The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  “Here’s your coffee.”

  Sam spins around and Romey hands her a demitasse of espresso. How cool and European, Sam thinks, taking a sip. She nearly chokes. The coffee is strong and quite bitter.

  Romey laughs. “Cream, sugar?”

  Sam shakes her head, then takes a seat on a couch with a red velvet throw. Romey joins her, sitting closer than Sam would have expected. Are they on a date? Sam can’t tell. Romey isn’t wearing makeup and is dressed quite casually in black jeans and a hoodie covered with black and white, Japanese-style comics of teenage girls with swords. But on the other hand, her hair is slightly damp as if she has just taken a bath. Of course, it’s probably safer not to think of this as a date since Sam isn’t even sure she trusts Romey. Her best friend is a thug who practically threatened Sam.

  Romey says, “You can have those pictures of your sister if you want.”

  Sam gulps her coffee as if it is a shot of tequila. “No, you keep them. I have other pictures of her. But I was wondering, how did you guys meet?”

  Romey sets her own espresso down on the floor— there’s no coffee table. “She answered an ad I put in the paper. I wanted a female roommate who smoked and was messy. Turned out she smoked pot, not cigarettes, but that didn’t bother me. She was the only girl who answered. Everyone else who replied was a guy. I remember one of them told me he had feminine qualities.”

  Sam has to smile at that. “So what did he think were his feminine qualities?”

  “I don’t know because I hung up on him. I was so fed up with men. I kept sleeping with them, thinking it would be different if the guy was an artist, older. Once I even slept with this blind guy who said he was great in bed because he was so tactile.”

  Sam can’t keep herself from asking, “Was he?”

  Romey wrinkles her nose. “No, he was nothing special. Anyway, I wanted to live with a woman, but not another dancer. There’s too much competitiveness, has she got nicer boobs than me, that sort of thing. Along came Chloe, and we got close, like that.” Romey snaps her fingers, and Sam glimpses a tattoo on her wrist, a black triangle.

  “So you met Omar through Chloe?”

  “Yeah. Omar’s never gotten over her. Those two were madly in love. But, you know, it would never have worked.”

  “Why not?”

  Her frown is dainty. “Omar’s mom came here from Egypt with, like, five hundred dollars. She could barely speak English, didn’t speak any French. He grew up in a shitty apartment, and they were always scrambling for money. He wound up running with a gang of West Indian guys. One’s dead now, another one’s in jail, and the other two got jobs in the straight world and married their girlfriends. Omar loved Chloe, but I’m not sure he would have given up the thrills and chills for her.”

  “Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted him to.”

  Romey looks at Sam with disbelief. “Your sister was a proper girl from a proper home. No offence, but she was slumming. There was just a lot of chemistry between them.” Rolling her eyes, Romey adds, “God, they used to be freaking loud.”

  Sam says, “They had stuff in common. They both lost a parent.” When Romey doesn’t respond, except to draw her body back, Sam realizes her tone was too snappy. Listening to someone talk about her sister having sex makes her feel perverted, as if she is having sex with her sister. Maybe she’s too uptight, but she suspects Chloe would feel the same way. Sam remembers her sister once saying she was glad Sam was six years younger because it meant they would probably never fuck the same guy. Turns out Chloe need not have worried.

  Romey fumbles with a pack of cigarettes she takes out of the front pocket of her sweatshirt but seems to change her mind—instead of lighting up, she sets the pack on the floor beside her coffee. Now she’s not even looking at Sam, who tries to think of something to say to her. Is the awkwardness because they don’t know each other very well, or is it about attraction, or something else altogether, something relating to Chloe? Sam doesn’t know. But another question occurs to her. Asking it, she feels her heart thump, lay down a bass line. “Were you out to my sister?”

  Romey leans back against the arm of the couch. “I told Chloe I was bi, which was what I called myself at the time. She didn’t take it seriously at first. She didn’t believe me. People don’t. My mom doesn’t.” She bats her lashes, but the set of her mouth is flinty, hard.

  This doesn’t tell Sam what she wants to know, which is how homophobic was Chloe? But Romey’s manner is a diversion. She has an essential insolence that Sam finds terribly appealing. She remembers the sarcastic way Romey took her clothes off. No. Don’t think about that. Don’t think about Romey naked. Don’t think about doing things to her.

  Sam asks, “Did Chloe ever talk to you about me?”

  Romey gives her a sardonic smile. “The only time I remember Chloe talking about you was when I was admiring a dress in her closet. I went, ‘Hey, you have a real vintage Diane Von Furstenberg,’ and she just stared at me. She had no idea what I was talking about. She said you gave her the dress, you found it second-hand. From that, I figured you for this fashion plate girly-girl.”

  Now it’s Sam’s turn to grin. “If I was a girly-girl, I would have kept that dress!”

  Romey’s eyes lock on Sam’s. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but Chloe was kind of heavy. At first I thought maybe she also liked girls, but she didn’t. She really didn’t. She was bitchy about women, always putting down the waitresses at work. I don’t know why she liked me. And there was something about her, I don’t know what, but something about your sister I couldn’t tear myself away from.” Romey stands up from the couch in a fast awkward movement, as if to prove she can, however, tear herself away from Sam. Walking over to a CD player Sam hasn’t noticed—a pile of laundry lies on top of it—Romey presses a button, and loopy ambience streams from an invisible set of speakers. The band is Air, their first CD from when they were just popular in France. A great CD to have sex to, Sam thinks, as she watches Romey shift the Virgin Mary statue slightly, centring it. Sam asks Romey why she has a shrine.

  Romey flops back onto the couch. “I pray to her sometimes.”

  “You’re Catholic?”

  “Of course.” Romey flings her hands around. “I’m Italian.” Her hands fall back onto the couch, her baby finger resting against Sam’s thigh.

  Sam feels a flurry of breakneck beats in her chest and shifts away in case Romey didn’t mean to touch her. “You’re a Catholic lesbian who takes her clothes off for money. No contradictions there!”

  Romey launches an arm outwards. “I know, I know. According to my family, I’m going to hell. But I can’t not be Catholic anymore than I can’t not have a family even though, yeah, they’re both fucked up. It’s who I am. I can’t break it down better than that.” Her explanation, or lack of one, is interrupted by the ringing of a phone. Romey doesn’t pick it up—just stares at it without speaking. A disembodied voice emerges from the wreckage on the floor. Then a click and a whir followed by Omar’s voice. “Rome, pick up, it’s your homeboy. Guess you’re still out on your date…”

  Sam thinks, a date. Oh my God. They are on a date.

  Romey scrambles across the floor, tossing items of clothing out of the way to reveal an answering machine whose buttons she begins to stab. Omar’s voice is abruptly cut off. When Romey sits back on the couch, her cheeks are flushed. Omar tipped Romey’s hand.

  Sam doesn’t want to embarrass Romey, so she continues the conversation. “So, um, do you go to church?”

  “Huh?” Romey is still flustered. “No, but I go to confession sometimes. And I tell the priest the truth, which I never used to do.” She thrusts her chest forward, observing Sam from under half-lowered eyelids to see if she is having an effect. She is, but what turns Sam on are not Romey’s breasts so much as the effort she is making to get Sam’s attention. They are tapping into sex, sugaring a maple. Sam has this sudden insight—at work, Romey has to be in control of sexual situations, but that isn’t how she lik
es it in her personal life.

  Sam says, “When you were a kid, what did you lie about to the priest?”

  Romey says, “I liked girls, but I never told anyone. I was the slut, you know, the girl at parties who was always drunk and making out with some guy on the staircase. I told the priest about kissing boys to get penances for what I felt about girls. Being a slut was camouflage, you know?”

  “No, I don’t. I never bothered with boys.” Sam pounces then. Moves over, bringing her face close to Romey whose lips, even without lipstick, are so full. And she smells lovely, of something light and fresh and herbal. She closes her eyes and Sam kisses her. After a moment, Romey wriggles onto her back while Sam gets on top and pins Romey’s arms above her head. Romey makes little noises, then lifts her pelvis and slides it against Sam’s thigh.

  Opening her eyes, Romey stares at Sam. “I wanted you the first time I saw you.”

  Sam doesn’t tell her she felt the exact same way. She always holds back to have the edge and to make sure the words aren’t going to be stolen later on. She runs her finger over Romey’s lips, then darts a tongue in and out of Romey’s mouth in a rhythm suggestive of the one she will feel when Sam works her way down. Under Romey’s sweatshirt she’s not wearing a bra. Her breasts swell in Sam’s palms, her nipples temper against Sam’s fingers. Instinctively, Sam knows Romey wants her nipples to be pinched; no gentle caresses here.

  Romey isn’t content just to be touched. She slips her hands under Sam’s shirt, then beneath an unwieldy bra. The delicate rub of her fingers soon kindles flames in Sam’s nipples. When it comes to making love to women, Romey’s no amateur. To avoid surrender, Sam fishes Romey’s hands out and tamps them to the couch. Lifts Romey’s shirt, exposing her breasts. Stops touching her in order to observe those burgundy-brown nipples, those very round breasts, which Sam can tell are natural because they fall ever so slightly.

  Romey giggles. “Do you like what you see?”

  Sam stares at her. Tries not to think about the fact that Romey probably says this to men all the time. “Not bad.”

  Romey opens her mouth in mock outrage. “Fine!” She pulls her shirt down but Sam pushes it back up. Romey reaches for Sam, who grasps Romey’s wrists with one hand while raising the other hand as if to say you’re going to get it. The threat is empty, but when Romey’s wrists are released, she flips over on her stomach and tilts her ass up. Sam spanks her. Slapping Romey’s ass, Sam feels heat shoot through her like a sparkler.

  “You’re a top. Lucky me.” Romey jiggles her butt in Sam’s hand.

  Sam has never been called a top before, but the word feels right, as if she’s being given something she already owns. In high school, she imagined having a cock and using it to fuck the mean, pretty girls. At the same time, the word “top” makes Sam anxious. She isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do, what’s expected of her, but she takes a stab by telling Romey she has to undress.

  “Okay,” she whispers. “Let’s go into my bedroom.”

  Her room is dark, but she opens the black, gauzy curtains to let in a thin stream of light. Romey removes her clothes without fanfare and lies before Sam on her futon. Sam gathers her up, runs rough hands over the silk of her. Sam’s lips kiss a path from Romey’s collarbone to her cunt. Sam scores the trail with her tongue, a line of fire tracing gasoline.

  Afterward, Romey lights a few candles and Sam strips down to her boxers and a T-shirt. Romey had offered to make love to Sam who said, no, she was satisfied. “I hope it isn’t always going to be like that,” Romey said. Sam felt her chest catch; Romey used the word always—there was going to be a next time. “It won’t be,” Sam promised. “I like to come too.”

  Sam strokes Romey in a contented haze. The slate of her skin is almost blank. Her only piercing is a wedge of gold embedded in her navel, and she has just the one tattoo on her wrist. Women always finger Sam’s tattoos, ask her the names of the shops where she got them done, occasionally ask about the meaning of a particular symbol, and then flash Sam their own, inevitably smaller, markings. The inquiry is routine, boring, yet Sam feels oddly annoyed Romey isn’t following the protocol. Catching Romey’s wrist, Sam runs her thumb over the black triangle, feels thick tracks of skin. The tattoo isn’t decorative; its purpose is cover-up. The ends of the scars, where the tattoo doesn’t reach, are a gleaming silver. Sam edges her thumb along each line of scar, feeling Romey’s muscles tense. She doesn’t stop Sam, but Romey’s permission is reluctant. There is usually only one reason a person has these kinds of scars on their wrists; Sam is overwhelmed with a feeling of tenderness.

  After a moment, Romey withdraws her hand, sits up and winds her legs—flexible from dancing and working the pole, Sam thinks—into a yogic position. “I haven’t been with anyone in awhile. I’ve had affairs with some of the other dancers, but they’re never butch enough. The last couple years, I’ve just picked women up at Pride, girls who are too young for me.”

  “How young?”

  Romey begins to laugh. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” Sam lies. She watches Romey’s jaw slump, but when her eyes narrow with suspicion, Sam tells her the truth. “I’m twenty-four.”

  “That’s cool. I’m twenty-eight.” She reaches over, grasps tufts of Sam’s crewcut and holds the sections into pigtails. While Sam squirms, Romey leans her head back to observe. Then she stands up and puts her sweatshirt and jeans on without bothering with a bra or underwear. Sam lies on top of the sheet, her hands folded behind her head, watching Romey.

  Romey pats her stomach. “Ho fame, I’m hungry. C’mon, I’m going to treat you to dinner with my filthy lucre.” When Sam doesn’t immediately get up, Romey leans over and licks her chin. “I can taste me on you!”

  She is affectionate while Sam is less demonstrative. Sam tells herself Romey’s screwed up, she’s tried to kill herself, and she’s friends with Omar who did God knows what to Chloe. But Sam’s admonitions to herself fail to close the muscle of her heart. From the beginning, Romey sews herself into Sam’s skin, sinking barbs she can’t feel at first When Sam does feel their sting, she makes no effort to pull them out.

  Sam and Romey spend every day together. They have more sex than Sam thought was possible, bouts that leave them ravenous with a more prosaic hunger. Romey introduces Sam to Italian food, takes her to the Jean-Talon market where they buy organic tomatoes, braids of garlic, fresh basil, pungent cheeses Sam has never heard of, and red peppers they broil until their blackened skins can be slipped off under cold running water. Between prepping meals at work and being around Romey, Sam learns a lot more about cooking great Italian food. She learns to curl her fingers when using a chef’s knife so she doesn’t slice her hand. She learns to begin with oil, herbs, and heat, to wait for their perfume before adding more ingredients. She learns about the importance of the right ingredients: blocks of parmesan so rich they leave a greasy smear on her fingers, fresh pasta dusted with flour, and organic cream.

  At work, Lemmy asks Sam if she’s met a guy. She guesses she’s acting way too cheerful. Can’t he tell she’s a lesbian? She regards him as if he has three heads. “No. I met a woman.”

  Word gets around. Now they know she’s out, the gay male waiters are chummier with Sam. The older woman who does the bookkeeping and writes the paycheques is noticeably cooler. Not unpredictable. A “Jesus Saves” button is often pinned to the woman’s lapel.

  Two days a week of work at Le Triangle d’Or pay Romey’s bills. If she has to go to the dentist, she picks up extra shifts. Sam doesn’t have full-time hours at the restaurant so she, too, has time. And Montreal is full of cheap thrills. Romey unfurls the city beneath the glamorous image, cracks open the dark, brittle places. Thrift stores along Monk in Ville-Emard where Canadian hockey legends Mario Lemieux and Gilles Meloche grew up, and people drink beer on their balconies long before the sun sets. The Italian district of St. Leonard where Romey makes a monthly trek for what she considers to be superior coffee. In St. Leonard, the
y go into a place Romey calls a “sports bar,” which isn’t really a bar at all. You can’t buy alcohol, just coffee and juice. In the “sports bar” they play foosball and drink espressos and pear juice at a counter with old Italian men.

  In the southwest where Sam and Romey both live, they bike along the canal and the river, stopping to shoot pool in a dive called The Dew Drop Inn, where everyone speaks English, and the television is tuned to a hockey game in which the sportscaster announces the plays in English. The neighbourhood is Point St. Charles, an Anglo-Irish ghetto, where about a third of the population is on social assistance. The reason they are on welfare, according to Romey, is because they’re unilingual. Romey is fluent in English, French, and Italian. When Sam’s plumbing backs up, she asks Romey to call the landlord, even though it isn’t too hard to say “Ilj a unprobleme avec la toilette” If she stays in Montreal, Sam will have to learn some French.

  Romey and Sam take a trip east of downtown, have a late afternoon beer at Foufounes Electriques (”Electric bum cheeks,” Romey translates), a punk bar with a half-pipe in the interior for skateboarding. From Foufounes, they go into a sex shop. Inside an emporium of sleaze, they examine a smudged glass case of plastic dicks. They reject a pink rubber obelisk with ersatz veins in favour of a black and white striped silicone candy cane designed to press upon the G-spot, a dildo more like a sex accessory than a cock. When they get home, Sam cuts Romey’s thong off with a Swiss Army knife, and they christen their dick. The next morning, Romey hides Sam’s boxers and makes her go commando when they go to get croissants at the market. Sam isn’t always the top, and the hunger with which Romey takes Sam’s nipple into her mouth demonstrates, as words cannot, that Sam is a desirable woman, not a freak.

  One night they don’t have sex because Romey has cramps. As Sam rushes to the pharmacy to get pain medication, fills up a hot water bottle for her, and makes herb tea, she doesn’t feel disappointed. Looking after Romey is just as important as having sex with her. Sam thinks, I’m in love. Except maybe with Dyna in high school, Sam has never been in love. Her lust always crumbled into guilt and fear when the women she slept with began to glow with soft feelings for her. But her response to Romey’s affection, to the hearts and arrows Romey may as well have inked all over both their skins, is to stay still, to breathe love in.