“I think sooner or later, we’re going to have to have it out,” Luther was saying. “Erica and me. I thought she and I were cool, but I can feel it building again between us. Drum just skyrocketed, and now the label’s pushing her hard to get me in on the album after the follow-up—”
Jill. But Jill’s straight, I thought. Isn’t she? That first day I met her, I could have sworn she was flirting with me, not that I’m the best judge of the lesbian mating dance. After all, I hadn’t slept with anyone since—
“Which means we’re back together in the booth, and we got all this unfinished business…”
Why not Jill? God knows I needed to get laid. For the first time in quite a while, I was thinking of someone else without the perverse notion that I was somehow cheating on Erica. If Jill wasn’t interested, it could prove excruciatingly awkward for the short term, but according to Luther, she seemed able to glibly detach emotional investment from sex. Just like our boss.
In my own strange way, I had learned to do the same. Loving Erica, but finding physical release with guys like Odell all the way back to pimply fools in high school. Karen had been her only worthy rival.
If Jill could find me attractive, it would certainly keep her mind off snooping in places she shouldn’t. Morgan was calling me again. I would have to do something about that man.
Jill handled security. I had a lot of access given my position with Erica, a lot of power, but it wouldn’t hurt to have someone like Jill firmly on my side.
What had she said to Luther? We’re like two zebras, dirty like this. Those beautiful bodies speckled with paint. Crazy chick letting the ceiling fall in, putting him to the test as she went down on him. I wondered what she looked like naked. I wondered if she’d feel inhibited being with a girl—
“I said are you okay for a ride to the Vanity Fair thing tomorrow?”
“Sorry? Oh, yeah, honey, I’ll be fine. I got to run a couple of errands for Jill first and then I’ll catch up to you guys.”
“For Jill? What do you got to do for Jill?”
“Nothing,” I said, drawing a blank. “What are you talking about? I got to shop for Erica’s present for BSB’s president—he’s got his birthday coming up. And marketing is bugging me to go through those ‘video autographs’ for the charity kids. You know what my days are like, Luther.”
“I think you must be tired, Mish. We should call it a night.”
Well, well, I thought. Look at me. First the woman’s stirring me up with her intrusive questions and now I’m actually contemplating the idea of being with her. Here I am excited by the idea of getting Jill Chandler into bed.
Only a couple of weeks before my dinner with Luther, I was in Seattle on the tour when I had the impulse to phone Karen in Toronto. It had been a long time since we talked, only emails that said nothing important except that we missed each other. Neither one of us ever referred to our last argument in the Library Hotel.
I heard laughter first as the line was picked up, then: “Hello?” A female voice but not hers. More tinkling laughter in the background, Karen’s unmistakable voice, and the anonymous girl ordering her playfully, “Go! Go to your corner!” Karen saying Hey, that is my phone, oh, Jesus, it better not be work—
Just before the receiver was passed, I hung up. The girl who answered, she sounded so young.
My seduction of Jill began with modest thoughtful gifts. Stuff from the Body Shop because “Hey, I was picking up stuff for Erica, and I thought you’d like this.” An Eric Benét CD she might enjoy. I progressed to having my workouts at the gym coincide with hers, though I could never bring myself to join her on those punishing jogs. Jill certainly couldn’t guard Erica 24-7, and her deal allowed her certain days off. While she was there for most concerts and public appearances, Brown Skin Beats and the concert promoters were obliged to fill in any gaps. As Erica’s PA, I learned Jill’s official routine as well as my boss’s, so I was there and ready with a suggested evening out when she was available. We went out to dinner. Frequently. We hit the movies together, and there was a night when she fell asleep during a boring European picture, and her head rested against my shoulder. I stroked her short hair, and her eyes opened slowly. She didn’t complain. She muttered an apology and went back to watching the screen. I thought: Contact.
One night after dinner, I invited her to walk back to the apartment with me for a nightcap, knowing we’d have it all to ourselves. Erica was doing a shoot for a video in the West Village, and I knew at this hour she’d be holding a cup of hot chocolate near a line of trailers with blazing white lights and police crowd-control sawhorses. They probably wouldn’t wrap until five in the morning. Knowing Erica, who was a good sport and very patient when it came to filming the videos, she’d probably go out for breakfast with the dancers and crew. I had the run of the place.
I went to the stereo and put on the old Acoustic album by Everything but the Girl, Jill watching me as I said, “Yes!” Loving the cover version that Tracy Thorn sang of a Tom Waits classic. Will I see you tonight on a downtown train…
Then I fetched bottles of gin and tonic water, deliberately bringing all the fixings to the white carpet. Sit down on the floor next to me, I implied, shortening the distance between us. Jill plopped herself down, and I stretched out, carefully arranging the cascade of fabric of my sarong. She smiled at me and did a couple of leg stretches, saying the walk had done her good. She told me how much she’d always liked “Erica’s and your place.”
“It’s Erica’s, she owns it,” I corrected her.
“Sure, but I can see little touches of yours in the decoration. It’s your home as much as hers, right? Hey, what are you trying to do, get me drunk?”
Two-thirds gin, one-third tonic. I laughed and said, “Yeah. Maybe I’ll get the truth out of you.”
“Oh? What do you want to know?”
“Look, I don’t want to give you the impression Luther has a big mouth,” I said. “But he’s my friend, and we’re fairly tight.”
“Yeah?” she asked blankly, not knowing where I was going with this.
“Did you, uh…” I was on the verge of giggles. “Did you really force him to hold up your ceiling while you pulled his trousers down?”
She rolled on her back, laughing. “Ohhhhh, that! Damn right, I did! When I want something, I make sure it can’t get away!”
We both laughed for a long moment, and I topped up our drinks. Jill said Luther was fantastic in bed, but he had made it all too clear they wouldn’t have any future together.
I was consoling. “Well, Luther, he’s the brooding type. Only happy when he’s miserable.”
She shook her head dismissively. “I don’t know what it was with him. We did it, and then he couldn’t get out of my house fast enough. Maybe he just didn’t like the package when he unwrapped it.”
“Are you fishing or what?” I said. “You know you’re beautiful. You kind of look like Sade to me.”
She burst into giggles. “Please!”
“No, really.”
“You’re as bad as Erica. She thought I looked like that black actress from Clueless, you know the one. What’s her name? Oh, help me out here. She pops up in TV shows now and then, Stacey something—”
“Stacey Dash—”
“Stacey Dash, yeah. It’s because of the shape of my face, I think. It’s so oval.”
“It is not,” I insisted. “You’re very pretty.” I took a chance and leaned in to her, kissing her cheek near her mouth, getting close but not so close I’d frighten her away. As I pulled back, I paused. Our mouths close enough together to taste each other’s breath, our eyes staring at each other.
“Let me, um, ask you something,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. “Our going out lately…Have I been going out on dates, and I don’t even know it?”
I leaned in and tenderly pulled her full bottom lip between my teeth, sucking it and then kissing her. After a second of indecision, her lips returned the sweet pressure.
; “I got to tell you this is new to me,” she whispered when the kiss was over.
“You mean you’ve never been with a girl?” I asked.
She looked down at her hands demurely, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“You got to be kidding? You and your yoga? I figured if you did that, you must have done some experimenting in your time. And from the sounds of it, you rocked Luther’s world!”
“Yeah, but being with a girl,” she started again. “I wouldn’t…I mean I don’t know if…”
“Let me teach you…”
She watched me in fascination as I reached out and took her hand, bringing it first to my mouth to suck her middle finger. And then I guided it under my sarong. I pushed on her finger to nudge it between my pussy lips, directing her silently in my desired rhythm, and then with my other hand I was cupping her breast, my fingers stealing under her jumper. Her flesh was warm, her nipple already puckered and waiting for my touch. I needed to see her. She kept fingering me as I gently lifted the jumper over the swell of her breasts, taking in the sight of those lovely buds, Jill’s mouth still open in fascinated arousal.
“Kiss me…”
As she leaned down to join our mouths, I felt her finger slip into me all the way. She kissed me quickly at first, shyly, a smile of brilliant white teeth flashing as her eyelashes brushed my cheek. I was still kissing her and didn’t even notice the sarong suddenly parted like curtains on the rug, my pussy and legs exposed.
“Can I taste you?” she asked me. So shy. Like I was all those years ago with Karen.
I cried out with the contact of her mouth. Her hot breath on my clitoris eliciting a moan even before I felt the wash of her tongue. God, she had such instincts! The way her tongue probed between my lips, her fingers strumming my clit. I opened my legs wide for her, lying back and enjoying myself in a submissive way I hadn’t felt since…Yes, since Karen. She made me come but didn’t relent as I finished, returning her hand to my pussy and letting her mouth explore my bare stomach, kissing me between my breasts. I couldn’t strip for her quickly enough, and she still had her thin jumper pushed above her tits, the large areolae swollen, the nipples jutting out. It was more erotic in a way, seeing her like this, still clothed but the layer peeled back. Her chest was bigger than I expected, her breasts round and full and reminding me of Erica. That was it. That was what exhilarated me in those first wild embraces. The target of my seduction seemed to offer me the physical best of my lovers, the girlishness of Karen’s small body and the ripeness of Erica’s, with Erica’s sensual aggressiveness.
“Oh, God, you’re so beautiful,” I whispered, and I lifted both my hands to cup her tits, to knead them and fondle them.
She looked glassy-eyed for a moment, as if frozen in pleasure. And then she said softly, “Can I trust you?”
I didn’t understand. I would have nodded yes to anything she asked me in that moment. Yes to everything. Sensuality. Release. Joy like you’ve never had with a man, baby. For the first time in my life, I think I was making love with a sense of hope. I loved Erica, and I knew I would go on loving Erica, but I needed an outlet for my own physical cravings and frustration. I liked Jill. I thought on that night that I could develop real affection for her.
“Will you…” My turn for shyness. I sensed a magic in her, a prowess that both tantalized and intrigued me. “Will you do things to me?”
Her mouth on mine in a sudden hungry rush as if my request was a granting of permission. I felt her straddle me like a man, climbing on top of me with almost a masculine assertiveness, snuggling down to crush our breasts against each other’s, Jill flicking her tongue out playfully, running it over my bottom lip just before she sank her teeth into it, rubbing her pussy urgently on my thigh. “I don’t know if this is going to work on a girl,” she murmured almost in apology, and she took my right arm and raised it above her head, nibbling the sweet spot just below my armpit. All at once she rolled onto her side to spoon behind me, left hand coming around to finger my pussy, right hand pressing against the small of my back, still tasting my skin below my arm.
I felt myself opening up to her as I heard her whisper you’re so wet and the actual slurping sound of her fingers on my slick labia, her fingers on my back sinking down, slithering down, making their way down, down, down to the very top of the cleft between my buttocks, and it was like she hit a massage point or something there. So intimate just at the top between the cheeks of my ass, and now Jill’s breath on my neck, tonguing me just behind the ear, my voice squealing surrender, “Oh, fuck me, baby, fuck me hard, please, please fuck me hard!”
Like a nimble cat, she scrambled to the other side so that she could face me, dexterously switching hands, and back she went to that delicious point just at the top of the cleft in my ass, three fingers inside me now plus a warm wet tongue alive in my mouth. Coming in short cathartic spasms now, aah, aah, aah, opening my eyes to look at her as I felt my mouth open in wonder as well, saying again and again like a chant, you’re so good, so good, baby, and in one violent quake, I held her tight as she rammed most of her hand into my greedy pussy, thumb on my clit, pumping my hips as I gritted my teeth and cried and cried.
I lay back with such a sense of grateful release, stroking her hair, saying, “For someone who says she’s never done this before, you sure know what you’re doing.”
She looked modestly down at the sheets, covering half her face in her hand. “I like…giving pleasure. I just always thought it was weird, you know, the idea of lying flat on your back and letting a guy do stuff to you. I can’t enjoy myself unless I’m pleasing my partner. It’s all intuitive for me.”
“So how can I please you?”
“I’m okay,” she said, kissing me reassuringly.
“I want to see you come,” I whispered.
“I…don’t know. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
“Well, what do you want, sweetie?”
“Do what you want with me,” she said. And when I hesitated, she added, “No, seriously. I can’t come unless I know the other person’s enjoying him—herself. It’s my hang-up.”
“You are straight,” I laughed. With one hand, I gently insisted, “Now lie back and think of England.”
“Shut up!”
But I was busy opening her legs. I smelled the enticing odour of her pussy. I probed with my tongue, I teased, I offered long, warm, wet strokes that worried that lovely bud of her clit. The tension in her legs seemed to gather in a ball, Jill’s fingers running through my hair. As she rose on the crest of the wave, her thighs began to close on my face, and she apologised in a high-pitched sob, spreading herself for me again as she flew back on the pillows. I was lapping her furiously, and when she cried out, a new tide of her juice flowed with her orgasm. I wanted her as swept away as I had been for her, my tongue still lathering her, and then the fingers that were in my hair softly caressed their way down to a point on my neck, tapping, gently tapping. I didn’t understand at all what she was doing. It was almost distracting me, and then as I sucked her clit into my mouth and began a rhythm with this mischievous technique, thrilled with her moans as she bit her lip, a bolt of lightning went from my neck down my spine and to the core of me. I was crying suddenly like a little girl, curling up in a fetal ball, still sucking Jill but touching my own pussy as my vaginal muscles contracted with a furious impulse. The two of us coming simultaneously, Jill getting off from striking at the very heart of me.
We kissed and fondled each other in after-play for a good hour, no words between us. Then she fell asleep. She seemed to fall asleep easily, little tossing and turning, not so much drifting off as suddenly collapsing into slumber. I traced a fingernail down from the mound of her breast, over the shadows of her ribs to the sweet fleshy portion of her hip, circling around to the softness of her ass. God, she was beautiful. She made love like a Cosmo magazine fantasy about massage therapists, those deadly Kama Sutra fingers of hers finding erogenous zones you never knew ex
isted. She woke up and kissed me as if we’d been lovers for a while, asking groggily, “You okay?”
“Yeah. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
I was a little embarrassed, but I couldn’t stop.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I need…I was watching you sleep.” She had caught me masturbating.
For some reason, it made her smile. The flash of those brilliant teeth nearly drove me over the edge. “You getting off on actually watching me sleep?”
“Yeah.”
“You want some help?”
“Yeah.”
We kissed a short kiss on the lips again like familiar lovers. One more short kiss, then a long one as I kept strumming my clitoris, and there was a rustle of the bed sheets as her hand massaged my breasts then settled on a point between them. Kissing me, her other hand resting on my pubic bone. Her touch so light, no more than the weight of a coin. She told me later that all kinds of disciplines had identified these points on the body—acupuncture, chiropractic, cranio-sacral therapy. It was getting warm below my navel and between my breasts, and her voice was a dirty lullaby, keep touching yourself, baby, you look so hot touching yourself, I want to taste your cream, and oh oh oh, bringing my knees up and shedding tears as whatever she did to me this time happened.
Her mouth on me was exquisite, perfectly timed.
She found me half an hour later, standing naked in the doorway of Erica’s bedroom, asking once again if I was all right. I felt her arms drape around me, felt the wedge of her fur on my buttocks.
“I have a confession to make,” I said, turning to her.
She raised her eyebrows at me, still smiling, still on a high from our making love. She waited.
“I think I was a major bitch to you when you first showed up,” I said. “I guess I felt threatened. I’ve worked with Erica for quite a while now, and I…Well, I wasn’t prepared for someone else to work with her so closely, day in and day out.”
Soul Siren Page 23
