Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica (2 page)

 

 

 

 

 

She was best in the flickering light of a movie theater, our faces turned away from each other, our hands following their own course downward. She fumbled her way from the top button of my shirt collar to my skirt, parting its damp folds with her hands. She coaxed me, with whispers, with small noises, as if she were begging a dog out of the road. Our eyes never left the screen; we stared at the narrow ribbon of flesh between Ingrid Bergman's halter top and the waist of her palazzo pants, that one inch of her enlarged on the dust-speckled screen.

We were fifteen when we met in Sister Bartholomew's English class. My desk was pressed up against the back of her chair the day Sister's habit caught the late-summer breeze from a low window in the first-floor classroom at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow School for Girls. As she turned away to adjust its tight band at her neck, the girl in front of me tilted her head back. A strand of her strawberry-blond hair fell between the open clasps of my binder as I snapped the metal fasteners together. The straggled ends caught there, pulled taut; she gasped. I curled that long strand around my finger,
kissed it, and released her. Christ stared down from his station on the powder-blue wall, his loincloth slipping.

The next year she cut it off with her mother's kitchen scissors. Her shorn hair fell in kinky strands over her father's shaving brush, her older sister's neat zip bag of eye shadows, the opaque whiteness of her mother's Ponds cold cream jars.

“Do you like old movies?” she asked, one hand following the line of her cropped hair along the dome of her head, the other hooked into the clasp at my locker's handle.

“I don't know,” I told her, school books pressed against my chest, my hip slung out, leaning into the locker's cool metal surface.

All I knew was that I wanted to press closer to her than I thought was possible, that my clothes felt too small in her presence and my skin itched with an ardent, heated rash as if I were allergic to my school uniform, its soft weight against my breasts, the skirt falling in even, pleated lines over my thighs.

In the balcony of the old Tower Theater on East Avenue, next to the glass-walled Cadillac dealership, catty-corner from King Prince's diner on a crisp November afternoon, she showed me
Notorious
. Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Brazil, 1946. The theater swelled with the odor of mildewed carpets, moth-worn upholstery. The ancient hinges on the seat bottoms whined as they yielded to our weight. My hands wrapped around some iced drink, my mouth poised on the sharp edge of a straw, we sat in the balcony and abandoned our school bags to the dark recesses of the littered floor.

Even before the opening titles finished, she moved her thigh up against mine, let her left hand fall across my knee. With her right, she caressed my mouth, ran an ink-stained thumb over my chin. Her fingertips rested in the small dip at the base of my neck. Our eyes darting across the lighted screen, her hands traveled to the rounded Peter Pan collar of my blouse.

The small buttons, pearlized, caught in the screen's dim light, glowed beneath her fingers.

One button at a time, she moved my blouse out of the way, whispering in the darkness “Please, please, please.” Her mouth, hovering above mine, that even, repeated tone on her breath, the words barely audible, over and over she said it to Ingrid Bergman, to Cary Grant, to the half-empty theater.

She found her way from the flat disk around my nipple to its rising tip, ran her middle finger along each rib. Her hand paused at the white edge of my underpants. Then, traveling the circumference of the worn, elastic waistband, she played along that edge till she got up the courage to pull me to her. One arm around my shoulders, guiding me over, she settled me between her thighs, my back curving into her chest. Our eyes fixed on Ingrid Bergman's full mouth, her hand slid down farther, squirreling in between the worn elastic and the untraveled skin below.

When she entered me I gasped. The couple in front of us stirred, the man, his brush cut tickling his girlfriend's cheek, turned around, squinted back into the shadowy darkness. She put one finger in, then pulled it out, returned with two fingers. She pulled out again. I followed her fingers down as they left me. She returned with three, stretching the untried muscles, her thumb on the outer rim.

I knew nothing of the wetness. I had never heard of it before, never felt such a rush of it. I thought it was menstrual blood, my period come early, or a kind of internal bleeding, her hand at the sight of the wound, cutting in. I filled her palm with it, spilled over, rivering into the narrow line between my buttocks, pooling on the cracked, leather seat. Her uniform skirt gone damp, its even pleats wrinkling under us, she added and subtracted her fingers into me. Three, two, one. One, two three. Working faster, she matched her rhythm to the increasing speed of my breath. All the while her small whisper
continued, like a ticking clock at my ear, “Please, please, please.”

Her thumb traveled to my clitoris, running over that elongated spot with a flickering exactitude. I arched into her hands, my breath came hard. Then, a catch in my throat; for one long moment I could not breathe. I felt something buzz around me, something almost tangible, a cloud hovering over me, waiting to descend. As Ingrid Bergman leaned over to the airplane's small window, her lips parting, the Brazilian landscape opening out beneath her, it fell and I came for the first time.

 

It's five years later, it's seven, it's ten, and still when I walk into a theater I walk into her. My scalp tingles, my hamstrings contract. The air, close around me, opens up to her form. The worn wood of the seat arm softens into the edge of her biceps. Already her thigh presses tight against mine. Already she is descending on me, her mouth at my ear, her hand between my legs, the fingers adding and subtracting into me. One two three. Three two one. I arch back, spread my legs wider. There, in a high corner of the balcony, the safety bar cutting the screen in half, dividing Ingrid Bergman at that flash of white skin, I remember the mottled and flickering light on my classmate's face, Ingrid Bergman floating out of the screen, her mouth on the lip of my mind, the edge of that white abdomen, that narrow ribbon of flesh, like a road, a rope, a signal light flashing, flickering in the half-empty darkness.

I'm just getting ready to wash my white school blouse in the bathroom sink when the phone rings.

“Baby sister. What's shakin'?” It's Marla, calling from Charlotte. From the Girls' Club, no doubt, she's talking so street-like.

“Nuthin' doing,” I reply. “You comin' home this weekend?”

“I just might. But that sure isn't the reason I'm calling. I just got a call, long distance—collect. From Cleo.”

I feel my breath leave me. Already I am certain this isn't going to be real good.

“She asked me to send her some calculus books.” A pause. “Tammy? She called me from the women's prison? They've already moved her from the jail. She's ‘up against a li'l charge' is all she'll tell me. And she's not sounding too proud of whatever it is she's been charged with
this
time. This time, sounds like it's gon' stick.”

I can see the loose little shrug that Cleo'd give, acting cool and shucking, all the way into...into prison, this time. Before it had just been lock-up, “diddly little county time,” Cleo called it, bragging about it in that way that people will about their trouble when it's the only thing they have.

Marla sighs into the phone. “Cleo's life has done went all to hell and pieces, exactly how she wanted it to go. I'm not sure if knowing where she's at is any much better than wondering if she's dead.” She lets out a flat, not-happy laugh.

“Aah, Marla—” is all I can say.

Cleo's gone; gone for sure now.

Cleo was Marla's Little Sister, whom Marla had adopted soon as I'd gone off to college. I think I was supposed to be jealous that Marla had a substitute, but I was the one who ended up getting that last laugh.

I remember the first time I saw her play, saw her legs and arms as long as licorice sticks, so whip-like she nipped the ball out the other players' fingers, snapped and plucked the rebounds before they hit the backboard, jumped so quick it seemed there were springs in her knees. Cleo is a li'l bit darker than me and built just wiry, all tight and smooth at once. Cleo
moved
like silk sliding through water.

Cleo...I can see you with your sleek legs flying, your lanky muscles stretching tight, the stripes around your socks, around the hems of your red-silk real-tight basketball shorts...

Her jump shots were so smooth she could have been diving up through water, and watching her make them put me in the shivers, as though she were sliding, silkenly, all along the most secret of my places. She'd bounce and flick that ball around a helpless tangle of legs and arms that hopelessly tried to stop her. One time, she dribbled the ball right out of some chick's fingers, then darting and springing around her, bounced the
ball—I swear—right through the girl's outspread legs, catching it off the bounce before her opponent even had the chance to
think
of turning around.

“Cleo's Back,” said the front of her favorite black sweatshirt, in bright pink letters. “Cleo's Gone,” said the other side. Sometimes, by the time you figured out where Cleo was back
from,
she'd already be long gone. “Slick” was the word she chose to describe herself, because like everyone with the player's personality, Cleo had two sides: street side and court side. On the court, Cleo wore her lucky black-canvas hightops; but coming in off the street, she wore new suede or leather tennis, and she cussed if someone so much as scuffed them and fussed when Marla asked her where she'd gotten them from.

“Because she knew I was actually asking her where did she get the wherewithall to get them from.”

Everybody knew that Cleo had absolutely no visible means, other than hanging 'round the littered, rotten-smelling court-yard of the M C Morningside Homes, hanging out supposedly empty-handed.

“But you never can tell what-all I got in my socks, or in my secret pockets,” Cleo bragged.

Man oh man, when I think of how gone I was over that girl...from the beginning of that summer I was visiting Marla, managing her team, until the August day she made me leave, I had one hopeless schoolgirl crush. I'd be sitting on the sidelines making like my own Girls' Club cheerleading squad, until everybody started to see who I was really cheering for. And the thing about it was, Cleo didn't need more cheering.

“F that ‘everybody's a star' stuff,” she'd say, not saying the full curse word because Marla had forbidden her to swear. “I'm the only star on this team.” And she'd thump her ball a couple times off the locker room bench, as if to punch the point home.

Cleo is an Aries, like me: sometimes we're so selfish, we don't even know we're being it. Or so Marla says—but I believe that Cleo's a whole lot worse, a lot more selfish, than me. If it was me, I'd think twice about kissing someone, especially some other girl—even more, some other girl who, most likely, would not want it. After she picked me, and after she kissed me, she told me this:

“I knew you'd like it, once I did it, so I just went ahead and did.” And that smile again—flashing, then closing, like the quick white glint of a pocket knife.

Cleo thought she was smooth, but she sure had one quick attitude. Let someone step on her toes wrong, even in a basketball game, for goodness' sake, and Cleo'd go off. I remember tears in her eyes, she'd be so hurt that someone had made her so red-hot mad. I remember how she got, cutting her eyes and snarling 'bout “someone” saying this or doing that. I recall a time that “someone” had draped Cleo's jacket over their own “stinkin', sweatin' shoulders.” By pure mistake, thinking the jacket was their own, but you sure couldn't tell Cleo that, just like you couldn't tell her that this wasn't the Training School, where everyone just naturally stole from
her,
the youngest and the skinniest of all.

That's how I knew that Cleo really thought of me as “her” girl: the game when she let me wear her jacket for a whole entire two quarters. After that game, after everyone was gone, the showers dripping off and me innocently picking up the dirty towels, Cleo backed me up against the lockers, and her mouth was spicy with the taste of Good 'n Plenty. I knew, that day, that it was just a matter of time before I'd be back on the bus toward home, back toward everything that was boring to me.

Cleo never gave me flowers, never said she cared for me, and always asked for money—which sometimes she would get—
so why'd I ever love her? It was all about her beauty, the way that she would press her hands all along her long, strong body and grin at me.

“Sometimes I makes sweet love to my own self,” she would say.

Not too many people are as dark as I am, and Cleo's one of them. What does it mean to put your hand beside someone's and see how close its color matches yours, even more than your own sister's does? What does it mean to know this color, so beautiful, chose your color out of knowledge of its beauty?

By the end of August, when Marla finally called Mama to let her know that I was on my way back home, by that hot and steamy time, I'd heard the threat one hundred thousand times:

“Im'a send you back down home, Tamara.”

The first time I heard it was the July night I came in drowsy, hungry, and smelling like burnt rope. Me and Cleo had smoked weed, sneaked it back behind the Homes where they backed up on a park that really was kind of piss-stinky. Though naturally I didn't say as much, not wanting to be called a “sissy country girl.”