After Midnight (8 page)

“I liked how you took charge of the class,” I told her. “But you weren't bossy or anything like that. You just knew what you were doing.” She stared at me, perhaps her way of testing me. I gazed silently back at her, perhaps my way of letting her know she could control me, like she had her class.

“And you like that, Gina? You like it when someone else is in charge?” she asked, this time moving closer so her hand brushed my arm. Her body leaned toward me, ready to pounce.

“Yes,” I told her, unable to say anything else as her fingers slid down my arm, stroking my wrist with her thumb as she captured it in her grasp. Again and again she stroked that one tender spot in the center of my wrist, near my palm, until I couldn't stand it anymore and tried to pull away—not because I didn't like it, but because her touch had such a hypnotizing effect on me.

“Where do you think you're going?” She held me tighter then reached for my other wrist. I offered them both to her, bringing my arms together, giving her a silent signal that I was hers. “That's more like it,” she said. “You want me to take over, I will, but you should remember that old saying: be careful what you wish for.”

With my arms caught in hers, Sonia pushed me onto my back. I was fully dressed but felt bare as her eyes took in all of me, not missing a trick as they wandered from my tight red sweater, the edges of my black bra peeking out, to my even tighter jeans, which I probably wouldn't have worn had I known I'd be lying on the bed of one of the hottest women I'd ever seen. She took one hand away from the wrist it was holding, letting me know with her eyes that she wanted me to leave it above my head.

Sonia's hand traveled down my arm, slowly filling me with her heat as she made her way to my waist, where she burrowed beneath my sweater to touch the spongy flesh above my hip. She lingered there, massaging the far reaches of my stomach with her thumb while I breathed heavily, looking up at her as she surveyed me. I wanted desperately to meet her approval, to make this adventure worthwhile for both of us lest I give in to my potentially ridiculous urge to back out, hop up, and run away. She waited me out, though, and stroked me gently. Her other hand roamed up my sweater, lightly stroking my breast
until I gave in, my body relaxing fully into her touch, my spine unwinding as I offered myself to her.

Somehow Sonia could tell, and as I let out the breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding, her hands clamped over my rib cage, then pushed my sweater up to my neck. I made a move to take it off entirely, but she stilled me. “Keep your hands over your head, Gina,” she told me, and the way she said my name, like some kind of curse, made me shiver. She peeled down the lacy layers of my bra, exposing my breasts and very quickly much more. “
Dios mio, chica
,” she said, lapsing into Spanish at the sight of me, even though English was clearly her preferred language. It sounded so sexy to my ears, but soon I stopped listening almost altogether as my moans drowned her out.

She squeezed my breasts, making me wet my panties and arch my hips, and tugged on my nipples, pinching them tighter and tighter as my face contorted involuntarily. I swallowed hard and shut my eyes. She pressed hard against my nubs, while my jeans pressed tightly against my cunt as I twisted around. Sonia leaned down and grabbed one nipple between her teeth, sinking them into my pink flesh slowly but forcefully while her fingers did the same to my other nipple. Again she waited me out, pouncing on me as she pushed me to the limits of my arousal. I let out a strangled cry as her teeth crowded my nub, the pain sinking in above the pleasure, and just then she let go, her tongue assuaging the pressure she'd just created. If Sonia was on a quest to make me come by playing with my nipples, she was doing a good job.

I'd given up on trying to reciprocate in any way, because her powerful focus had turned me to jelly. She ran her lips all along my breasts then moved lower, licking along the ticklish rounded edges of my stomach, squirreling her tongue under my waistband. Finally she pressed the back of her hand against the wet seam of my jeans, rubbing my slit as I'd wanted her to do
from the start. She pressed hard, the bony edges of her hand firm against my slick, needy lips. I think I cried out, “Yes” and later “Sonia,” but I knew she would go at her own pace.

After torturing me with these clothed strokes for a while as I teetered on the edge of the waterfall, threatening to spill over but staying on the safe side for the moment, she peeled off my jeans and took my soaked panties with them. I was so wet that all I cared about was her touch, and Sonia didn't disappoint. She pushed one finger into my dripping wetness, and I heard her let out a moan, then a real curse as she inserted another and another. My arms still above my head, I banged my fists lightly against the bed, spreading my legs as her fingers sank magically inside. Out of the corner of my eye I saw some lube nearby, reached for it, and delicately tossed it over to her. I was plenty wet, but I wanted more. She slid her fingers out, and I felt the loss immediately, but when I opened my eyes and saw her drizzling lube onto her fingers, I was more than placated.

Sonia returned to my pussy, a look of studious arousal on her face as she again entered me, this time with three slippery fingers. I contracted around her, tightening against this much-needed pressure. She slipped her little finger inside, and I felt it edge its way along my walls. No sooner had I adjusted to that last digit than her thumb was nudging against me, pressing inside. Tears of pleasure pooled in my eyes when I realized she was going all the way: her whole hand. I shut my eyes and tried to stay as still as possible.

Sonia pressed her face against me, her tongue lightly stroking my clit as her fingers easily curled inside me until the tight ball of her hand was simply there, a fullness like nothing I'd experienced. If I opened my eyes, I could see her sinewy, muscular arm rocking minutely as she gently moved her powerful fist and her tongue kept pace with my clit. But what made stars explode
behind my eyes, what made Sonia seem like a superhero, was when her free hand came around to press against my stomach. At first my hand reached up to stop her. The swelling and pressure were too great, too much, and I was afraid of what I might do. Would I crush her? Hurt her? Scare her? The Sonia in front of me wasn't just the sexy computer geek I'd glimpsed earlier, but a woman who was huffing and sweating, taking me over and over the most dangerous of precipices, giving so much of herself I could barely stand to accept it.

I didn't wonder why she was pulling out all the stops on what could only charitably be called our first date but simply went with the feeling, opening my body to her as she gently twisted her hand back and forth, knocking on my door, begging for entrance, even as her powerful palm pushed down against me. She was pushing and pulling, inside and out, everywhere at once, and when I finally did fall over that cliff and ride the sparkling white crashing waves to the ground, I screamed, my cries echoing off her walls as she flattened her tongue against my clit and guided me safely to the ground. My pussy clamped tightly around her hand, as if molding itself to her shape, while my juices trickled down her wrist. Who knows how long it went on—all I can tell you is that I was spent when we were done. I couldn't talk, and even if I'd wanted to, I had no idea what to say.

Sweetly, Sonia kissed me—on my hip, then my chest, then my shoulder, then my cheek—before getting up. She returned sparkling clean bearing a glass of water, and she helped me sit up and held the cool glass to my lips. “I don't know what to say,” I finally managed, knowing she'd understand.

“I'm the one who's used to being in front of the mike, remember?” she said, her deep brown eyes teasing me as I struggled to sip instead of gulp.

That was two years ago, time during which I've seen Sonia work many crowds, flirting and teaching and showing off that gorgeous body as effortlessly as she slipped her hand inside me that first night. The only thing that's changed is that I've managed to show her a trick or two as well, but she's still my favorite geeky girl, and I'm happy to say I'm hers as well.

 

 

 

 

 

D
alia was long past the tuning stage when I walked through the door. I recognized one of her new songs coming out of the amp, and I smiled. “Sorry I'm late. Sounds good.”

She smiled at me and kept playing. I dug the thickest sheaf of poems out of my bag and looked for a clean place to sit. Jay and Kadja were lying propped up against each other on the futon. When I had closed the door, Jay had opened her eyes and taken a film canister out of the pocket of her hoodie. Now she picked up Kadja's limp hand, tapped some powder out onto the web between thumb and forefinger, sniffed a bump, and nodded up at me. When Kadja woke up and Jay told her, “I didn't want you to feel left out,” the couple dissolved into sleepy kisses and giggles.

I settled onto one of Smith's famous dark-wood desk chairs with the wide seat, heavy frame, and inexplicable lower-leg tilt. Snide upperclasswomen-with-a-
Y
called it the Plath Tilt while
looking up, for effect, at the ceiling for a pipe sturdy enough to toss a noose over. I had developed quite a penchant for sitting naked in mine, tipped all the way back, while getting eaten out. I'd hold on to my partner's long hair for balance, as ze sucked my clit and bit my luscious fat labia, and when I came I'd slide almost all the way off on my own juices.

Thinking of a mouth over my crotch made my cunt grow warm and my nipples harden. I breathed deeply and looked over at Dalia, hunched over her black Fender Telecaster with the punk rock stickers and white pick guard, her feet moving rhythmically in their untied striped sneakers. I'd missed her over the summer. Sometime in June she sent me a postcard from her favorite diner in her Los Angeles neighborhood, talking about the gig she'd had the night before. I carried that postcard in my bag with me for weeks until it nearly fell apart and my partner laughed at what a crush I had. “That's not true,” I'd said, even if I could taste her skin in my every dream. “But even if it were true, we're only friends.”

Dalia and I were friends, even though most of her friends, lovers, and girlfriends were much tougher than I, who had little interest in drugs and guns. We were college friends who valued each other's voices, art, ideas, and kindness, but I doubted we would value, say, each other's scent in the middle of the night. And though my primary partner was certainly not a man, I'd never slept with what I considered a woman before, a woman in the traditional sense, the double-
X
-labeled-at-birth sense, the bleeding-uterus-like-a-sacred-heart sense. Where Dalia'd had a hundred women since she started fucking at fourteen, I hadn't put more than kisses on one since I'd come out a year earlier. I didn't want to tell her, and I didn't want her to think she'd have to teach me anything.

Dalia turned on the four-track and we started putting lyrics
and music together. Her band had just signed a two-record deal, but she still liked playing casually with me. We'd gotten together at least weekly during our first year, listening to the end results at the end of every session, our heads pressed together as we shared one set of studio headphones. I loved the resonance of Dalia's enormous voice and could hardly ever believe that she wasn't a foot taller—rather than a foot shorter—than I was. This night was no different. The lovers on the futon hardly stirred as we experimented and harmonized and laughed.

As always, Dalia and I ran out of tape, which signaled the end of the session. We soon got into a loud, heated conversation about the likelihood of Andrea Dworkin becoming a porn star before we realized it was past midnight and Dalia's roommates probably had their own midterms to take in the morning.

“Come to my room for a beer,” I said. Unlike Dalia, I had a room of my own, of which Virginia Woolf would have approved.

“Sure, sounds good.”

I pulled a hardpack of menthols out of my bag while I was putting my writing away. I tapped it hard against the palm of my hand and watched Dalia unplug her guitar and place it on its stand. By the time she was done, a red mark had formed just above my wrist, and Dalia came over to look. She touched the mark with one finger. Her eyes met mine, and she smiled slowly up at me. I swallowed hard and gestured with my head toward the door. The fluorescent hallway lights whined at us as we turned the corner.

My key turned over the tumblers very slowly as I unlocked the heavy wooden door to my room. At this time of night, the slightest noise was amplified in echoes that hit every door of every sleeping student on the hall. Somehow, tonight, it felt like a dozen eyes were watching me, but it could have been just
Dalia's two, looking at me calmly, which made me move self-consciously into the dark room.

I pulled the chain on the light and was able to see the detail on her white wifebeater. As usual, her tits bounced against her slim rib cage as she talked and laughed, her pierced nipples temporarily restrained by the fabric covering them. I handed Dalia a beer from the small fridge and turned on the stereo. I offered her a cigarette before lighting one for myself. I had the rough brown end in my mouth and flicked the lighter's silver wheel before I noticed she was looking intently at me. I inhaled deeply, my cheeks going slightly concave around the filter. As I sat next to her, I noticed she had three bruises on her left arm.

“Did you get those from rugby?” I asked her.

Dalia smiled at me, a little too sloe-eyed and deeply, as she smoked. “Something like that.” She turned her left arm out further and brought it closer to me. At this angle, I saw two additional bruises, muted blue patches against her light skin, and I couldn't stop myself from wondering which lover had grabbed her so roughly. Before I could ponder this thought too long, Dalia brought that arm over my shoulder, resting her hand on my shirt, touching me all the way from my collar to the edge of my cuff. Her hand rested on the tender skin of my inner elbow where my pulse was jumping. I stretched my fingers to touch her in return, and her fingers bent in on themselves slightly, her nails making contact with my flesh as she pulled them down my forearm, hard. I gasped and arched my back before she scratched me again, this time with both hands, the cigarette hanging loosely from her lips. My eyes, wide at first, shut tightly as I processed the sensations accompanying the red lines on my skin.