by Fiona Zedde
She wanted to be in a place where she could be herself.
She wanted to be in a place where it was okay to have crushes on other girls.
Sara drew a deep breath. Finally, she had arrived at that place.
Third Court was one big party. Loud voices raised in laughter, philosophical disagreement, and general raucousness, immediately greeted Sara as she crossed its invisible threshold. Bright blue Christmas lights decorated the trees in their small courtyard and twined around the cement work balconies. Large Japanese lanterns decorated with flittering dragonflies and cherry blossoms bobbed gracefully in the breeze while marijuana smoke wove its way through the air, coming from all sides and slipping into Sara’s hair, dress, and nose.
Boys—and girls—watched her walk by, sliding their inquisitive gazes over her body, up her newly long legs and the shifting heat of her bottom under the dress. She smiled nervously but kept going. With the neon invitation clutched in her hand, Sara walked past each glass door on the bottom floor until she realized that 318 meant the top floor, not just the court number.
Before she could knock on the door, it opened, releasing the scent of more marijuana, and something else, something sweeter than she’d ever smelled before. The person at the door—it was hard to tell if she was a he or vice versa—smiled gently at Sara and tugged her into the room.
If the atmosphere outside was a party, this was a dream. D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar” wove its smooth, jazzy funk through the room, rocking into the bodies gathered there, the sleepy-eyed women in flowing skirts, the liquid-limbed boys lying across the queen-sized bed, passing a pipe back and forth between them, the girls who stood talking around a table filled to overflowing with food. They all seemed to rock gently to the song’s beat, mellow and loose.
“Come on in.” The stranger’s voice was warm and feminine.
“Hey,” Sara murmured, shyness suddenly overwhelming her.
Short spiked hair. Dark eyes under slashing brows. Nutmeg skin. The woman gently rubbed her palms up and down Sara’s arms, smiling. “Where did you come from?”
“Um…First Court. I got an invitation.” She nervously waved the pink flyer.
“You must be a first year. Are you?”
“Yes.” Sara cleared her throat of its squeak. “Yes, I am.”
“I thought you were leaving, Devi.” An unmistakable, throaty murmur emerged from deep inside the room.
Devi, who still had her hands lightly grasping Sara’s arms, didn’t look toward the voice.
“I was, and now I’m not,” she said.
Looking past Devi, Sara saw Rille in the bed. She wondered how she’d missed her presence before. She sat at the head of the bed, leaning back against a wall draped with a plum purple Om tapestry. A woman smoking her own pipe, a bone colored antique with silver accents gleaming in the low light, lay across Rille’s lap. Thick white smoke hovered over them, growing thinner as it swam toward the rest of the room. The fourth year caught Sara’s eye and winked again just like she’d done in the cafeteria that Monday afternoon.
Rille nudged away her girl to slide across the bed and emerge from the slow moving wave of bodies in the room, a compelling vision in low rider jeans and a tiny tank top advertising shucked and raw oysters. “I was the one who invited her, not you,” she said to Devi.
Sara shifted in Devi’s arms, suddenly uncomfortable. Everyone at the party, at least those she could see, was casually dressed in jeans, shorts, or vintage frocks. Nothing approaching the formality of Sara’s dress.
“I like your outfit,” Rille said. “Red velvet. How appropriate.”
“Does that mean we’ll get the chance to eat you up, too?” Devi asked.
“If we’re lucky,” Rille answered for Sara.
Sara blinked at them, watching the game between them like the spectator she was.
“You have to learn to share,” Devi said.
“I always share with you. All of a sudden you’re complaining?”
Rille linked her fingers with Sara’s, while on the other side of her, Devi gently held her hand. “You’re just in time for spin the bottle,” Rille said.
The two women guided Sara to the food table with everything sweet her heart could desire—red velvet cake, chocolate covered strawberries, baklava, and sparkling plum wine. Devi briefly relinquished her hold on Sara to cut herself a slice of cake. Looking at Sara suggestively, she sank her finger deep into the cake then, after it emerged coated in red velvet crumbs and sticky white frosting, sucked it clean. Rille watched her antics with a cool smile.
“Don’t try so hard, baby. It makes you look the opposite of fuckable.”
Soft color washed beneath Devi’s cheeks and Sara reached out to squeeze her hand. She glanced at Rille, surprised by her casual cruelty.
“What?” Rille asked as if she’d done nothing more innocuous than blow her nose. “It’s true.” She turned back toward the other partygoers.
Everyone seemed to be doing their own thing. Smoking, talking, lingering over the table of edibles. That was until Rille made an announcement, tapping a spoon that had traces of sugar on it against a gigantic glass bong.
“Gather round, one and all. It’s time for more festivities to begin.” Her gaze swept the room. “Those who want to watch, can. Those who prefer to play, let’s play.”
A few of the two dozen or so people gathered in the room and arranged themselves in a circle on the floor. At least five chose to stay out of the game, including the girl who had been lying in Rille’s lap. She sat back in the bed, still puffing on the pipe with its sticky-sweet smoke, making herself comfortable against the pillows to get a good view of the show. A girl on the floor nearest Sara, with her hair cut close to her head and a wealth of dark skin exposed in very short shorts, sucked her teeth.
“I wish Thalia would take her damn opium pipe somewhere else. She can be such a poser.”
But the words tumbled past her lips without any real heat. A few people laughed, but the girl on the bed paid them no attention. As Devi drifted away from them, Rille tugged Sara down on the floor next to her.
“I’m not sure if I’m ready to play this game.” Sara had heard of this on television and even whispered about in middle school, but she thought that people in college, especially those at the party, were way past such childish games. Apparently not.
“You have to play.” Rille’s eyes were heavy-lidded. “I promise you’ll have fun.”
Devi dropped an empty beer bottle in the center of the circle and dropped herself between a soft looking boy with pretty, full lips and another butch girl directly opposite Rille and Sara. A boy with a thick Afro leaned over to start the game.
“By the way,” Rille said, leaning close. “Gender doesn’t matter. Whoever the bottle lands on, that’s who you have to kiss.” Sara had already figured that part out on her own. “You can decide to kiss here in the circle, or in the semi privacy of another space in the room, balcony included.” Rille grinned, the perfect picture of a charming fourth year lecher.
Sara sat at Rille’s side watching the game, mesmerized. This was what college people did? They spun and kissed, leaning toward each other in the circle, bottoms high in the air, wriggling with pleasure if their kisser was doing it right. No one took the activities away from the circle. When it was Devi’s turn to kiss, the boy with long dreads down to the middle of his back and the scent of sandalwood on his skin, neatly cupped Devi’s head, sliding his fingers through her short hair and down to the back of her neck. She shuddered when he touched her and they drew back, finally, to catcalls and whistles.
“Very nice.”
The D’Angelo CD segued to Johnny Hartman, sinking the room deeper into sensuality with his strong, rich voice and words of yearning. When someone lit a joint and passed it around, the game got even slower with couples taking up the circle to form their own make-out area. The girl next to Rille passed the joint and she took it, holding it between her index finger and thumb like it was something su
rprising she’d just found. Sara watched her take a hit, drag the smoke slowly into her lungs, her eyes squinting against the sting of smoke. Rille leaned close to Sara, to tell her a secret maybe, and pressed her lips to hers, probed with the quick flick of her tongue, until Sara, caught off guard and still amazed that people did such things in public, opened her mouth.
She coughed and sputtered, the smoke burning behind her face and in her lungs.
“Open. Suck it deep inside,” the gravelly voice licked at her ear.
Sara blushed, still coughing, still reeling from the sound of those words so close, and at the feeling they sparked in her body, the electric shock under velvet, the startling zing in her lap.
The people who saw what happened laughed. But the couple in the circle, and now those off to the side, bored with waiting for their turn at the spinning bottle, earnestly made out, reaching tongues and hands in places where Sara could not see. She blushed again. And this time, Rille laughed. She put the joint to her lips again, inhaled deeply before holding it to Sara’s mouth.
“Just one,” Rille said, smoke trailing from her nostrils.
Sara inhaled, coughed, and pushed the joint away.
“Good girl.” Rille kissed her quickly as a reward then passed the weed down the line. “Come on,” she said and stood to lead Sara away from the circle toward something Sara wasn’t sure she was ready for but wanted to taste anyway.
“Are you a virgin?” Rille asked with her lips a whisper from hers.
They were out on the balcony now, squeezed in next to another couple already half dressed and moaning into the warm Florida night. The lanterns dipped in the air near them, providing a pseudo light, light to seduce and smoke by, to say and believe anything by. Sara closed her eyes, convinced of the magic in the night and in this girl by her side.
“Yes.” She felt rather than saw Rille’s smile.
“We can take care of that for you tonight, if you like.” Rille’s breath teased her lips and Sara felt herself leaning closer to initiate contact.
“I’d like,” she murmured.
Sex was a surprise for Sara, but no miracle. Even with the hazy high blown into her by Rille’s careless mouth, the promise of fulfillment turned out to be just that. Rille tried everything on her—tongue, fingers, the firm pressure of her thigh, until finally, she found an old dildo with a condom already on it from previous use. Rille stripped it off, looking only half apologetically at Sara as she went quickly inside the room to rinse off the dildo and put a fresh rubber on it.
“This will be better,” Rille said when she came back out to the balcony.
With her jeans discarded and wearing only her skin and a dildo harness, she pulled Sara down on top of her on the couch. Hot delirium, her mouth. Hair exhaling the scent of marijuana smoke as she nuzzled Sara’s throat, encouraged her to touch, whispered sweet filth in her ear. Rille seized the new territory of Sara’s flesh. Opened her for intrusion.
She bled and called out in pain, straddling the green-eyed dream in the semi privacy of the balcony sofa. The couple next to them came and went. Rille soothed her until she almost forgot that pain, until she found some sort of rhythm with the red velvet shoved up around her waist and down below her breasts and Rille sighing how beautiful she was. On the inside, Sara felt battered.
“That was really nice,” Rille said when they were finished.
Sara’s thighs quivered from the ache between them. “Nice” wasn’t quite the word. Her cheeks warmed with embarrassment as she moved against the sofa to pull down her dress. She bit her lip. But Rille’s eyes glowed in the dark as if she still wanted to devour her. Sara blushed then, feeling somehow special.
“You can stay with me tonight, if you want.”
But Sara heard the token offer for what it was. Smoke. She shook her head and adjusted her legs next to Rille on the sofa, trying to take up less space. Rille patted Sara’s still smoothly French twisted hair and peered around the balcony door to see what was going on inside.
“Go inside,” Sara said. “I’ll be fine out here.”
Rille smiled, gratefully, Sara thought, and left her outside with the lanterns and the faint strains of music and the laughter floating up from the courtyard. Sara didn’t know how long she stayed, but the sky was lightening and the party was at its lowest with almost everyone on the bed or on the floor or in the bathroom. She didn’t see Rille’s bright head anywhere.
So this was college, Sara thought, looking around. The beginning of everything. More laughter rose up and died from people in the courtyard below. No one noticed when she left the party, passing slowly out the door in her crushed red velvet dress.
*
Sara’s room was silent and dim. After the abundance of the party, it seemed especially lovely. The display on the answering machine flashed. A message waited. She sat on her bed, carefully arranging the soreness between her legs. Her thighs felt sticky. She was sure there would be blood. That was what all the books said.
Sara ran a hot bath and sat in the water with her head resting against the tiled wall. Rille’s shadow rose up, kneeling again between her thighs, her mouth on Sara’s, her body vibrating with want. Sara closed her eyes.
When she opened them again it was fully light and Raven was shaking her shoulder. A shiver raced through her as she shifted in the water. It was cold.
“You need to get out of there.”
Raven brought a towel and spread it wide for her to step into. Disoriented, Sara stood and stepped out of the tub. Raven dried her unresisting body.
“What time is it?” Her mouth felt sticky, as if something old had finally died in it. She shivered again.
“After nine, I think. I called, but you didn’t answer the phone.”
“I didn’t get back from the party until late.” Sara registered, dimly, that Raven should’ve still been in Tampa over fifty miles away with her boyfriend, not crouched over the tub, worry carved into her forehead.
Raven’s touch through the towel was clinical but concerned. She only lightly skimmed over Sara’s thighs with the cotton, not drying between them. Sara looked down at her body. The glaring red towel looked too familiar against her skin. She wanted to rip it away from her body. But that wasn’t a normal thing to do.
“I think I stayed in the water too long.” She cleared her throat to get rid of its croak.
“Yeah, a little.”
They both looked at Sara’s skin, wrinkled and gray from the soak.
“At least you weren’t under it.”
“The party wasn’t that traumatic,” she said, stirring finally. Sara gently pulled away from Raven and from the towel, reaching over the toilet to her small stack of clean towels to get another, a green one this time, and securing it like a sarong around her body.
Raven looked away from Sara to the discarded velvet dress on the floor, the balled up panties. “What did she do to you?”
“Nothing I didn’t want.”
“Is that really true?”
Was it true? Had she wanted Rille to feast on her like a snack, to peel away her wrapping, gorge herself, and leave Sara vulnerable and empty, on the balcony?
“I swear. Yes.”
Raven sighed, but said nothing else. Sara looked away from the concern in her face. She was all right. And even if that wasn’t completely true, she would be soon. Sara left the bathroom and Raven followed.
“Are you going to see her again?”
The question echoed in Sara’s head as, “After tonight, do you think she’s interested in you anymore?”
“Yeah, why not?” she murmured. “I think we had a connection. Something.”
Raven opened her mouth, dark eyes flashing a familiar fire, but whatever she saw in Sara’s face made her sigh instead. Then: “Okay.”
Her Worldly Goods
Stephen/Atlanta
The light from the restaurant, amber and sharp, found the hints of red in Sara’s hair, blended with the gold in Rille’s eyes, and made them easily th
e most beautiful women in the room. Preening a little under the envious glances, Stephen pulled out a chair for Rille. But when he moved to help Sara with hers, Sara gently shook her head and pulled out her own chair. He smoothed down his tie and sat.
“You look very nice, darling.” Rille said, her playful look sliding over the charcoal gray suit and green paisley tie she’d picked out for him weeks earlier. She had a good eye for tasteful things so he’d only nodded at the woman behind the counter at the Burberry in Lenox Mall, not looking at the price tag before she ran his credit card.
At their intimate table for three, Rille reached out, weaving her fingers through Sara’s, a reward for the smile and relaxation of the stern look Sara often wore these days. Maybe something at work was bothering her, or at home. Whatever the problem, she wasn’t talking. And although Rille had not mentioned it, Stephen knew she worried. She couldn’t be that unconcerned, or blind.
The waitress, when she came to their table, was homely in the ubiquitous black slacks and gray Polo shirt the restaurant staff wore. But she had a lovely body that the three of them immediately sat up to appreciate. She smiled at Sara first.
“What can I get you to drink, miss?” the waitress asked.
With her hip a delicate incline in Sara’s direction, her smile danced on the edges of flirtation. Rille immediately took notice, watching for Sara’s response with dissecting eyes. Stephen hid his smile. After all these years, she should know better than that. Sara had always been faithful, loyal to their relationship when it would’ve been in her best interest not to.
