Best Lesbian Erotica 2011

SNAPSHOT A. D. R. Forte

I see her on the beach at sunset, a portrait against the backdrop of a tropical sea and a sky on fire: long hair, down to her waist; one arm raised, holding a wide-brimmed hat in place; T-shirt flapping around lean hips as she watches the light burn into the sea.

I could walk away with my picture and tell any story I want, make her into anything I desire. In another place, I would.

But here on a distant beach, I gamble on the preposterous because I’ll never see her again.

Sand tries to trap my steps, but I stumble across it anyway. I apologize for my intrusion, for my forwardness. I don’t know if she understands me, or even if she speaks English. It could as easily be Dutch or French or Spanish. She looks at me with old eyes in a young face and I hurry to find words, try not to stumble over them or replace them with others that are meaningless and safe.

Not that I can think of anything appropriately mindless to say—not here, where even laughter means more than sound.

“This may sound strange,” I say. “But I wanted to tell you I think you’re beautiful. You should know that.”

After the first surprise, she laughs—a mocking laugh but not for me. For herself.

“Yeah. Right,” she says, and I’m inspired to stay, to convince her. But even the impropriety of strangers in a strange place has its limits.

“It’s true,” I say, and I leave her with a smile.

I don’t look for her again.

Under the hot equatorial sun, I sweat and do the things tourists do: buy strings of polished beads and eat spicy shellfish and thick chunks of fried bread dipped in sauce. I go on bus rides and look at stone forts with silent cannons robed in green moss.

My fellow tourists snap pictures.

I keep pictures in my head.

“I should’ve thanked you,” she says behind me, and I jump, startled at finding myself not alone. Her voice is well bred but lazy, muting the consonants, drawing the vowels out, running them all together like notes strummed on a guitar.

By contrast, the voice of the sea is loud in this empty stretch of resort walkway where we stand: a wall hung with local art on one side and bougainvillea bushes lining the seawall on the other. It’s a secluded place, lit with incongruent fluorescent lights against the tropical dark, and I feel guilty simply being here.

The black dinner dress dips between her small breasts and shows delicate bones under the skin of her chest, reveals slender arms smooth with toned muscle. In heels, she’s half a head taller than I am. Even with her painted eyes and lips I can still tell she’s half my age.

I look at her and shrug.

“You want to fuck me.” The words from those cherry-bright lips in that ladylike voice shock me, arouse me, make me feel a little bit dirty. I want to deny it, desperately. Stutter that my words were just a compliment, a kindness, a moment of aesthetic appreciation.

All bullshit. And she doesn’t deserve bullshit. Something deep down in my conscience decided that for me when I first saw her.

“Yes,” I say. “I won’t though.”

“Why not? You’re here alone.”

I want to argue that I damn well have company, but something in that pretty face and sarcastic smile won’t let me lie.

“Don’t confuse solitude with desperation,” I tell her. She leans against the wall opposite, slouched, hands behind her back. That kind of come-hither, gauche posture perfected by models with their awkward sensuality. But for her the gesture is unplanned, unstudied and magnetic for it. I look away and take a deep breath. Beads swing and glitter against her skin.

“I never suggested you were.”

It’s not pride that makes me tighten my fingers on the strap of my bag and straighten my spine as I turn away. It’s something else that flutters, hot and cold and shivery, just below my navel.

Pictures are meant to stay whole, in completed perfection—not taken apart, dissected and undressed, played with and ruined as if they were plastic dolls with plastered smiles and silky, shining, nylon hair.

“That’s good,” I hear myself say. Walk away now, while the barrier of unfamiliarity still exists. Let her think I’m offended or neurotic or worse.

Don’t let her see how much I ache.

She catches up to me in two strides, maybe three: the advantage of having long legs and not wearing a pencil skirt. She catches my chin and cheek between thumb and fingers, forcing me to stop, forcing me to face her. My scowl doesn’t faze her for a minute. Used to getting her way, I tell myself. Spoiled. Bratty.

Cherry-red lips brush against mine. Light catching on the clustered diamonds of a bracelet dazzles me.

She draws back a little, still holding me, holding my gaze. “You should know I thought you were beautiful.”

A pause. Her gaze falters, drops to my mouth as her thumb grazes my lower lip. “I couldn’t understand why you’d noticed me. I was angry because…” I feel her sigh brush my neck. “…because I didn’t believe you.”

Like a caress or a slap, the fingers release my face. I watch her walk down the corridor, hips and hurried steps making the black dress sway, like a charm. I close my eyes for a second and inhale deeply.

I don’t know what the hell’s just happened.

All I know is need.

I look at black rocks stark against white powdered sand and think there’s someplace I ought to be instead of here. There are obligations somewhere in my life, but I don’t want to think about them now. I think about her until my head spins from heat, inside and out.

Skin on fire, I stumble back to my room and pass out on white sheets until the sun goes down. I shiver, reluctant to head down to dinner. Afraid I’ll see her again. Afraid I won’t.

Fate takes the decision out of my hands.

I’ve made acquaintances here at the hotel: middle-aged divorcées, career women getting away from it all; they mistake me for one of them. So I get the dinner invitation phone call, and I can’t think fast enough to find a good reason to refuse.

I fill in the fourth chair at the table near the window, smiling and laughing, but my choice of seating isn’t accidental. I can see the entrance to the dining room and all of the room itself but the few tables behind us and the wall, and those are all taken. I don’t see her belonging to any of the framed pictures of laughing diners they create. So, like a covert spider, I wait.

I watch her stalk in, stunning in lavender silk splendor tonight, the dress sleeveless and short of course, showing off those fine arms and magnificent legs to every male in the place. They all look of course, and I decide I hate them all.

Her gaze slides over me. I feel its touch: much more than the bored disinterest her pout advertises, but her façade doesn’t falter for an instant. She goes to a table at the far windows, joins the couple seated there with barely a nod. They acknowledge her then ignore her, return to their wine and conversation.

I can’t see her face at this distance, but I watch her take a phone out of her purse and start tapping with rapid intensity at the keyboard. She waves the waiter away with a dismissive hand and a shake of her head, without looking up. Her hair is tied up tonight in a carefully styled ponytail, and the tips of smooth, gathered strands brush the sharp lines of her shoulder blades as she hunches over the phone, shutting out the world around her, oblivious to the way it adores her.

Then for a split second, a brush of movement, she glances up and looks across the miles of pretentious carpet and polished crystal. She meets my gaze without the mask, without the veneer of indifference; with simple longing.

I melt inside.

This, I think, is real lust. I haven’t known what the word meant before now. Beyond mere physical desire, or romance or passion, it resists having other words and adjectives attached to it. If I force myself, I can think of terms like primeval and devastating and ruthless, none of them even remotely adequate.

Swallowing, I look at my plate and see the fork in my hand shake. My dinner companions are giggling, bantering with the waiter, another twentysomething-year-old with a twenty-year-old body evident under the hibiscus-printed shirt and formfitting white slacks. He grins, enjoying the attention, probably hoping somewhere at the back of his mind for an older, richer lover with the promise of a green card.

And that would be okay; acceptable in the eyes of the world.

What makes my fascination any different?

She leaves a letter for me at the front desk.

There’s a phone number and an email address. No name.

I stand there, holding the scrap of paper while the warm breeze flutters it and my hair. I feel shaky, off balance, knowing she’s gone and this—whatever it’s been—is over. Unless… I turn the paper over and over in my hands. Unless…

Back in my lair, in my world, surrounded by the mundane things of my life, I unfold that piece of paper again. For months it’s lain ignored at the bottom of a drawer, crushed beneath keep-sakes: a necklace of shells, a miniature wood carving of some bird decorated with colored glitter and varnish, as useless and exotic as these things.

But the souvenirs haven’t haunted me, taunted me silently every time I pass the drawer.

With the email I find a picture online and an offer to click her into my life. But it feels too intimate yet, and too cheap. “Friended.” Easy, acceptable, uncomplicated, banal.

Instinct, intuition tells me it’s not what she would want either, if she even still wants anything of me.

I close my eyes for a moment against the pain of that thought. When I open them again, I find the phone number instead. The letters bleed black over the white screen of my phone, glare at me impatiently until a tap of my thumb on the keypad sends them flying beyond my reach, into the impossible.

Tell me where to find you. Tell me how.

I steer the rental car, top down, along miles of highway under a relentless sun. Horses and brown dirt and scrubby grass roll by. Where the land slopes into pretend hills piney trees crowd its face. Cattle drowse in the meager shade behind wire fences. This is her country. Wide open spaces, amazing in their sparseness.

She sent me an address, directions, dates. She didn’t have to tell me she would be there alone.

The gates of the property are open. I drive up to the house at the edge of the lake, and she comes up from the waterfront and around the side of the house, like a nymph from her domain, to meet me. Hair loose and half dry in distracting tangles, T-shirt damp and revealing dark nipples, skin kissed by the sun into gentle bronze, hinting at some heritage native to this wild, sun-baked land.

If I thought her beautiful in the exotic tropics, here in her habitat she is beyond words, beyond my power to do anything but gape and stare and sweat, feeling ridiculous and old for having come this far in my pearl earrings and khakis. For what?

“It’s insane, but I’ve missed you. God, you look like fucking Jackie Kennedy,” she says as she kisses me, getting lake water all over my perspiration-soaked shirt. Her hand slides up my spine, her tongue into my mouth.

I was hot before, but this… this is a different kind of heat. This sears. Incinerates logic and caution and prudence. It withers uncertainty.

I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. But she does.

I lift the T-shirt over her head and her breasts bounce free. I stare. Slowly I reach out to touch, to catch her nipples between my fingers and squeeze. She moans between folded lips.

My thumb slides down the line of her torso, to stomach and navel and the waist of the wet pair of shorts clinging to her hips. She sucks in a breath. Her flesh moves under my hand, and I feel an answering quiver between my legs.

“Undress me,” she says, quietly. Her voice is loud in this silence of wind and water.

“Here?”

She doesn’t answer, and after a moment, I unbutton the shorts. I trace the shape of her pussy through the wet panties hidden under the shorts.

“Mm…” she sighs. I can feel her breath on my cheek and smell her body, a trace of perfume lingering under the scent of earth and water. I smell her arousal as my fingers press the wet cotton into her crotch, rubbing harder.

Hesitantly, I lean forward and let my tongue flicker across one stiff nipple. I feel her body under my hand jerk. Her intake of breath is sharp and sudden.

I look up because fingers are twisting, tumbling my wind-blown hair, pulling my head up. She kisses me again, my hand still trapped between her legs, still playing with her, sliding now beneath the panties to touch her hot, wet flesh. With a moan, she pulls my hand away and breaks the kiss.

“You…” she breathes.

I lean back against the car where she pushes me, unresisting while she lifts my shirt. The light dances red and harsh against my closed eyelids. I feel the heat on my bare skin as she slides my pants down, conscious of my exposure, even in the seclusion of this place. I should say no. But my chance for saying no happened before I got on the plane to come here, happened a year ago on that distant beach.

A shadow falls over my face, and I open my eyes as her naked skin presses into mine. Tiny jolts of awareness ripple along my skin as I reach up to pull her closer, tighter. Her panties are gone and the hair between her legs brushes the nude skin between my own.

So different, even in that detail, I think as the hard metal of the convertible digs into my back and I caress her shape, finding it by touch.

But does it matter?

Her lips at my earlobe, my neck, the swell of my breast, tell me nothing matters but them, their hot kiss. She’s on her knees in the dirt, spreading my legs. Her tongue tests my wetness, laps at my clit. I shudder. I try to push my palms against the bones of her shoulders, but she’s stubborn.

She will force me to orgasm here and now, like this, with the sun and the damp heat of sex burning me up, outside and in. Her fingers move in my cunt and my ass, and I tighten up against her patient tongue. My head is on fire as release floods my limbs. I don’t know how to breathe.

Scolding, she slathers sunblock over my body as we lie on a towel at the water’s edge. Her hands linger on my breasts, filling them with dangerous heat.

“You’re going to kill yourself with skin cancer, running around out here without it.”

I want to tell her sunburn is the least of my worries. I just take the tube from her and return the favor, massaging the cream into her ass and thighs and the backs of her calves. I end up lifting her feet and kissing the arches of each instep. I run my tongue in little circles around the skin and she moans and wriggles.

“Don’t!” she says, which means “Yes.”

We roll together, bodies slick with grease, tongues moving hard and fast. The sunblock tastes god-awful, but it’s not long before it’s washing off again as I chase her into the water, as we struggle and writhe together. My fingers probe her cunt as she tries to float, and I find the places that make her shiver and squirm and lose her equilibrium. She drags me under with her as she splashes down, and we come up laughing, coughing, swatting stinging fans of water in each other’s faces before she falls into my arms again.

We’re like children.

She is. I remind myself of that daily even as I try to avoid remembering whose house I’m in.

“My parents don’t come here anymore,” she tells me. “Not since I was a kid. I’m the only one who gives a damn about the place.”

“Boyfriends?” I ask, a little bit jealous as I say it. She shakes her head.

“I was trying to escape them. All of them.”

I imagine slideshows of the stories she tells me: nailing shingles on the roof and repairing a toilet herself. Writing her thesis. The months of one long winter, living on coffee and a broken heart. Endless southern summers on the lake.

Like the lake, it all lies hidden beneath the toss of silken hair and the hard flash of diamonds. Her hair hasn’t seen conditioner in the days I’ve been here. Not a scrap of jewelry except when she absently snaps her watch around her wrist out of habit while she works. Lost in lines of code for hours at a time until she rouses to the smell of dinner or my touch.

I remind myself to keep the stills of her like this: flush and tousled from lovemaking. Serious from thought.

But she’s an enigma. A 3-D puzzle picture that I can’t capture and set in two-dimensional glass. Am I afraid?

I look away from the questions in her eyes as we drink frozen margaritas and listen to cicadas drone in the darkness. Beyond the lights of the porch there’s nothing to see; nothing to frame and save for later.

“I only meant to stay a week,” I say. “And it’s been far longer than that.”

Her release of breath is so soft it might just be a breath of wind.

“I know,” is all she replies.

After a while, she stands up and takes my hand. She leads me inside.

After the still-heavy heat of the night, the bedroom is cold. Her nipples pucker, and I trace a finger down raised hairs on her arm. She turns to me and catches my hands and we sink down on her bed. I kiss her pretty nose and her lips and her chin.

She arches her neck and I kiss her breasts and the half-moon shadows beneath them. I follow the shape of her ribs with my tongue and listen to her shallow breaths, coming faster as my lips touch her belly and then her mound. I’ve tasted her now so much, I know her taste better than some lovers will know each other in a lifetime, and still I catch my breath—trembling inside with wonder at the way I can make her move under my mouth, the way I can make her twist and grimace and bite her lips.

I love the taste of her clit. My brain knows it’s just another bit of skin and nerve endings, scented with her wetness, but it’s something else on my tongue, a delicacy that I can savor, but never have enough of. Is this what love feels like?

Raising myself to an elbow, I replace lips with fingers, because I want to lie beside her and watch her body move from tense stillness to sudden fitful motion; watch her face.

She begs me to fuck her and fuck her and I do, until the sex becomes hell. I wanted to stop on the second day when we’d been fucking nearly constantly, bitches in heat, and I could tell from her grimace and the agony in her soft, half-stifled moans that she was too sore. That pleasure had become laced with pain. But I couldn’t stop.

Then, like now, my own cunt tightened greedily, enjoying her torment. And I could see the same greed mingled with pain in her eyes as I touched her. She wouldn’t have let me stop anyway.

By now, I know what she wants. I know how far to push. When to stop and tease with the edge of a fingernail until her breathing becomes ragged, when to pinch and when to slap so that she squeaks and her tanned skin flushes red. When to kiss her and steal her breath and massage her abused flesh until she rises and throbs beneath my palm. Then I kiss away the salty tears of release from the corners of her eyes and run my fingers through her hair.

I wrap my fingers in the strands, heavy and soft even after days of scorching sun. I twist until my hand is bound with brown-gold silk, and pull her head around until she faces me. Color still stains her cheeks. Her eyes shimmer under wet lashes.

A portrait, etched on my memory like a woodcut, deep in the grain where it won’t fade, can’t be forgotten.

I ask her the question that isn’t a question, my voice rebelling with some emotion I don’t really want to figure out.

“But you aren’t gonna let me go.”

“I can’t make you stay,” she whispers, bitter and passionate and sweet.

I release her hair, strands clinging to my fingers like errant silk, roll over on my back with a sigh. She crawls over me and doesn’t make a sound as she pushes my thighs apart.

I tell myself I’m an old dog trying to learn the impossible. Browsing the shelves of a bookstore, I find a used paperback copy of Death in Venice. I buy it and put it on the front row of my bookshelf. It will make her laugh. She’ll tell me I’m a fool as she kisses me.

I do things like that on purpose. Planning what to say to her, anticipating the toss of her head, or how she’ll lean on the back of a chair in the awkward, sexy way that makes my stomach clench. How she looks at me, saying nothing at all.

I save it all up, hoarding every snapshot. Keeping pictures in my head. Always.