Hungry for It

by Fiona Zedde

  “I did not fart,” René chortled.

  “Whatever. You did. Like broccoli and green peas.” Yvette nudged his shoulder, and both dissolved again into giggles.

  Rémi sat down close to Yvette, wrinkling her nose. “Broccoli and green peas? Jesus!”

  “I know, right?” Yvette laughed again.

  Kelia pulled her son backwards into her lap and ruffled his curls.

  “Mama!” he protested, but stayed where he was.

  Yvette moved back to allow space for Claudia on the blanket. But Rémi tugged her lover close until Claudia sat in the juncture of her thighs and Rémi could bury her nose into the fragrant curve of her neck.

  The setting sun drowned the world around them in darkening light. Soft orange. Amber. A curtain of approaching dusk. The wind picked up, sneaking into the spaces between Rémi’s jacket, but Kelia’s arm pressed against hers was warm. She didn’t feel the cold.

  Chapter 33

  “I wish you didn’t have to go so soon.”

  Yvette sat on the edge of Rémi’s bed, watching as she packed. Her eyes bounced from Rémi’s face to the black duffel bag slowly filling with clothes.

  “Soon? We’ve been here a week.” Rémi tucked her cell phone charger in the pocket of her bag and zipped it shut. Their cab would be at the front door in less than half an hour. Claudia had long since packed and was downstairs having one last round of coffee and croissants with Kelia.

  “That’s barely any time at all.” Yvette frowned, folding and unfolding the cuff of her jeans.

  In some ways Rémi had to agree. She had only just begun to understand her family as it was now, fractured but healing, the way Auguste had left it.

  “I know,” Rémi said. “But I’m glad for the time I had with you and Mama. If you hadn’t come down to Miami she and I would still be fighting.”

  “And I would still be without a sister.”

  They exchanged cautious smiles, and Yvette bit her lip.

  For Rémi, the past few days had been an unexpected blessing. She’d come to Maine to help Yvette work through her issues with their mother, but she was the one walking away with a better relationship with Kelia. Through her inability to simply accept things as they were, her sister had managed to accomplish what Rémi hadn’t been able to because of her fourteen-year-long bout with resentment and fear. Things weren’t perfect between her and Kelia, but they were better.

  “I never thought I’d say this.” Rémi zipped up her duffel bag and pushed it aside to sit on the bed next to her sister. “But thanks for running away from home and coming down to Miami to disrupt my life.”

  Yvette laughed quietly and tossed back her wild hair. The sun arching through the wide windows and over her face picked up chips of gold in her hazel eyes. “You’re welcome.” Some of the sadness leaked from her face.

  Rémi squeezed her sister’s hand. “Any time you want to come visit me, just come. I left you my spare key and you already have the alarm code.”

  “Do I get the same invitation?” Kelia walked through the bedroom’s open door with Claudia in tow. Her look was tentative. Hopeful.

  “Of course, Mama,” Rémi said. She stood up to take her mother in a loose embrace. The scent of fresh coffee and pastries from Kelia’s hair brushed her nose as her mother pressed a smiling mouth to Rémi’s cheek.

  “I’ll try not to come unannounced,” she chuckled.

  “Unannounced guests are free to stay with me,” Claudia said, laying a gentle hand on Kelia’s back. She flicked a grin Rémi’s way.

  “Seeing how the two of you have been carrying on since you’ve been here, I’ll make sure to call ahead.” Kelia chuckled at her own joke while Rémi blushed helplessly.

  Claudia only brushed the back of Rémi’s scalding cheek with a cool hand and smiled. “We’re still in the honeymoon phase,” she murmured with curving lips, looking at Kelia. “I’m sure you understood.”

  Then it was Kelia’s turn to look away with suspicious color in her cheeks, but she smiled back at Claudia. “I do.”

  The taxi honked its horn a few moments later while simultaneously the house phone rang. When Kelia answered it, the driver announced over the speakerphone that he was waiting in the circular drive.

  “Okay,” Rémi said and picked up her bag.

  She and the others trooped down the stairs and out of the house to where the black taxi sat idling. The driver, sitting behind the steering wheel and reading a newspaper, looked up quickly as they came outside; then he tossed the flimsy pages in the passenger seat and got out to help Claudia with the luggage.

  “Call us when your plane lands,” Kelia said, her arm around Yvette’s waist.

  The young girl hugged herself through the thin sweater and leaned into her mother’s shoulder as a crisp breeze whipped up to tug at their clothes and hair.

  Rémi nodded. “We will. And give René another kiss for me when he gets back from his piano lessons.”

  She and Claudia briefly hugged the other two women again before getting into the cab. The door slammed shut. Rémi felt a lump in her throat as her sister and mother waved beyond the car’s open window. Her lover squeezed her hand in sympathy before leaning forward to speak to the driver.

  “Take us to the airport, please.”

  As the car pulled away, Rémi forced herself not to look back.

  Chapter 34

  Rémi dropped Claudia off at home with the promise that they would get together the next day for a quiet dinner at the condo. It felt strange leaving her lover standing on the doorstep, lips still tingling from their kiss and knowing that they wouldn’t be spending the night together like they had for the last week. Too soon, she’d gotten used to domestic simplicity with Claudia. Much too soon.

  She walked into the condo, dropping her duffel bag by the door with an exhausted sigh. The apartment felt quiet without Yvette. In the guest room, things were as they were before her sister arrived. Everything neatly put away, the television off, no clothes scattered all over the bed. Only the single pillow was missing, leaving its mate behind to rest in solitude in the middle of the bed. Rémi sat on the low bench before the window and looked at the garden below. The small cherry trees, in full blossoms of pink and white, trembled with restrained sensuality under the spring breeze. She pushed open the window. Having family around her, she realized, was something else she’d gotten used to.

  Smiling, she pulled her cell phone out to call the bar and let them know she’d be in tonight. It rang just as she opened it. Claudia’s number flashed on the screen.

  “Missed me already?”

  “Would you be offended if I said no?” Claudia said with a weak chuckle.

  “Are you all right?” The hesitation on the other end of the line made her pause. “Sweetheart?”

  Her lover cleared her throat. “I’m—I’ll be okay. Just wanted to hear your voice.”

  Rémi walked quickly out of the room, grabbed her keys, and was out the door. “I’m coming over right now.”

  “No! No, you don’t have to. I’m actually just a few minutes away.” She paused. “Just open the door for me.”

  “Okay.” Rémi stopped her progress down the hall and went slowly back into the condo. “Can I do anything for you now? Anything at all.”

  “Just stay on the phone with me. Be there when I get off the elevator.”

  “I’m already here waiting for you.”

  When Claudia walked out of the elevator barely twenty minutes later, Rémi wasn’t sure what to expect. But it wasn’t the coolly self-contained creature who glanced once at her before whisking past to go into the apartment. The woman she’d left in Coconut Grove had been relaxed and smiling, her face a warm invitation itself and her lean form draped in a floral sundress. This woman wasn’t that. Black slacks, white blouse, closed face. That’s what she wore now.

  Claudia’s features, ice-cold and devoid of emotion, chilled Rémi more even than her brushing past to disappear inside. Rémi closed the door. Clau
dia dropped her wisp of a purse on the sofa, gripped the back of the chair as she leaned forward. Her shoulders shook. Rémi came up behind her lover and pulled her backwards, bracing Claudia against her chest, clasping her hands over the tight belly.

  “Love, what’s wrong?”

  Claudia relaxed against her. Minutely, slowly, until she was a fragile liquid weight. She began to talk. Warrick had been calling all week while they were in Maine, but she never answered the phone. Just after Rémi left the house, he called again. She answered.

  “He called me a fool for being involved with you. Said I became a dyke because no real man would want me.” Claudia turned to face Rémi, tears crawling down her face and between her lips. “Can you believe he said that shit to me?” She drew air between her teeth. Her body trembled in anger. “Why does he always make me feel like nothing?”

  Rémi shook her head, feeling the helpless rage ripple through her. “I’m sorry, baby. His life must be really empty if he’s coming after you like this.” She tightened her arms around the other woman. “I know it’s hard, but try to ignore him. He can’t live your life for you. He’s way the hell out there in California. A divorce ten years ago and he still wants to fuck up your life. What is he, the fucking IRS?” The tremor in the small body crept into hers.

  “For the first time in forever,” her lover said, “I’m happy again. And he makes one phone call, making me feel like a pedophile and a worthless old woman for loving you.”

  With a low sound, Rémi swept her up and carried her to the sofa, crooned softly and rubbed her back. Claudia slackened in her arms, trembling like a tuning fork. She pushed herself away.

  “I don’t want your pity.” A pulse pounded in her throat. Rémi flinched when Claudia’s fists clenched in her shirtfront. Then shook her. A button popped away. And another. “Make me feel better.”

  Rémi didn’t have much experience in this arena. Usually women came to her for sex, not comfort. Their emotional states weren’t what she was able to take care of with any degree of success. There was only one kind of comfort that she knew how to give to a woman. She dipped her head to kiss Claudia’s mouth but the smaller woman turned her head away.

  “No. I don’t want that.” Her face was hard again. Harder than when she’d first walked through the door.

  A ball of ice slammed into Rémi’s chest. Did this mean that Warrick’s careless words had ruined what they had with each other? She slowly pulled back. But Claudia’s fingers dug into the skin under Rémi’s shirt.

  “I want more.” Claudia’s eyes burned. “Do you understand?”

  The ex-husband who had abandoned her bed for another—younger—woman’s caresses just came back into her life accusing her of not being worthy of real pleasure. He denied her satisfaction as a woman. Denied her desires. Just like when they were together, he wanted to shut her off from pleasure. He wanted to make her need him and never satisfy that need.

  Finally Rémi did understand.

  “Are you sure you want this?” Rémi’s voice grated in its lowest register.

  Claudia leaned close, breath hissing against Rémi’s throat. “Yes.”

  They took the bike. Claudia held on tight to Rémi’s back as they blasted through the thick Miami night, city lights and car lights blurring on all sides as they passed. The Harley roared between Rémi’s legs. At the door of Odette’s, a new hostess carefully looked over Rémi and Claudia before scanning Rémi’s membership card and waving them inside the two-story building that had once been a beachfront hotel. They walked down the carpeted stairs into the sunken main room. Tonight, the music hummed low and sweet, a sensual caress against the air, just loud enough to register against the skin. Trance music, straight out of the mid-1990s.

  On three of the walls moved real-time images of sex. Three different films, all featuring women kissing and stroking each other, their mouths occasionally moving silently in some bit of irrelevant dialogue. Their corseted backs or bare breasts or open thighs moved seductively on the giant screens.

  The windows covered with thick velvet curtains, darkness that saturated the intimate space, the twin semicircular bars on opposite sides of the room with their dark-clad and flirting bartenders. All this added to the atmosphere of anonymity and decadence of Odette’s. Women, heavy shadows, moved around them, lightly touching, their scent animal and thick. Some smelled like sex, others of the outdoors and the ocean just outside. A woman walked past in nothing but strings—a scarlet thong and spider web fabric that emphasized the small and pert shape of her breasts.

  At her side, Claudia took it all in, eyes alternately wide and shuttered. “What is this place?” she finally asked.

  “A fun house,” Rémi murmured against her ear, keeping a hand at the base of her lover’s spine, gently guiding but ready to lift away at the slightest sign. “But tonight, you can call it therapy.”

  She moved them slowly through the crowd, giving Claudia a chance to take it all in, see properly the place that she had been brought to. Instead of going upstairs as she would have normally done, Rémi took her lover past the stairs and down a wide hallway. Here the only sound was the music of fucking. Doors remained slyly half opened for a voyeur to peek in or perhaps join. Gasps. Moans. The vicious slap of flesh against flesh. Hand against flesh. Leather against flesh. Grunts. Sighs.

  Claudia stopped. Her hand grasped Rémi’s. For the first time in hours, her face was hers again. Warm and beautiful. She looked like a woman waking up from a dream.

  “Here?” Claudia asked.

  “Yes. But only if you want.” Rémi allowed herself to tease. “As the great lyricist Ricky Martin once said, we’re at the age we don’t have to behave.”

  A smile rippled briefly across Claudia’s features.

  They chose a room at random, walking past; Claudia pointed and Rémi stopped, opening the door on a scene of plenty. Three women playing together on a thick fur rug. Two mouths kissing around a full breast. The woman being pleasured leaned back, palms flat against the ground, elbows locked, mouth parted in pleasure. Her lovers licked her breasts, lovingly, treating her like a scoop of ice cream they were afraid would melt. Their tongues left trails of wetness on her brown skin.

  When Rémi and Claudia came fully into the room, the three barely stirred from their play. Pleased murmurs bubbled from the two women with their mouths full, ecstatic praises on the taste of their lover’s breasts. They fondled each other, fingers tangling and untangling in the thick dreadlocks of one and the pixie cut of the pale-skinned brunette.

  Rémi sat down in the only chair in the room, avoiding the bed. Claudia sat on the edge of the bed to watch the women, her mouth slightly parted, nipples already hard against the white shirt.

  “Is this the kind of thing you do all the time?” she asked after a long moment.

  “Not quite all the time, but often enough. I love sex; you know that.”

  Claudia’s ghost smile made another appearance. “Yes.”

  The women’s play licked the flames of arousal in the seat of Rémi’s body, but she made no move toward them. The one being tended to, though, watched Rémi through eyes slitted with pleasure. Then winked. She pressed her hands into the women’s hair, pushed them harder against her breasts. Her hot gaze rested on Rémi.

  “Do you want to join us?” the woman asked in a not-quite-steady voice.

  “Not yet.” Rémi glanced at Claudia. “What would you like, love? Anything you want, you can have.”

  Before coming to Odette’s, Rémi wasn’t sure what her lover would say when faced with the reality of the kind of life she had before, or the things Claudia could do tonight to assert her womanhood, to recognize the fact that she desired and deserved to be. Her gaze moved between Rémi and the naked women.

  Claudia seemed to breathe Rémi’s words in, palms flat against the bed, eyes flickering. Then she stood up.

  “I want to touch your breasts.”

  Without asking, she unbuttoned Rémi’s shirt, bared her to the
other women in the room. Over Claudia’s shoulder, Rémi watched the three women, saw them adjust their positions to see what Claudia was doing. The brown girl opened her thighs. That seemed to be the signal the other two were waiting for. They both dove down, and one began to lap eagerly at her pussy, eyes trained on Rémi and Claudia as her tongue worked through the dense pussy hairs and her fingers plunged into the wet nest. Behind her knees, the other one bent, dipping her head under the upturned ass. Claudia’s mouth at her breast pulled Rémi’s attention from the women.

  Her lover kissed her breasts one after the other, then sighed as if the flavor of Rémi’s skin made her swoon. She curled her tongue around the stiff nipples and tugged them slowly into her mouth again and again. The sensation shot straight to Rémi’s pussy, but she held herself calm, didn’t want to rush it. Her head fell back in the chair. Her eyes closed. The sounds. She lost herself in the sounds of Claudia licking her breasts, her eager sighs. The girls on the floor, lapping at each other’s pussies, groaned and lost themselves finally in each other.

  Claudia fingers fluttered down to unbutton Rémi’s pants. A faint squeak sounded as someone opened the door and came in. Rémi felt them standing over the daisy chain of pussy eaters on the rug. She lifted her hips for Claudia to pull down her pants and underwear. Her lover moved low, sinking into the cradle of Rémi’s hips. Her breath scorched Rémi’s cunt. Ah.

  Through her slitted vision, Rémi saw the couple who had entered. A woman, butch with a soft pink mouth and red hair clipped close to her head. And her friend, not so butch and with waist-length black hair loose and moving like a wave around dark and brutal features. The woman leaned back against the wall to take in the action of the room. One foot flat against the wall, hand diving into her pants. Her friend came up behind Claudia, cocked a questioning eyebrow. Claudia, whose mouth delicately licked Rémi’s pussy, tucking her tongue into the slick folds of cunt lips, teasing the dripping hole with the tip of her tongue, just the way she knew Rémi liked. Claudia. Rémi allowed the groan past clenched teeth and told the woman to shut the door.