Best Lesbian Erotica 2005

by Tristan Taormino

  She’d been right about that, too. Let’s just say we’d been creating our own erotic Twelve Days of Christmas.

  Now Becca came into the living room, bearing a tray with milk and sugar cookies. She was wearing a Santa hat, with a button pinned to it that displayed a piece of greenery and the words Mistletoe: Kiss Below.

  So I did. For a good long time.

  The End

  Rachel Kramer Bussel

  do you see her face

  when she’s gone

  sometimes so bright

  your heart just stops

  did she answer you

  your other half

  you know they say

  she comes just once

  —Sleater-Kinney, “Jenny”

  It doesn’t help that she looks more beautiful now than ever. Her face glows with a natural tan and the sweetest smile I think I will ever see, her blue eyes shining at me with need and want and love and pain. I want to feel as if we are our own entity, existing in a private universe that nothing and no one else can pierce. That life is all about looking at her, in her, nothing more, nothing less. Without makeup, she is the perfect combination of girl and woman, and she fills me with a need to hold and protect her that leaves me raw and open and more vulnerable than any person should ever be.

  I know all the right moves to make, the ways to touch her, the strokes that will make her melt and move and clutch me as if she will need me forever. I know how she wants it. I need to feel as if I’m the only one who can give it to her. I live for those times when she grabs me and looks as deeply inside me as I am inside her.

  As she lies there, so small, so seemingly fragile, her doll’s body looks like some alluring creature, one that I might break if I handle it improperly. I can easily forget the core of strength and stubbornness she possesses. Spread out in front of me, she is truly the girl of the dreams I never knew I had. I slide my fingers inside her, pushing deep into her core, knowing just where to curve and bend to get to where I want to be. I’ve never known another woman’s body quite like this, navigating her pussy as easily as I trace my fingers over her face, reading her like a well-worn page of a beloved book, instantly, easily.

  At this moment, with her hair messy and tangled like an overworked Barbie’s, I want to grab it as I’ve done so many times before, to pull fiercely and then bring her head down into the pillow, to live up to the violent promise of this situation. I almost pull away, because I am not that kind of girl. I’m still getting used to being the girl who wants to hurt someone else, who feels a distinct kind of awe when I hear the sound of my hand slamming down against her ass. I’m still getting used to being the girl who likes giving it rough, who likes to claw and scrape, who sometimes wants to slap her across the face. The girl who got the slightest thrill when she cried the other day while I spanked her.

  I see the collar next to the bed glittering brightly. It meant everything when I fastened it around her neck those countless weeks ago, transforming the airport bathroom into our own private sexual sanctuary. Now, it is too bright, too accusatory, a mistake in so many ways. Like the sweetest of forbidden fruit, her neck beckons, so white and exposed, pulsing with veins and life and want. Now when I see her neck, tender and ever-needy, I can barely go near it. The pleasure would be too great. It would be too easy to press a bit too hard, to enjoy it for all the wrong reasons, even though I can feel her angling toward it, begging me to obliterate her for a few blessed seconds. I know what it does to her, and for the first time I don’t want to know. That’s never been the kind of power I’ve wanted, even though she’d gladly give it to me, give me almost anything except what I need the most.

  I want to slide back to that simple starting point, our bodies blank canvases on which to draw magnificent works of the most special kind of art. Maybe there is still some power left in this bed, something that flows from one of us to the other rather than simply inward, something that binds us together. The ways I thought I knew her have all vanished, lost in a mystery too complex for me to solve. Too many silences and unspoken thoughts war for space between us. She is just as much a stranger to me as she was on our first date, perhaps even more so now, her mind locked away in a box with someone else’s keys. Knowing only her body leaves me emptier than if we’d never even met, giving me a hollow victory, a prize I’m forced to return, undeserving and unwanted.

  My fingers grant me nothing except access to a disembodied cunt, separated from all reality, the way the old-school feminists described pornography, parceling out body parts at random without context or meaning. I wish I could erase my sense memory of how it feels to fuck her, love her, and know her all at the same time, in the same motions. I am somehow back to square one, vainly hoping, praying, that I can make her happy.

  Only this time, we have so much more to do than just fuck, than slide and scream and bite and whisper, than twist and bend and push and probe. The stakes are so much higher that no orgasm will ever be enough, but I try anyway.

  No matter how far I reach inside, I cannot crack her. Those eyes are a one-way mirror, reflecting a surface of something I cannot see and probably don’t want to. I want to tell her I love her, show her everything inside me, but I open my mouth and just as quickly close it. I can feel her body shaking, the tears and pain rising up like an earthquake’s tremors, and I shove harder, grab her neck and push her down, anything to quell the rising tide that will be here soon enough. This may look the same as all those other times, my fingers arching and stroking, her eyes shut or staring at me, needy, grabbing me when I touch her in just the right way that is almost—but not quite—too much. But it is nothing like those other times, nothing like anything I’ve ever done before. It is like touching something totally alien, someone I never even knew, someone not even human. I feel lost as I touch her, my heart so far away I hardly know what to do or how to act. I can see that this is not bridging the gap, but I can’t stop myself. I try to pretend that her moans, her wetness, these external signals of desire actually mean she is truly mine. There is no way to make her come and erase the other girl’s touch entirely. I am not yet thinking about her and the other girl, wondering how she touches her, not wanting to know but needing to, drawn to that deadly fire with a car-crash allure, though that will all come in time, in those freestanding hours of numbed shock, those lost weekends when she invades my head and will not leave.

  She has written me a letter, as requested, given me exact blueprints for how to fuck her. How to take her up against the wall, how to tie her up, tease her, taunt her, and hold out even when she protests. I want nothing more than to be able to follow these instructions, which by now I don’t even need because I know how to trigger her, how to get her to go from laughing to spreading her legs in the briefest of moments. I know exactly how to touch her now, where to stroke and bite and slap to give both of us what we need, but that is no longer enough. I don’t have it in me to be that kind of top, to blank out all the rest and fulfill only that viciously visceral urge to pummel, pound, and punish. That urge is too clearly real, too close to the unspoken pain, the words that will come later, the ones right underneath the tears. I know when I hit her what it means. There can be no erotic power exchange when she holds all the real power. I have enough soul left in me to know that sex should not be a mechanical obligation. It should not be the only thing you can do to stay alive, compelled with the force of something so strong you’re powerless to resist.

  I reach, reach, reach inside her, desperately searching, hoping to wrench us back to wherever we are supposed to be, back to where we were—a week, a month, a lifetime ago. I draw out this process, watch myself as if from afar as my hand slides inside her, as I lube myself up and try to cram all of me into her, make a lasting impression. I have my entire hand inside her, yet I feel more removed from her than I have ever felt. She might as well still be in Florida. She might as well still be a stranger, this might as well still be our first date when I laughed so much because I was so nervous. I’d rather
this be any of those nights, even the ones when I was so drunk and afraid, so powerless and unsure; anything would be better than this slow death, this slow withering until we are nothing more than two girls in a room with tears in our eyes and an ocean of questions and scars and hurt between us. I can’t predict what will come after this most pregnant of silences, can’t know the depths of pain that will puncture me beyond the horrors of my imagination, can’t know that I will regret everything I might have, could have, done wrong, or did do wrong.

  She turns over on her stomach, face hidden from my searching eyes, and I fumble to reconnect, to slide into her as if nothing is wrong, as if it’s just a matter of finding a comfortable angle. I finally have had enough, cannot keep going with the charade that pressing myself against her will fill all the gaps that still exist between us. But for whatever twisted reasons we need this, this final time. And this is the last time, because nothing is worth feeling so utterly and completely alone while you’re fucking your girlfriend before you break up. No power trip or blazing orgasm, no heart-pounding breathless finish, no sadistic impulse or mistaken nostalgia is worth this much pain.

  I don’t know how to say what I have to, what I’m terrified to, how to ask questions whose answers I know I won’t want to hear. There’s no book I can read that will teach me how to make her G-spot tell me her secrets, tell me those fantasies and dreams that don’t come from her pussy but from her heart. The end, it turns out, is nothing like the beginning. There is no promise of something more, some grand future of possibility, the infinite ways of knowing each other just waiting to be discovered. There is no hope that we can merge, in all the ways love can make you merge, into something so much greater than the sum of our parts. The end is like what they say about death, when your whole life flashes before your eyes. I see moments, fragments—my hand up her skirt on the street, taking her in the doorway of a friend’s apartment, so fiercely she can barely sink down to the ground, her on her knees in the bathroom, surprising me as she buries her face into me, no room to protest, grinding the edge of a knife along her back, slapping her tits until they are raw and red—but they seem so far away right now, like a movie, like someone’s else’s pornographic memories. They don’t make me smile, and I don’t want them anymore. I want to bury myself in her and never let go, hold on to something that has just fluttered away in the wind, fine as the glittering sparkles she wears on her eyes, miniscule and almost opaque, too minute to ever recapture. But all I can do is back away, as slowly as I can, so slowly that it seems as if I am hardly moving, and before I know it, I, and she—we—are gone, almost as if we never existed.

  Trash Talkin’

  R. Gay

  I met Mia in high school. We were just friends then and I gravitated to her because she had a southern drawl that sounded like she was pouring honey over every word. She was a daddy’s girl in the worst way. Her daddy, Old Man Spencer, called Mia his princess and his little lady, and her bedroom looked like one giant confection, all pink and sugary. The best part was a bench for two in front of a huge dressing table with a wide mirror gilded in gold. The top was always covered in hairbrushes and ribbons, bottles of perfume and lotions, and of course, there was her makeup—powders and mascara and eyeshadow in every hue a girl (or stylish boy) could imagine. We spent countless hours painting ourselves like Brooke Shields and Christie Brinkley, our narrow shoulders pressed together, legs crossed, right over left. We were determined to be as stunning as our imaginations would allow, though, looking back, I can admit that we were somewhat deterred by the limitations of late-eighties couture. I fell in love with Mia because she could shape my eyebrows without making me cry and knew the difference between plum and grape.

  I was not a daddy’s girl—never even knew mine. What I did know was that I was going to get out of Valdosta, Georgia, and hanging on to the tail end of Mia Spencer’s star was the fastest way to do that. She took pity on me, I think—a little Puerto Rican girl who came from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks and spoke without thinking, more often than not. My mouth has always gotten me into trouble and it’s my mouth that changed things between Mia and me. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, on a Tuesday morning, looking up at Mia who was staring down at me, her eyebrows furrowed, lower lip tucked between her teeth as she held my chin in her hand. I fidgeted and she squeezed my chin harder.

  “Sit still, Mami, or I won’t get this right,” she said.

  I batted my eyelashes and stilled. She had taken to calling me Mami since we moved to New York where we heard Spanglish more than anything else. It made her feel more urban, or so she said. Mia started tracing the outline of my lips with a MAC lip pencil, for we only used MAC products—Spice, for contrast. And, I don’t know, she was smelling good, wearing a threadbare tank top that I could see right down and a pair of my boxers. Her dirty blonde curls were piled atop her head save for a few stubborn strands that kept falling into her eyes, which, as I said, were staring at me with this intensity. The next thing I know, my hand is wrapped around her wrist and I’m falling back, pulling her with me, and I’m kissing her even though my lips are only half done. I heard the pencil fall to the floor and her breath catch in her throat. I felt my thighs slide apart and press against her sides. And then she planted her left hand against my chest, pushing me away, wiping her lips with her right.

  “Jesus, Lettie, why do you always have to go too far?” Mia said. She rolled off the bed and stalked out of the room. I could hear water running in the bathroom and cabinet doors loudly opening and closing.

  I stared at the ceiling, rubbing my stomach, and I couldn’t help but smile. I was going to turn that girl out. I hated girls like Mia and all their friends who befriend girls like me to reassure themselves that they are part of their very own rainbow coalition. I do my part, of course, adding a little extra boricua to my walk and talk—rolling my r’s and popping my neck; giving a little extra shimmy to my shake when I’m strolling the block. I paint the picture that they want to see and keep everything else to myself.

  Mia and I met in her daddy’s peach orchards where my mama worked, when we were both fourteen. For whatever reason, Mama had to bring me to work with her one afternoon. She told me to stay out of the way, so I started wandering through the orchard, eating bruised peaches that had fallen to the ground.

  I was about to take a bite of a fresh peach when I heard a sharp little voice say, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I looked up, and there was Mia, hands on her hips, chin jutting forward, looking every inch the little princess I would soon learn that she was. “What does it look like I’m doing?” I asked, taking a bigger bite than usual, never looking away. White girls like her did not impress me.

  She shrugged, picked up a peach for herself, and we’ve been friends ever since, going on eleven years now. We came to New York seven years ago to attend Columbia. I majored in business, she majored in art history, and then, because we had nowhere else to go, we stayed, for the shopping, if nothing else. We’ve done everything together over the years—we even came out together sophomore year, when we grew weary of trying to pretend that the girls we had spending the night in our dorm room were just friends that we shared the same bed with. A lot.

  When I think she’s calmed down, I go look for Mia, who is lying on the futon mattress in our living room, watching something on television. I sit atop her legs and drag a finger along her bare upper arm. “You mad at me, querida?” She loves when I call her querida because I told her it was my nickname for her and her alone. Mia doesn’t need to know that I’ve told other women the same thing.

  Mia buries her head in the covers and I know I’m forgiven because I also know that I’m doing exactly what she wants. I’ve been watching her, the way she leaves the bathroom door open just so while she’s stepping into the shower, how she walks around the apartment in next to nothing, how she dresses in the outfits she knows I love, how we’re more affectionate than any given circumstance warrants—it’s all out o
f a bad high school romance novel. Neither of us has had a girlfriend in over a year, even though the opportunities have been plentiful. I continue to assume we’re waiting for each other. I know all about this little dance and so does she. I kiss her cheek, letting my lips linger, then retire to my room to finish getting ready for work.

  When Mia calls me in the afternoon, I shake my head when my assistant asks if I’m in. She arches an eyebrow but takes a message anyway. Instead of focusing on a merger of two small bookstore chains, I hike my skirt up over my thighs, twirl my chair around, and brace my feet against the glass window. I spread my legs and stroke my clit hard and fast. I think of Mia and the weight of her body falling against mine. When I come, I’m tired. It’s hard work loving and hating someone at the same time.

  Mia is meeting me after work for shopping and drinks, so I don’t bother washing my hands. When I lean in to kiss her cheek, I want to leave the scent of me on her arm. At 5:30 sharp, she’s in the lobby of my building, wearing a dark brown suede sleeveless dress and matching shoes. Her makeup, as usual, is flawless—Film Noir lipstick and Bamboom eye paint, just a touch of Blunt face powder. I would never have thought those shades might work together, but on her they do and I tell her this as we quickly embrace and strategize about the evening’s targets. This morning has been forgotten, or so she makes it seem, holding my hand as we head uptown in the back of a cab, her perfectly manicured fingernails lightly grazing over my knuckles in a steady circle. I so appreciate the attention to detail. Meanwhile, the cab reeks of unwashed people, the seat is torn, and the cabbie is taking the wrong route but I’m ignoring all of it, slowly but surely inching closer to Mia until our heads are practically touching. She turns and again our lips brush together.