Best Lesbian Erotica 2014

HEY, STRANGER Diana Cage

Atlanta in the spring smelled like wet leaves, different from Brooklyn, where Sabina had lived until a few months ago, different from San Diego where she grew up. The cleanness appealed to her; the stately homes in their neighborhood sported neat lawns dotted with azalea bushes and dogwood trees, like everything she’d ever seen in Better Homes and Gardens. On nights when their small, hot apartment felt more punishing than cozy, she’d take a walk through the area, breathing in the boring middle-classness of it all, until she felt glad again for her own cramped, complicated life.

She and Cass had found a nice rhythm: they never fought, they fucked twice a week, they made dinner. Things were very good, which is why she’d allowed herself to be drawn down to Atlanta, to the “dirty South,” as Cass called it, though Atlanta felt much less dirty than where she’d come from. Brooklyn, which smelled like hot trash and sewage and sounded like car horns and people yelling, seemed a whole lot dirtier. They’d spent a summer there, living in Sabina’s apartment a half mile from the Brooklyn Museum, wanting every day to leave the house in time to visit the museum, and every day being sucked back into the bed, into the sex they couldn’t stop having, into each other’s bodies and countless orgasms.

It was only the last week, right before Cass returned to Atlanta to teach, when they’d finally made it. At 4:00 p.m., an hour before closing time, they dragged themselves to the museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art in order to see The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago’s iconic art installation. The compulsion to visit what was arguably the most famous and most profoundly’70s piece of second-wave feminist art had started as a private joke. Cassie, the stoic art history professor who almost never relaxed, had little interest in art from that period. She dismissed it, rolling her eyes: “So the plates looked like pussies, okay, I get it.” But each day that they fucked through visiting hours, the plan grew into something more compelling, until one day, there they were finally standing in front of it, postcoital and spacy, Sabina wearing her T-shirt inside out.

For at least ten minutes, they just stared. They stood next to each other and took in the massive ceremonial banquet table set for a seemingly random assortment of important historical female figures. Even Cassie felt it. They were into it deep, devouring the vulvar plates, the gold chalices, the embroidery. Sabina felt overwhelmed by sex and women and the goddamn Primordial Goddess. She wanted to throw Cassie down on the table, knocking Isis, Hatshepsut and every other cunt out of the way and fuck like maenads.

That was a year ago. In that year she had moved to Atlanta, embraced her inner domestic-partner-goddess and become a full-time writer who kept the home, planned the meals and generally did all the work you’d traditionally assign the wife. She liked it. She wasn’t bored. She cooked impressive recipes and plated them with an alacrity she gleaned from reading food blogs. Her novel was coming along, albeit slowly, and somewhere in the back of her mind she was considering getting pregnant. Sometimes she’d stare at her body in the mirrors at the gym, picturing what she’d look like with a giant belly. She was into it.

Sabina was standing in the laundry room of their apartment complex, flipping through a copy of Entertainment Weekly, waiting for her underwear to dry. Her heavy blonde hair was piled on top of her head, the mass secured haphazardly with a single elastic. Her white T-shirt came to the bottom of her cutoffs, the V-neck dipping low between her small breasts. Her muscular legs were sweaty, but shaved smooth and clean, and her flip-flops were decorated with gaudy plastic flowers. The look she was going for was Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman but in reality, it was probably a little more Daisy Duke if she’d gotten older and been through a divorce and maybe rehab. She was a little tipsy, having drunk most of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc over the course of the afternoon, and had decided it was a good time to take a break and finish the laundry.

The magazine was boring, but she continued to skim it, stopping on the “Who Wore It Best” spreads and fantasizing about celebrities’ naked bodies. What do famous people do in bed? she wondered. Do they fuck in real life like they do in movies? She liked to guess which celebs were actually queer. She’d been thinking about sex nonstop since summer started. Her head was full of wild ideas, and there was a near-constant buzz between her legs. Cassie wouldn’t be back for months, having accepted a summer-long research fellowship in Boston. She was studying neo-classical nudes in some boring archive, and Sabina was left all alone to deal with her insistent, unrelenting thrum. She wanted to finish her book over the summer, she wanted to make Cass proud, but mostly she’d been looking at the basest Internet porn she could find and watching episode after episode of trashy cable shows. Cass would have been appalled.

“Hey, stranger!” The greeting startled her out of her celebrity fuck fantasies and back into the reality of the dingy laundry room. Euclid Court, the name of their apartment complex, made Sabina think of an arcane feudal system where knights swore oaths of fealty to princesses, and kings went around raping maidens. In reality, it was a slightly rundown subdivision with an inordinate number of gay tenants. There were Pride flags in the laundry room and Steve, the tanned, shirtless building super, played club music while he replaced the belt on a broken dryer. It was a little like doing laundry on Fire Island. Sabina loved it and often hung out waiting for the clothes to dry, even though she was steps from her apartment.

“Long time no see,” said Syd.

Sabina took in the lanky frame and long brown hair, the untucked, checked shirt, baggy jeans, the nearly six feet of sex that was her ex-girlfriend and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Sabina was genuinely startled. It made no sense for Syd, who lived six hours away in Durham, to suddenly appear. She closed the magazine and put her hands on her hips. “So, this is awkward,” she said.

“Relax, Peaches,” Syd said. “I took a job in Atlanta for the summer.”

“Doing what?” demanded Sabina.

“Working for CNN. Doing stuff. Calm down. I got in touch with Veronica, and she told me where you live. I left you a voice mail. You still never check your phone.”

Veronica was Syd and Sabina’s mutual friend or mutual ex-lover, depending on how you looked at it. They’d had a few threeways, a lot of fights, and Sabina made a mental note to ask Veronica what the fuck her problem was. Most people are more formal about dropping in on someone, but Syd was generally uninterested in boundaries and privacy. She preferred living communally; she loved renting rooms in big punk houses, rock-star palaces full of artists and addicts. The kind of place where the house has a name, like a ship. She bristled at anything that felt like normalcy.

The buzz from the dryer was painfully loud. Sabina winced. “I have to finish what I’m doing,” she said. “Maybe we can get together sometime?”

“What about now?” was Syd’s answer. “What are you doing now?”

Steve looked up from his dryer project with a raised eyebrow. Sabina shot him a look and took a step back. She felt like she was on the edge of something big. Syd stepped closer and pulled the elastic band from Sabina’s hair. It tumbled down around her face.

“Your hair is so long now. You finally let it grow.”

Sabina ignored her comment. “There’s no food in the house,” she said. “I haven’t shopped or anything. Tomorrow might be a better time to hang out.” Syd’s narrow frame and sharp jawline reminded her of a Romaine Brooks portrait, maybe Peter, a Young English Girl or the Lady Troubridge one. Cass had taught her about Romaine Brooks. She thought silently about the trouble she was about to let happen, calculated how much it would affect her life and decided to charge ahead.

“How about I go pick up some food and some wine and come back in a bit? We can watch a movie. I haven’t seen you in forever, Sabina. It’s so good to see your face.”

“Fine,” Sabina said, mustering as much nonchalance as she could. “See you in a bit.” Sabina tied her hair back up, perched the full basket of laundry on her hip and headed back inside.

Syd’s beauty stemmed at least partially from being untethered and easygoing. She drove an old van and was not above sleeping in it. She lived in whatever way she wanted to and didn’t worry about what came next. Sabina stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The bathroom felt like neutral space; like unclaimed territory. She brushed her teeth. She put on lipstick. She put on perfume and then more perfume. She really wanted to fuck Syd, there was no denying it. And she was going to do it, so she may as well stop pretending she didn’t know what kind of trouble she had just invited over. Syd knew Cass was gone, that was obvious. Everything was obvious.

It was okay, she thought. “This is okay,” she said out loud. She was a grown woman and people cheat sometimes. It happens. She felt like an explorer; like a slutty lesbian version of Jacques Cousteau. Like she was entering new territory. It was exciting. She fingered her pussy through the denim of her shorts and felt the damp heat. Twenty minutes later she’d put the laundry away, wiped off her lipstick and put it on again, combed her hair and braided it and then unbraided it. Then she vacuumed the floor, mopped, and dusted whatever surfaces were in easy reach. “Jesus Christ,” she thought. “What am I doing?” Then the doorbell rang and her nervousness went away. She opened the door to find Syd with a pizza in one hand and a liter of red wine in the other. It was not a bad sight at all.

Syd set the bounty on the table and pushed Sabina onto the couch. Sabina nervously tried to tie her hair back up, but Syd grabbed her wrist and said, “Leave it.” They stared at each other for a few minutes, not kissing, faces close but not touching. Sabina’s insides turned warm and liquidy.

“So your girlfriend is out of town, huh?” Syd said with a smirk.

“Are we in a Bruce Springsteen song?” Sabina shot back. “Are we in high school? Let’s just fuck.”

The night they’d first met, Sabina had no idea she was being seduced. Syd moved with such incredible, calm, embodied assuredness it seemed as if she was just being nice, just being friendly and extra attentive. Sabina thought she was simply making a new friend, until the very moment Syd’s tongue was in her mouth.

They were at a bar in Durham. Sabina was on a mini-tour with four other writers, the Porn Tour, they’d dubbed it, each of them reading material about whoever they’d fucked the night before. Durham was the last stop, and Syd had been her last story. She wrote it all down the next morning, her prose graphic by even the Tour’s standards. The two of them managed to extend what should have been a one-night stand into a tumultuous eight months of long-distance torture, but eventually the distance proved fatal. Sabina needed a lover who slept in her bed each night, who stayed put. She was less wild than her writing.

Syd kissed her, and Sabina felt an overwhelming sense of relief. She kissed back, leaning in, pushing her face against Syd’s. Her body felt electric. It was the hottest, most exciting feeling she’d had in what felt like forever. She wanted everything now, in this moment, she didn’t want to wait. She didn’t need warming up; she was already there. She scrabbled at Syd’s clothes, wanting her naked, wanting them both naked. Syd smelled like sandalwood soap and the herbal-scented pomade Sabina remembered. She felt a familiar pull in her cunt. It was so strong it eclipsed everything else.

“Hey, Sabina, slow down,” Syd said. She leaned back against the couch teasingly, knowing the effect she had on Sabina. Knowing how good she was at making her want it.

“Sit still,” said Syd. “Don’t move.”

Sabina leaned back in a huff. She felt irritated and childish; she was the one taking risks after all. She didn’t want to go slowly. Her cunt felt like a gaping maw, like a sheela na gig. She wanted to be stuffed full; she wanted to fuck until the constant throb went away.

Syd took out a pocketknife and opened it carefully. “You have too many clothes on,” she explained.

“This is a new trick,” Sabina said.

“I’m just going to undress you a little bit,” Syd told her. She placed the knife at the bottom of the neckline of Sabina’s T-shirt and made a small cut. She then set the knife on the couch carefully, the blade open, next to Sabina’s thigh, and began to pull at the edges of the cut, tearing it apart. The material gave quickly, and with a ripping sound, Sabina’s shirt quickly split down the front, nearly to her navel. Her small breasts were exposed, her nipples dark and hard. “Beautiful,” muttered Syd, “Fucking gorgeous.”

Sabina reached down and ripped the material the rest of the way, cleaving the shirt in two and peeling it backward off her small shoulders. She picked up the knife and ran the flat side of the blade across her nipples while Syd watched, mesmerized. Then she dropped it on the floor, stood up, and peeled off her shorts.

“Oh fuck,” said Syd, staring. She leaned back in an attempt to mask her need, stroking her crotch with one hand, reaching for Sabina with the other. “You’re still a bitch, Sabina,” Syd said. “You still never let anyone else drive, do you?”

Sabina smiled, staring back at Syd. Everything was soft focus and bright like the way heaven always looks in Sophia Coppola films.

“Mmmm. Come over here.” Syd unbuckled her belt and pushed her jeans down around her hips in the same deft move.

Sabina leaned down, ran her hands across Syd’s chest and down her arms before kneeling between her legs and pressing her face into Syd’s damp cunt. Sabina licked Syd, small licks at first, testing the waters, just to see how far she was going to get. When Syd groaned and leaned back into the couch, she took the hint. Syd spread her legs wider, and pressed Sabina’s head against her crotch, moving her this way and that, positioning her. Forcing her playfully to stay on her knees, demanding that Sabina make her come.

Sabina brought Syd to the very edge with her mouth, feeling her clit tighten and grow and Syd’s hips press harder into her face. She stopped then, with Syd so close, and whispered, “I want you to come inside me.”

She climbed up onto the couch, straddling Syd’s lap, her cunt wide open and ready for fingers. Syd thrust three fingers inside her, then four, stretching her open, pushing, then all of them. Her fist slipped into Sabina’s cunt, filling her as full as she could get. They fucked like that, leaning into each other, slippery and groaning on the leather couch, rocking back and forth in a crazy rhythm. Sabina gasped and yelled, demanding more, harder. They held on to each other tightly, pulling and pushing, slippery and hot and fast until they both came in a heated, sweaty, screaming rush.

After a long while, Syd slipped her hand free, her fingers slick and sticky. She looked at Sabina’s face and her own face showed first a tight twinge of need, and then happy satedness.

Slowly, slowly, gently they peeled their bodies apart. Sabina feeling slightly broken open, and Syd seeming elated and renewed.

Sabina looked around, still feeling like an explorer, like she was observing her own life. She looked at her lover’s body, and at her girlfriend’s things littering the small apartment, and she knew clearly there was no fixing this. She pressed her forehead to Syd’s chest and sighed.