Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica (3 page)

“I know that you afraid to go with me and get sky-high,” she said to lure me, smiling in her shark-like way. Didn't she know it though? Don't nobody tell Tamara what she's afraid to do.

That day, she was wearing black suede tennis shoes, shorts, and pulled-tight knee socks. And carrying her cap, I'm sure so I could see how neat her hair lay, all newly dressed and styled, shaved short around her ears and back along her hairline. And Lordy, she was smelling so good to me, like sweet grease and barber-shop powder, she smelled good enough to be eaten; and she surely knew it too.

We settled in the evening sun beside the worn-out courts. Cleo reached inside the lining of her cap and held up a little
hand-rolled cigarette. She stretched, and then she yawned so wide I could see the whole way up inside her mouth.

“Act as though you got some manners,” I almost let my sister's words pass through my own two lips. Cleo liked to stretch and scratch, to pick her teeth in public—with her fingernail yet—liked to belch and never say excuse me. Cleo was the kind of child that Mama would feel sorry for, would shake her head and softly suck her teeth over.

“Think I got some matches.” She was searching through her pants pockets—though I couldn't see, with those jeans tight as they were, how she could've fit a thing much thicker than a folded piece of paper into those pockets.

“Look inside your jacket, Cleo,” I suggested. The first time I'd seen Cleo high, she couldn't do nothing but laugh and dance and suck the popsicles she'd gotten me to buy for her. When she wasn't high, Cleo made me tense and flushed every time she touched herself. Now she stroked one hand along her pants front, while groping through her jacket pocket with her other hand, and it made my neck tingle. It made me curious, how could one of Cleo's hands be scrabbling even as the other one so casually, so smoothly, was taking care of yet another kind of business? Was it true a person could be born with hands belonging to a criminal? Secretly, I shivered.

“Here it go,” she said, pulling out a book of matches. “You ready?” She grinned, whipping that weed cigarette from behind her ear and holding it so I could see it.

“I am a big girl now, for your information,” I said out loud, to whom I wasn't sure.

Cleo raised her eyebrow, struck the match, and grinned her sharp-toothed grin. “What you gonna do, babe, when I—” but she'd stopped to breathe smoke in, pulling wisps of it into her nostrils.

When you do what, Cleo? Like you the one invented the idea of getting next to me? Now she was handing it to me, it
was smoking, and she was grinning back at me grinning back at her.

I reached out for the cigarette and put it to my lips and drew it in, keeping both my eyes closed tight. I drew it in and—coughed and heaved, but somehow kept my lips together tight enough to keep the smoke inside. Even I knew that was what you had to do. When I opened my eyes, still holding my breath, the world outside still looked the same. Somehow I had thought it wouldn't.

“You ain't high yet, baby sis,” Cleo said, watching me while I looked around and waited. I guess I ain't, I thought, but how'm I gon' know it when...when suddenly I felt it—like something pulling out away from me, slow-motion out from under me. And all this heat, this depth and color rushing in at me.

“Wo-ow,” I heard myself sigh. In a way, my own sounds I made, my own thoughts I had, seemed like something I was hearing from outside myself. And the scene I was in seemed more like something I was looking at. It was like another depth to my perception.

“You like this, babe?” Naturally I thought she was talking 'bout the weed, until I looked down at her long hand and her longer fingers creeping all along my thigh. “Poppety pop,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “Poppety pop my finger pop.”

“Mmmm,” I said.

Cleo's hand was moving, quivering on me. “You untouched, baby sis?” she asked.

What difference could it make to her? I mean, God knew she wasn't.

“Sam,” was what I said. Funny, I had gotten through the summer without so much as thinking about that ex-man of mine, and here I'd gone and mentioned him. At a very inconvenient moment too.

She snatched back as though my leg had stuck her with a splinter. “Who the hell is
Sam
?”

“Oh,” I waved my hand to show how bored I was with this topic. “This man I used to know.” Used to know. I didn't like to lie like that.

“You know that man good as I know Cynamon?” Cleo asked. “Know that man all the ways I be knowing her?”

Cynamon? Was I hearing right? Cynamon was the Lady Panthers' center, who had a twitchy booty and not a whole lot more. What-all could anyone
find
to know about somebody like Cynamon? Cynamon painted her nails bright orange and looked at stories on TV, those times she wasn't making up no even-more-stupid stories of her own about the boys she knew, away now in the army or sometimes the Marines, and the presents they bought or were going to buy for her. Not that I ever laid my eyes on present one:

“My baby Wally go' buy me a microwave and eelskin shoes and satin underthings.”

Now who was going to believe that, and who was going to care enough to tell her she was clear and plain a liar?

“Cynamon?” I wanted to know what Cleo knew about girls, every little bit of it, but I didn't care to hear about Cynamon. “She likes boys, Cleo.”

Cleo grinned. “Not no mo' she don't. Least not since I turnt her out, so's to speak.”

Turnt her out? I never had understood just what “turnt out” meant, but I'd never had known how to ask without seeming too sweet and churched and babyish.

“How'd you do that, Cleo?” I heard myself ask, despite the fact of it including Cynamon.

Cleo tap-rubbed at my leg. “Turnt her inside out, I mean. Made her river run the uphill way.” Cleo moved in a li'l bit closer to me. Even with my eyes closed I could feel her, hear her jacket leather squeaking while she shifted.

“You wanting me tell you 'bout it, sis, or you wanting me to show you?”

“Mmm, tell me first.” Eyes closed, I leaned back all ready to be told. I was feeling very lazy, floating away out in the middle of a drowsy, sleepy sea.

“Then show me too,” I actually said. I pictured me and Cleo, floating arm in arm up to the sky on a
natural
high.

“Yeah...” Cleo's voice had deepened. “Yeah—I like to ease on back and watch whiles I be poppin' 'um, watch 'em knot their brows like they in pain, then smile as though they ain't, and I like to hear 'em grunt and cry and moan an' squeak and beg like how the ladies do once you got them goin' good, got 'em good and sweet and greezed.”

Ooh my goodness, that was nasty, nastier than I'd ever heard her be. What would Marla say and do? I couldn't exactly see Cleo lying slapped-down on her back, but I couldn't see Marla doing anything less.

“Know how I picked that fist girl I ever really wanted?” Cleo asked.

“Who was that, Cleo?” I noticed I had caught my breath, the way I do whenever I feel jealous. Me, having to be jealous of a simple-face like Cynamon.

“What I mean, li'l sis, is that usually they's the ones be wantin' me, and I just goes along just for the ride, so's to speak.”

“Just for the ride?” Was it the weed, or was it something else that was making my arms and legs feel so limp and weak and warm? And making me sound so very young and stupid?

“Mm—mmm tha's right. Mmm…hmm. But you want to know how I picked that first girl I ever really wanted?”

“How?” I obliged by asking. How could a person tell, ever, what it was they really wanted?

“You mean, how'd I
find
that girl I wanted? That's the question that I'm tryin' to answer you with, now. If I went ahead and answered it, I might be tellin' you about this party I had went to, deep down in the East Bee-mo' jungle, way way late at night, so late it was getting on toward early. That blue
lightbulb had been burning for a good long while by the time Cool Cleo finally got there.

“So then I walks right in, real sharp, wid my cap politely in my hands 'cause I know it's go' be ladies there—I walks on in, and ooh wee, what right off do I see?”

I opened my eyes, and I leaned so far forward, I almost fell. I propped myself on both my hands. “What did you see, Cleo?”

“I saw one whole line of ladies, baby sister, all preening and a-strolling that old hip-grind booty-shake they be using on the street, and all of it is just for me, Cool Cleo.

“Then up to me, comes a lay-dee,” Cleo sang it. “This long-haired light-skin lady in a evening gown with some silvery tinselish fringe along its front come strolling up to me, hip-grinding booty-shaking right up to me, and ask me would I like a glass of wine. Which you already know, Cleo isn't go' refuse.

“So I sits there sipping—the lady done provided me a seat—and lookin' all these ladies over, all of which is wanting me, waiting just to do whatever I be wanting them to do for me, when I sees this one in back?”

“Uh huh?” I nodded with my eyes closed, thinking all of this was sounding too wild even for a life like Cleo's.

“This one look quiet, like she's hiding an' surprised to find herself in this late-night doing, and she's wondering why has she been invited? I mean, this one definitely ain't no party lady, so why she been invited here? Look to me as though she's thinking that, hanging back there in the corner lookin' all so quiet and so sweet.

“Then up to me, comes the lady,” Cleo sang again. “The lady in the evening gown? She seen my glass is drunk down to its dregs. So then she start to po' some mo' of that plum wine, and then she lean down toward my ear, and then she sing to me:

“ ‘Spill that wine, take that girl—' ”

“Oh, Cleo,” I play-slapped at her arm. “That is that
song,
Cleo.” That song I should have recognized, because it had been all over the radio a couple summers before.

Cleo laughed, but then went on. “But you wan' know how I decided which girl it was that I was gon' take? I decided when that sweet girl been hiding in the back was brought up to me by the lady in the evening gown. That sweet young thang is looking giggly, like she likes me so she gots to cover it with silliness. And there she goes, giggling even harder when I lean in toward her to touch them thick soft lips with mines. And I know, soon as I am kissing her, I know it then fo' sho': this the one. This the girl that I been wanting, this dark-skinned soft and chubby one with the real sweet features and the cute print skirts and li'l red Keds and the oh-so-easy feelings I can see inside of, right this living minute. I can see that she the one, once I gits her in the bed, the one gon' scream and cry more happier than she ever done in church. Because the facts is that she ain't yet had real lovin'. Ain't had
my
real lovin'.”

I felt so naked, I felt X-rayed. Embarrassment had never before felt so exciting to me. Not before right now.

“So now I'm thinking I'ma take that girl,” Cleo said, and then she took me. With my eyes closed and my head all weed-smoke dizzy, Cleo took and hugged and kissed my breath away. 'Cept for that tiny squeak I loosed.

That was the real beginning, that first long tight and sliding full-tongue kiss that I gave back to her. That was the real beginning of my realizing how I was much more than someone else's little sister. And in those rapturous high moments I couldn't care at all about whatever people might think of to call me.

All the ways and why of how we kissed: We kissed one time so deep, just because it felt so good, that afterward, still dizzy, as I was dazedly signing on a form, I looked down at my hand, and I saw that I had misspelt my own name. Badly, in
two places. We kissed one time so sweet, just because it tasted good, sneaked little dabs of lip sugar back behind the gym bleachers, so sweet that I forgot to stop, and we almost got caught by watchdog Coach Alberta.

“What y'all doin' back up in there? Popping popcorn maybe?”

We kissed so juicy, so flavor-full for days, sneaked inside the laundry room because the sneaking was so fun. I remember still the way her lips would feel. Luckily, because it is most likely I will never feel those lips on mine again.

 

 

 

 

 

Tonight I am everything
and you are my first love
curled now suckling
yummy girl apple of my eye

 

the girl I own like a mother owns her baby
with her eyes and her shoulders and the dusk
of her body the tongue with which she licks that baby awake
inside the deep folds of neck traced with dinner crumbs
and salty sweet blue powder beads of dreaming

 

I rub my face in you deep like sugar
like blankets left on some street corner
in the box cut open like a door

 

I have known you since the beginning
I ate cereal from your hands
It was 1969 and you were just being born
I was big already I was eleven I was growing everyone-seemed to notice
I let boy after boy touch my body underwater
on the railroad tracks in stuffy living rooms
on rainy afternoons five different ones telling me
what they wanted to do my body black like butter in their hands
curviness out of control lips pulled back

 

Every once in a while there was a boy
with a sour smell beneath the buzz
a smell I could count on coming in from way ahead
like it could be any boy but it was you
that smell from inside behind the sweetness of your mouth
like when I was almost twelve it was as if I was being pinned down by your breath
lifting my ass when I was only fourteen to your baby girl lips
hundreds of miles away lying in your cradle or no maybe a little bigger
in your backyard mourning over chickens killed for dinner