by Radclyffe
“Yes,” she whispered back, wrapping both hands around the back of my neck.
I nudged her back against the arm of the couch and crept on top of her, wedging my thigh between her legs. Her arms slide down to my back, her fingers stroking me through my shirt as I devoured her mouth with hard kisses and a determined tongue.
She gripped my ass and pushed me into her. I couldn’t believe what I was feeling. She was completely into it.
I kissed her cheek, her chin and then her neck, whirling my tongue lightly under her ear. When I started sucking her earlobe, she writhed with pleasure, and I gushed with wetness.
“Oh, Vanessa.”
“I hope I’m not being too pushy.” I was unsure of the protocol involved in luring a widow back into the saddle.
“I don’t care,” she breathed. “I’m very turned on right now.”
Taking her cue, I unbuttoned her blouse, kissing her from the neck down, gliding my tongue between her warm breasts. Her breathing escalated as my lips trailed down the middle of her torso, stopping at the waistband of her Capri pants. She moaned as I tugged at the fastener with my teeth, but I wasn’t ready to seal the deal just yet.
Kissing my way back up to her breasts, I unhooked her bra and stroked her nipples as I nibbled her lips. Her hands ravaged me, squeezing the flesh on my back and mussing my hair, running her fingers through it.
“I haven’t felt this good in so long,” she murmured as I tongued her hard left nipple and tweaked and twisted her right one. “Vanessa, I want you.”
She pulled off my shirt and hugged my hot skin against hers. I teased her neck, licking and sucking, letting her body’s undulations guide me. She began grinding her crotch against my upper thigh in a rhythm I felt against my clit, already throbbing wildly.
“Leslie,” I warned, “if you keep doing that, you’re going to make me have an orgasm.”
“I want you to touch me.” Her hot breath dampened my ear.
I opened her pants, stuck my fingers in and played around in her wetness. She whimpered again and squeezed me tighter, squirming against my hand.
“That’s not how I want to have you.” I slowly rolled down her pants and spread her legs, diving down on her.
“Oh, my god,” she said as I slid my tongue inside her and swirled it around. I teased her clit, flicking and sucking it as her moans reached a fever pitch. After a few moments, she grabbed my head and tried to keep me in place. “Baby, I can’t hold back anymore.”
I glided two fingers inside, fucking her vigorously as my tongue riveted her clit, whipping her into a climax that had her shrieking, clutching the sofa cushions. She came with a force that seemed to purge three years of grief and loneliness. After her body stopped shuddering, I climbed up and kissed her neck softly.
“I’ve never come so hard,” she said, still gasping for breath.
“It’s been a while, huh?”
“Too long.” She stroked my back with her fingertips and grew quiet.
I knew what she was thinking—or rather who she was thinking about. Suddenly feeling like an interloper, I let her have the moment.
“Do you want me go?” I finally said.
She picked my chin off her chest and shook her head with a sweet smile. “I want you to stay with me. Let’s go upstairs.”
We gathered our clothes and went to bed but got very little sleep that night.
Leslie hadn’t returned the three messages I’d left her after our weekend together. I intended to drive to her house and confront her like an adult but ended up doing the stalker drive-by instead. I had done something very stupid. Having sex with a grieving widow? No, falling in love with one.
On my fourth or fifth pass by the front of Leslie’s house, I saw her walk into the kitchen. Seconds later, my cell phone started singing.
It was Leslie’s home number. “Ah, shit,” I muttered before answering.
“Vanessa, why do you keep driving by my house?” Her cold voice chilled me in the autumn air slipping in through the half-open window.
“You haven’t returned any of my calls.”
“Did you just pull into my driveway?”
“Yes. I want to talk for just a minute.”
“That’s not a good idea right now.”
“Then when? You’ve ignored me for two weeks, Leslie. I know our time together meant something to you. If I was just a sport fuck, you wouldn’t have asked me to stay.”
She sighed, and I clicked off the call as I bounded up her front steps.
When she opened the door, her expression was less than receptive. “Come in, but it’s late and I have to work tomorrow.”
“I know.” I closed the door and leaned against it. She propped herself against the arm of her sofa, arms folded and body well out of my reach. “Look, I get that you don’t want to see me anymore, but why wouldn’t you even call me back to tell me? That really hurt.”
“I’m sorry, but you know why.”
I decided I could be a hard-ass too. “Maybe I’m a masochist, but I just want to hear it from your lips.”
Her mouth twitched defiantly. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’re also a little bit of a sadist.”
Why did I find bitchy so irresistibly sexy? I held my ground. “Oh, I’m a sadist because I won’t let you take the cowardly way out.”
“Out of what? We had a great night together but that was it.”
My heart sank. I knew that wasn’t it, but she was running from the topic like a whore in a Vice raid.
“Look,” she continued, her voice softer as she let down her defenses, “I’m just not ready to feel this level of intensity for someone, especially for someone so much younger. I didn’t call you back because I was afraid if I heard your voice, I’d tell you to come over.”
My mind raced. While I was skulking past her house, I had prepared myself to walk away from this with dignity, but looking into her sparkling, pooling eyes, I lost all grasp of reason. “Leslie, this was last thing I expected too, but I can’t stop thinking about you.”
She slumped down onto the sofa cushions and stared into her lap. “It’ll pass.”
“Really? Is that the attitude the broken-hearted are supposed to take toward life?” I waited for a response, but she wouldn’t look up. “I know your partner passed away and even though I can’t imagine that pain, I do know about loss. I know what it feels like to believe you’ll never be able to feel anything for another person again.”
Frustration simmered. I felt like I was scolding a child as she sat silently, twirling the rings on her middle fingers with her thumbs.
“Leslie,” I said sharply, startling her. “Tell me to go. Tell me to piss off and I’ll leave you alone.”
She slammed her fist sideways into a puffy throw pillow. “Damn it. Why do you have to be so wonderful…and so young?”
I sighed and plopped down beside her, quiet for a moment. “After losing Rita, I would think you wouldn’t want to let anything wonderful in life pass.”
She sniffled in a deep breath and swirled her fingertips around the top of my hand. “You make me feel alive again, Vanessa. I don’t know what I think about that just yet.”
I thumbed away a tear that escaped down her cheek. “I don’t know what I think about anything these days. I just know I love being with you.”
Her head fell like a feather against the back of the sofa. She was silent for a long moment before exhaling and contorting her eyebrows playfully. “I should warn you—when I fall, I fall hard.”
“I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather have land on me.”
“What if your ex decides she wants you back?” She giggled as I tickled her forearm with my fingernails.
“She won’t.” I lightly kissed her neck. “She’s moved on to better things.”
“What a fool,” she said in a breathy groan.
As I flicked my tongue behind her ear, I whispered, “What if you decide you don’t want to see me again after I leave?”
“The
n don’t leave.” She yanked me by the shirt until we fell back, our lips meeting.
She never did make it to work on time the next day. But since our wedding three months ago, I’m much better about letting her out of bed in the morning. Well, most mornings.
THINGS I MISSED
Kathleen Warnock
If you can believe it, we used to go to church together. We’d catch the five o’clock Mass on Saturdays, which counted as the Sunday obligation, and then go out and have dinner and a few drinks. We also went on holy days, calling each other up to remind ourselves that it was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception or All Saints’ Day.
This was in the Deep South in the early to mid-1980s. There weren’t many Catholics in town. Sometimes we’d go to the church near the university, where she worked, or the one toward the eastern end of town, where I worked at the newspaper.
I was twenty-three, and it was my first “away from home” job. She was twenty-eight, and it was her first Division I job. I went to interview her when she was hired to head up the newly formed women’s soccer team (considered rather daring, if not crazy in the mid-’80s). It was the Catholic thing that started the friendship; she said she’d been so busy she hadn’t had time to find a church, and her mom kept calling her to see if she was going to Mass.
“I have a mom like that,” I told her and offered to take her to the 11:00 o’clock at Our Lady of the Valley. She grinned and said she’d appreciate it, and suddenly we were two people with a bond, deep in a foreign land, surrounded by Baptists and Methodists, a few Episcopalians and the occasional snake handler. She was from the mountains of the West, and talked about how much she missed them. I was from Philadelphia and was counting the days until I could move up the newspaper food chain and one day be the beat writer for the Phillies.
She was big, like her mountains: a bit over six feet tall, with short, curly blonde hair. She held your eyes with an honest, trustworthy gaze. Spoke in calm, measured tones. I liked to get her to laugh, because she was so serious and focused. She was deeply tanned, and it made her sharp blue eyes stand out. She liked to wear T-shirts with the university logo and baggy shorts, and her long, brown legs were muscled and smooth. At home she went barefoot, and she often kicked her shoes off at the office, padding around at the athletic center on the carpet woven with the school colors. When she was with the team on the field, cleats added another inch or so to her height.
Sometimes I’d go over to the athletic center to meet her for lunch, or she’d swing by our office, which wasn’t far from the university’s conditioning center. She took me over there once to show me around and demonstrated how to use the Nautilus machines and free weights. She did many reps of great weights until she glistened.
The newspaper I wrote for was owned by a local family and most of the higher-ups had gone to the university, and they knew each other and scratched each other’s backs and didn’t print the embarrassing stuff, and rooted for the football team and to a lesser extent, the basketball team, to win. No one minded that I went for drinks with Lise, or that we went to parties at each other’s houses, or when I hitched a ride with her to away games.
I had several friendships like that: with the dark-haired stringer who’d played high school hoops, and who I drove to Charlotte to help look for an apartment when she got a gig on the Observer. I wanted to tell her how much I’d enjoyed working with her and how I’d miss her. I had the words right in my mouth, but somehow they never came out. Then there was the graceful, model-pretty forward on the women’s volleyball team. She was so kind and humble, and she introduced me to her parents, and they had me out for a barbecue, and I met her nieces and nephew. And there was the softball catcher who both terrorized and fascinated me. Her swagger was mesmerizing, and every time she saw me at a local watering hole, she’d come over and tease me and take a sip of my “girlie drink” and insist on walking me to my car for safety. She always said she’d go to Hollywood and be a stuntwoman.
I had a degree in modern languages, a couple of writing prizes and a draft of a sci-fi novel featuring two young women heroines, with a deep and complex friendship. Oh, and I hadn’t a clue.
But I had some fun. I was on my own for the first time; living in a young, partying town; and I got to drive all over the countryside and go to lots of games and got paid for writing about them. And I had some good friends.
I left before Lise did—gave up the newspaper business and moved back up North to go back to school and lose myself and find myself and throw myself into causes that kept me from having a personal life, and to drink and party some more. I was quite sure that the answers I sought were just ahead. I tried to stay in touch with my old friends. We didn’t have the Internet then. We wrote letters, every now and then, and placed long distance calls on phones that had cords that went into the wall.
Fast-forward five years. It’s the turn of the last decade of the century. I still have lots of intense friendships with women. A few of them challenge me, and I assert my heterosexual credentials, even though they’ve only been used once or twice. Fast-forward another five years. The bitch of my life finally calls me on it. She taunts and harangues and seduces me out of the closet, then laughs at my ass when I declare my love for her. And at thirty-seven…I don’t go to church anymore. I kind of miss it. But I don’t miss the effort it took to remain in the dark all those years.
The dark-haired stringer came out to me a few years after I left the South; the model-pretty forward is twice married and a mother; the softball catcher went to Hollywood and became a stuntwoman.
And Lise… We stayed close the first few years, and she had some success with the team, got them ranked, got some national attention. Then she left. Didn’t say why… I got a letter from her after she went back out West. She said she’d started working at a bank, given up coaching. I got her on the phone, and she sounded so sad. I asked her what happened, and she told me one of her players, the big star girl, head case, diva, didn’t like being told what to do. Didn’t think she had to follow the rules. And that cut a conservative soul like Lise to the bone. It never occurred to her that any athlete, particularly a girl athlete on a scholarship in a minor sport, would ever take her position for granted, and that she wouldn’t be selfless and committed to the team and a good example to others and a role model, wouldn’t do what had to be done to make a winner. That was what Lise had always been and done. And Lise decided that if the girl didn’t straighten up and fly right, she’d kick her off the team. And the girl went to the athletic department and said Lise had made a pass at her.
They believed the student. There was no real investigation, just quietly ushering the tainted coach out the door for “personal reasons,” “to pursue other opportunities.” The school, which had had its share of scandals, with the steroids, and the grade changing and the illegal recruiting practices, was on a hair-trigger, and they felt like a dyke scandal would be the last straw. (For whom? The athletic boosters, I guess. New gyms and practice fields cost money.)
And there was Lise…who’d never dated a woman, had memorized the NCAA rulebook and would have kicked the shit out of any coach she found sleeping with a player. And she was done. Nothing official, on the record. But no one would hire her to coach again. People she’d worked with wouldn’t look her in the eye, answer her calls, be seen with her. And of course, she had no one to go to church with.
So she moved back home, back with her parents and got a job in a bank, and 2,000 miles away, I cried for her. At the injustice of it all, and how even then I couldn’t tell her I’d loved her. Because I wasn’t there yet, either. And then we lost touch, and I often wondered about her and where she was and whether she’d ever gotten over it. Or through it. Or if she ever thought about me.
Fast-forward another ten years, and the woman asleep beside me is my love, my partner, my wife. We’ll grow old together and have an interesting time doing it.
And in the last ten years, I have realized that I can either pine for all the mi
ssed opportunities of the first thirty-seven, or I can enjoy what’s essentially my true adolescence, denied me back when it would have been much more difficult, and I can dream of beautiful women and making love to them, and think of what I’d say and do to the women of my dreams and fantasies, and work and play with my partner in love and mischief, the woman who has my back (and my front) and knows what to do with the both of them.
Of course we do have the Pandora’s box of the Internet these days, and wireless high-speed and search engines and finding people at the touch of a button. The other night, when I was at home alone, my laptop on my knees in bed, desperately needing a break from a project due too soon at work, I put her name into the browser, and in a few clicks, there she was: Lise Bender, licensed real estate agent, serving all your residential needs. There was a big picture of her smiling that smile, blue eyes still blazing. Her hair had a lot of gray in it (I dye mine a shade of blonde it never was, having finally embraced my inner femme). She had crow’s feet and laugh lines; we didn’t use much sunscreen back then. (Me? I haven’t aged a day! Right.) But she was still Lise, and my heart warmed. There was a phone number listed, but I didn’t want to jump out at her like that. So I sent her a friendly email. Hoped she was doing well, remember me? And I gave her my number.
Less than an hour later, the phone rang. I was back at work, had already forgotten the email. I thought the call was from my sweetie, telling me she was on her way home.
“Hello, love,” I said. “Did you eat? Do you feel like picking up something for dinner on your way home?”
“What? I…is this…” someone began.
“Lise?” I let out a sort of half laugh, half sob.
“Yes…yes.” She sounded relieved. “I got your email and thought…well, I hope it’s not too late…I’m a couple hours behind…”
“It’s not too late,” I said. “It’s never too late…to talk to you.”
“I think you thought I was someone else,” she began, sounding embarrassed. “Your husband? Is he working late? Oh, my god, it’s been so long. I don’t even know if you’re married or not! Are you? Do you have any kids?”
