Best Lesbian Erotica 2014

TONGUE IN CHEEK Amal Arabi

It was Pride Month, and I was at a queer BDSM club in San Francisco. I had bought a pair of leather pants especially for the occasion at a shop in the Castro earlier that day. F2M porn was playing on a screen above our heads and I watched in fascination, though not much arousal, unfortunately. I was, well, erotically quite out of my element. I found no pleasure in their pain, though I confess I do like to be tied up occasionally, blindfolded and vice-versa. I love to fuck a woman when I am in handcuffs. I don’t know why, it’s just sexy.

The one thing I love about Frisco is that sex comes to you; you don’t have to go looking for it. And I am particularly over-restrained by a feminist upbringing that leaves me loath to make unwanted advances on a stranger. I loathe making a woman feel like a piece of meat without her prior, written consent. So, for me, cruising is not easy. I have too many honorable protocols that inhibit me from being the freewheeling sleazeball of the sexiest city on earth. Tonight, I was here on a mission. My friend, of a substantially older generation, was in town and I was his ride home. Although we had known each other for years, he had only just let slip what his birth name was. I knew him as Bob, but apparently he used to be called Edith, probably before I was born. It was a jarring moment; how could Bob ever have been Edith? And Bob… he says quite frankly between licks of his fingers after he devours his burger and fries, “I fuckin’ hate lesbians.”

Of course he doesn’t mean me; I didn’t leave him because he turned out to be a dude back in the ’80s when it wasn’t so cool, and radical lesbianism was on fire and the sex wars were ablaze; I was in primary school back then. Bob makes an exception for me, because between us there is a silent understanding that is the language of masculinity. I could have been a man, a transgender man by a hair. There is only one distinguishing difference between Bob and me: I felt at home, always, in the female body. I loved, even as a child, being masculine, butch, as strong as a hundred boys. I never wanted to be a boy, even though that’s what everyone else projected on me—at school; not so much at home, where my parents were hippies.

So I’m sitting there while Bob is trying to get laid, and now my attention turns to a demonstration of great precision with a whip. At one end, a woman, naked and tied up in a star shape at ankles and wrists, is having her nipples slashed with the very tip-end of a whip in the hand of a leather-clad lover. These things hurt, I’m thinking, but there’s pleasure in this. Interesting, it must be the extrasensory stimulation, compounded by the exhilaration of an extrovert having an audience.

So, let’s go back a little while. Your vanilla lesbian friend here (that is, me) hasn’t had sex for a couple of months, since a complete stranger offered a lingeringly beautiful, but brief, sexual encounter. And she’s thinking, I don’t know how these people can pick each other up. I don’t have the nerve for that. And suddenly I have a moment of clarity, that Zen moment where everything in your head goes quiet for a second or two and then a deep insight, like a vision, emerges. And the insight is: I’m not going to have sex again for a very, very long time. It feels very true.

Enter Cindy, stage right. An au pair. Femme. Gorgeous as hell. Strikes up a conversation. And I notice that no matter what I say, she finds it funny. It doesn’t matter: I could say “potato” (which I probably do, to test the theory) and she would just laugh. I like to make people laugh, I like to bring happiness into an otherwise grossly oppressive world. But by the third or fourth burst of laughter I start to think: Oh, she’s coming on to me! I get it. Could it be, my moment of Zen was wrong? So I tell her I’m leaving town in a week, but maybe we should go out for dinner before I leave. She gives me her number, takes mine and leaves with her friend. I told you, in Frisco you don’t have to look for sex, sex comes to you.

The following morning she sends me a message. Fairly straightforward. Do I pack? And I realize Oh shit, she thinks I’m a dude, I mean statistically speaking, given where we met, I should have been. So I tell her quite honestly, No, I don’t have any prosthetics. Then she responds: So you use your hands.

Yes.

Do you fist?

I know it’s just text messages, but my face totally goes red.

Yes, if it is possible for the woman in question.

She thinks that’s hot. Okay, good. So she says she’s going to be at the Dyke March with her butch; if I see her there, please don’t approach her, she doesn’t want to upset her very possessive companion. I say, Well, there’s gonna be 10,000 people at the park, I doubt I’d see you.

I kid you not, I’m standing there, a few yards away from the stage at Dolores Park and I get a message on my phone. It says: I’m behind you. Cindy! In a beautiful summer dress, with an insanely large hat, the specific name of which I should know, let’s just say it’s the hat Natalia Landauer wears in Cabaret. She disentangles herself from the grasp of said butch, gets up from this totally normative picnic rug and comes over. The smell of a sweet, feminine fragrance fills my head as I kiss her cheek. I ask her what the name of the perfume is, because it’s beautiful. She tells me, but I forget.

“Ten thousand people in Dolores Park, and you manage to sit right behind me?”

“I know.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences. I think we should hook up. Now.”

“I can’t now. I told you why. But call me.”

“Sure.”

But I have no intention of calling her. I don’t cut other people’s grass, and my system of restraining ethics kicked in moments after the initial grip of lust. There’s someone over there on a picnic rug with a straw picnic basket who is doing the best she can to win this woman’s heart, and here I am, plotting and planning to be the lesbian lothario who totally undermines the feelings, wishes and desires of another person? Nah, that’s not cool.

See, I told you we weren’t gonna have sex again for a very long time, my left brain says to my right brain. Nonetheless, the asshole in me is thinking she should go and scope out the situation with portaloos. Are they clean enough, can one possibly be induced to have passionate, hard-core sex in one of those, or has the heat of the sun already cooked the stagnant shit at the bottom into a meaty, rotting stew? Besides, I mean, sex in a portaloo? I don’t know. Bob says he wants to take a dump so I accompany the bastard, just to scope out the situation. I was right, stew.

And that’s the end of that.

An hour later, the light reflecting from the handcuffs I have attached to the aforementioned leather pants hits this cute girl in the eye as she’s walking past. Strangely enough, she’s wearing a leather police uniform. She stops in front of me, takes out a pen and writes her phone number on the tiptop of my breast. Fuck, I love San Francisco. I hold up the handcuffs, and I tell her she should be wearing them. She takes them, cuffs my wrist to hers and we dance like fools, in the sun, in the glorious spring sun. I immediately start coming up with reasons why I won’t have sex with this person. She’s so tall, I need a ladder to get to her mouth. On the upside (or perhaps, the downside), I can probably give her a blow job just standing up. I’m kidding, she isn’t that tall. Now I’m thinking, How much does she weigh? I think I can pick her up, you know, and throw her around, if she is into a bit of rough and tumble and if we subtract the height of the heels she’s wearing, then maybe…

We get exhausted, me first, since I don’t usually dance, so I say I wanna sit down for a bit. She says, “Do you want me to uncuff you?”

“No.”

She smiles. Neither of us feels the need to exchange names or even pleasantries, which is great, I don’t do chitchat. I can meet someone and within thirty seconds be having deep discussions about the meaning of life, the place of planet earth in the universe and a range of other existential considerations. But right now, I just want to catch my breath.

Bob comes over to say he has had enough of lesbians for one day and he’s going home. Exit Bob. Soon after, cop girl uncuffs us, hands me the cuffs and quite unexpectedly grabs me by the shirt, pulls me in and kisses me. Her lips are softer than I expected them to be and our tongues enact an unusually gentle dance. I keep thinking the kiss will end, but it just keeps going. You know, when you kiss someone and something tastes good? Her breath, the texture of her saliva, the heat or cold of her skin? It’s one of those. I open one eye to take a peek and see that she too has her eyes closed; she’s really enjoying herself, or me, it doesn’t matter which. I have permission. I find my hand covering her ear, partially; it’s just automatic, I’m instinctually pulling her mouth closer into mine. That kiss seems to last an hour, but it probably only lasts a minute.

“I gotta go,” she says.

“Sure.”

“Call me.”

You bet your ass I’m gonna call you! I think as she leaves. I like her. She’s free and easy. I’m easy too, you know.

I respect a woman who fucks easily. I like the honesty of such an exchange, and I dislike the song and dance some people have to engage in so that they can somehow be seen as more respectable. I abhor the “whore” concept. Or in other words, I actually applaud the “whore.” The whore is honest, so whatever society thinks of an honest person who doesn’t pretend that she wants anything else, a person who doesn’t care what others think of her, means shit to me. I respect a woman who can just fuck with honesty. I don’t respect a woman who wants to just fuck, but pretends to be respectable. I think that’s a whorish thing to do, but the whorishness has nothing to do with the element of sex involved; it’s the hypocrisy, the pretense, the desire to be respectable that bothers me.

I remember overhearing this in a New York subway: a couple were having an argument and one woman turned to another and said, “You’re not a whore because you sleep around, you’re a whore because you want to pretend that you don’t.” That snippet struck a nerve, and the sentiment has stayed with me.

And by that moment, in the park, I have reached a peak level of arousal. Two beautiful women giving me a very easy entry into the ethically complex world of sexual engagement. What more could I ask for? But still, no sex. I am walking around with a throbbing pussy, wet, completely in heat. Left brain is thinking, Would somebody please just fuck her, already? I ignore it. Everything is hypersensitive. Even my shirt rubbing against my nipples when I walk is turning me on. Even the light spring breeze is stimulating them. The last time that happened was ten years ago. I was undergoing a renaissance of adolescence (not that I was that young ten years ago).

I decide I should save cop girl’s number in my phone and then to my horror I realize that the sweat has made the numbers illegible. Now I think there’s a conspiracy.

I’m looking at the transboys Bob introduced me to as we’re sitting on the grass sipping beer, and I’m thinking to myself, I know this guy is keen on me, could I? I mean isn’t it like racist or something to preclude a transgender man? Aren’t we all just queer and fluid and shit? Unfortunately, even though politically I find it appalling that I wouldn’t be attracted to a transgender man, biologically it’s… well, I couldn’t give him the satisfaction he seeks. I would only be able to relate to his body as a woman’s. At least this guy. Absence of penis is encouraging but, as horrible as it may seem, I want a woman. I want a beautiful woman with hips and breasts and no facial hair, and preferably with a vagina. Actually, sadly, definitely with a vagina. I feel awful for being such an old-school lesbian, here in the city of queer, in the heart of a park where the rivers of sexual fluidity overflow and nourish the grass. I’m just not cool enough to be queer. So no, that’s not gonna happen.

For a long time in my young adult life, I struggled with the fact that I couldn’t be bisexual. But this didn’t stem from a desire to extend my homosexuality to involve more acceptable social practices, no, not at all. I just wasn’t comfortable with the idea of discriminating against another human being purely on the basis of gender and/or biological sex. Politically, it was not sound. Isn’t it discrimination to look at someone and immediately preclude them? I mean if they were applying for a job and you looked at them and said, “No, you’re a man, you can’t have this job…” See? But since then I’ve learned to accept my limitations and the fact that I am textbook, butch, versatile, vanilla, gold-star lesbian. But this is probably why I have always liked bisexual women, always admired their ability to move freely between sexes and genders without boundaries.

The next day, Bob offers fatherly advice. “The trouble with you, kid, is you think too much. Too many ideas and preconceptions; you just need to loosen up a little.”

“I don’t have a problem with sex!” I reply sulkily, fingering the rim of my hot chocolate. “I love sex, it’s the getting-to part that troubles me. I can’t bear the thought of making an unwanted advance. And how can I know if it isn’t unwanted unless I make it?”

“You pay attention to body language, see if she laughs at your stupid jokes.”

“Yeah, right, that’s true. But then I think she’s being just friendly! I don’t even let myself think sexually about a woman I’m talking to. The other day this woman I know was climbing down from a tree and I was helping her, her ass was totally in my face, dude. I had a face full of sexy ass and you know what I thought? Oh no, this is not sexy, you are just helping this person down from a tree. Have some respect!

A minute later Bob stops laughing. “Well, we could go to a sex party, and you could watch for a while, but it’s pretty clear what people are there for.”

“No dude, that’s just as messed up, not everyone there wants to have sex with everyone else there!”

“You know, I’m amazed you have had as much sex as you have, seriously. How did you manage threesomes and relationships and one-night stands with this massive structure hanging over your head?”

“I wait until they come to me. The minute I have permission, no fucking problem, I know exactly what to do.”

“What a lousy top you are!” he tells me. “Listen, I’m not recommending this at all, but are you familiar with cocaine cultures?”

“I studied pharmacology; I know it acts as a disinhibitor, gives you a superman complex and the confidence to think you can do anything. It increases arousal too. I’m not interested in that. While cocaine is in your blood, you are not you anymore, you’re someone else. I’m not comfortable with the delusory self on coke, or ecstasy or what have you. When I wake up in the morning I want to look back on everything I said and did and find that it is consistent with my inner reality, consistent with the person I am when I’m not drug-fucked, or drunk.”

“Didn’t your writing teacher tell you to write an erotic piece? I mean people will be reading this, waiting for you to have awesome fucking sex, and you’re hung up on bullshit? Why don’t you write about the sex you had in a sauna when you were sixteen? And every other public place you had sex when you didn’t have a place of your own? Sex in a church, man! Why don’t you mention the steamy, raunchy shit you get up to? Like are you seriously gonna leave everybody so completely dissatisfied? In the shittiest anticlimax in lesbian erotica history?”

“I’m afraid so.”