by Sacchi Green
“You mean we could do something besides stay in bed? I may be able to communicate with you more than just waving at the bumps in the ceiling? You want to do something else? You don’t want our relationship to be only sexual?” Her face showed wonder.
“That may be the best part.” I grinned. “But it’s not the only thing.”
This time, she pulled me to her and kissed me. And did she kiss me!
I’m surprised I made it to work on time.
That evening I walked into the casino after dropping her off at her sister’s. She would be going back to Wichita as soon as she’d showered and spent a little time with her sister. We’d made tentative plans and had exchanged the necessary information; addresses, phone numbers, et cetera. She had said she’d call when she got back home; probably between 3:00 and 3:30 a.m. I said I’d be home by then.
I still couldn’t believe everything that had happened, but I was really looking forward to her next visit.
Jane wasted no time in asking how the night had gone. What was I going to tell her? What wouldn’t ruin my reputation?
“Did you take her to dinner?” she asked. “Did you go for a drink?”
“Yes, we had something to eat and we talked for a while,” I hedged with a shake of my head, “but I got sort of tied up with other things.”
FUCK ME LIKE A CANADIAN
Raven Sky
There is a heat to attraction. An energy. You can feel it. It’s undeniable. This is the last place I expected to feel it. Not least of all because it’s illegal here. Is it punishable by death? I strained to remember my online research predeparture. Morocco. Homosexuality. What did Google have to reveal about that? My mind blanked. Because her hands were on my naked flesh, lathering me in a traditional black olive oil soap. Something in her actions was more than indifferent. Something in her eyes, when they happened to catch mine, was not impersonal.
She put a kiis on her hand, a kind of scrubbing glove, and asked me to lie down. I arranged myself on the tile floor, suddenly selfconscious, and she set to work, eradicating days of showerless mountain trekking and sweaty desert camel-riding from my body. It was an odd sensation right on the line between pain and pleasure. I wondered if I should feel embarrassed, but the hammam, the public bath, has no place for modesty. That made me laugh earlier. Seeing Muslim women topless with their hijabs still in place, like modesty had no relation to bare breasts amongst the same sex.
The bath attendant noticed my tattoo, hesitated in her otherwise practiced motions, and asked, “Is this the sign of your people?” I didn’t know what to say. The tattoo shows two interlocking women’s symbols in rainbow colors, a throwback to my heady first days of coming out. What could I risk here? But she headed me off, lifting a long and silky mane of hair to show her own surprising tattoo gracing the back of her neck. I recognized the symbol. “Berber,” she said. “My people.” Berbers are the original peoples of Morocco, the first inhabitants who lived here before the Arabs came and colonized. I complimented the design and she smiled. I noticed her eyebrows. Why do women from Muslim cultures often have such perfect fucking eyebrows? Classically arched. Impeccably shaped. 1950s gorgeous. I guess eyes are everything in a culture where hair and bodies are hidden. I tried not to pay attention, to dismiss the obviously electric erotic tension. But this is where it started. This improbable romance between a white tourist and a Berber beauty. Unbelievable.
She complimented my dreads and invited me to a women’s party. I knew enough to read between the lines and accepted the invitation with a mix of apprehension and excitement. This was dangerous. And yet I’d never roamed the planet seeking the comfort of the known. The thrill of travel is about stepping outside of everything you know and risking misadventure, and so I went to the party. All women. All gay from what I could glean. A secret underworld of sisters who looked out for one another. I was immediately enthralled.
We fucked for the first time there, Till and I. After a few hours spent drinking wine and singing incomprehensible Berber songs, occasionally dancing with ludicrous abandon, she pulled me into a private room and shut the door meaningfully. The music was turned up outside, and though I spoke another language, I read the signs correctly. She was flushed from dancing, pink-cheeked, eyes afire and I felt suddenly nervous, unsure of what was expected in this new context. But I didn’t have to do anything. She was intentional. Stripped for me knowingly, a mocking smile teasing about the corners of her mouth. And I just stood there, mesmerized and slightly drunkenly stupefied, honestly, by the sight of all that undulating tan flesh so enticingly within reach. Her breasts were full and weighty, her stomach achingly round, hips perfect curves. I was overcome. Do I make a move now? I wondered, questioning my role in this foreign interaction, but she left little room for such questions, her fingers working deftly to rid me of my clothing, the last barrier between us.
That night was nothing less than torturous. Till loved every inch of my exterior, caressing, licking, biting, lightly scratching every morsel of my flesh but never entering me. Always careful. I remembered things I’d read in a biography about a Western trekker working his way across the Saharan desert, encountering intimate cultural confusion with Moroccan women along the way, until he learned the unwritten rule that you could play, but you could not penetrate, for that was the prerogative of future husbands. And so he learned to “paint,” a not uncommon Middle Eastern form of foreplay, in which a man uses the tip of his penis like a paintbrush to create elaborate patterns upon the beloved’s vulva. I remembered this, through clenched jaw and thrusting hips, as Till used the tip of her breast to tantalize me. Her nipples slowly tracing the shape of my lips, spreading wetness into intricate patterns, lulling, maddening, intoxicating, un-fucking-bearable. So close. So fucking enragingly close. I teetered on the precipice of climax until tears sprang to my eyes with the frustration of knowing that it would never happen, not without the hot rush of her fingers inside me. Was it wrong to ask? Was it unthinkable here? Her fingers took over for her ample breast, continuing the maddening artwork, and my whole body trembled on the edge. I couldn’t care; I grabbed her by the back of her hair to pull her close and half whispered, half growled, “I want you inside me—please.” Her rhythm halted, her face registered surprise, and then a small smile upturned her cheeks and she was inside me. Warmth flooded me, concentrated where she moved within me, and within a few short minutes I was coming loudly as she was laughing and trying to shush me, while the music outside increased rather thoughtfully in volume. That’s how we started, Till and I.
What a whirlwind we were. Reckless. Giddy with lust. What she saw in me I was never sure. Was I just a story she would impress the local closet dykes with? A story about her silly fling with a weird-haired foreigner, a white girl she’d managed to seduce? Mind you, was that how I would speak of her, albeit in reverse? Would I similarly reduce this to some tale of an alien dalliance with a mysterious woman from a faraway land? What here was fetishizing the other and what was the pure curiosity of inexplicable, natural attraction? I couldn’t say. I just knew that I was enthralled with her and it was wrapped up in the differences she embodied.
I’d traveled a lot, hostel hopping from country to country, so I knew the sweet intensity of a vacation romance was partially about its inherently time-limited nature. This could not last and we both knew it. One morning, waking in my impossibly tiny hostel room, she asked me about my plans. I told her I had another week in Morocco and then Essaouira was next on my hope-to-see list. She avoided my eyes, and fiddling with one of my dreads, she mentioned she could take time off from the hammam; that her boss, whose home we had partied at that first night, would understand. She was painfully beautiful in that moment, vulnerable, desirous. I toyed with pushing her boundaries. Watching her face carefully, I teased, “Only if you finally let me fuck you.” This had been a struggle from the beginning. Till was generously attentive but always refused to let me return the attention. Many feelings crossed her face in rapid succession b
ut she settled on joy. “Before you leave,” she promised and snuggled into me.
And so we said good-bye to bustling Marrakesh, with its scammy snake charmers, transvestite belly dancers, and aggressive street hustlers. We said hello to the seaside, to gulls and open-air cafes and hippie wanderers. We knew our time together was ending, but that just concentrated everything. My second-to-last night, we sat in a seaside bar by the beach and watched boys playing soccer in the sand. We ordered beers. The waiter brought them, but frowned at Till, disapproving. She looked him right in the eye and chugged. I laughed.
“Do you know what my name means?” Till inquired. I shook my head. “It’s Tilleli. In Berber that means freedom.” She laughed. “My mother should have named me more carefully.”
I asked about her family but her eyes went hard and she just drank from her beer, so I stared out at the water and wondered about this woman I barely knew. About how in a few days I would be back in Canada where I could be the lesbianest lesbian who every lesbianed and nobody cared, and she’d still be here, hiding, risking her freedom with every encounter. “Do you ever think of leaving?” I asked, after a pause.
“This is my life,” she said simply.
I pushed. “Yeah, but you could go somewhere else, somewhere where you could be more free,” I insisted. She turned slowly to look at me, the hardness still in her eyes, and said absolutely nothing. She turned back to the water. I’d said something stupid but I didn’t know why or what. What did I not understand? I couldn’t know.
The last night we fought. There were tears and apologies and I-just-don’t-want-you-to-gos. The usual, typical, doomed-romance girl-drama. But it was potent. Emotional tension shifted so easily to sexual tension and she fucked me furiously up against the wall of our little room, fucked me like there was no tomorrow, because there wasn’t. Not for us. And when we were done and exhausted, a crumpled sweaty heap on the floor, I saw that she was crying. I never know what to do when women cry. I went to wipe her tears away but she grabbed my hand and held it tightly, looked me in the eyes intently, and said, “I want you to fuck me like a Canadian.”
I started to laugh because it was so incongruous, this sudden ludicrous image I had of fucking her up against a snowman. She was wearing only a toque and I was licking maple syrup from her naked, shivering flesh, as a friendly looking moose ambled by. It was stupid and inexplicable and I could see that I was offending her, but I couldn’t stop laughing. She threw on clothes and made to leave. I hurried to stop her but she was out the door. I dressed hastily and ran after her. She’d gone to the courtyard. It was after midnight and the air was cool. You could see the night sky just bursting with stars.
I trid to explain. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what you mean by ‘like a Canadian.’ It confused me and I laughed. I’m sorry.”
It was a long-drawn-out affair, but eventually I won her back over and figured out what she meant. She wanted penetration, unusual for non-married women who played here.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not like you’d be the first. Don’t be so full of yourself.”
Great. Because insults and anger are the way to set the mood. But I knew it was just about me leaving, and so I moved in to make this work.
I grabbed her face in both my hands and forced her to look at me, to stop, to feel the way our breasts were pressed up against one another. I didn’t say anything, just waited for her eyes to soften, and when I knew she felt like it, I kissed her. Slow, sweet, holding back, a shy first sort of kiss. I felt her shiver.
We both smiled. I kissed her again, savoring her taste, the warmth of her breath mingling with mine. Her arms were around my waist and my tongue began to dance with hers, so slow, so sweet. I went to lift her shirt. She raised her arms, inviting, and I watched as the fabric rolled across her torso and full breasts, over her head and down to the floor. I brought my mouth close to hers and it opened expectantly, but I didn’t kiss her mouth; I touched my lips to her jawline, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts. I lingered there. Cupped the swell of her in my hands and teased her nipples for a time. She shifted her weight and made small noises of pleasure. My hands slipped beneath the waist of her skirt and I pulled it down the length of her legs. In her hasty dressing, there was no time for underthings, and she was magnificently naked.
I looked around for an appropriate space. There was a stray towel by an intricately tiled fountain and I laid it down with extravagant care, smoothing all the corners and acting ridiculously like it was a bed fit for a queen. We both smiled and she approached, knelt on the towel and tried to unbutton me, but I demurred, just as she had done many times before. This was all her. She lay down, her eyes twinkling with a faint hint of daring, her knees up and locked together.
I like to remember her right there. In that moment. In a courtyard in Essaouira. Surrounded by snoring tourists. Just waiting for me to fuck her silly. Looking so utterly tempting in the moonlight. In my memories, I linger here.
In reality, I didn’t. I went to town. I’d been waiting so long to touch her that eager would be an understatement. I held her eyes, met their daring, and opened her legs. I feasted on her like a man dying of thirst in the desert feasts at an oasis. I wish I could say I was more suave, more controlled, but I was drunk with delight and abandon. She came before I entered her. So we dallied before take two, losing ourselves in bottomless kisses.
I was deliriously tired. That might have contributed to the random, uninvited images that kept popping into my head as we built up to another go. “Fuck me like a Canadian.” It was still funny. This time we were on a frozen pond, hockey players skating all around us, politely averting their eyes as I used my mouth to roll up her rim . . . oh yeah!
That’s stupid, stop thinking about that, I told myself. I focused on the task at hand. I had primed her clit sufficiently now, she was slick with desire and now was the time to give her what she wanted. I slipped a finger inside her gingerly. She was tight, but her whole body reacted and I knew it was good. I worked away, patiently, focused, listening intently to her reactions and adjusting my pace and fingers accordingly. Her breath was speeding up, her hips were encouraging a particular rhythm. I kept at it. Now she was peaking, now we were getting there, her hips became more insistent, her sounds more unthinking. But let me tell you, it was a long freaking climb to her summit. My arms began to ache, my fingers to cramp, but I kept on trekking. She was flooding now. I could feel her wetness splashing up my arm, almost to my elbow. I held in there. I kept the beat. I didn’t miss a step because I was Canadian goddammit and we were dependable little beavers. The Mountie always got his man. My country was counting on me. She wanted to be fucked like a Canadian, eh? The glory of the maple leaf depended right now on my ability to keep this pumping steady, add just the right twist at just the right moment.
I imagined myself at UN headquarters, Justin Trudeau, with his McDreamy hair and feminist principles, presenting me with a special award for international diplomacy. It came with a lifetime supply of Tim-bits and bragging rights as Chief Canuck Pussy Whisperer. k. d. lang would be pissed. Ha, I out-dyked you, I gloated inside my head as singing filled the air. Wait, that was real. There was singing. What the fuck?! I looked down at Till and at just that moment her pussy erupted, her muscles clenched and shot out my hand as her body spasmed and her scream joined the singing. I was so confused. Was I that exhausted? My arms felt like floppy spaghetti but was my mind similarly cooked? I fell down beside Till on the sopping-wet towel, shaking all over. That’s when I realized it was the call to prayer. The singing. It was the mosque, calling worshippers to the first early morning prayer. So my mind was only half baked. It all made sense.
I love that memory of that ridiculous, gorgeous night, just as I love that sound. And now when I hear it, I think of Till, this beautiful, fierce, brave woman I once had a short time to love. Wherever I am, when I hear the call of the sacred, I think of her.
JANI-LYN’S DRAGON
Nat Burns
September 1970
It didn’t matter that she came over unannounced, at odd hours. In fact, I liked it that way. Made it seem more like the illicit, secret rendezvous it was. When I heard the heavy, solid slam of the limo door late that Saturday, I knew it was her and a sense of well-being washed over me. She always affected me that way. I was a Janis-junkie, giving up all hope of any other relationship just for these sporadic, intimate, stolen visits. It was a lonely life. Sometimes I’d see her once in six months, other times three times in one month. I just never knew. Some of it had to do with proximity; if she was playing in a city within one hundred miles she’d point the limo my way. If she was working on either coast, however, I wouldn’t see her for a while.
But when she was here . . .
I felt her before I saw her. I stood in the center of my small living room, my breathing shallow. The heat of her presence crept along my back, warming me. Turning my head, I inhaled her unique scent—cigarettes and whisky with an undertone of patchouli. She’d found this lotion once in a little shop outside San Francisco. It was hand-mixed by a woman named Clarence, another of her conquests, I’m sure. She’d been so excited by the new discovery that she’d brought me a whole set of the patchouli toilet water, lotion, and soap. I’d never used them. They were her scent. I did, however, open the bottles often, especially when I was missing her. I’d inhale the fragrance, feeling her all over me. I usually cried.
“Hey, sweetheart,” she said from the doorway. “You’re gaining some weight finally. You look good!”
I smiled and dropped my eyes, feeling shy. “I always gain a little when the school year begins. All those other teachers bringing in the home-baked goodies to the meetings . . . ”
She grinned and placed her woven bag on the hall chair. Then her floppy hat joined the bag, the movement mussing her frizzy auburn hair. I reached into a nearby drawer and fished out a thick, black rubber band from the stack I kept there, just for her.
