Tough girls need each other. To be tough against each other, to be tough against the world. Tough girls are their own measure, bitter enemies, bosom friends. Tough girls know their weaknesses and their strengths are never enough.
They set snare traps in the meadow and the next day they catch a baby raccoon. The snare twists around the hind leg, breaks it, and the tough girls gather around. Sues, no tough girl, starts crying, and the girls jeer, Baby, going soft. Yosh takes in Sues, the girls, the cry of the small, furry animal and sees no way out of it. She takes a rock and smashes in the raccoon’s head. Yosh feels her stomach pitch into her mouth but she masks it with a snarl.
Sues runs.
The tough girls sneer after her but Yosh only stares at the creature she has killed. Blood speckles the rock and she throws it into the river. Later Yosh tracks down every snare trap, smashes it in two. She gets a welt from the guide wire, her fist bloody from the bark.
That night, Yosh sits in the canoe shed, playing with her knife. Sues comes in.
Chicken—
Its leg was broke—
Can’t do anything without your gang—
It was gonna die—
Coward—
But Sues begins to cry and hates herself for it. Tough girls never cry. But Yosh’s arm is around her shoulder, her hands wipe away tears, Yosh’s lips brush lightly against Sues’s cheeks, her closed eyelids, her mouth, and deeper, kisses deeper, a tongue shivering ache into belly, their clothes are off, an awkward shedding, off and on the floor, their bodies slide, playing chicken without knives, this game all broken rules and Yosh’s mouth kisses Sues’s breasts, kisses nipples standing out, afraid but sucking harder. Sues’s whimper is caged in her ribs, watching Yoshi come up for air, Sues still afraid but chicken chicken, smoke in Yosh’s hair. Yosh’s eyes, asking as her fingers trace down to those fine forbidden hairs, circling, afraid but it feels so good, dampness faster, fingers deeper, wetter inside the cleft, circling the hard little bud round and round and round, Sues’s hot, she’s burning, her shivers not from tears, a sudden shudder, rising, rising, that ripple-shock from there—
Sues, Sues—are you all right?
Sues holds her, clinging, braces her coming in Yoshi’s clasp. She’s still fearful of this newness, this game she does not understand but she trusts so completely that Yoshi is undone. Sues doesn’t know that tough girls bruise easily but hide under a thin-skinned bravado, under tough girl bluster and pride. But Yoshi still holds her, rocking comfort, soothing caress, a silent appeal for forgiveness, for tough girls, who blunder, even as they win.
Shy girls excel as they try not to be noticed. They know the square root of three thousand and three. Sometimes they know Latin or French and their good shoes have buckles, or eyelets or some kind of fancy strap. They blossom in shadow, waiting for the world to come to them. They try and they try, however awkward and painful it is, but when they come forward, they seem to retreat. Shy girls are forever hopeful, skirting anger and a vague sense of dread. They seethe and they smolder, on the cusp of forever, unaware of the heat they give off.
Sues lies in the canoe shed, her head on Yoshi’s shoulder. Her thoughts spin in darkness, her stomach in a knot. “It” has happened. “It” has occurred. Sues has no words for the lightness in her chest. But her body still hums from that burst between her legs, the tingles in her breasts. Sues is all open and she wants to know how.
Yosh, on her elbow, whispers, Are you cold Sues? Are you okay?
But Sues’s heart is exploding and she kisses Yoshi, pushes her back, her mouth, taking her own time now, traveling over lips, tongue, teeth and Yosh cannot say a thing. Sues slips lower, feels Yosh tremble beneath her. Sues presses hard but can’t keep herself still. Yoshi’s breasts, Yoshi’s breasts, and Sues exploring every bump, every curve, every slope, every dip. Sues kisses, caresses, her tongue on a quest, ever lower, ever lower, until her lips—
Yoshi sits up on her elbows.
Sues?
Sues opens Yoshi’s legs, pushes wide her shaking thighs. Light kisses below the tangled hair and Yoshi almost cries. Sues remember Yosh’s fingers but she wants to kiss some more. She kisses and she kisses and she kisses, her face, wetter, tasting deeper, she wants to crawl inside. But Yosh’s jerking, helpless now, her legs don’t know what to do. Her chest is bursting, her lungs are gasping and her hot palms smack the floor. Sues thinks of her own building rush, and she wants to ride Yosh into that center, to ripple out this storm. Her mouth latches on to that little bud rising and she begins to lick and suck. Sues loves this taste, this feeling, like holding candies in her mouth, her lips pouring out, Yosh beneath her; Sues sucks her in as well, how can this be, but no time to think, Yosh’s breath faster now, hips rising, legs wide as Sues presses her mouth down, tongue swirling and Yoshi comes, Yoshi comes.
The morning light begins to sneak through the cracks of the canoe shed. In the shadows Sues can see what she has done. Wet curls back from Yosh’s vulva, pink lips waving, spiraling down. Sues knows the words for this place but the name is just the beginning. Shy girls know their Latin, shy girls know their French, but Sues, still shy, wants to know more. The square root of three thousand and three will never be enough. Sues’s finger slides into vagina, rippled muscle, contracting space and Yoshi arches, a choking surrender, as Sues begins all over again.
Shy girls aren’t so shy now and tough girls aren’t so tough. But what they need they will find in each other, as they imagine themselves as different girls.
PARADISE
Valerie Alexander
Our mouths were rubbed raw where we kissed. Nights were sleepless aches of devouring each other, tumbles of animalism and grief. We didn’t eat, we were too anxious, and we could not sleep except for exhausted afternoon slumbers in each other’s arms. There was little differentiation in time. Street-lights came on and went off, different degrees of light filtered through the apartment blinds. She sobbed when she came; I came all the time. I loved her.
We barely went to class. Always I was rubbing my eyes, bleary, dizzy, I did not hear if spoken to. The sheets went dirty and cartons of takeout piled up in the kitchen. Sleepless and dazed, my hands shook too much to grasp a pen. There was much to say, years to cram in nights. We had no idea how long we had together. Every second was vital.
We could not even shower apart. Rubbing shampoo into her hair, bare of makeup, she looked so innocent. Our kisses tasted of soap and water. I shaved her legs for her, pulling them around my waist from behind and lathering them up well. Her pussy was also my domain and I sculpted it with the obsession of a lesbian Rodin. Her briny sweetness graced my tongue like nirvana. The tang of her walls clung to my fingers. Like a love-struck dog I couldn’t stop licking her, until her screams bounded off the walls and drowned out the rushing water.
The first time with her was awkward but potent. It was after class and I was facedown in her mattress. She was unhooking my bra from behind. Then taking it off. A CD was playing; it emphasized the silence between us. I stared straight into the black of the sheet but I was seeing her room in my mind, the bamboo blinds and framed poster of Virginia Woolf. Her hands, smooth and cool, slid down my hips. My throat was tight with anticipation. She pushed at me and I turned over to see her long dark hair hanging in her face. Her perfect, inscrutable face.
My dress was crumpled in the corner. She hooked two fingers under the elastic of my panties and pulled them down my thighs. My navel looked brand new, like someone else’s, under her gaze. She leaned over me and paused. Then she unsnapped her dark blue lace bra. I looked at the ceiling, closed my eyes. Quick, harsh breathing sounded in my ears. It was mine. She crawled over me on all fours. We were naked now, both of us. Her cool soft breasts melted against me like heaven descending to earth. Our mouths met like two halves locking together in a delirious whole. We rolled over and over, kissing, her knee slowly rubbing my pussy until I moaned in her mouth.
Earth ascended to heaven. Everything was pink and brown and li
ke silk. It was ice-cream sex, vanilla and sweet, but I held her shaking body tight when she came and in her honey I tasted the venom of our potential.
At night we’d go into the club like angels, pretty and glittery and messy. We would enter into the humid darkness crisscrossed with neon laser beams; would pause to take in the pleasurable scandal of hundreds of girls dancing with girls, kissing girls against the wall; then quickly we would scan the crowd, taking in who was and was not there. We were superior and haughty, but interested in the crowded female heat. And both of us enjoyed the gossip.
(Girlworld gossip can eat your romance alive. We learned that on our second night. Her roommate told my ex who told her roommate who told her lab partner who told her ex; and that night when we met at a Mexican restaurant as arranged, our ears were ringing with untrue and hostile rumors. We were casual and distant with each other until the truth emerged. Then we realized how tight, together and impregnable we had to be. We got drunk on margaritas and kissed sloppily in front of the restaurant and then we went out and fucked in the alley, in the falling snow. It was November and the first snow of the season. I pushed her jeans down and backed her bare ass against the brick building, her pussy burning against my hand in the cold night. My fingers teased her clit, circling lazily, lightly pulling at her delicate hood, until she stood with her legs strained apart in her jeans, wordlessly begging to be fucked. Finally I slid my fingers deep inside her as her pussy sucked at me like a feverish animal, and more than anything I wanted to taste her but instead I watched the snow melt over her flushed cheekbones and closed eyelids as she groaned with her first orgasm of the night. I knew as I held her snow-flaked hair that I was on to something.)
In the club:
Topless girls gyrated and shook on three platforms. Huge projection screens were suspended from the ceiling, offering a film of two naked girls kissing in a shower, black-and-white stills of famous models, a photo of two perfectly round breasts, then one of a pale-eyed beauty with a vacant stare. Hundreds of women filled the club, exchanging the contagion of kisses and laughter and lit cigarettes, and back in the dark recesses, anonymous hands. Where before her, I had sometimes given myself over to sadness, dazed by the alien coo of computerized music booming through the speakers.
“Are you hot?—Are you okay?—Do you want a drink?”
We would dance until we were wet. We liked to sway to the tacky slow songs, our damp faces rosy-blue in the electric bath of light. I would feel her hot skin through her damp T-shirt. She would gather up my long blonde hair in her hands and blow on my neck. And on the sidelines, women would watch us.
“You are blessed,” an older woman said once when I went to the bar for ice water. I looked at her, stunned, and realized a deity of love was communicating to me through her voice. I wanted to ask her for more wisdom but then something feverish hurtled at me—my girlfriend, hugging me like we hadn’t seen each other in days. When I turned around, the oracle had moved off.
The bathroom was always the usual holding pen of competitors smearing on lipstick, struggling with their hair, slipping on wet toilet paper and screaming out gossip. Ears rang with deafness. Bloodshot eyes squinted in drunkenness and nausea. Bang, bang, the stall doors opened and closed and girls went in and out. I would empty my bladder, wipe off my smeared raccoon eyeliner and reapply it, powdering my skin. Then I’d drop my magic tools in my leather bag and reenter the dazzling multileveled game board of the club. Even when I could not find her, I would sense my beloved, batlike, in the sweltering darkness. I would pause and revel in that anonymous crush of love, that ancient desire of girl for girl; and then I would see her making her way toward me, swaggering in her ripped fishnet stockings and tight shorts and high heels.
We were femmes but we liked to put on jeans and combat boots and dress like boys, our long hair escaping from baseball caps. It was some Playboy parody of butch that turned us on, much like ignoring or taunting the males who tried for our attention. Sometimes we wiggled into long gowns and hiked up our bustiers and painted our faces, officially “beautiful.” We couldn’t stop admiring each other. We were monsters and we were in love.
In a girly shop, where French pop music played inanely from hidden speakers and I reclined exhausted on a velvet couch, we looked like all the other girls. The eyes of coiffured salesgirls seemed to flirt and promise. I couldn’t tell if I was lucky, beautiful or misinformed about the nature of women. To me, it was obvious we were tired from fucking all night and were unwashed and smelling of sex, but the straight girls critiqued the dresses we tried on, they gushed over our lingerie and our hair.
“It’s like we turn invisible when we’re together,” she said, walking home with shopping bags one night.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s like our superpower.”
We rarely left the apartment. There was no need to. I forgot the outside world existed. The first time one of us got her period, it was her, and I went out late on a Friday night to buy tampons and candy and ibuprofen. We had been in bed all afternoon and evening and she had been sluggish and cramped but content in my arms. Leaving for the store, I was surprised to see the city crawling with students and bar-hoppers. In the harsh fluorescent glare of the convenience store, I saw it was only ten o’clock.
I was paying at the counter when a friend walked in and squealed: “Where have you been?”
“Well,” I wanted to say, “I fell in love—I got married—I left this earth—” but I felt she would understand none of that.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” I said.
Walking home through the social plans and chatter of others, I felt invisible again, like a ghost. So irrelevant the rest of the world seemed, with my one real flame burning in a basement apartment at the end of the street.
Her body haunted mine. Every idiosyncratic trick of her skin, from her seashell ears to the crooks of her knees, dominated my cosmos. I was Marco Polo, intent on mapping her planet. Bored in class, I’d begin my mental inventory at her toes and by homecoming would have a list of several questions to test and resolve, from the ridge of her hip bones under my tongue to the taste of the bottom of her ass. I was eating the apple in the Garden of Eden. Knowledge was the key to Paradise and not the key to expulsion. Or so I believed.
It was her pussy that obsessed me, its perfect tang of brine and honey, its soft throbs around my tongue when she came, so in contrast to the fire of her temper. Each come was a surrender, a succumbing to my persuasion. I liked her unperfect: a roughness on her thighs abrading my cheeks, a sleepy dormancy in her wet pink cunt that was my job to awaken and rouse. Never did I want morning sex until it was with her. Her black hair fanned over the pillow, her mouth slack, I’d trail my fingernails over her ass until she awoke just enough for me to slide my thumb into her cunt. Then she would sleepily roll over and open her legs before me as if inviting me to feast on the heavenly spread of her body.
Sometimes we infiltrated each other’s dreams and then waking and rolling over on top of her and kissing was just an extension of where we had been. It was as if our sleep had been transformed into an adventure and our bed into a ship, as when we were children and sailing into dreamlands unknown.
Her father came to town on business and took us both to dinner. We were listless in the candlelight. We answered lamely his questions about school and our futures. We’d been fucking all afternoon, one nonstop somnambulistic raw and gritty dream, and nothing in the restaurant, not the white tablecloth or water glasses or the violin music, seemed real. In the bathroom we clutched each other and kissed just to stay awake. Then we stepped out of the stall and blinked in the harsh sterile pink and white brilliance. “I’m so tired,” she whispered and she started to cry. I held her dark head as she gripped the sink and said, “Just another hour…” Matrons frowned at us and I remembered in their eyes we were criminals.
The next day her mother took us shopping. On a whim we made her stop at the toy store and buy us, with a bemused but tolerant smile, a Barbie doll.
In the car we took her out of the box and touched her long flaxen hair and plastic legs.
That evening we napped and awoke and dressed together before meeting her parents for the symphony. I lay naked on the couch, one leg up and one leg dangling off while she rolled up sheer black thigh-high stockings on me, then slipped my feet into high heels. I spread my legs wider for her, feeling my lips swell and unfurl. My cunt ached to be filled, so wet my inner thighs glistened with it. She slipped Barbie into me, feet-first, the cool plastic of her legs feeling so alien in my heat. I leaned up on my elbows and watched my own pussy as the Barbie doll slid in up to her waist. In and out, in and out… I gripped the sofa cushions, biting my lip as Barbie fucked me…. A storm was building between my legs, a carnivorous tornado that wanted to suck up everything inside me until I came. My girlfriend circled the doll’s legs inside me, her black eyes gazing at me with an odd light, and then she pressed Barbie up into my G-spot and I clamped my legs shut as lightning struck and I screamed. I twisted to the side, my throbs breaking through me like a seizure, as she pulled Barbie out and sucked off her legs. Then she put the doll on top of the couch, where it smiled dazzlingly.
“I love you,” I said. “I love you I love you” and I devoured her mouth.
We had sex all the time. Night and day blended. Lying under her, after my sixth orgasm, I would open my eyes and not be able to tell if her face floated in the dimness of daybreak or dusk. We kissed in cabs, in theater lobbies, on the street. There was no assumption we could not pervert. I dressed her in pearls and gloves and lipstick in the Lord & Taylor dressing room, then lifted her skirt and exalted her. To feel closer, we wore each other’s underwear to class. We slipped into an empty history classroom once and fingered each other silently on a back desk as students streamed by outside. What I loved in her was her ability to be raw, turbulent and dreamy all at once…. She was perfect and I loved her totally.
Men and women both fell in love with us, our fever was so gorgeous. We got used to it. We thought we were born that way and that it would last forever.
When She Was Good Page 2
