Macho Sluts (10 page)

As the set progressed, she would move closer and closer to the audience until she had assumed front-center stage. By this time, they were playing some of their own music—“Boxcar Bertha,” “Snake Goddess,” “How to Liberate a Lady”—and Jessie had kicked out all the stops. The music kept getting faster, louder, and more dangerous. Women would be jumping up, dancing on their chairs if there wasn't any room in the aisle, possessed by the music. She would be moving too, taking these incredible leaps and coming down to hammer out another riff, never missing a beat. She rarely looked at the audience, and the occasional wicked grins she flashed at us elicited roars all the way to the back of the crowd.

They closed with “Backdoor Man,” Jessie's solo. She didn't bother to introduce it or justify it. She just put every ounce of her bitterness and pride into it, and when she sneered, “The men don't know what the little girls understand,” we howled with one voice.

They never did encores. After they disappeared from the stage, a lot of leftover energy would be flying around. One post-concert crowd was treated to a knife fight in the best tradition of
West Side
Story
. (Nobody got hurt. The two combatants wound up leaving the woman they had been fighting over to fend for herself, while they went home with each other.) When members of The Bitch were confronted about this in the feminist press and asked to comment, they all disclaimed responsibility and shuffled and apologized—all of them, that is, except Jessie. She scowled and announced that it was time for women to reclaim their violence. “I just wish the stupid cunts would cut up some rapist instead of each other.” Then she offered the interviewer a line of coke.

The journalist, Amazon Birdsong, was not mollified. She could afford to buy her own coke (pharmaceutical, an ounce at a time). She had wealthy parents who loved Te Kanawa, had never heard of Chuck Berry, collected first editions of D.H. Lawrence, but never went near an adult bookstore. After the stinging review she published (“Pornographic Attitudes Infiltrate Wimmin's Music”), The Bitch didn't get any gigs for six months. They were rescued by a women's karate school on the brink of bankruptcy. The benefit concert they did there salvaged their foundering reputation and gave the bar owners an excuse to start booking them again.

Incidentally, the school had huge, blown-up photos of Jessie and other band members in the locker room. I wondered how many women took self-defense classes there just so they could shimmy out of their jeans under Jessie's sardonic smile. I had been considering getting into Tae Kwon Do myself.

There was a stir at the head of the stairs. I looked over crossly, unwilling to interrupt my introspection. Then I saw who was causing the commotion. She had come back. It was Jessie.

I had an immediate physical reaction to her presence: my clit jumped. Then it started throbbing in time with my heartbeat. As I watched her speak to acquaintances here and there, moving on before a greeting could turn into a conversation, I began to shake a little—an erotic attack of fear.

The party picked up. There was a last-minute run on the beer and apple juice. More couples started dancing. Jessie found her spot on the stair railing and leaned there, not moving. I ran my eyes up and down the slim, well-muscled lines of her body, teasing myself with estimates of her strength, wondering what she would feel like pressed down against me, her arms wrapped around me.

She was taller than me by six or seven inches. Her dark hair was clipped short and neat. She was wearing a black velvet jacket that showed off her shoulders and lean build to perfection. A long, white scarf was knotted around her throat. Whenever she moved, the fringes floated behind her. The nerve of the woman, to come on so tailored and dykey, with that trailing length of silk to remind you she was very much a lady.

A roly-poly woman with long, cornsilk hair and a cowboy hat bustled over to offer a beer. Jessie thanked her and then turned three-quarters away. Her helpful fan talked to her shoulder for about five minutes before she got the idea and faded out.

The nerve of the woman!

A crowd began to spiral around her. She stood at its center, blowing smoke into the faces pushed too close to hers, nodding absently at whatever was said, but drawing so hard on her cigarette that it was obvious she took more pleasure from it than from her present company. All her movements were graceful and confident to the point of arrogance. I find arrogance irresistible.

Perched in my window, I wondered about Jessie. A friend of mine told me that her last lover left her because “she was tired of being pushed around.” Pushed around? How? I asked. My friend smiled mysteriously and began to roll another joint. It was the kind of remark that was calculated to set all my fantasy movie machinery in gear, and it had.

My fantasies have a way of turning into challenges. I started to frighten myself with the idea of going up to her. What the hell—she was a woman, like me. Puts her pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of the Lesbian Nation. Wouldn't it be enough just to talk to her for five minutes, introduce myself, even if she snubbed me? If I didn't expect too much, I couldn't really get my feelings hurt.

But I already expected a lot. Too much. I didn't want an autograph—I wanted to stroke that soft skin and feel the resilient muscle running underneath it. Light her cigarette? Bring her a beer? Ha! I wanted to have her under me so I could brush the tops of my breasts against her cheek, graze her half-opened lips with my nipples—shit, even a standard one-night stand would be a disappointment. I wanted something a little more exotic, a little more intense—kinky, to be exact. But maybe she wouldn't care if I was on my feet or on my knees. Maybe she only got off on crowd control. There was a split second when no hand was reaching for her arm; no one was sidling up with a joke to tell. Looking a bit quizzical at being left alone, she took a cigarette and tapped it on one thumbnail.

I found myself transported to her side. She turned her head to stare at me, and all the beer I had drunk ran straight into my bladder. We were too close. If I puffed out my breath, it would disturb the downy hairs along the sides of her neck.

She did not back away, just gave me a cold little once-over. I forced myself to stand my ground, keeping my feet apart and my hands unclenched at my sides, while she took in my tousled gold-brown hair; the tight, black leotard; the studded leather belt; and my faded, button-fly Levis. But I could only bear to look her in the eye for a few seconds before I had to drop my gaze to the toes of her boots. I was in agony. I had no alibi, no catchy opening line, no excuse. I needed a haircut. One of the buttons on my fly had slipped out of the frayed buttonhole. I tried not to pant, knowing that would expand my cleavage, and wound up hyperventilating. When I glanced up, she was, indeed, staring at my breasts … or was she looking at my throat? Then her eyes flicked to my wrists, and back to my neck, and I knew what had caught her attention.

I was wearing, as I always do, two braided black-leather bracelets and a matching collar. It sounds dramatic, but most people don't notice them unless they know what they mean.

If she read me, it didn't show on her face. “What's your name?” she demanded.

“Liz.”

She nodded, and continued to stare at me while she finished her beer. “Dance?” she said finally, and walked toward the music without looking back to see if I would follow.

I was there when she turned around. Her arms accepted me, fit me to her, and we began to duel with one another. I wondered how many women had been settled against her hip. How many eager cunts had pressed just where mine was pressed? More than she could remember, to judge from the practiced, almost automatic rhythm of her dance.

At first, we stared over each other's shoulders, our faces expressionless. This dance is so intimate that some formality must be maintained, even as one of her breasts fits between yours and you feel your own breasts similarly nestled. You must pretend there is no flame between you, no erotic friction, no liquid silk sliding between your thighs. It wasn't easy for me to feign nonchalance. She was damnably competent. I finally quit wondering whether I was having hot flashes or cold chills and just let waves of excitement flicker up and down me, praying I wouldn't shiver in her arms. Her own smell (the salt of perspiration, the secret hollows and folds of her skin, the musk and wild onion of her sex) was mixed with tobacco and booze, and it aroused me so painfully that I wanted to bury my nose in her hair, her armpits, the folds of her labia.

She started playing with the braided leather band around my throat. “You have interesting taste in jewelry,” she said casually. “What is this, a choker or something?”

“It's a collar,” I said.

She was looking for a snap or a knot, but all she could find was the silver ring woven into the design. “Doesn't it come off?” she asked, turning it. I smiled. “Well,” she shrugged, “I'm impressed.”

She let me snuggle up to her, and rested her chin on the top of my head. “You're very sensitive,” she drawled, stroking my neck. Goosebumps covered me in a flash. “Just the lightest touch … and your skin is so pale.” She pretended to take a professional interest in my health—“I hope you're not anemic?”

“No, but I bruise easily.”

“Ahh.” Her nostrils quivered.

My inner lips had continued to swell, unfurling themselves until they were in full bloom. I was slippery with hot vaginal oils. She continued to tease me, shifting suddenly to apply pressure when I least expected it, clinging and grinding against me when I tried to move away. I threw back my head and looked at her, letting her see the flush on my cheeks. Her eyes narrowed, and she began to coax more sensation from me, trying to see how high I could get without breaking away. My breath was coming in fits and starts. But it was she who suddenly uttered a short cry of surprise and ecstasy. I was startled— flattered. She took my chin in her cupped hand and brought me to her mouth. Teeth, clean and sharp, cut my lips. Her tongue rippled against my inner cheeks and palate. I moaned inside her mouth, safe, where no one could hear me. My vagina was a fountain, little spurts of lubrication welling up out of me.

“I'm kissing you too hard,” she whispered, and released me.

“I can take rougher treatment than that,” I murmured in reply, and laid my cheek on her shoulder.

She twisted her hand in my hair and forced me to look at her. There was something like pity in her eyes, then that was replaced by a predatory joy. “Can you really?” she threatened.

“I can play any game you can come up with.”

“But I'm not playing.”

I considered carefully. “If anyone changes their mind, it will be you,” I promised quietly.

She squeezed my ass. Hard. “Do you know, I have never let a dare go by. Not once in my whole little life.” She danced me into a dark corner, kissing me up and down between my ear lobe and shoulder. Her lips were soft. She took little nibbles of me, like a doe working on a sapling. Now she pressed me against the wall, standing between me and the crowd. We kissed, and she slipped her hand into the spandex bodice of my leotard to fondle my breasts. My nipples responded instantly to her touch, pointed and hard as little pine cones. She used her tongue in my mouth, and I couldn't stop my hips from responding. She stroked my back, belly, kissed me again and again, pinching my nipples and squeezing my breasts.

“How does that feel?” she whispered in my ear. “Did you know you're dancing all over the place? Ooh, let me do that again. No— take your hand away—I want to. You want me to. I can tell you like it. You're so turned on, I think I could make you come right now, in front of everybody.” She began to call me names—slut, bitch, whore, cunt—and they were rich and resonant in my ear, like an incantation. “You're a very bad girl,” she said. “I think I should take you home with me and teach you a lesson. Only I don't know if I can wait until I get you home.”

It seemed to me that everyone in the room must be staring. I tried to protest without drawing attention to us, but when Jessie started working on the buttons of my Levis, I shrieked.

She stopped what she was doing, her hand resting on my hip. “Apparently, I'm not the one who's going to change her mind,” she drawled.

I winced. “Touché. I concede the point.”

“Mmm.” She wound her fingers in my hair. “What else are you willing to concede?”

“Whatever you can make me concede.”

“You won't go along peacefully, huh? I have to use force?”

“Don't you want to use force?”

Jessie laughed. “Point for you.” She put her hands up to her throat and untied her scarf. I stood perfectly still while she threaded one end through the ring on my collar. “This should insure your compliance,” she said, trying the knot with loving care.

The stairs were only a few steps away. She led me out, holding onto the other end of the scarf. I may have imagined it, but I thought I heard someone say, “Did you see that?” and someone else say, “Oh, my God!” behind us. It seemed to me that Jessie walked a little more briskly.

I concentrated on the high heels of her boots as she led me out of the building to her sports car. “They know about you,” I said jealously as she unlocked the door.

“And now they know about you, too,” she said harshly. “Get in. I didn't ask you to worry about my maiden reputation.”

Her car was so little and low, I had to hunch myself and duck, then almost fall into the bucket seat. Jessie was already seated, whistling through her teeth and drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. She leaned across me to lock my door, then retrieved the end of the scarf and tied it around her wrist. “Can't forget your safety belt, now can we?” We gave each other big smiles that were only twenty percent phony.

“What about your reputation?” she asked me, looking over her shoulder as she backed into the street.