by Sandy Lowe
“Sure, I’ve gotten worked up over somebody before,” Joelle is saying, “but it’s different with…you know.”
“With Brent?” I venture, following Joelle into the residence hall.
“Uh, no. Brent is bent.”
“Why? Because he’s in the thee-ay-ter?”
“No, because he’s gay. You think every guy is after me. I’m”—Joelle unlocks the door to her suite—“After you. I’m not the Big Woman on Campus, or whatever the female equivalent would be. Is there one?”
“Beats me.” I stretch out on Jo’s bed, the closest I’ll ever come to sleeping with her. Her sheets smell like a gingerbread house. I rub my bare legs against the cotton. “And FYI, Joelle, every guy is after you.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jo sets her script onto her desk beside the Intro to Anthro textbook. “Name one.”
“Darrin.”
“Darrin?”
“That guy who was in the elevator with us at the Student Center yesterday. Darrin took one look at you and was instantly bewitched.”
Jo’s eyebrows curve like the pipes on her radiator. “Weren’t you?”
I shift on the bed, my elbows thrusting against the mattress, which is ludicrously long and makes me feel puny and pitiful. I’m blushing too, I can tell—the closet is across from the bed and the door is one big mirror. “I prefer Dick,” I squeak, a humble homage to the highlighter. “With a capital D and that rhymes with P and that stands for—”
“Pussy,” Jo provides, and slides the closet door open. For one merciful moment, the mirror disappears. “Don’t hoodwink at me with those pretty eyes of yours,” she says, selecting a pair of jeans on a silly satin hanger. “You’re more transparent than a pair of pantyhose.” She propels the door closed, forcing me to come face-to-face with the numskull in its reflection. “You’re also weirdly interested in men,” Joelle adds. She takes the jeans off the hanger. “What were you like B.C.?”
“B.C.?”
“Before cunt. Or did you always like lady parts like me?”
“The only lady parts you like are the ones you get to do onstage,” I tease, because if Jo ever does give me my LGBT cue, there’s no way I’ll miss it.
Joelle kneels down, begins fussing with one of the many straps that trap her feet inside her shoes. The V-neck of her shirt dips into a U.
“I’ll do it.” I practically throw myself at her feet.
Joelle stands. “It’s nice to have friends in low places.”
Friends. Why did I pursue a friendship with Jo when I can’t pursue a romance with her? I mean, what is it about unrequited love that makes it so appalling and appealing at the same time? I hope the professor covers this topic in my Psychology of Women course. Otherwise, I may have to withdraw. “Um, B.C. To answer your question, I dated guys during that epoch, but I always knew I liked the birds better than the bees, so…Hmm. I think only half that euphemism is effective, but you get the gist.”
Jo steps out of her shoes. “So did you ever let a bee sting you?”
“Nope.” I flop back onto the bed, the pleats in my skirt spreading out like a paper fan.
“I think I’m allergic to bees,” Jo says, unbuttoning her shorts. She grins at me. Looking away is not an option. “You’ve seen London. You’ve seen France. Now you get to see my—”
“Camouflage underpants? Who do you think you are—G.I. Jo?” I’m surprised they’re so simple, but they’re sexier that way: no frills, just thrills.
Joelle trades in her shorts for the pair of pants she got from her closet. She leads them up her legs, slowly concealing their svelte shape with the dark denim.
“Do these jeans make my ego look fat?” Joelle inquires, posing like a paparazzi princess in front of the mirror.
“Colossal.” I pat her posterior. “Just like your caboose.”
Joelle shakes her fanny in my face. “You can borrow them sometime.”
“Oh, so you’re going to let me get in your pants?”
“Absolutely.”
My smile squirms. “Stop leading me on,” I mutter, half-hoping she’ll hear me and half-hoping she won’t. It’s my fault—I shouldn’t be flirting with Jo, not when she knows I have feelings for her. And she knows. There’s no way she can’t know. It’s plain as gay. Day. Whatever.
“I’m not leading you on,” Jo insists, but her tone is too chirpy, like she doesn’t take me seriously.
“You’re a leading lady. It’s what you do.”
“I’m not always a leading lady. Freshman year I auditioned for Peggy Sawyer in 42nd Street, but they cast me as Dorothy Brock. It all worked out for the best, though, since Dorothy has this fabulous song about wanting someone to be gay with and play with. Not exactly your garden variety coming-out story, is it?”
Jo wants someone to be gay with? Great. Jo wants to play with someone? “Great, I’m in love with a playgirl.”
“Luck be a lady. You’re in love with me?”
“Like you didn’t know.” Attagirl—make her look stupid.
“I knew you were attracted to me, but amour? I didn’t know I could wish you.”
She’s next to me on the bed, smiling with her straight teeth and sitting with her straight spine and…and…
“Not exactly your garden variety coming-out story?”
“Hey, just because my posture is straight doesn’t mean that I am.”
“But you look so—”
“Ladylike?”
“Yeah.” Stupid Sapphic stereotypes.
“You look ladylike too, except when you sit like that.” She studies my signature sprawl. “Look at you. Legs spread. Wide open. Gaping. Legs. Wide open.”
“Hey, just because I’m not sitting pretty doesn’t mean that I’m—”
“A lesbian?”
“Yeah. Wait, what?”
“Sometimes you’re more bewildered than bewitched.” Jo jabs my side like she’s trying to stick a straw into a juice box. It tickles then tingles. “I hate that about you.”
“Is there anything that you love about me?”
She shrugs one shoulder. “Nothing.”
“What else?”
She hugs both of mine. “Everything.”
I stare at Jo. Could it be that the girl who always has to have the piece of cake with the flower on it wants to have her cake and eat me too?
“Oh, come on,” she says, eyes spinning like a compact disc. “You think I’ve been flirting with you all this time for tits and giggles?”
The whirring in my ears mimics the frozen yogurt machine in the cafeteria. I open my mouth to squeak, but this time no sound comes out.
“Okay, clearly you didn’t like that question, so maybe you’ll like this one: what does a person have to do to get some lip service around here?”
Nothing, apparently—before I can do or say anything, Joelle is shoving her fingers into my hair, letting them tangle in the loopy blond locks. I guess gentlemen aren’t the only ones who prefer blondes.
The kiss is long and long overdue. It is liberal and liberating, decadent yet decorous. It makes me want to do a keg stand (I don’t drink), study a broad (but with no space between us), and go streaking across campus (fully clothed).
With lips that taste like tropical punch and a mouth that tastes like blueberry yogurt, Jo’s kisses are more amazing than Joseph’s Technicolor dreamcoat. Go, go, go, Jo! This girl kisses with precision, perfection, panache.
But then, I always figured she would.
Jo College is not your average Jo.
*
Joelle slams the door of my room. The bulletin board above my desk shudders. The framed poster beside my bed—Marilyn Monroe lifting weights in blue jeans and the top half of a bikini—jiggles.
“Most people go out with a bang,” I remark, retrieving a fallen flyer for Jo’s show. “Not you. You come in with one.”
“Your roommate isn’t here, is she?”
I scan the room: bunk bed, books, basketful of garments that just got back from a trip t
o the laundry room. But no roommate. “She’s in class. Well, she could be in the closet, but let’s not go there.” Jo gives me the Valley Girl face: snarls in charge. I close my laptop. “What’s up?”
“The curtain,” she says, dropping into a plastic blue chair that feels more comfortable than it looks.
“You’ve got four hours till show time.”
“I’m not going on.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Not in my condition.” She sniffles. “I think I’m coming down with something.”
“You’re too hot to catch cold.” Jo is the first to growl at me. Her stomach goes next. “You hungry?”
“I’m too nervous to eat.”
I slide my desk chair back and make the brief migration to the other side of the room. I kneel in front of Jo, folding my arms over her thighs. “We’ll get your favorite: spaghetti SOS.”
“That’s not a bad idea, actually. I could use all the help I can get.”
“Not help, silly. SOS. Sauce on the side.”
Jo stops her smile before it peaks at her cheeks. “Don’t be endearing. I can’t handle it right now.”
“How come you’re so nervous?”
“My mind is a tabula rasa. The dialogue is going to die on my lips, and don’t even get me started on the lyrics.” She taps her foot, flaps her hand, groping for the words to the bushel and a peck song.
“Isn’t there something about hugging and necking?” I query, and get a weary look in response. Maybe I should show, not tell. I lift myself onto Jo’s lap and wrap my arms around her neck, nuzzling her manicured mane, dark and shiny like black coffee.
I don’t know if this is helping, but what I don’t know can’t hurt me. But it can hurt her, so… “I know what you need.” Reluctantly, I climb off Jo’s thighs and move to stand behind her. “You need a massage,” I offer, rubbing her shoulders.
Joelle shrugs against my hands. “I don’t think that will be sufficient,” she says. “I do, however, think that I’m going to faint.”
I frown down at her. “Put your head between your legs.”
Jo tilts her head back and regards me as though I’m one sip short of saying so long to sobriety. “So when I pass out I can hit my head on the floor? Do I look like a numskull to you?” She slants her head to one side, her eyes narrowing into buttonholes. “Can’t you put your head between my legs?”
A fuzzy feeling flutters inside my panties. “You want me to give you a peck on your bushel?” My heart socks my rib cage and my knees knock together like a plastic clacker.
But I’m not too nervous to eat.
I come around the front of the chair and kneel at Jo’s feet again. I curl her skirt up across her thighs. No camouflage panties today. No panties period. It’s like a stage without an apron, a theatre without an orchestra pit.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, as if someone just turned the spotlight on me.
The curtain is most definitely calling. And this is no time for stage fright. I can do this. I’ve taken a few improv classes, and the first rule of improv is to always accept what your scene partner gives you. Have you seen what my partner is giving me? I peruse the playing area, all lush lips and liquid lust. Instead of chewing the inside of my mouth, I should be chewing the scenery.
Besides, Jo went up on her lines, so it’s only fair that I go down on them.
Those lines are ridged like a desktop globe and slippery when whet.
But let’s pace the plot more practically.
I start at the top of the show. Jo’s curls, pitch-black like the flats and sharps of a piano, provide the backdrop to a striking set. Not be upstaged, her clit, hard as the head of a tassel tie, begins to vibrate, complementing her vocal cords.
Waiting in the wings is the ensemble, and I see to it that each and every part is featured fairly. Her folds are flavorful—succulent and sugary, like Bartlett pears and conversation hearts.
“You’re getting wet,” Jo informs me.
My head pops up as if from a trapdoor in a stage floor. “How do you know?”
“Your hair’s in the dip.”
I glide my hand through my tresses. Smeared strands stick to my fingers. I grip the tips, massage the gel into the blond loops.
Joelle’s lips skew into a half-smile, as if she’s too worn out to lift up the other side of her mouth. “That’s one way to treat split ends,” she mumbles.
I duck back down. Whispered whimpers glide past Jo’s lips and she grinds her groin against my mouth.
A song pops into my head, and I murmur the lyrics into her sex as if it’s a microphone. “I’ll know when my love comes al—”
“Adelaide may be getting laid, but she’s not singing that number,” Jo grouses in a hum-cum-moan.
“I’ll know when my love comes?”
“Now you’ve got my number.”
I’ve also got her licked, and kicking like a chorus girl. I hold her thighs tighter, my nails scraping her skin, like a pencil making light marks in a libretto vocal book. Jo sings my praises as if she were a bell, and the show ends on a high note.
“That was nicely-nicely done,” Jo murmurs, looking satisfied.
Perhaps a little too satisfied.
“You weren’t nervous at all, were you?” I challenge. “You conned me into cunnilingus.” Jo giggles. “You stooped pretty low, you know that?”
“I know,” she crows. “Good thing I’m sitting down, ’cause I am rockin’ the gloat.” She winks at me, her mermaid-green eyes sparkling.
“Take back your wink.”
Jo looks me straight in the eye. Well, as straight as she can, anyway. As for me, I can’t even see straight, but I can see her eyes darken, the way the house lights go down in the theatre.
So much for intermission. I was hoping to catch my breath, give and get a more in-depth critique of my performance, maybe participate in a post-show talkback with the actor. But Joelle doesn’t hold the curtain, already having decided to turn our one-act play into a full-length work.
I’m under her direction now, and then, after she sweeps me off my feet and drags me to the bottom bunk (which, fortunately, is mine and not my roommate’s), I’m under her.
Jo rushes through the overture, pulling at my clothes, plying them like she can’t get the curtain open fast enough.
The show gets on the road; rides over the speed bump of my hip, zooms past my thigh, passes under my skirt, parks inside my panties.
Jo follows the fold—all of them. “It’s like a sauna in there,” she remarks, eyes alight with delight.
I squeeze her breasts, the cups plump and cushy against my palms.
“They make wonderful supporting players, don’t they?” Jo jives as things continue to heat up.
“Yup,” I manage, already approaching the finale. The second act is always shorter than the first.
“Maybe in our next production, you’ll cast them in a starring role.”
I laugh just as my body starts acting funny, shaking like a fistful of dice.
“Fuck be a lady,” Joelle growls, and lifts her hand to her mouth. She blows on her fingers as though they’ve gone from yearning to burning. “You should have auditioned for the show.”
I take her hand and take over, because I can take the heat. “Me? Why me?”
“Because you,” Jo replies, and licks the lollipop-like luster from her fingers, “would have made the perfect Hot Box Girl.”
Final Exam
Meghan O’Brien
Jess Holt trudged into Newsome Hall, the only all-girls dormitory on the university’s sprawling 3,000-acre-plus campus, in a funk to end all funks. She’d just completed the second-to-last final exam of her freshman year at college, but rather than feel relief, the knot of panic that had been steadily gathering in her stomach for the past week now threatened to strangle her from the inside. It was a terrifying, suffocating feeling that made it hard to keep taking normal breaths. She hadn’t made it past the common room before an overwhelming fe
eling of dread forced her to stop, bend at the waist, and grab onto her thighs while she struggled not to pass out. She only dimly heard a voice before a strong arm wrapped around her middle and guided her to a nearby couch to sit down.
“Hey.” A hand rubbed her back, chasing away the worst of the attack while slowly returning her to reality. “You all right?”
Jess inhaled, exhaled, then looked up at her caretaker only for her heart to chug impossibly harder. “Mike” McDonnell—whose birth name was rumored to be Michaela—sat next to her on the couch, concern etched across her handsome face. A junior and therefore the oldest student living in their dorm, Mike was the only verifiable lesbian she’d met at college that year, a late transfer who had moved into all-girls housing with obvious trepidation only to become the darling of the mostly straight, largely bi-curious population of first- and second-year underclassmen. Jess had harbored a secret crush on Mike since the very first moment she’d laid eyes on her, excited by her unapologetically butch appearance—the shaved head, low-slung jeans, and various tanks and T-shirts that showed off her muscled arms—and, eventually, impressed by her clear dedication to her education. They’d struck up a casual friendship over the course of multiple, sporadic evenings studying in the common room together while their roommates were getting laid or had otherwise rendered their rooms inhospitable, but they weren’t exactly close. At least not as close as Jess had often fantasized.
Flushed, Jess nodded. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Mike stopped rubbing her back, though Jess wished she wouldn’t. She knew Mike tried to play it safe, with freshman girls especially, though she also knew she’d slipped at least once that year and engaged in a heated make-out session with a bold, curious former homecoming queen who happened to be Jess’s roommate. According to Zoe, Mike had also fooled around with at least two other girls in their dorm, though only at parties, and only to second base. Mike had never behaved flirtatiously toward her at all, much to her despair. Even now, Mike’s expression was pure platonic friendship. “You okay?”
