Camptown Ladies (35 page)

I was leaning against a tree, bent over slightly, making ridiculous sounds trying to regain my breath, when I heard footsteps. Against the backdrop of the bonfire, I saw the distinctive silhouette of Erica, who had gotten extremely close without me hearing her over my gasping. I tried to recover, straighten myself up, but seeing her made me cry harder, and instead of standing, I caved into my shame and covered my face with my hands and dropped to my knees like a total fool.

She came closer, and I thought any impact would crash against me as if she were a demon in the night (she was, after all, the one person I could not have in the entire world), but when she knelt down in front of me and took me in her arms, I was astonished by her softness, and I could do nothing but bury my face against her
shoulder. She only held me and said nothing. She waited for me to calm myself, and it took a terribly long time.

While she waited, she talked to me.

“I’m in such trouble,” she said, “I thought it was bad enough when I was confused, when you left California and I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy without you, why Vince couldn’t make me happy. But the confusion, that was easy. This, this is hard. Knowing what I want is hard. All I want is to look at you, be near you—all I want is you.”

When I found enough air to lie, I said, “And all I want is you to be happy with him.”

“That’s not what you want,” she said, then, when I tried to pull away, she locked on to me tighter, and then pulled her face back to cover my lips with hers, and I was gone. I was a little girl completely lost in the woods.

I didn’t have the strength to fight it, I told myself this. I told myself I was too weak from the crying, too weak from wanting her, too weak from losing her to fight this anymore—or, did I just make the evil decision not to? Could someone this weak be returning her kisses this hard? I wondered this as her hands moved to the front of my sweatshirt. She unzipped it, and in a brief moment of sanity, I grabbed her wrists, but not before she had already landed both hands on my breasts and set my chest blazing like a satellite bonfire, in a very dangerous location. Bonfires in woods cause forest fires—bad idea, very, very, very bad idea.

I knew all this, and yet, instead of peeling her hands off, I kissed her harder as I slid my hands from her wrists to let her grab me as hard as she wanted to—and this woman was so much stronger than she looked. The groan that escaped me (which I didn’t recognize as mine) gave her permission to kiss me more deeply, leaving me wondering how something so insanely soft could press so fucking hard against my lips.

Then, just as I was thinking it, she said: “I am
yours.
” And, if it is possible to whisper a command, that is what Erica did, right into my ear.

“You. Are. Mine.”

Since she had possession of both my breasts, with such a remarkable grip, a bizarre thought occurred to me, something that I’d learned when I was quite young: Possession is nine-tenths of the law.

I. Was. Hers.

I blocked out everything but the feel of her, otherwise I could never have reached under her sweater, then under her bra to climb along the front of her like a teenage boy in the back seat of a car. I was racing the clock, expecting to get a flashlight in eyes from some cop at a make-out spot. There were moments I was in total denial of what I was doing, and it made my mind spin off into bizarre directions. My mind raced from being grateful I had a ridiculously large rack of boob to offer a woman as spectacularly attractive as Erica—and, oddly, like I often do at the most inappropriate moments, I escaped to a vivid memory of my last trip to a department store to buy bras.

I was in the lingerie department and asked a size question to the young woman working there. She took one look at my giant jugs (with a half angry/half frightened look that said:
Hell, no, if I am working overtime, bitch
) then she said, in a voice that could only be described as terrified, “I have to call my boss.” Minutes later, after placing the call for help over a Madonna-style headset, the lingerie boss arrived with such an air of importance, hair fashionably disheveled, that I wondered if they had flown her in via a helipad on the Macy’s department store roof.

The boss was a fantastically attractive, tall, rail-thin African American woman who strode toward me confidently, with a practiced look of
You don’t scare me
arranged on her face, like that of a doctor who has to face (with no detectible alarm) the worst cases of skin disease, giant tumors, or alarmingly giant jugs that need measuring. I watched her eyes for changes as my boobs came into alarmingly clearer view. Oh, this woman was good at hiding fear. The lingerie boss’s ridiculously long cloth tape measure was draped around her neck with the fashion sense of an orange scarf but the importance of a stethoscope, the ends fluttering behind her armpits as she strode toward me. If she had been my height, that tape measure would have dragged on the floor.

Was this really necessary?

She directed me to go in the fitting room, where she proceeded to take three lightning fast measurements, with knuckles boob-grazing me in a professional carelessness that I didn’t doubt, while I babbled how I knew the Wal-Mart bra I was wearing was probably incorrect at a size D, and that I might actually a be a double or (giggle) possibly a triple D—she interrupted my pre-teen banter to diagnose me a “G.”

My response: “Um, as in A, B, C, D, E, F, G?”

She said, “Yup. Small frame, but
very
big ones.”

But I dyke-gress.

I was pleased about my big ones now, as I was ripped from my Macy’s lingerie memory by Erica’s stirring responses as she attempted to get her hands around my most pronounced feature. Good luck, honey.

Meanwhile, I only thought I was lost in the woods before, because I had her breasts in my hands too, and Erica’s nipples were hard and pressed against the center of my palms as I held on, a feeling so distracting it was nearly impossible to touch her and kiss her at the same time.

“Please,” Erica said against my lips, “you have no idea how much I need you.”

If
I could have spoken, I might have said she was the one that had no friggin’ idea, since the woods were spinning around me and I felt I was plunging through this delicious hell I had chosen to dive into.

“Please, take me,” she said against my mouth, and when I didn’t move right then, shocked from her words, she grabbed one of my hands and pushed it down the front of her jeans. If that had not been instruction enough (and it may not have been, since I was in the middle of having my mind completely blown), she whispered into my ear, “I need you. Now,” and I thought, Erica was always at her best when was she was telling me what to do.

If I had been weak from crying, her words erased this now, and I wrapped my other arm around her, leaning against her until I pushed her flat onto the ground. Something, maybe a button, tore off her jeans as I slid my hand inside her. She cried out, I think, but
I was a total animal by now, and, actually, the cry might have been mine. When she whispered hoarsely, “Yes, more of you, please—” I once again did what I was told, but then she said “Oh fuck” as if it had not been her idea at all, and this is when I found out that three was Erica’s lucky number.

So this was what it was like to be with a contractor. Take this, put it there, now. More. Harder. Yes. No. Yes. Just like that . . . faster, please, yes, right now. She may have cried out when she came, and this time it really may have been her, because I was watching her face, and in the dim moonlight I could see her cheeks flood with color, and her mouth open as I heard a cry. Or maybe it was me, because when you were doing something perfectly, the beautiful contractor says nothing at all.

Her orgasm served only to make us more desperate, so I roughly pulled her sweater off so my mouth could feast on her breast (why had I waited?), sucking and opening wider until I had most of her in my mouth. When I released her nipple, she clutched me so I wouldn’t let her go, and she let me apart only enough to trail my mouth across her chest to feed on her from the other side. The whole time I kept my hand buried inside her and she kept pushing against me, getting so insanely wet that I could barely feel her. Stupidly, I thought: No going back now. It was stupid because I knew that point had come at our first kiss, on top of a roof.

I felt Erica dig her nails into my back as I put my mouth against her ear and informed her in great detail about how very wet she was, in case she wasn’t aware. I told her if I could bear to pull my hand out of her, ever, I would rather die than never get the chance to taste her. While I was doing all the talking, continuing to say much more dirty things, Erica took me by surprise. Whatever I said, had excited her so that she put her hand on mine and joined her fingers with mine to push me deeper and take her harder, just in case it didn’t occur to me to do so. She came with a series of unfeminine growls behind clenched teeth, and I was certain I couldn’t have lived a lifetime long enough to imagine anything hotter than this—except that we kept intense eye contact the whole time, and while it is thrilling to see a woman’s eyes roll back in her head from pleasure,
the eye contact with her during all of this was almost too much to bear.

When she finally asked me stop, I did as directed, but we continued to kiss, more slowly and deeply. Erica rolled out from under me, and got me laying on my side next to her, our mouths never leaving each other, except when she told me her plans for me. I wondered if two such very dirty girls actually got together, could they survive the explosion? I was betting no, and it seemed such a perfect solution, the two of us fucking each other to death in the woods. Could anyone blame us if we were dead from it? Everyone would see it couldn’t have been helped, and that in the end (pardon the pun) we got what we deserved: fucking death.

Erica got me off this track by whispering against my mouth, “I’m completely in love with you. You know this, right?”

I nodded my head. I knew this.

But her saying it made me think of why we couldn’t be together, and I would have gotten stuck on this thought if only she hadn’t touched me then, slipping inside, to fuck away the last of my thoughts with her unreasonably strong hand. (There are such advantages to a woman’s hand, to be able to go where no man could ever reach. Oh, yes, size does matter.) And, I was thinking now for the first time, there are advantages to a woman who can pound nails with a beautiful rhythm. And if she hadn’t done it just right, taken me just that way, making me come so hard, just like that, I might not have lost my mind and said, “Erica . . . I love you. Of course I love you.” And if I hadn’t said that, then she might not have kissed me harder, still, and I might not have had to take her once again.

After, when we had both come back down to the earth that noticeably prickled with pine needles beneath us, I noticed the bonfire flickering far behind her had grown much smaller. I also had my first sane thought since she found me here, falling apart in the woods. I was so much saner then.

The bonfire was fading, but would this fire between us ever go out? Never. Not for me. Especially not now, not after this. Erica searched my eyes, and I could tell she was reading my thoughts. We
would not die here, we would live, and in our lives was my brother, who I loved as much as life, easily as much as I loved Erica.

Oh fuck.

When she saw the flicker of fresh tears in my eyes and then I saw them on hers, I wondered if she had read all my thoughts. Erica proved she had by whispering, “I can’t love anyone else. It will always be you.” If she did read my thoughts, she would have known how thrilled this made me feel—but she would also have known how it didn’t matter, not at all.

Twenty-Nine

Nobody Wants To Talk About The Pink Labia In The Room

When Lisa was in college, she saw a demonstration happening on the campus grounds. About seventy students, mostly female, were enthusiastically wielding protest signs and chanting, “Spread the word to end the word!” Not one to miss an opportunity to skip class (and possibly pick up a cute co-ed with perky breasts that bounced lightly in protest as she marched) Lisa worked the perimeter of the crowd like a Boarder Collie with an over-achievement complex.

Lisa’s first move was to select what she deemed to be the weakest link and lure a blond girl away from her pack of friends. Who would expect a well-fed Border Collie with a big smile to be any kind of threat?

The girl, happy to have gained a new recruit, stepped aside to speak to Lisa, but not before Lisa showed her commitment by bellowing at the top of her lungs: “Spread the word to end the word! Spread the word to end the word!” Lisa was convinced her commitment to a cause, any cause, would be foreplay to do-gooder chicks. She poured on the charm with a fake-shy chuckle as she asked the girl, “I’m sorry, I’m going to sound retarded, but what’s the word we’re trying to end?”