Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica (10 page)

In her post-orgasmic stupor, Jordan observed that the woman, while excited, was nowhere near climax. Briefly, Jordan was tempted to succumb to her own satiety and exhaustion, to shove the woman away, leaving her breathless
and wanting on the tile floor as she walked out of the steam room and got dressed. No lovely reciprocity, no awkward attempts at politeness—how liberating that would be.

The only thing that held her there was the insistent warmth that slowly flooded the area between her legs. At first she tried to ignore it, but, as it grew more persistent, she tried to devise ways to appease it. Gripping the woman's hips even more firmly, she wrestled them, still thrusting, down again to the floor. Standing, she looked at the woman through the lingering dampness. The woman's eyes were shut; her face, turned to one side, impassive but for the faintly creased forehead, the slightly flared nostrils and the dry lips, which she sought to moisten with the pink tip of her tongue. Her body, which shocked Jordan all over again with its pliant immensity, rocked slightly, its creases and rolls reconfiguring themselves with each new movement. As Jordan eased off her worn, damp Levi's, revealing bicycle shorts, and, beneath them a pair of thinly jutting hips and another, lower bulge, Jordan knew that she would not leave—could not—until she had fucked this woman as God, nature, or the planets had clearly intended her to be fucked.

Crouching as she peeled off the Lycra shorts, Jordan lowered herself onto the soft, billowing bed that was the woman's body, and slipped herself—or, rather, that part of her which was not herself—into the woman's wet, waiting pussy. Bracing herself against first the floor, then the warm, full rolls on the sides of the woman's body, Jordan slammed into her with a force bordering on fury. Looking down, she dimly saw the woman's breasts as they jerked and swelled in time to her rhythmic thrusts. Gazing at the abundant belly that helped to hold them in check, Jordan was just beginning to marvel anew at the abandon with which it spilled across her hips when she felt a tremor deep in the woman's body. Like the sensation you get when you touch the railroad tracks and feel the rumble
of a distant train, Jordan felt both curiosity and terror, anxious to see the promise fulfilled and yet afraid that its coming would destroy her by its sheer force. As the tremor turned into a pounding and the pounding turned into an explosion, Jordan held onto the woman's churning, thrashing body, pumping her own hips until she too exploded.

As they lay there, spent and gasping for air, the faint hissing sound resumed, and Jordan felt her sweaty body grow increasingly damp as steam once again filled the room. She eased out of the woman, pulling herself up and, with a twinge of regret, off those gently pressing breasts and the firm convexity of that stomach. Groping, her eyes still shut, Jordan made her way over to the bench, which was somehow reassuring in its hardness. She sat there for a while, not thinking, not moving. Opening her eyes, she felt herself in a dream, surrounded by the clouds of hot, white air. Focusing, her eyes sought the form of the body that had given her such amazing pleasure, only to be distracted by the shaft of light and cool air that shot through the suddenly opened door—a light that was immediately obscured by the shadow of the figure who stepped into it, ushered out by billows of steam.

 

 

 

 

 

It was terribly cold and nearly dark on the last evening of the old year, and the snow was falling fast. In the bitter cold and encroaching gloom, the wind whipped through the clothing of any poor souls stranded outside, to freeze them in their very tracks.

She clicks the remote once.

“Fuck The Weather Channel,” she says to herself. “Goddamn depressing, that's what I say.”

The American Bandstand guy has replaced the images of the storm on her forty-eight-inch screen. Dick somebody, right? What the fuck is he laughing about?

Safe and warm tonight inside her office on the thirty-fifth floor, she draws her bare feet up beneath her in the large leather chair behind her executive-sized desk. Both pairs of her shoes are ruined or gone. A young man lifted her not-yet-out-of-the-bag Reeboks on the subway. He'd been part of a gang of performance artists, who'd laughed as they'd danced off with her running-shoes, saying they could use them as cradles for the twin births in their nativity program. She had to wear
the fucking Gucci's to the office—ruined those suckers in the slush, damn it. And she'd had to carry those goddamn sample cases the whole way, as though she were no more than a common salesperson. She shudders and draws her feet further up beneath herself. Leave it to the Chinese Army to want to do business on New Year's fucking Eve. Well, she wasn't going to lose this account—no way. Sheffield and Buck had bids in, but her own company's blades were going to be the official knives of the Chinese Red Army, and it didn't matter to her whether she had to miss New Year's Eve to cinch the deal.

But the phone does not ring.

The fax machine is silent.

Damn it!

Click. The large-screen television in her office offers up the evening's news: family shots, parties.

Click. Couples going out for dinner and drinks. Fuck 'em all.

Click. A diamond is forever.

Click. The television winks out.

She glares balefully at the phone. General Ping is over an hour late. Bastard better call—she isn't about to go through this day without closing that deal. If she doesn't sell this lot of blades, the CEO is going to hang her ass out to dry. She snorts once. That asshole is most certainly at the company party right now, smiling that ice cold smile of his, the one he'd taught her when she'd first joined the company, the smile she scares herself with in the mirror nowadays. She's vice-president in charge of overseas marketing, and she can play hardball with the toughest of the guys. But tonight is going to make or break all of that.

She shudders involuntarily and hugs herself—a gesture she hasn't done for years. Her fingers trace the toned muscles of her forearms. No sign of the scars anymore—Doc did a good job. Ha! She'd paid him enough!

Click. More parties, more people laughing, dancing, singing, laughing, kissing…laughing.

Click. Silence.

She doesn't dare leave the office without this deal. Her eyes drift to the sample cases, and before she can stop herself, she opens each one. Revealing row upon row of gleaming, razor-sharp cold-forged steel blades.

One more glance at her arms, scar-free now for…what was it? Four years, ever since she joined the company. Four years since she'd become as hard as she had, as cold as any of the assholes working here. No…colder. Four long years since she'd made herself bleed. She looks longingly down at the blades.

“Yeah…yeah…what the fuck,” she says softly to herself. It'll take the edge off waiting for General Whatsis-Ping to call. She barks a short laugh.

“Or put the edge on,” she whispers.

Slowly she draws a long, curved blade from the sample case—she cannot stop the small animal cry that escapes her lips. Holding the blade between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she lightly scrapes it across the fine down on the back of her forearm. Oh, yes: as sharp as she might hope. Hell, she used to do this with her father's razor blades!

She takes a deep breath and, eager and sure, cuts the warrior mark into her upper right arm.

Ohhhhh, yes.

The warmth of the pain spreads swiftly through the rest of her body.

Yes, yes, yes. It really is a wonderful cut: blood dancing out behind the blade and trickling down her bicep. But more truly wondrous, it now seems to her that she is kneeling beside a small burning brazier with polished brass feet and intricate brass ornamentation. She can see the irons heating up to white hot. With a small whimper, she lifts her thighs to present herself for the brand when, lo! The blood from her mark stops flowing,
the brazier and irons vanish, and she has only the red-stained blade pressed between her fingers to remind her of this vision.

Breathing heavily, she shakes her head. Omigod, she thinks, I can't go back into that space. No no no—I've got too much going for myself in this job, can't give it up for that. Yet, even as she thinks no, she takes a second blade from the case and slashes more deeply across the first mark on her arm. She cries out in joy and pain, the blood pours willingly down her arm. And where one or two drops fly from her blade onto the wall, it becomes transparent as a veil, and she can see into the room beyond: a dungeon! Beneath bright lights, a young slave lies on a table, eyes closed, a ceremonial dagger piercing the upper thigh.

Who's that laughing with such pure delight? The creature on the table? Or herself?

What is still more wonderful, the slave jumps down from the table, and hobbles across the floor, knife in thigh and all, right up her. But the bleeding in her arm ceases, and once again she is left alone in her darkened office.

“Gotta stop this shit,” she says aloud, but she's already grabbed the third blade and, crooning softly to herself, she cuts a deep circle into the top of the vertical slash on her arm. Blood seeps from her wounds, suffusing her with a warmth she's not felt in years. A moan escapes her lips as she lifts her eyes to the next vision: herself, pierced with hundreds and hundreds of needles, each sparkling and dancing in the light of the now blazing brazier. Taller and taller she grows, this pierced apparition, till the needles themselves seem to her like stars in the sky.

Stars indeed. The bleeding has stopped, and she's looking out through the office window into the New Year's Eve night. A star falls, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire. “Someone is dying,” she thinks to herself, for the woman who first collared her, the only person who had ever loved her, and who
was now dead, had told her that when a star falls, a soul was leaving the physical plane.

She drags a fourth blade through her arm. Blinking, dizzy, she lifts her head to see…her first owner, the woman who had first put a collar round her throat and called her “mine.”

“Ma'am,” she calls out to this vision, her voice hoarse with tears uncried for four long years, “Please, take me with you. I know you'll disappear when my arm stops bleeding. You'll vanish, like the branding irons, the slave with knife in thigh, and the girl who was pierced like the night sky itself.”

She quickly takes blade after blade from the case, and cuts here and there, everywhere all over her body, for she wishes so deeply to keep her lover with her. Her blood flows with a heat that is more intense than the summer sun itself, and her lover, who has never appeared so large or so beautiful, takes the still-bleeding one into her arms, and makes a final cut: deep across her throat.

“You knew I always wanted to do that, didn't you love?”

She can no longer speak to answer, only shake with ecstasy. And they both fly upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there is neither coldness of heart nor hunger of soul, for they are together and they are in love.

In the dawn of morning, there lies the young woman, with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, curled up in her over-large leather chair; she bled to death on the last evening of the year; and the New Year's sun has risen and shines down through the window upon a slashed and bloodless corpse. The woman still sits, in the stiffness of death, holding the blades in her hand, many of which are yet stained with her dark blood.

“It's because the China deal fell through,” said some, “She couldn't take the pressure,” said others. And in the very highest offices, they agreed, “It's a man's job after all.” No one ever imagined what beautiful things she had seen, nor into what glory she had entered with her lover, on New Year's Day.

 

 

 

 

 

call me james brown while i dance
on the cum-stained floor of your
steamy juke joint and let these legs be
eyes seeing rhythms/dancing
in shades of

1
maroon
2
black
3
pulpy
4
earth green

 

5 6 7 8 toes already in the water
and i'm still burning up
the floor and burning up and
burning up like when the sage stick
becomes fire
burning until your joint is smudged
and there is nothing else. but the smoke of the rhythm of
the color…

 

until there is nothing
else but us/here/in this
charred slow drag called us/here.

 

 

 

 

 

Jesse. Sharpen your knives on my long bones. The first time you came by with your bag of stones, sat at my kitchen table with all the contents of my knife drawer glinting up at you, dazzling me, slices of mirror refracting your beauty as you ran the long stones along each dulled edge of metal, making it fine again, I thought about cutting up chickens. How with a good sharp knife, the gristle slides off like butter, the slippery meat opens to you as if it had waited its whole simple life for this moment.

Even after you'd finished, and laid the knives gently on a dish towel, all pointing the same way like teeth in a cared-for mouth, even after I'd paid you and you'd said “Thank you, ma'am” in a shy, self-mocking sort of way, we stayed at my kitchen table and drank half a bottle of wine. You never seemed to be in a hurry. Not that night, or any other when you'd come around. The trouble lay—and trouble is always lying coiled up someplace close by—the trouble lay in not knowing when you'd come around. And buying the toughest of meats, using my knives as often as possible, wishing them
dull so I could call and ask you back only made me feel like the worst kind of woman, the kind who waits.