Wild Nights

by Therese Szymanski

  When she came closer, I stepped back, but I couldn’t leave. All I could do was stare in fascination, shaken with awe because I was alone in a bedroom with Beth Shaulis, chair of the women’s studies department at the University of South Florida.

  Her brunette hair was rather coarse with streaks of gray, and fine wrinkles covered her hands and face. Her neck, attenuated by smooth tendons, emphasized her lean, vegetarian lifestyle. She was stunningly androgynous, a feminized boy with narrow hips and features like the drama of a graphic novel—all black-and-white angles. Her urban sophistication was both daunting and appealing to a small-town girl like me.

  As I stood, incapacitated by the struggle between lust and a lifetime of conventional morality, I realized this was what coveting felt like.

  Her smile grew until her white teeth showed brilliant against magenta lips. She had a delicate, bird-like jaw and pointed chin. “He won’t be home for hours,” she offered, guessing at my sudden reluctance. Her hand reached for mine.

  “I don’t care about that.”

  Her touch had been tentative, but now she curled a confident hand around my limp fingers.

  My heart thudded and missed a beat, the pressure like a tug on my chest. “This is so—”

  “Wrong?” One sharp black eyebrow rose to mock me. It wasn’t the first time. We had spent an hour after class once, arguing whether honesty and openness are the same thing. We attributed our different opinions to our different childhoods. She had grown up in New York’s trendy East Village when it was just the Lower East Side, the daughter of two lawyers. As adept as her successful parents at tweezing shades of meaning from common words, she convinced me she wasn’t playing a semantic game when she portrayed herself as honest, despite the many times she failed to tell her husband about her women. However, the Sisters of Mercy convent had enlightened my young conscience to the many ways I had sinned, not the least of which was by omission.

  Of course this was wrong, but to say so would be to show how unsophisticated I was. I was supposed to believe that whatever two consenting adults did was acceptable. I was supposed to believe craving physical intimacy with another woman was not immoral. I was supposed to believe her gay husband had agreed to a marriage of convenience.

  Afraid she would mock me further, I tried to laugh derisively and succeeded only in coughing.

  She leaned toward me and pressed her lips to mine. Her breath warmed my face. The soft brush coaxed me forward, and my body began to ache. I rested my fidgeting hands on her shoulders and let her kiss me. I let her. That was all I could do.

  Her hands drew me closer, and her pliant breasts pressed against me, a sensation as startling as the gentleness of her small mouth. “No,” she scolded as she drew away. Her hazel eyes narrowed with an insight that left me feeling foolish. “Kiss me.”

  With weak hands, I drew her into a hug and rested my weight on her shoulders. My heart was racing. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  She eased me toward her broad bed. The support slats creaked as I sat on the tan comforter. I began to relax until I realized I was about to make love to a woman. As I leapt to my feet, light-headedness made me sway, and her amiable concern vanished. She grabbed hold of my arm, steadying me.

  When the pleasure I had imagined for years and a woman I had adored for months intersected, I possessed neither the focus nor the fear to worry about pride. So she might humiliate me. So she might break my heart. As I stood inflamed with an exquisite longing, I knew the pain of loss wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. Nevertheless, I backed from the room, and when I was in the hallway, I rushed from her house.

  The following Thursday after class, Beth pulled up in her car alongside mine in the remote Sundome lot. After obediently getting in her Jeep, I rode with her for ten minutes before I asked where we were going. She winked.

  We arrived at The Lighted Tree, a lesbian bar on Pass-A-Grille beach near St. Petersburg. It was nearly eight o’clock. An orange sun seemed to ignite the low clouds over the bay, and the easterly breeze carried the dense sea air inland. Seagulls screeched above us, almost hovering like hummingbirds in the strong wind. Along the sandstone wall that bordered the walkway, palm-sized anole lizards, with their jittery scamper, hunted insects as the noisy gulls hunted them.

  Beth led me into the bar. Although The Tree was an open-air beach bar, few patrons wore bikinis like those I saw in the straight bars. Tattooed butches in boots and T-shirts mingled with tank-topped femmes. A few university students lit up the bar with their fresh, straight-girl looks—all cosmetics and easy-access skirts, like billboards advertising sex. They were the kind of women who said they did anything but usually proved to be merely passive. Their long nails gave them away.

  One woman, who made eye contact and let her hand slip across my hip, wore an open brown blouse over a black leather bra, and her piercing eyes alarmed me with their interest. Beth handed me a cold bottle that beaded with condensation. I flung the water from my fingers, took a long drink and relaxed.

  My blonde hair stuck to my neck and my pink satin shell clung to my small breasts in the sweltering evening made hotter by the bodies and the spotlights. Shielded from the wind, mosquitoes took opportunities where they found them, and I spent much of the evening swiping at something whining near my ear.

  The pungent hops from my beer faded behind the enticing coconut-scented oils that oozed from the shiny skin all around me. It had rained that afternoon, and the pavement around the stage smelled musty from evaporation. Palm trees arched over us, blocking much of the blue sky, and their spear-like leaves hung with fat drops of moisture.

  The Tree was a wind-down bar for those spending time on the beach or at one of the hotels. Few came to dance, so Beth and I were among a handful of couples swaying in front of the acoustic, all-woman band.

  “Feeling good?” she asked into my ear.

  I hated being the center of attention. “Do we have to dance?”

  “I want everyone to see you,” she said sweetly.

  I leaned away to look into her face. “Why?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  She was lying. I knew I was only pretty. “Do you bring all your students here?”

  “Just the hot ones,” she replied with a wink.

  Resting my head on her shoulder, I dangled the bottle of beer from my fingers and wrapped my arms around her waist. She wore a black-and-white checkered blouse and black jeans.

  After dancing for a time, Beth left to get me another beer. When she returned, I was dancing with a muscular woman in a softball jersey, whose jasmine-patchouli scent of Giorgio for Men had me wet with lust. Beth charmed the taut-skinned dyke with a few questions about her team’s season and then drew me away.

  After I finished my second beer, Beth ushered me from the bar, and we drove for a half-hour before arriving in downtown Tampa. Hulking buildings blocked off two sides of the parking lot, and couples walked some distance away on a broken sidewalk. Beth leaned over and buried her face in my neck. I giggled and asked where we were.

  “You’re already feeling the beer,” she said. She sat back, and after a short appraisal, she shrugged. “Whatever it takes, darling.”

  Thursday was “alternative night” at Tracks and brought in pretentious university students with their fashionable bandana color codes, along with the kind of women who owned boxes of surgical gloves, soldered chains to their bed frames, and lived their fetish for more than an evening.

  The pounding trance music was too loud to talk, so we found a tall, fiberglass table and climbed up onto its blue padded stools. Already scores of women were dancing, but I found myself watching the gay men, some flamboyantly effeminate, others almost caricatures of masculinity, their jocks stuffed with dildoes—unless the mounds of flesh I tried to imagine were real.

  A gay couple came to the table. They touched fists to Beth’s in greeting. She leaned toward me and shouted in my ear, “This is Teddy and Dom.”

  Teddy was a
redhead with curls and a ruffled blue shirt. He seemed to be an obvious bottom, wearing wrist restraints without the chains. Dom was a swarthy Cuban with piles of chest hair spilling out of his sleeveless red T-shirt. Large pores coarsened his olive skin, and his red nose suggested a man never far from a bottle. Dom took a handful of sealed single-use syringes from his cargo pocket and slapped them on the table in front of Beth. Her small eyes widened with delight as she scooped them up and shoved them into her sock.

  Teddy drew Beth to the dance floor. Dom gestured to me, but I shook my head. After finishing my beer in several gulps, I shouted at him, “What are the needles for?”

  He smiled, his yellow teeth showing briefly before he pulled an ampule filled with crimson liquid from his canvas pants. “Blood.”

  I didn’t ask why, because I didn’t want the answer. I didn’t want anything to do with the fetishes I saw around me. I had been living a fantasy for too many years to sacrifice a single evening of reality for new illusions. Besides, rules and codes were what I was breaking.

  The driving rhythm of Black Box hip-hop rushed through me like a euphoric drug, the pulsing sounds seizing my senses, magnifying hedonistic desires, and giving every wild thought an erotic life of its own. Slipping from my stool, I paused to watch Beth as she turned to a woman behind her. Their hips joined in motion, the stranger drenched in blue and Beth in black.

  Beth drew the length of the woman against her and slid her arms under and around the other woman’s arms, spreading them high with her own so that the two women merged as if in flight, and then they moved as one, their bodies joining, separating and locking in a sensual rhythm that swayed to the electronic beat. The hair on my neck stiffened.

  When more men and women spilled onto the crowded floor, Beth disappeared. The music’s bass tones rumbled through my feet, and chills shivered through me, loosening what reservations I had left. I was a terrible dancer, but I found myself on the dance floor, grinding with Beth. She laughed at me, and I laughed at myself.

  When I couldn’t ignore my full bladder any longer, I noticed I was dancing alone, or rather, I was dancing with people I didn’t know, and Beth was gone.

  A thick, leather harness hung from the ceiling in front of the main bar, and I found her whipping a man who hung face-up and splayed out in the harness. Several people had short whips, their ends frayed like cat o’ nine tails without the metal tips. The man wore a full head mask that buckled around his throat, and a studded thong belted around a black pouch that sacked his well-packed crotch. The smooth white globes of his ass chafed pink where the more earnest whips had left their marks.

  When Beth saw me, she handed me a whip and shouted, “Teddy.”

  I shouted back that I had to use the restroom, so she took my hand and led me through the crowd until we stood in a short queue. On the opposite wall of the narrow corridor, two women clung together, a redhead heaving her blonde partner against the wall. The redhead had her hands down the back of a blonde woman’s purple slacks, and after a moment, I realized the redhead was working something into her partner’s ass. The blonde was grinding against the wall, like a cat in heat humping a doorstop.

  Beth pushed me into a stainless steel stall. The great relief of emptying my bladder distracted me from noticing that she had stayed in the stall with me. She used the toilet, and as we left the restroom, I looked around at the stainless steel doors and sinks and the utterly foreign object I knew to be a urinal.

  Beth noticed my surprise and shouted, “Gender doesn’t matter here. Except transvestites always use the women’s.” She laughed.

  I was saturated with arousal, and even focusing on walking took effort. My panties stuck to me like a second skin and tugged on my clitoris, sending jolts of pleasure through me as I walked. Time became a series of snapshots as everything sped by in a flow of drunken indistinctness. We danced for a while more before Beth dragged me from the club, and we ended up in a hotel room on the beach.

  Before she closed the door to the room, Beth was kissing me, her hot mouth coming at mine in nipping bites. Her hands grasped my thighs, squeezed and held me. Her hands burrowed under my clothes and squeezed my ass. She kicked the door shut, and with great relief, I peeled off my soaking shell and tumbled onto the bed under the cold stream blowing from the air conditioner. She removed her jeans but not her shirt. The wrinkled tails of checkered cotton covered her to mid-thigh.

  She finished undressing me and stared at my naked body. Her chest rose and fell, but I couldn’t hear her sighs. The club music was still in my memory and my ears throbbed in the silence. I wondered what she saw. I wondered how desire could grow without mystery, without difference. What could be exciting about another woman’s body when she saw hers every day?

  Over the years, I had imagined sex with a woman would be comforting or even comfortable, but when she shoved me about, as if I were a device examined for what it could do, raw lust wet my thighs. I realized then why Beth kept her shirt on, and I pulled it off; I wasn’t the only fascinating object in the room.

  She fell on top of me. When I pulled the clasp loose on the back of her bra, her breasts toppled onto my face. They were soft and heavy. I squeezed one in each hand—substantial, resilient, like bread dough. As I massaged them, I muttered, “God, Beth. You’re so beautiful.”

  As I kneaded her breasts, pleasure sparked across skin that had seemed insensate all my life. The feel of her lit every part of me with a sexual fire. Every nerve cried out in a carnal chorus that overwhelmed the voices of conscience and fear still whispering to me.

  One of her nut-brown nipples brushed across my face until it slipped into my mouth. The tight bud had a rough texture that stimulated my tongue. She pressed her chest against me and rubbed her hips against mine. Her hot breath sent chills along my spine when she began to suck my neck. Drawing my leg between her thighs, she spread me and slid her groping fingers around my slippery labia with the abandon of a child finger painting. She gave me her tongue to suck, and I held her face with shaky hands.

  Her finger penetrated easily. Cushioned by the creamy response to relentless arousal, my slick pussy felt only a vague pressure, but then she flexed her finger, stretching my tight walls. Thrilling convulsions shuddered through me. My body churned, trying to draw her probing finger deeper, and she eagerly dug into me. When a stray finger brushed my anus, I lost my already shallow breath in a single, violent sigh.

  “Hmm,” she murmured into my ear. “I see.” She rolled me onto my stomach. I tightened against her exploration until her persistent finger lured me into submission. I eased my muscles, and when she wiggled her nimble finger into my ass, my mind seemed to explode.

  Although the pleasure was all wrong for orgasm, my body wanted more, just more. The pleasure grew painful because it found no resolution. She jabbed her expert finger in-and-out, and her rhythmic finger-punching so unstrung my strength that I drooled and whined.

  She talked gently, but I understood only her soothing tone— compassionate affirmation, as if she were managing a mentally ill patient. I tore at the pillow and wondered how long I could stand such wanton intensity. Any sense of caution, any sense of time, any sense at all, vanished until what remained in all the world was the finger inside me. I fainted.

  I awoke to a tight grip on my thigh and realized Beth lay beside me masturbating. I reached down and joined her hand. She startled but didn’t stop rubbing herself. “That feels good,” she said, her voice cracking. “Do you like it when I touch myself?”

  Desire rushed like a river between my legs, and my attention riveted on her shapely mouth. My voice was hesitant, imploring as I asked, “Do you like to fuck yourself?”

  “I love it.”

  “You like to fuck yourself,” I said, as a correction, a request. I wanted to hear the word.

  She smiled and said distinctly, “I love to fuck myself.”

  As her mouth formed the word—such a scandalous word, such a defiant word, such a powerful word—I slid down
and clamped my hungry mouth onto her velvet pussy. I had always wondered how another woman tasted. She was salty and musky, and breathing her in was like immersing myself in the fertile, humid air of the tropics.

  My greedy tongue rooted for her clitoris, so easy to find as it plumped in response. She smiled down at me and her fingers alternately stroked my tongue and her clitoris. With steady pressure, I flicked her tender clitoris over my teeth. She grew still as she concentrated. I maintained my rhythm, and she began to rock gently and finally came with a long cry.

  Resting my weight on my knees, I straddled her waist. The sticky sound of slapping skin syncopated with her breathing as I furiously fingered myself. She scooted down, curled her arms around my thighs, and as she tickled my anus with her tongue, I came in waves that radiated to my toes. When the paroxysms subsided, I rolled to my back, physically satisfied but emotionally unleashed.

  When I was in bed with Beth, I wasn’t self-conscious or preoccupied; as she had shown me, sex was not just about her. It was also about me. Sex was about my pleasure and my power to give pleasure. Trespassing boundaries I had obeyed all my life, I discovered a secret, a man’s secret. Desire wasn’t a weakness; it was a strength. It was a simple idea, but one not so obvious to someone taught that a woman’s love was only a reaction and followed rules made by other people.

  In those few months of beachside escapes, I came to understand how sex could be a transcendent experience and why people show up crying drunk at someone’s door at three in the morning.

  Beth enlarged the beauty of my life because she enlarged me. Although she hadn’t transformed my life, she had changed my path, and the challenge for my future would be to live the honesty of volatile and often transitory desires, while accepting no one’s definitions of their significance but my own.