by Fiona Zedde
That, amazingly enough, didn’t lower the aggression coming from the big group.
“She fucked Crystal and took off,” one of the guys said.
“Yeah, she’s not exactly a kid but this chick just bailed just bailed on her.” This came from one of the more reasonable siblings.
“Did you want something else than what happened that day on the couch?” Sage asked. Okay, maybe that was too much detail. One of men growled for real, or it might have been the sister.
Crystal still didn’t say anything, just looked more embarrassed than anything.
“Look, if there’s no point to this little tête-à-tête, we’re going to leave. I haven’t hung out in parking lots since high school.” Phil’s mouth twisted and aimed a pitying look at Crystal. “Although apparently that was last week for you.”
She held out her hand, palm up.
Sage dropped the car keys in Phil’s hand and Phil coolly unlocked the SUV and pushed Sage in and completely over the center console into the passenger seat. She climbed in beside Sage, settling behind the steering wheel before locking the door. Crystal’s minions stood frozen for a moment, probably as shocked as Sage was, before rushing toward the truck as one. Phil started the car, didn’t give any warning whatsoever before tearing out of the parking lot. They weren’t stupid enough to stand in the way.
They drove in silence for a too-long while, the sound of the road moving swiftly beneath the truck’s tires the only sound between them. Sage’s belly twisted with guilt. Barely a mile from the house, Phil finally spoke.
“This is the shit you do when you’re pissed at me for real, huh?”
“Pissed at you?” Sage twisted around in the seat to stare at her. “This is a little more than me being pissed at you.”
Phil adjusted the air in her throat. “You’re being such a dumb ass right now.”
“Look, I know I don’t win any points for smart thinking when I jumped into the sack with Crystal, but you…you…” Sage sputtered to a halt, the feelings that had washed over her during the last few days coming back to drag her under a fierce tide. “I don’t want this kind of life, Phillida. I told you that years ago when we first got together.”
“So, you expected me to stay the same naive twenty-year-old you met back in college? That’s stupid.” The leather of the steering wheel creaked under the tight clench of her hands. “I never lied to you about what I wanted. I wanted you back then. I still want you.”
“But now you want dick too.”
Phil winced, her lips thinning until they were nearly a straight line. “It’s not that simple.”
“Then simplify for me in your words, because from where I sit, shit is pretty cut and dry.” A familiar street sign whipped past the window. The turnoff to their neighborhood. “Where are you…?”
“Just shut up and let me drive.”
Sage shut up. And they drove. Miles and miles. A twist of Phil’s fingers near mile fifteen turned on the radio and killed some of the uncomfortable silence between them. She changed the channels on the satellite radio until Halsey started playing, then leaned back with a grunt, their previous silence now filled with empty sound.
It wasn’t long before Sage realized where they were heading.
Sage and Phil had always been wild together. Two elements gravitating toward each other, instantly combustible. An immediate explosion when they first met that had only grown more intense over the years. But sometimes even they needed a place where they could be inert together, away from everything, to settle and allow peace to float over them, if only for the time being.
The place they’d found, they didn’t go very often. But when they needed it, it was there.
After less than another hour of driving, Phil parked the car, tucked her shoes and purse under the driver seat then threw the car keys to Sage.
A staticky buzz started at the base of Sage’s neck and soon enough spread through her whole body. If she was being honest with herself, she would admit to being scared. But today wasn’t a day for honesty.
“Remember when we first came here?” Phil asked.
It was hard to forget. In college, their attraction was so painfully explosive that they had burned too hot in public. Phil at twenty, an odd combination of nerdy girl and exhibitionist freak, shocked her peers at the university. A genius and child prodigy, she did everything well. By the time she got to Sage, she already had a PhD, two Masters degrees, and a black belt in some martial art or other. She studied nano-technology for fun and had about a gazillion articles published in world-renowned science journals. It was obvious she was holding herself back academically, so she could fit in. Obvious too that she might have been just a little too uninhibited for relatively tame Miami.
Being with older students most of her life had affected her, jaded her a bit, given her experience that she shouldn’t have had, and she was more than happy to share that experience with Sage, teach her, corrupt her. But Sage had loved every moment of it.
One night, they stumbled away from a school party in the middle of nowhere safe. The grounds of an abandoned hotel, private property that was empty and a paradise to them and their college friends.
They’d started making out, kissing in desperation and Sage remembered how her skin felt like it was on fire, the heat coming from inside her body, impossible to extinguish no matter how much she kissed Phil, squeezed her breasts, bit into her soft skin. She felt delirious, out of her mind. It was more than lust, more than infatuation.
They snuck away to one of the empty patches of grass behind the abandoned hotel and fucked until she was rubbed raw, inside and out, her voice hoarse from shouting.
“God damn, you two! Get a room!” Somebody shouted. “This place has about fifty thousand of them.”
But Sage needed more than a room. For her, and for Phil too, being around everyone else was too much. The emotions writhing between them disturbed everyone around them, disturbed even Sage. But she didn’t want to let them go. Even the thought of that loss paralyzed her on the grass where she lay with Phil’s fingers still inside her, her heart beginning to race again but for an entirely different reason than before.
There would be no one else for either of them now, no one who meant this much, Sage thought then. She remembered being elated and frightened at the same time. In the bright moonlight on that still, long-ago evening, Phil’s eyes had glowed with the same feeling. Her mouth turned down and serious, her expression a little sad.
With a sound like a wet kiss, Sage tugged Phil’s fingers from between her legs, body still electric and too much and just right at the same time. She pulled her clothes on, grabbed Phil, and ran.
She didn’t remember exactly how they found the place. Only that after stumbling over rocks and up sand dunes, they staggered, breathless, onto a barren beach.
White sand lustrous in the darkness, a tumble of high and sharp rocks on both sides of a small stretch of beach. A perfectly secluded grotto. It was absolutely pristine with none of the signs that other college kids or careless partiers had found it—no used condoms, empty beer cans, or liquor bottles.
They collapsed on the sand together, their bodies starfished, only their hands touching. That connection, though small, felt unbreakable. They didn’t have sex again that night, only lay together, breathing and overwhelmed.
Now, that night felt eons away.
With Phil, Sage followed the long familiar path, gasping and trudging through the sand, their hands linked, more so from habit than any desire to cling to each other. But when Sage found her fingers gripping Phil’s she reevaluated that thought. Maybe she did want to hold onto her, at least this last time before everything that was “Sage and Phil” finally shattered and the pieces blew away on the wind.
The powdery sand pulled at her feet, bare from Phil’s example and the experience of trying to climb up and down unstable sand dunes in dress shoes. They were both panting by the time they got to the top of the dune and began the blessed descent to the gro
tto, gravity pulling them inexorably down to that place where they were most raw with each other. Most real.
At the bottom of the dune, breathing heavily despite the fact they both worked out semi-regularly, they stared at each other under the half-moon. Phil dropped Sage’s hand and stepped away, but their eyes stayed connected.
The tide rushed up to their feet, higher than Sage remembered from before. Otherwise, their sanctuary was the same. The sense memories rooted in each grain of sand, every transient rush of water, and every lungful of air nearly overwhelmed Sage. She clenched her teeth hard, but that didn’t stop the pain.
More than twelve years they’d known each other, and nearly all of those years spent in each others’ beds, wrapped up in each other even while other lovers had come and gone.
All that was over. Gone.
“Why did you bring me back here?” Sage asked, the pain turning her voice vicious. She crossed her arms over her chest hopefully tight enough to keep herself from flying apart.
Phil pressed her lips together and turned away. She was quiet for way too long, the long line of her back to Sage, dark dress fluttering around her body from the insistent wind. And then. “I love you.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Sage wanted to scream and barely just held herself back. “That’s what makes this worse.”
Phil finally turned around, and Sage could see the tears glittering like captive diamonds at the corners of her eyes. “I’m not doing this to hurt you, Sage.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
“Do you think I want to be dealing with this shit?” Phil looked stunned, hurt. Miles away from the confident and mocking woman who’d driven Sage crazy at dinner with her parents. She shoved the thick cloud of hair away from her face, hands visibly trembling in the moonlight. “Everything I thought I was, everything I built my identity around is…is different now. I feel completely lost.” Vulnerability hung from her like torn and bloody bandages, and it took everything for Sage not to cross the space between them and pull Phil into her arms.
“How do you think I feel?” Sage demanded.
Phil stopped dead. “This isn’t about you.”
“You’re right,” Sage said. “This is about us, and why you want to blow what we have out of the water.”
For years, she thought her parents would turn her away once they knew who she loved. Because of that, Phil and the friends were all Sage had. Now, with a single confession from Phil, she lost half of her life’s foundation.
“You’re so damn selfish…” Phil pressed fingers to her temples, her frustration obvious. “But fine. We can do this the way you want. You don’t want to marry me now. You don’t want me to hang out with your parents. Shit, you don’t even want me living in our house anymore.” Phil spat out a curse and stalked toward the water’s edge, ignoring the waves sliding over her feet. “You’re fucking afraid!”
“You mean my fear that you’ll leave me for the first hard dick that pops up?”
Saying the words actually made her a little sick. She twisted away from the agony on Phil’s face, feeling like it was a reflection of her own.
When she turned back to Phil, the woman she once loved was staring at her with an odd, unreadable expression. Sage squirmed. Usually, she didn’t have to guess what Phil was thinking.
“Okay,” Phil said after a tense moment, her mouth thinned and most of her lipstick gone. “Let’s just stop for a second and regroup.”
Phil backed away and the wind plucked at her hair and the dress, fluttering it around her slender and graceful body. A sigh blew past her lips and she stalked away from Sage to root around in the gap in the rocks where they kept a blanket and other essentials.
“Okay…” With her arms still crossed tight, Sage stood back and watched Phil spread the oversized blanket on the sand and sit down cross-legged. All in silence. Sage sat down on a corner of the blanket. It wasn’t like she would spite anybody but herself by standing up and watching Phil roll around on the blanket that had been her idea to stash out here.
Phil took a deep breath. “Sage, you and I have just been reacting since that night at the premiere. You’ve had a shock, I get it. But we’ve been together for twelve years. We can’t throw that away.” Phil drew another breath like she was getting ready to dive off a cliff. “I want us to work this out.”
Sage’s breath hitched. She wished it was that simple, but it wasn’t. She couldn’t be with Phil if Phil wanted to fuck men. No way. “No,” she said. “There’s nothing to work out.”
Among the sound of the waves, the breeze battering the rocks, she heard Phil’s quickly indrawn breath. She squeezed her eyes shut, unable to look at her ex-lover. She wasn’t bi-phobic or whatever Nuria wanted to call it. She just knew what she wanted.
“Tell me,” Phil said. “Tell me exactly what you mean so there’s no misunderstanding.”
Even from so far away, Sage felt the quivering in Phil’s body, but with the dip of her head, the whip of the wind that drew the dark clouds of her hair across her face, she couldn’t see her expression.
“Tell me,” she said again.
“I want to be with you,” Sage said, the rest of what she had to say resting bitter and wrong on her tongue like a dirty confession. “But I don’t want to be with the bisexual you.”
Although Phil’s expression didn’t change, her legs jerked suddenly on top of the blanket, bare feet digging into the sand. Flecks of white sand dirtied the smooth dark of her skin. She looked like a puppet with cut strings. Her eyelashes fluttered wildly.
“And that’s it?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “There’s nothing else I can say to make you change your mind?”
Sage’s heart jolted in her chest. “No.”
“God, Sage!” Phil gasped, and the sound was like pain. “After everything we’ve been through together? After all the years we’ve loved each other and lasted through…through everything?”
“This is different and you know it.” They were lesbians together, their world was a world of women. When they played together, they only played with women. Changing that was like changing her blood to vinegar. It hurt. It destroyed everything.
“But what about this?” Cool fingers curled around the back of Sage’s neck, a balance of possessiveness and tenderness Phil had always held her with. And God, it hurt. “What about the way I make you feel?” The fingers slid higher into her hair, up to rake through her scalp. Sage shivered. Skin goose-dimpling, nipples hardening under her thin shirt.
“That doesn’t mean a fucking thing,” Sage said, fighting the arousal that flicked like a warm tongue between her legs.
“Liar.” Phil kissed her.
The press of her mouth was familiar and immediately tender. If she had tried to take, to be rough, Sage would have pulled away with some insult on her tongue. But it was too much like they were always with each other. A light press of soft lips, warm breath huffing over her face, fingers cupping her cheeks and their bodies moving inevitably closer.
No… This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what she wanted.
But the kisses continued. A delicate touch on one corner of her mouth, then other, tingles of warm moving from that soft point of contact and radiating through all of her.
This was Phillida. Her love. Her lover.
The first one to touch her heart. The last.
Phil pulled away and her eyes were a universe of pain, dark with dots of light too vast to be mere stars. “No one else can make you feel the way I do,” Phil murmured. “Nobody.” Her warm and firm breasts pressed into Sage. The blanket shifted under them and it was like their world was moving, falling away and falling apart. Sage clutched at it.
“No!” She opened her mouth and devoured what she didn’t want to lose. Their teeth clicked, lips bruised while Sage deepened and roughened the kiss.
Hot breath misted over her chin as she pulled back this time, fumbled at the neck of Phil’s dress for the clasp the same time Phil dragged her shirt up and
off. Her pants unbuttoned, unzipped, a hand dove into her underwear. A knowing thumb flicked her clit, fingers dove into her soaked pussy.
Sage’s fingers fumbled for the zipper and still found nothing. Frustrated, she finally ripped the dress away, the expensive fabric tore, giving her the sight of Phil’s heaving breasts in the black bra. She tore that away too and latched her tongue to a hot and heaving breast.
Oh, God…
Sage bit her neck, gripped her arms tighter, overcome with desperation. Unnamed and uncomfortable feelings thundered through her, fueling that desperation. If this strange poison was all they had between them now after twelve years of untamed and unconditional love, she would drink up every drop.
The taste of her was familiar, the faintly bitter lotion on her skin that also smelled sweet. This bitter-sweetness combined to confuse the fuck out of Sage’s senses, but another tang, of fear and hopeless, struck Sage through the heart. But she drank that up too, opened up her legs to the liquid fuck of Phil’s fingers inside her at the same time Phil’s nipples pressed hard against her tongue, getting firmer with each decadent suck and hot and panting breath.
“Please…”
One of them was crying now, and Sage realized with a sickening lurch in her stomach that it was her. “Phil, don’t do this!” She sucked Phil’s nipple into her mouth along with the salt of her own tears. She sucked and begged, licked and begged, scraped her teeth across the fat pebbled tip of a nipple and begged some more even though she didn’t know what she was pleading for.
Sensation wriggled through her body. Pleasure and pain and regret and the rolling tide of a shattering orgasm from the relentless thrust and twist of Phil’s fingers, the hummingbird flick of her thumb on Sage’s clit.
She threw her head back and screamed her pleasure.
This was the last time. The knowledge thundered through her. Battered her. If this was it, and it had to be, then Sage needed more.
She dragged herself across the blanket, the fabric of Phil’s dress rucking up on the sand, the sound of her harsh sobs rocking between them. Grains of sand from Phil’s legs under her tongue, the loamy smell of Phil’s pussy, wet and more intoxicating than the sea, calling her mouth. Her tongue dripped with the desire to taste one last time, her fingers curled tight into the soft skin.
