like a curtain over her face when she dropped her chin to her chest. We both watched my hand at the top of the triangle her legs made with the bed. The soft flesh was loose and pliable. I squeezed it and tugged it away from her body.
I had been naked just an hour before, but I had not been seen an hour before. Jo’s eyes wandered unabashedly over every part of me when I lay back against the bed that was still warm from her body. She hurried only to hit the power on the television remote when the VCR clicked off and we were interrupted by the false studio audience laughter of some late night sitcom re-run.
She returned her attention with two fingers shoved into my cunt.
“Do you like that?”
I clawed at the sheets on the bed.
“Yes. Oh.” I jerked against her when an unoccupied finger used my dripping excitement to lubricate then penetrate my ass.
We fought deep, the bed bounced, she straddled my leg and rubbed her slick center back and forth against my skin. Her face pinched in concentration and I watched the red flush expand down her neck and chest. I crawled to my knees, too and sat across from her. We stared at each other like two sculpted lions guarding the entrance to an ancient Greek temple. But the only guardian that was there was unseen. It was the one in my head that kept me from what I wanted.
It was her; brash, loud, insensitive, and witty. I touched the milky, white skin of her breasts, her strong thighs, and cradled her sex in the palm of my hand. She rode me while stirring my clit with her fingertips.
“I want you to come for me. Let me see you come, Emily.” These words were the prescription that drove me over the edge. All the want, all the need, all the shame disappeared in a flash that I saw as bright white behind my eyelids. My heart pounded it out, it must have been three times its regular size as it knocked against my chest and sent me gasping for air. My whole body clinched and squeezed through the feeling. At the end I slumped back against the bed, tingling all over.
Jo flopped over next to me and started playing with herself again.
“Are you going to see him again?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I shrugged.
“I hope you do.”
“Why is that?” I was irritated with her chatter, why couldn’t she just be quiet and enjoy the moment?
“Because as long as you keep going out with these morons, you’ll keep coming back to me.”
“It’s not like that.” I protested weakly.
It was exactly like that.
“Oh no?” She was amused and still masturbating. Jo could make herself come under almost any circumstances. I once watched her bring herself off while on the telephone with her aunt in Missouri.
“No.” I grumbled and refused to look at her.
“Then why am I over here all alone? Stop trying to keep everything clean and tidy and make me come, you bitch.”
These things we did together were made possible by the unspoken theory that she was doing all of it to me and that I had no part in it. If I made her come, it would be like an admission of guilt.
I was a fucking lesbian and didn’t want to be.
Lesbian, Lesbo, Carpet Muncher, Muff Diver, Dyke. Jesus, could the titles get any more derogatory?
So I make her come, then what? I bring her to my brother’s wedding and introduce her to my family as my new girlfriend? We get hers and hers matching towels? My parents see me on the 6 o’clock news at a gay pride parade?
No way.
“You seem to be doing fine on your own.”
“Whatever.” She snapped and gave up on masturbating. She rolled to her side away from me. I got up and gathered my clothes.
“I’m going to take a shower.” Even I caught the apologetic tone.
“Be sure to wash it all off, Emmy.”
I stomped into the bathroom and turned the facet as far as it would go to HOT. I watched and waited for it to disappear down the drain, but even the scalding cascade pounding my skin wouldn’t erase all the things I had done. I guessed it was too late.
I toweled off and noticed that the crack under Jo’s door was darkened. Tommy’s number was on a little slip of paper folded in my purse. I wrapped the towel around my chest and held the phone to my ear as I let it ring once, twice, three times before he picked up.
Everyone would love a guy like Tommy.
Even I could.
Couldn’t I?
© 2004 Lilie Berlin. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.