by M. J. Rose
Three floors below us was a small courtyard, overgrown with lush, leafy trees, the flower beds studded with dark purple, lavender and blue blossoms. Occasional bursts of yellow. There was a stone fountain of an angel, with water spilling out of the shell she held.
I stood there with the water splashing in the stone basin and a lilting jazz tune coming from somewhere, enjoying the scent of humid green air and a breeze that was as warm and gentle as Noah’s touch when he came up from behind and wrapped his arms around me. We stood like that for a moment, and then he dropped his arms.
“Let’s take a walk. I can’t wait to show you New Orleans.”
On the plane, sitting beside him while he slept, I’d imagined that we’d fall onto the bed as soon as we’d closed the door behind us. I’d imagined the room—how wide the bed, how soft the pillows, how fresh-smelling the sheets. We would close the shutters but leave the windows open so that the light wouldn’t be too harsh, and so the fresh air could tumble over us. In my mind, while the plane sailed over the clouds, Noah and I undressed quickly, and in the cool, shaded room pressed up against each other, fitting our bodies together, not losing a beat, our breath quickening, wiping out everything else.
As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t wish fantasy into fact, and as much as I wanted him to stay with me on the balcony, I didn’t say anything. I was actually shy. And then I was angry with myself for feeling that way, and for allowing the fantasy to take root in my head and disappoint me when it didn’t come true. This wasn’t like me. At least, wasn’t like me before I’d met Noah.
It didn’t matter. The moment had passed. Noah was waiting for me, ready to show me his hometown.
He searched my face in the elevator.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for some clue as to how you’re feeling.”
“You’re trying to gauge my mood from the way I’m looking at you, from how I’m holding my hands, from the slant of my eyes. You’re using the tools I use on my patients, judging their words against their actions and mental equilibrium. That’s not fair.”
“Why not? You do it all the time.”
I laughed. He was right. “Okay then, so tell me, how am I?”
“You’re going to be fine, darlin’. I promise.”
Twenty-Three
It was a work night. ZaZa sat at the glass table in the dining area of her loft, with a glass of cheap white wine that really wasn’t half bad, and waited for Tania. She was jumpy because she wanted to see her so very badly. For more than a year, every Saturday, Tania Hutchison would show up around midnight. They’d drink some wine, light a joint, and after they were relaxed, they’d get undressed and go at it.
She looked at her watch. Why was Tania late? ZaZa got up, put the bottle of wine back in the fridge and sat down at the table again.
She’d decided. She was going to tell her. Finally. She’d kept the secret way too long. Months earlier, this had stopped being just a way to pick up some extra cash, to supplement the pathetic salary she made as a waitress while trying to get work as an actress.
Like too many other women, ZaZa had come to New York with stars in her eyes, and three years later had only managed to get some work as an extra in a dozen commercials. Every few months, she would decide to pack it in, move away, get a normal job, and yet something made her stay. She hated waitressing. Hated the studio loft in the crappy building in Hell’s Kitchen. Even with all the painting and decorating, it still looked like shit. She hated the hope she felt every time she went on an audition, and then the greater hope she felt every time she got a callback, and then the torture of waiting for the phone call that she’d gotten the part. The phone call that never came.
At first she’d resisted when Barbara, a fellow actress, had told her about this job. But ZaZa needed some new clothes, a good haircut and decent highlights. If she didn’t look good, she definitely wouldn’t get any work. So she’d said she’d try it. After all, how bad could it be—it was acting, wasn’t it? And she and Barbara were both actresses. They’d done scenes together in class. They’d gotten friendly, gone out for coffee, talked about their boyfriends when they had them, and their lack thereof when they didn’t. They’d become friends, not just fellow thespians.
ZaZa jumped. Damn. The buzzer was too loud. She’d complained to the landlord about it a dozen times already. Every time he saw her in the halls, he wiped his hands on his already dirty jeans, leered at her—not enough to upset her but just enough to creep her out and make her wonder if he’d seen her on the Internet—and promised that as soon as he finished fixing the floor in 4-B or repainting 6-A, he’d fix the buzzer. But it never happened.
Tania brought a freezing cold whoosh of air with her. As she unwrapped her scarf and her hair fell back into place, ZaZa pretended she wasn’t watching her, but she was. Tania’s nose was a little longer than was considered beautiful, and her jaw was too strong, but that just made her more striking.
The two women did not kiss hello, but they seemed genuinely glad to see each other. While Tania took off her coat, ZaZa poured her a glass of wine.
When, after almost two years, Barbara had finally given up hunting for work as an actress and moved out of New York, ZaZa had recruited her new partner. She’d met Tania doing extra work and they’d gotten friendly, going to auditions together. After a few weeks, ZaZa felt that their friendship was good enough to withstand the suggestion, so she took on Barbara’s role and broached the subject of the gig. First, Tania laughed. Then she asked to see what ZaZa did online. They’d sat in front of ZaZa’s computer, with two glasses of wine, and when ZaZa hit the play button, Tania leaned in.
She didn’t say anything while the footage ran. She didn’t get up, or move back, or squirm. The longer she watched, the more hopeful ZaZa became. When the scene was over, Tania stood up and told ZaZa she needed to think about it. A week later she called and said yes, she would do it, because she needed the money. All the stress in the sentence was on the word money.
That had been more than a year ago.
This would be the fifty-third time they’d stripped down and played at being lovers for the sake of the thousands of men who were out there in the black nowhere watching. ZaZa didn’t like to think about them. No, she couldn’t think about them. Couldn’t picture them, couldn’t wonder at what they were doing—it would poison her performance. Instead, each time they got together, ZaZa and Tania spent the first hour or so drinking wine and improvising the story they would use that night. ZaZa played at the scenarios as if she were on Broadway.
It was a test of their acting skills, Tania had said.
ZaZa had agreed. “It’s great practice for us. As good as any class I’ve ever been in.”
“So who should we be tonight?” Tania asked once she’d had some wine and warmed up.
ZaZa had bought a used paperback of Sappho poems and read two of them aloud.
“I love those. Let’s use them,” Tania said.
“You don’t think it might go over our audience’s heads?”
“As long as we give them virtual head with the scene, they won’t care, now, will they?” Tania had laughed, stood up and started to unbutton the black cardigan she was wearing.
“Don’t,” ZaZa put out her hand to stop her friend. “Let me do it. They’ll like that.”
And then they turned on the camera.
Twenty-Four
For dinner, Noah took me to a small restaurant that wasn’t in any of the guidebooks but was packed. He introduced me to Bella, the owner, who was in her sixties and had big blond hair and earrings that dangled down to her shoulders. Despite the crowd waiting at the small bar, we’d gotten a table immediately, along with a basket of hot corn sticks, dripping with butter, and a plate of spicy pickled okra that I wasn’t sure I wanted to taste. Once I had, I couldn’t stop eating them.
I let Noah order for me—crab étouffé atop a plate of dirty rice—and then ate more than I should have. The wine was crisp and cold, a welc
ome respite from the food that was setting my mouth afire.
Afterward, we walked over to Blues Palace, an unassuming club. After the band had played a few songs, the sax player noticed Noah in the audience and called him up onto the stage, insisting he play with them. He looked at me and I nodded. Once on stage, he sat down at the piano and his fingers took off.
Until I met Noah, I’d never listened to music just for the music; it had always been in the background. But I’d discovered that if you give yourself up to it and really listen, your body begins to resonate with the notes, and you hear it inside of you as a sensation as much as a sound.
Noah improvised for more than an hour and we got back to the hotel a little after one in the morning. There was enough moonglow coming through the open window for us to see each other. Without speaking, he reached out, put his hands around my waist and pulled me toward him. I felt as if I were moving in slow motion. First there was his face, with his soft blue eyes looking at me, and then it was closer to mine. I could feel his breath on my cheeks while his fingers gripped me, digging through my sweater and into my skin, the pressure contrasting with the gentle expression on his face. And then there was nothing but the blackness inside my own eyes and the sensation of his lips compelling mine to open. Lips moving in a way that makes nerve endings burst. Lips moving in a way that sends shivers up the back of your neck. Lips that cover your mouth and tease you alive. Lips that do not stop even as one kiss moves into the next, and the next one after that.
The rest of my body felt the kiss as if every pore of my skin was experiencing the same sensation and reacting the same way. It doesn’t make sense now, but that was exactly how it felt. As if his fingers were suddenly kissing my waist, and our thighs were kissing each other, and my breasts, beneath my sweater, were kissing his chest, and my shoulder bones were kissing his arms.
His lips kept returning to mine even as he moved me toward the bed and laid me down and pinned my arms to my sides. For one moment, he raised himself up on his elbows and hovered over me, smiling, watching me, before swooping down and taking a kiss away from me, and then giving me one back.
“Don’t move,” Noah whispered in that slow drawl. “Don’t move. I want to undress you.” And then he unbuttoned the first button of my shirt and put his lips on my collarbone and kissed me there.
Twenty-Five
ZaZa took her time taking off Tania’s sweater. She let her fingers linger on each button, making every moment last an achingly long time. That was what she was supposed to do. It was also what she wanted to do. No matter what, the night would not last long enough. They never did anymore. But she wouldn’t think about that. She wouldn’t think about anything, because that would make her sad. She would just take the pleasure where she could get it. That her partner in this game didn’t feel anything back wasn’t what she needed to think about now. That she was in love with a woman, that she couldn’t get enough of the woman and her skin and her mouth and her hair and her pussy, didn’t matter now. What it meant didn’t matter now. What it said about her wasn’t important. She wasn’t going to put labels on this; it was an acting job. Except ZaZa knew she wasn’t acting, she was feeling all of this emotion. She’d stopped doing it for the camera and the money a long time ago.
Tania stood, unmoving, while ZaZa pushed the sweater off her shoulders, down her arms, to her waist. She breathed in sharply when she’d exposed the other woman’s breasts. Then Tania undressed ZaZa.
Seconds later, ZaZa felt lips kissing her neck—small fluttering motions that progressed from her collarbone up, up, up to behind her ear, where a tongue reached out and licked her skin on the spot that made her twitch and squirm and emit a small moan.
The tongue slid back and forth and then moved in a tiny circle around and around and around until ZaZa couldn’t have told you where she was or who was touching her. It was pure sensation and there was nothing attached to it.
She wouldn’t have minded if Tania never moved away from that spot, but she did, and her skin felt abandoned. The spot was jealous when the tongue and the lips started moving back down her neck.
Tania moved to pull ZaZa’s pants down, and the air on her bare skin was cold. She shivered.
“Never mind,” Tania whispered, “I’ll warm you. I’ll warm you until you don’t feel anything but your own heat.” She leaned across her, silky hair brushing ZaZa’s bare stomach, and reached for the bottle of oil.
ZaZa smiled. Nothing felt as good as Tania’s hands massaging the fragrant oil into every inch of skin on her body. She closed her eyes and waited for the warmth to enter her pores.
Twenty-Six
Noah trailed his fingers down my throat and across my chest. I closed my eyes and focused on the feeling. Or, rather, tried to focus on the feeling.
When you are a sex therapist people assume one of two things: that you are an intensely sexual person and interested in sexuality almost to the exclusion of other emotions, or that you have sexual problems of your own and are on the other side of the couch to try to convince yourself you’re fine.
But that’s not how it works for most of us. We become therapists first, and then choose to specialize in sex therapy later, because it fascinates us for a wide variety of reasons, many of which we don’t always consciously know. But for me, it was because Nina Butterfield was the most constant role model I had in my life and she was a sex therapist. So even before I understood what it meant, I wanted to do what she did.
“I am a doctor who helps heal people’s hearts,” she’d told me when I was little. And when my own daughter first asked what I did, that’s what I told her, too.
In my life, I have never been preoccupied with sex and have never thought of myself as highly sexed or a sensualist. I’ve met women who are, I’ve treated them, and I know how we differ. Sure, I’d enjoyed sex with the man I was married to, but I’d never noticed when we went through dry spells the way he did.
But now, with Noah, I was different.
His fingers trailed down my sides and made circles on my stomach. He lingered there, in the dark, spending whole minutes sensitizing a two-inch circle of ordinary skin that I had never been aware of. His fingers moved so slowly that I became conscious of the texture of his fingertips, slightly rough and callused. The intensity of the touch was magnified a hundred times. Looking at a snowflake through a magnifying glass, you see myriad crystals creating a unique and complicated design that the naked eye is incapable of recognizing. So it was with his one finger on that spot of skin. It was not a single movement that elicited a single reaction, but a constantly changing evocation of impressions that not only affected that area but sent electric warnings shooting through me.
Noah was melting me.
It was like this each time we were together. I always started off half frozen and he had to work me into relaxation.
“There’s nothing to think about but my fingers, Morgan. Nothing but my fingers and your skin.” His voice was as mesmerizing as the movement. The pressure was building to pain. I writhed.
“What do you want?” he murmured.
“More.”
“What else do you want?”
I shook my head.
“Tell me.”
I shook it again.
He put his lips up to my ear. “Let go, Morgan. Let go. Stop thinking.” The rhythm of his words was hypnotic, and the more he repeated them the less I heard them, the closer I got to disappearing into the feelings. “Let go, Morgan, let go.” The fingers moved into a wider circle. Around and around. I was seeing the circles as hot-blue neon lines going around and around, each crossing the other, exposing layers of nerve endings, shooting the same hot blue through my skin into an inner core, where they became lightning bolts of hotter blue and searing red, circles and then lines that traveled up my arms and down my legs, always coming back to settle deep in my womb, which sucked them in and still wanted more.
Twenty-Seven
ZaZa moaned under Tania’s fingers as she stroked
her from her shoulders down her back, down her spine, down around the cheeks of her buttocks, and then, with the same warm oil, made the reverse trip back up.
Now it was her turn. ZaZa grabbed the oil, poured it into her hands and then rubbed Tania’s breasts. Around and around.
They took turns with the oil and the massage. Back and forth.
ZaZa used more oil to travel up and down the length of Tania’s legs. Tania came around ZaZa from behind and massaged her breasts again. Held them in her hands and gently and reverently drew her fingers around her nipples. At the same time, she pushed her pubis into ZaZa’s ass.
ZaZa pushed back, the pressure was building. Her breasts were on fire.
And then she pulled away and turned around. Tania sat back on her haunches, watching and waiting to see what ZaZa was going to do next, both of them instinctively careful to stay at an angle to the camera so that neither of them would obscure too much of the other.
ZaZa was thinking about how much she loved this woman. How much she wanted to keep touching her everywhere and have Tania touch her back, and how complicated it was because she’d never wanted to be with a woman before and now there was no man she wanted to be with as much.
Tania reached out and rubbed ZaZa’s hard, small clit.
ZaZa threw her head back and closed her eyes and felt her insides throb. Rub me faster, she wanted to scream out, but she knew—she had been doing this gig for so long it was second nature to her—she couldn’t rush it yet. There was a pace and a rhythm; she had to stay with it.
But would it really matter if she got off fast once first? Maybe they—the anonymous “they” who never had faces or names—would like more than one orgasm.
