Best Lesbian Erotica 2014

CALL FOR SUBMISSION Nairne Holtz

As a writer, it wasn’t uncommon for me to receive Calls for Submission. But when Cyn Byrne invited me to submit a story to her anthology of lesbian sexual fantasies, I did wonder whether the request was strictly professional.

We had met a few months earlier in a city neither of us lived in, where Cyn was launching Dyke Dimensions, a collection of lesbian speculative fiction. When I arrived at the bar where the launch was being held, I introduced myself to Cyn, who was sitting at a table with a shiny stack of books beside her—copies of the anthology just arrived from the printer. I was surprised to discover she was black, partly because I was white and tend to assume others are, and partly because she wrote science fiction, which is white geek-boy territory. She was, however, a bit of a nerd, a chunky woman in khakis and a black Schrödinger’s cat T-shirt. Through her wire-framed glasses, she was staring blankly at me.

How could she not know the names of her contributors? “I wrote the story about the mutant heart,” I reminded her.

“Right!” She grinned at me. “I loved that story. I read it over and over again.”

I inhaled her compliment like a glittery recreational drug, something with unknown side effects. “Thanks.” The story had been my one foray into genre fiction.

Another woman approached Cyn, and I left. Later in the evening, after we had read our pieces and autographed books for the two people who bought them, I asked Cyn to dance. She hesitated before taking my hand, and I wondered if she had a partner. We boogied to Madonna and then a slow song came on. I stood uncertainly, but Cyn placed her arms around my back and drew me close. I could smell her cologne and feel her breasts and belly press up against me. Inside my padded bra I felt my nipples react.

Cyn said, “You’re tiny.” Her tone was both protective and full of awe.

“I’m taller than you,” I retorted. I had just gotten out of a relationship and wasn’t sure if I was ready to submit to the attraction flowing between us.

“That’s only because you’re wearing heels,” she replied.

When the song ended, she picked up my hand, gave it a reverent kiss, and said, “It was nice to meet you.”

Now I was being dismissed. Apparently, she wasn’t prepared to submit either.

At home, I emailed Cyn, but she didn’t reply. A month later, she invited me to be her Facebook friend, and I checked out her profile. I discovered she was “in a relationship” and had about four hundred friends. I wasn’t going to be some cheap Facebook conquest—I ignored her invitation. Then the email came, asking me to submit a sexual fantasy to her anthology, and I reconsidered the Facebook invite. Did I want to miss future calls for submission? As I clicked on ACCEPT, I told myself I was joining her network for what were strictly professional reasons. But when I saw her relationship status had changed to “in an open relationship,” I felt an unbidden thrill.

I began writing a sexual fantasy for her. Writing and rewriting it put me into a sexual fever, my thoughts a non-stop erotic cabaret, blinking lights, on, on, on. Cyn was my muse, even though a chubby black stud hardly fit the traditional image of a Grecian goddess. Sometimes, after writing for an hour I would lie down and finger myself to a climax, a wisp of an orgasm because I was so excited.

I sent my story to Cyn, who sent me a reply the next day: I want this story!

But did she want me? And if so, how available was she? I emailed her to say the story was hers if she sent me a contract, and got a response with an attachment. I expected it to be a contract, but instead she had sent me a story. Since I was a freelance editor, she wondered, would I be kind enough to give her some constructive criticism?

I printed her story and settled onto my couch to read it. Bombs detonate, superpowers fall, the human genome is nothing but a toy for scientists now, but Vegas is still the place to gamble and get laid. The government hasn’t really cleaned up Nevada since the last nuclear attack. To go to the desert you have to be genetically modified to withstand cancer (who would have thought nuclear war would be what taught us to cure cancer?), but for a cyborg like me whose body is part machine, it’s not a problem.

I read on. The cyborg had been hired to track down a stripper in Las Vegas. To get close to her, the cyborg paid for a lap dance, and then handcuffed her quarry. Ostensibly, the cyborg was in charge, but the dancer’s resistance made their roles jump like summer lightning—moving, glowing electrons. It was obvious to me that Cyn, like me, enjoyed a good power struggle.

It felt like Cyn was talking to me through her story, using it as a way to flirt, but I wasn’t sure if we were compatible. In both the story she sent and her story in Dyke Dimensions, her butch protagonists were tops who didn’t come. Did Cyn always have to be in control? Was she a stone butch? When I sent her my editing suggestions, I couldn’t resist adding a postscript: “Do your butch characters ever get done?”

Cyn thanked me for my comments on her story and ignored the postscript. I had to have an answer, if only to improve my fantasy life, so I went to a gay bookstore and pawed through Cyn’s work, looking for a scene where a femme makes love to a butch… but couldn’t find one.

Instead, I spotted Cyn on the cover of a lesbian magazine holding hands with a woman I recognized, Vixen Swift, the illustrious lesbian romance author. Vixen’s red hair had been tucked into a classic chignon, and she was wearing one of her signature corsets with her large breasts on full display. The article described Cyn and Vixen as a “celesbian” couple. Apparently, they had been hand-fasted for a number of years. With a shudder, I dropped the magazine onto the rack. Vixen and I had been introduced on at least three occasions, and each time she had to be reminded of who I was.

I went over to another section and picked up Vixen’s latest release, and brought it to the counter along with Chrome Stud, the first book in Cyn’s cyberpunk series.

At home, I began to read Vixen’s novel, Soul Mate, which featured a “playa” who meets “a titian-haired queen with piercing blue eyes.” (Nouns in Vixen’s novel were always accompanied by a convoy of adjectives.) When I finished the book, I felt like throwing it across the room. The story was so formulaic: a bad boi, who is afraid of intimacy because she was once fucked over by a heartless bitch, is saved by the love of a good femme.

Since when were lesbians afraid of intimacy anyway? I wished there were women my age—midthirties—who didn’t carry any more baggage than one bad relationship, whose only reason for not having a partner was fear of being hurt and not fear of responsibility.

I also wondered why Vixen, if she was in an open relationship, wrote such sappy, moralistic books. I had to give her some credit: the sex scenes, with which her novel brimmed, were spicy and accomplished. Especially the ones where the queen made love to her boi by going down on her while fucking her with three fingers, a scenario that sounded vaguely familiar.

I plucked Dyke Dimensions from my bookshelf and reread Vixen’s sex scene between a vampire and a werewolf. The vampire licked the werewolf and penetrated her with three fingers.

Was this how Cyn liked to be done? Reality often squirms beneath the stories writers choose to tell, and we give it away when we repeat ourselves.

When Cyn sent me a contract for my story, she asked if I would be attending Good for Her, a conference for “lesbian popular fiction.”

I write unpopular fiction, I replied. I’m not a big fan of genre stuff.

Her reply was defensive. By condemning genre fiction, I think you’re missing out on the importance of myths and heroes, which set moral examples and spiritually nourish us.

Right, she didn’t care what I thought of her writing—she was worried about my undernourished soul. Time to reassure her I did respect her. Tales of larger-than-life cyborg dykes saving the world are fun, but romances are cheesy.

A one-line response arrived. Were you just dumped or something?

When I read this, I clicked my laptop shut. I hadn’t been dumped but might as well have been. My lover had behaved so badly, she had given me no choice but to end the relationship. I didn’t answer her email, but a few days later checked her Facebook status, which seemed to refer to me: Cyn is wondering if she alienated a certain literary writer.

I sent her an email. I did recently end a relationship. My ex was untrustworthy, which tells you about both her limitations and my own for choosing her. I want to read (and write) books that more honestly reflect people’s flaws.

She replied within hours. So you’d rather read the kitchen sink realism of my life growing up in a dumpy bungalow with my homophobic Seventh Day Adventist white mom and black dad? Or hear about what it was like to look after my developmentally delayed brother who, last Thanksgiving, ratted out Pops on his trips to strip joints?

This was precisely the kind of book I wanted to read. Yes.

In May, the city where Good for Her was held was already hot and steamy, and the air smelled like flowers. On the first night of the conference, I found myself sitting on a patio sipping a generously alcoholic mint julep. On the sidewalk in front of me, a huge oak tree arose out of the concrete, splitting it open, and buskers were crowded around the tree, slapping bongo drums. I was in a hipster neighborhood with vintage clothing stores and juice bars, barbershops and head shops, a place in which the black and white counterculture convened. Earlier in the evening, at the opening reception, Cyn had been the sole black woman. Her features, which I could see clearly for the first time in the brightly lit hall, weren’t a smooth blend of white and black but a more discordant one. Her face was long and her slender nose jutted out, while her hair and lips were more typically Afro-American. It occurred to me that her writing about cyborgs was a metaphor for her own identity. Vixen popped over while I was chatting with Cyn, and was unexpectedly friendly to me. I was surprised to hear them call each other Cynthia and Victoria. When I remarked upon it, Vixen wagged her finger. “Vixen isn’t me; she’s my drag queen persona!”

Cyn said, “Never confuse the writer with her art.”

“Except they aren’t unrelated,” I told them.

Vixen proceeded to describe an anthology she was putting together about black and white queer relationships, and Cyn interrupted to ask me if I was interested in submitting to it. “I’ve only slept with one black woman,” I said.

“Was she any good?” Cyn asked.

“She was,” I replied. “But she refused to remove her baseball cap during sex. She even slept in it. It was very strange.”

“Maybe she was having a bad-hair day,” Cyn said.

“Or she didn’t want to put a do-rag on in front of a white chick,” Vixen added with a meaningful glance at Cyn.

“Interesting,” I said. “That wouldn’t have occurred to me.” Being white sometimes made me feel stupid, or worse, self-conscious.

As I sipped the last of my mint julep, my thoughts extended farther back to Shawna-of-the-baseball-cap, whom I had met at a gay club. I wasn’t terribly experienced, and she had picked me up. I had seen her at the same club the week before and couldn’t stop looking at her: she was a slender, elegant, very dark-skinned woman wearing a mustard-colored suit. It was as though she had materialized from an earlier era; she only needed a fedora. The night she picked me up she was more ordinarily dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a backward baseball cap over her short hair. As an excuse to talk to her, I had shyly given her a flyer for an event I was organizing. Later, as I was unlocking my bike and about to head home, she ran up to me and asked if I wanted to go to her place. “Okay,” I said.

Although we were both timid and complete strangers, we proceeded to have surprisingly satisfactory sex. Then we blurted out our life stories, bringing forth our most severe traumas like tiny, wriggling birds in the palms of our hands. The level of our intimacy both astonished me and felt like a terrifying responsibility. She wanted to hang out the next day, and I bolted. Feelings, which I definitely had for her, were liquid nitrogen, and it was safest to wait until the white fog of them dissipated. But I waited too long, and she hooked up with someone else. We remained friendly, but then I stopped seeing her around. One day I did run into her, and she updated me on her life. Unable to deal with being black and gay, she had drifted back to her island community, fucked a guy who had no interest in being a parent, and had a child. She didn’t seem happy about these choices, and I felt bad for her.

On the last morning of the Good for Her conference, I was drying myself off from a shower when I heard a knock on my door. Grabbing my bathrobe, I opened the door, expecting to see the chambermaid. Instead, Cyn stood before me.

She glanced at my bare feet and legs. “Is this a good time?”

“It’s fine.” What was she doing here? Rather disappointingly, I had barely seen her since the opening reception. She had been busy. She had given three workshops, been on a panel and last night been the MC at the awards ceremony.

I stepped away from the door. “Come in.”

She followed me into my room, and I sat on the bed. She grabbed the only chair, moved it beside the bed and sat down. She smelled as though she also had just taken a shower.

“Did you have fun at the awards?” she asked.

I hadn’t really but didn’t tell her that. “I found some of the categories surprising, such as Best Paranormal Lesbian Romance.”

“Finding three winners for that was challenging,” Cyn admitted. Each award had three winners because, as Cyn had earnestly explained last night, the lesbian community deserved more.

“To be perfectly honest, I probably wouldn’t come to this conference again,” I said. For the entire weekend, I had felt as though I were in some kind of lesbian-feminist time capsule. Everyone was wearing a T-shirt with a slogan, and there were women with hair on their chins who weren’t transitioning. It wasn’t a crowd that was into irony.

“That’s too bad.” Cyn tilted her chair back, like she was a kid, a nervous kid.

“I mostly came here to see you,” I blurted out.

The look she gave me was unsurprised. “Yeah. Well, um, Victoria is okay with us hooking up, but there are ground rules.”

I glanced at the clock radio. “My plane leaves in three hours, so tell me quickly what they are!”

“I can do you, I can top you.”

I frowned. The emails we had sent each other had felt so intimate, almost as though we were in a relationship. Now they seemed more like a conversation I had been having with myself. Hadn’t she realized from my story what my desires were? “But I wanted you to submit to me!”

The chair came crashing down. “I don’t know if Victoria would be cool with that. I don’t know if I am. Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”

She didn’t look me while she said this, and I raised my hands, like “stop.” She had been driving me crazy for months, and I couldn’t stand the idea of not having her. What to do then about the fact that we were both dominant? Perhaps I should lie back and let her do me? I loved to be done, and if there wasn’t much talking, we could each imagine we were in charge. This was a strategy I had successfully deployed before, but I wanted more from her, from us.

I gestured to the chair. “Why don’t you sit back down? I have an idea about how to make this work.”

She hesitated but then did as I suggested. I stood before her, wriggled my shoulders and let my bathrobe slide to the floor. Just before setting off for the conference, I had optimistically had a Brazilian, and her brown eyes immediately zeroed in on it. “Apparently, you like lap dances.”

She swallowed. “Uh-huh.”

“I’m going to give you one.” I sat on her lap and rubbed my warm shaved pussy against her pants. I slid my hands over my breasts and pinched my own nipples. Her hands stroked my back. I pushed my breasts in her face and she began to suck on my nipples. I felt myself get wet; could smell it, too. I slipped my fingers into my pussy and brought my hand up to her face, and she inhaled my scent.

Her hands gripped my thighs. “You sure you don’t want stud service?”

“Down, boi.” I eased myself from her lap. Turned around and bent down, so she could see my ass and cunt. I peeked coyly over my shoulder at her. “If you could do me right now, how would you do it?”

“I’d tell you to lie down and spread your legs.”

I got onto the floor and spread my legs as wide apart as I could.

She stared at my pussy and continued, “I’d unzip my pants and take out my dick. Your mouth would open at how big it was, and I’d ask you, ‘Do you want it, baby?’” She paused, waiting for an answer from me.

I took a deep breath and equivocated. “Maybe I do.” This was true. Her words turned me on even if I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy doing what she had described. My hand drifted between my legs.

She leaned forward to get a closer view of me playing with myself. “I’d fuck you nice and slow, and you’d beg me to be rougher. But I’d remind you a girl can’t get everything she wants. Then I’d pull my dick out of your pussy, and you’d run your nails down my back in frustration.” She paused. “Are you frustrated?”

“No,” I told her breathlessly. “I’m about to have an excellent orgasm.”

A doubtful look came into her eyes. She wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed that I contradicted her or pleased by how turned on I was. “You want my cock.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to admit it, but the idea of her strap-on inside me was definitely getting me off. “I do.”

Cyn continued in a hard voice. “I’d fuck you and then pull out and come on your tits.”

“I’m coming now,” I told her, and I was. I rubbed myself harder, and my orgasm rushed out of me, like something escaping and flying away. I felt as spent as I would have been had we actually fucked.

Cyn put her hands on her belt and started to tug it free. “To answer your question of a few months ago, I do like to get done.”

“I asked if your butch characters ever got done,” I teased.

She began to unbutton her jeans. “What would you do to me?” She wanted to jerk off, and she was willing to submit to whatever my fantasies were of her. Unfortunately, all I could imagine were the descriptions in her girlfriend’s book in which the butch heroine is licked and finger-fucked.

I got on my knees and kissed her hand, which was at her groin. “I have a plane to catch. Besides, I think we should stick with your ground rules.” I slipped the end of her belt back into her belt loop.

She looked down at me. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She had given me an orgasm, but since I couldn’t possess her in the way that I wanted, I was ready to hand her back to her girlfriend where they would no doubt process what had happened and have hot, tormented sex. “Besides, remember, I don’t like stories with—forgive the pun—happy endings.”

Her brows tilted into a frown. “Wait, are you going to write about this?”

I stood up and reached for my glasses and put them on. “Honey, what do you think?”