Fifteen minutes and the coffee shop and her name all slide by in a blur—you’ve forgotten her name but you can’t admit it, so you just keep smiling and hope and pray that she doesn’t think you’re a total twit, a ditz, a baby dyke without a clue. After coffee you’re walking down the street and you tell her all about your last relationship and how bad it went, doing your damnedest to convince her of your dyke credentials until she grins and says, “Hush—now is not the time,” and then she pulls you into a doorway and starts kissing you. She is at least a foot shorter than you, but she’s up on her toes and pulling you down with no hesitation and the kissing is easy, so easy and hot you’re melting into it, and then the door you’re leaning on starts to open and you realize that her hand is on the doorknob and her key is in the door and this is, of course, the door to her apartment and she’s taking you upstairs, woohoo!
She kisses you all the way up three flights of stairs, and her hands are all over you, over the T-shirt, under the T-shirt, under your bra to cup your breasts, squeeze your nipples, pull you up the last steps with her fingers tight on your nipples and her mouth latched to yours, and you are tumbling into her apartment and closing the door with your bodies ’cause your hands are too damn busy to spare. She breaks long enough to turn on the light and fire up some candles and incense and turn off the light again and then you are falling to the futon in the living room, lit by candles, the room is full of candles and statues and flowers and incense. You’re a little dizzy, but when she pulls off your shirt and bra and starts licking a nipple you have to know, you say, “Hang on,” and “I hate to ask this,” and “What’s your name again?” and wait for her to throw you out.
She laughs instead, and says, “Kali; my name is Kali,” and then she gets this wide grin and lies back on the futon and says, “Kali is a goddess, you know? Worship me.”
You’ve never touched a goddess before, but your mama didn’t raise no fools, and so you get her and you out of clothes as fast as you can, before she has a chance to take a proper breath or change her mind, and then you’re kissing her. Sucking on her toes and calves and knees and thighs, up around her clit, up her curving stomach and softball breasts, down to fingers and up again, kissing and sucking and licking until your mouth is dry and her skin is wet and shaking in the wavering light of what seem a hundred candles.
You worship her with mouth and hands, you slide a finger in her cunt and then another until they are slick and salty, and you bring them up to your mouth and taste them, lick them with Kali’s eyes on you, glittering, and she breathes “More,” and you go down, you breathe on, lick, and suck her clit, slide two fingers in again, thrust back and forth and she is writhing beneath you, she is silent but her body speaks. It whispers and moans and whimpers and screams and she is almost there and you can’t quite do it, you can’t get her there, you can feel the crest waiting there, the last lap, the last mile, and you’re not going to make it, you’re not good enough and you are ready to lay your head down on her stomach and cry if she will permit it.
You stop, removing the once-thrusting, now-sore fingers. She whimpers, and your stomach churns, and you take a deep, gasping breath. Kali opens her eyes then and sees you and she is not angry. She is twisted in on herself, she is bathed in sweat, dripping in the candlelight, and she says, “It’s okay,” and takes a deep breath and you can see that she is going to try to come down, to relax, to let it go and, dammit, that is not good enough, you know you can do better than this—and then inspiration hits. You slide back down, your mouth is on her again, on that sweet-salty mound, on that wet nubbin, and while you lick and she convulses silently again, starting the climb again, your hand reaches out and grabs a candle.
Your eyes are closed against her skin but you can feel the slim, cool shape of it, bubbled with old dripped wax, long and hard and untiring. You wave it in the air to put it out, you wait for it to cool as your tongue tickles and touches, twisting to penetrate every crevice, every inch it can reach, and when it is exhausted, when it feels that it is about to break in two, to shatter into a thousand pieces, that is when you reverse the shape in your hand and slide it into her, into her dripping cavity, sliding it smooth and hard into her, and Kali gasps beneath you and her hands come down to your shoulders, her fingers dig into your skin, and you know that you guessed right. You push and pull, thrusting hard and fast until finally, finally her back arches, her hips convulse, and she freezes still and silent for an endless, aching time, and even if your fingers and tongue fall off you are not going to move one inch in the wrong direction. And then she relaxes.
She pulls you up, after a time, and you make love in all the clever ways that two young dykes in the prime of their strength and stamina can, and she discovers how easily you come, how even nipple-sucking can do it, and she says that she might forgive you for that someday. Hours pass, and the candles are long burned out, and you are settling down to sleep but can’t quite get comfortable, there’s a lump, a bump in the sheets under your hip, and you realize that you’ve left the candle there and are surprised it’s still in one piece and you reach down and pull it out and in the thin moonlight you realize that it isn’t a candle after all.
A statue of a goddess, a naked goddess, and the bumps you took for dripping candle wax are breasts and curved hands, many hands, and you catch your breath, wondering if you have committed some form of sacrilege, if Kali will recoil in shock, horror, dismay, and she must see it in your eyes because she laughs and laughs and eventually, gently, explains that she is not religious, definitely not Hindu, that her family was in fact Catholic.
She herself had turned atheist long ago, she says, and got the statues from the new age bookstore free. She tells you that she only keeps them around ’cause they’re pretty and they seem to turn on the chicks, and you blush and are grateful for the thinness of the light. She also says that even if she did believe in the goddess, she doesn’t think She would mind being deep inside a woman’s wet cunt. Then she confesses a secret—that Kali is only her work name, after all, that it impresses the bookstore clients. Her true name is something she takes seriously, and she never tells it to lovers unless they stay around long enough for breakfast. And when you get over being embarrassed and amused and slightly shocked, you tell her that you think you could probably arrange that.
excerpt from PORTRAIT IN SEPIA
Isabel Allende
JEALOUSY. THE PERSON WHO HASN’T FELT IT cannot know how much it hurts, or imagine the madness committed in its name. In my thirty years I have suffered it only once, but I was burned so brutally that I have scars that still haven’t healed, and I hope never will, as a reminder to avoid that feeling in the future. Diego wasn’t mine—no person can belong to another—and the fact that I was his wife gave me no right over him or his feelings; love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way. A thousand dangers threaten love, but if the couple defends it, it can be saved; it can grow like a tree and give shade and fruit, but that happens only when both partners participate. Diego never did; our relationship was damned from the start. I realize that today, but then I was blind, at first with pure rage and later with grief.
Spying on him, watch in hand, I began to be aware that my husband’s absences did not coincide with his explanations. When supposedly he had gone out hunting with Eduardo, he would come back hours earlier or later than his brother; when the other men in the family were at the sawmill or at the roundup branding cattle, he would suddenly show up in the patio, and later, if I raised the subject at the table, I would find that he hadn’t been with them at any time during the day. When he went to town for supplies he would come back without anything presumably because he hadn’t found what he was looking for, although it might be something as common as an ax or a saw. In the countless hours the family spent together, he avoided conversation at all cost; he was always the one who organized the card games or asked Susana to sing. If she came down with one of her headaches, he was quickly bored and would go off on
his horse with his shotgun over his shoulder. I couldn’t follow him on horseback without his seeing me or raising suspicion in the family, but I could keep an eye on him when he was around the house. That was how I noticed that sometimes he got up in the middle of the night, and that he didn’t go to the kitchen to get something to eat, as I had always thought, but dressed, went out to the patio, disappeared for an hour or two, then quietly slipped back to bed. Following him in the darkness was easier than during the day, when a dozen eyes were watching us; it was all a matter of staying awake and avoiding wine at dinner and the bedtime opium drops.
One night in mid-May I noticed when he slipped out of bed, and in the pale light of the oil lamp we always kept lit before the cross, I watched him put on his pants and boots, pick up his shirt and jacket, and leave the room. I waited a few instants, then quickly got out of bed and followed him, with my heart about to burst out of my breast. I couldn’t see him very well in the shadows of the house, but when he went out on the patio his silhouette stood out sharply in the light of the full moon, which for moments at a time shone bright in the heavens. The sky was streaked with clouds that cloaked everything in darkness when they hid the moon. I heard the dogs bark and was afraid they would come to me and betray my presence, but they didn’t; then I understood that Diego had tied them up earlier.
My husband made a complete circle of the house and then walked rapidly toward one of the stables where the family’s personal mounts were kept, the ones not used in the fields; he swung the crossbar that fastened the door and went inside. I stood waiting, protected by the blackness of an elm a few yards from the barn, barefoot and wearing nothing but a thin nightgown, not daring to take another step, convinced that Diego would come out on horseback, and I wouldn’t be able to follow him. I waited for a period that seemed very long, but nothing happened.
Suddenly I glimpsed a light through the slit of the open door, maybe a candle or small lantern. My teeth were chattering, and I was shivering from cold and fright. I was about to give up and go back to bed when I saw another figure approaching from the east—obviously not from the big house—and also go into the stable, closing the door behind. I let almost fifteen minutes go by before I made a decision, then forced myself to take a few steps. I was stiff from the cold and barely able to move. I crept toward the door, terrified, unable to imagine how Diego would react if he found me spying on him, but incapable of retreating. Softly I pushed the door, which opened without resistance because the bar was on the outside and it couldn’t be secured from the inside, and slipped like a thief through the narrow opening. It was dark in the stable, but a pale light flickered far at the back, and I tiptoed in that direction, almost not breathing—unnecessary precautions since the straw deadened my footsteps and several of the horses were awake; I could hear them shifting and snuffling in their stalls.
In the faint light of a lantern hanging from a beam and swayed by the wind filtering between the wooden timbers, I saw them. They had spread blankets out in a clump of hay, like a nest, where she was lying on her back, dressed in a heavy, unbuttoned overcoat under which she was naked. Her arms and her legs were spread open, her head tilted toward her shoulder, her black hair covering her face, and her skin shining like blond wood in the delicate, orangeish glow of the lantern.
Diego, wearing nothing but his shirt, was kneeling before her, licking her sex. There was such absolute abandon in Susana’s position and such contained passion in Diego’s actions that I understood in an instant how irrelevant I was to all that. In truth, I didn’t exist, nor did Eduardo or the three children, no one else, only the two of them and the inevitability of their lovemaking. My husband had never caressed me in that way. It was easy to see that they had been like this a thousand times before, that they had loved each other for years; I understood finally that Diego had married me because he needed a screen to hide his love affair with Susana. In one instant the pieces of that painful jigsaw puzzle fell into place; I could explain his indifference to me, the absences that coincided with Susana’s headaches, Diego’s tense relationship with his brother Eduardo, the deceit in his behavior toward the rest of the family, and how he arranged always to be near her, touching her, his foot against hers, his hand on her elbow or her shoulder, and sometimes, as if coincidentally, at her waist or her neck, unmistakable signs the photographs had revealed to me. I remembered how much Diego loved her children, and I speculated that maybe they weren’t his nephews but his sons, all three with blue eyes, the mark of the Domînguezes. I stood motionless, gradually turning to ice as voluptuously they made love, savoring every stroke, every moan, unhurried, as if they had all the rest of their lives. They did not seem like a couple of lovers in a hasty clandestine meeting but like a pair of newlyweds in the second week of their honeymoon, when passion is still intact, but with added confidence and the mutual knowledge of each other’s flesh. I, nevertheless, had never experienced intimacy of that kind with my husband, nor would I have been able to invent it in my most audacious fantasies. Diego’s tongue was running over Susana’s inner thighs, from her ankles upward, pausing between her legs and then back down again, while his hands moved from her waist to her round, opulent breasts, playing with her nipples, hard and lustrous as grapes. Susana’s soft, smooth body shivered and undulated; she was a fish in the river, her head turning from side to side in the desperation of her pleasure, her hair spread across her face, her lips open in a long moan, her hands seeking Diego to guide him over the beautiful topography of her body, until his tongue made her explode in pleasure. Susana arched backward from the ecstasy that shot through her like lightning, and she uttered a hoarse cry that he choked off with his mouth upon hers. Then Diego took her in his arms, rocking her, petting her like a cat, whispering a rosary of secret words into her ear with a delicacy and tenderness I never thought possible in him. At some moment she sat up in the straw, took off her coat, and began to kiss him, first his forehead, then his eyelids, his temples, lingering on his mouth; her tongue mischievously explored Diego’s ears, swerved to his Adam’s apple, brushed across his throat, her teeth nibbling his nipples, her fingers combing the hair on his chest. Then it was his turn to abandon himself completely to her caresses; he lay face down on the blanket and she sat astride him, biting the nape of his neck, covering his shoulders with brief playful kisses, moving down to his buttocks, exploring, smelling, savoring him, and leaving a trail of saliva as she went. Diego turned over, and her mouth enveloped his erect, pulsing penis in an interminable labor of pleasure, of give and take in the most profound intimacy conceivable, until he could not wait any longer and threw himself on her, penetrated her, and they rolled like enemies in a tangle of arms and legs and kisses and panting and sighs and expressions of love that I had never heard before. Then they dozed in a warm embrace, covered with blankets and Susana’s overcoat like a pair of innocent children. Silently I retreated and went back to the house, while the icy cold of the night poured inexorably through my soul.
A chasm opened before me; I felt vertigo pulling me downward, a temptation to leap and annihilate myself in the depths of suffering and fear. Diego’s betrayal and my dread of the future left me floating with nothing to cling to, lost, disconsolate. The fury that had shaken me at first lasted only briefly, then I was crushed by a sensation of death, of absolute agony. I had entrusted my life to Diego, he had promised me his protection as a husband; I believed literally the ritual words of marriage: that we were joined until death us did part. There was no way out. The scene in the stable had confronted me with a reality that I had perceived for a long time but had refused to face.
My first impulse was to run to the big house, to stand in the middle of the patio and howl like a madwoman, to wake the family, the servants, the dogs, and make them witnesses to adultery and incest. My timidity, however, was stronger than my desperation. Silently, feeling my way in the dark, I dragged myself back to the room I shared with Diego and sat in my bed shivering and sobbing, my tears soaking into the neck of
my nightgown. In the following minutes or hours I had time to think about what I had seen and to accept my powerlessness. It wasn’t a sexual affair that joined Diego and Susana, it was a proven love; they were prepared to run every risk and sweep aside any obstacle that stood in their way, rolling onward like an uncontainable river of molten lava. Neither Eduardo nor I counted; we were disposable, barely insects in the enormity of their passion.
I should tell my brother-in-law before anyone else, I decided, but when I pictured the blow such a confession would be to that good man, I knew I wouldn’t have the courage to do it. Eduardo would discover it himself some day, or with luck, he might never know. Perhaps he suspected, as I did, but didn’t want to confirm it in order to maintain the fragile equilibrium of his illusions; he had the three children, his love for Susana, and the monolithic cohesion of his clan.
Diego came back some time during the night, shortly before dawn. By the light of the oil lamp he saw me sitting on my bed, my face puffy from crying, unable to speak, and he thought I had woken with another of my nightmares. He sat beside me and tried to draw me to his chest, as he had on similar occasions, but instinctively I pulled away from him, and I must have worn an expression of terrible anger, because immediately he moved back to his own bed. We sat looking at each other, he surprised and I despising him, until the truth took form between the two of us, as undeniable and conclusive as a dragon.
Best of Best Women's Erotica Page 26
