Stolen Moments

A new entry in Bold Strokes’ Erotic Interludes collection, this anthology offers no-holds-barred erotica from some of today’s best lesbian authors. Love on the run, in the office, in the shadows… women stealing time from ordinary life to make passion a priority, if only for a moment. Fast, furious, and almost too hot to handle.

Erotic Interludes 2: Stolen Moments

Brought to you by

eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.

Erotic Interludes 2: Stolen Moments

© 2005 Bold Strokes Books. All Rights Reserved
.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-272

This electronic book is published by

Bold Strokes Books, Inc.,

New York, USA

First Printing: September 2005

Second Printing: March 2006

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Credits

Editors: Radclyffe and Stacia Seaman

Production Design: Stacia Seaman

Cover Photo: Radclyffe

Cover design by Sheri ([email protected])

By its very nature, an anthology is a study in similarities and contrasts. Despite a common theme, diversity is inherent since the work consists of a collection of pieces by different authors—different styles, different language, different vision of the topic. That’s one of the things that makes reading anthologies so much fun—you never quite know what the next page will bring. Adding the element of erotica to the mix creates the potential for even greater surprises. Merely attempting to define the term “erotic” usually leads to considerable debate. What may be erotic to one person may not be to another.

My goal in choosing the selections for this anthology was to have a final work that encompassed a broad interpretation of both the theme, in terms of setting and circumstance, as well as the
sine qua non
, eros. Happily, the task was not difficult.
Erotic Interludes 2
includes works from a talented array of writers from around the world, and whether first-time writers or established authors, they all have one thing in common—they write sizzling erotica with style. With settings as diverse as “love in the stacks” and “mile-high moments,” and with flavors ranging from hot stranger-sex to steamy long-term-couple love, these are the stories of women who can’t wait a minute longer for their pleasure. Once you start reading, neither will you.

Radclyffe 2005

Michelle opens the unlocked door to the Park Slope walk-up and I am immediately assaulted by the piney smoke of incense drifting from someone’s first-floor apartment. It’s the kind of incense you can buy on the street, the kind that runs pungent through the air outside of the Astor Place K-Mart, a block from my present apartment—a block from the apartment and the life I am leaving.

But it’s not my apartment anymore, not really. It’s Rebecca’s, and it holds the scent of a sadness so salient that living there is something like suffocation.

“This one will be ready by March first,” Michelle tells me as I follow her up a flight of stairs. She knocks tentatively at the door, then unlocks it. “Warning knock,” she explains, laughing that unbearable giggle that strikes me as artificial as a cartoon.

The apartment is small—a main room with a kitchen and a couch, another door perhaps leading to the bedroom. It’s a “glorified closet,” as Rebecca would say. She is convinced that by leaving her, not only am I leaving behind the “love of my life” but also the
only
inexpensive apartment in
the entire city
that has enough room for
all of my crap. And I’m not just talking physical crap, Hannah, I’m talking all of your crap, all of your mental crap.

Those are the kinds of statements that make me want to slam every door of every insufficiently housed couple in the city with a noise that wakes all the neighbors and sends them grabbing for brooms to pound on ceilings and floors.
Shut up, Cut the Noise, Cut the Crap.

This place is furnished. But it’s not the layout I’m staring at now.

The current occupant is on the couch, eating macaroni and cheese from a plastic bowl and watching some makeover show. Everything inside of me rises and turns soft like a hallucination in a movie, like the one-bedroom is an underwater tank and the girl on the couch is the fake mermaid with breasts covered in aqua seashells, and I, in my layers and my sensible slacks and my sensible shoes, feel as sexy as seaweed.

“Hi! I’m so sorry—is this a bad time?” Michelle asks the girl.

“No.” She shrugs. “You just called me. I said it was fine.”

Michelle giggles again. I am embarrassed to be here with this woman with her nervous laughter and her pink tweed jacket.

“I’m sorry—what’s your name again?”

“Vivian.”

“Vivian—Vivian—right! Vivian, this is my client Hannah. She’s thinking about taking this place off your hands.”

Vivian gives a half smile. “It’s all yours.”

It’s all yours. All yours. Speaking of things that could be all mine—

In college, my first (and last) serious boyfriend told me he loved me the most in my sweatpants. He wouldn’t say why and so I asked a friend why and she laughed in my face, her eyes wide like gumballs. “Easy access, Hannah! Hello!”

I had blushed then. I blush now because Vivian is wearing sweatpants. I blush because I can see the perfect circles of her nipples under her tank top. I am hoping that she can tell, you know, tell that
I’m into girls,
tell that I am desperate for a fuck, that I’ve only got half an hour before I have to meet Lenny—a gay friend who makes fun of me all the time (
Did you forget how to read a clock, Hannah? Do you understand how time works, Hannah?)—
at a bar on the corner. And he lives in the neighborhood and wants me to live here too, and so he is buying me a drink as if he is in cahoots with Michelle, presenting promises of the grand life I could have here in the boroughs.

I think Michelle is talking.

Vivian’s sweatpants are gray, an athletic seal by her left hip that I can’t read. Michelle talks about exposed brick and I am imagining exposing Vivan’s pussy lips, parting them like the Red Sea, lowering an eager fingernail over the ticklish sensitivity of her clit.

“Any questions?” Michelle asks me. “This is it for today—so you might want to think about making a decision.”

“Um…” I pause. Vivian is looking at me now too, as if she too wants a question. Where do I begin? “How much?”

“Fourteen hundred,” Michelle responds, looking at her cell phone.

“Huh.”

“It’s a good neighborhood,” Vivian offers.

“Yeah?” I am pathetic, I am the girl at Girl Scout camp being pushed away by her bunkmate, sloppy and full of hate. “Is it?”

“I like it. It’s just so far from work for me—”

“Where are you moving to?” I ask her, trying to be conversational, trying to sound like a woman in a bar, a woman on the street, a woman with my eyes pulled like gravity to her cunt. Vivian is young, brilliant green eyes, short dark hair, and she looks fresh and showered and like something I could lick, without regrets.

“East Village.”

“That’s where I’m moving from, actually.”

“You don’t like it?”

“No, it’s great—it’s just…pricey and—well, I was sharing a one-bedroom with someone—and I can’t afford that on my own—you know?”

Vivian nods, and maybe smiles. After three years of reading Rebecca’s facial expressions like a practiced translator, the codes of other women are frustrating, baffling, a sort of crippling that makes dating feel like tourism.

Michelle is ready to go, manically looking around the place like an owl.

“You like this one, then?” she asks. “I have to meet another client in Red Hook in a half hour—you want me to draw up the papers?”

Does the girl come with the couch?
“I don’t know.”

And then we are back on the stairs, walking down, and there it is again—the incense from the first floor, a faint smell of marijuana, and I pause by the door. Rebecca. Rebecca with her joints on the fire escape, Rebecca with bath towels that smell like that, sex that smells like that.

I need it. I need sex. I need sex right now. I need my nose nestled in the petals of her pussy, surrounding me with the scent that lingers on my fingers for hours after masturbation.

“Um, I have to make a phone call, so you go ahead,” I say to Michelle, hoping she will leave me inside the building while I assess my own courage.

“Um, okay.” Michelle hands me her card again, for maybe the tenth time. “Call me.”

In the space under the stairs, I catch my breath. I know by the crescendo of my cunt that I can’t leave Vivian up there without at least giving it a shot.

For a moment I think perhaps I can forget—forget about Rebecca and her demands, her sadness, about the careful division of things, the inevitable fallout of a relationship that built us together like a house connected to another house with solid material like brick and mortar—of the melancholy thicker than smoke that coats our conversations and makes everything foggy and unbearable.

For a moment I can think, fully, of someone else, someone who can grab me by my cunt and send me elsewhere, leave love dangling in the other room.

And I can’t let that moment go.

I walk up the stairs but I am shaking, my knees are weak, I didn’t know I could do this, didn’t know someone could turn me to jelly without saying anything, by just sitting on a couch in a wifebeater and gray sweatpants eating macaroni and cheese and watching bad television with her dark pageboy hair hanging in her eyes like she needs a haircut and her eyes—God—her eyes—dark green like moss, the kind of dark that I could get lost in forever, forever or for twenty minutes or both or at least twenty minutes that feel, after all, so much like forever.