Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica (20 page)

 

Ingrid did stay. She spent the day in bed, not really ever awake. I waited on the couch, realizing finally that what I was missing were my afternoon drinks, the ones that usually started at lunch. I pulled out a bottle and a glass and lay there drinking awhile, watching Ingrid through the bedroom door.

About when I was getting dressed to go see Beth, Ingrid got up and went into the bathroom. And after a while of her being in there I heard water running, heard what sounded like her getting into the tub and I went in to brush my teeth.

“I have to go out for a bit,” I told her. And though she looked stricken, she pulled back from this I guess because her voice was steady when she said, “Would it be all right for me to stay here a few days?”

I considered this, knowing I would never refuse, but that alone wasn't enough to keep from figuring out where it'd put me. Having her here while I went back to work for real in the parking lot? The way this would up the chances of her husband showing up looking for me. Or sending someone else to do it.

“You can stay as long as you need…. As along as you want.” This was what I finally told her. And when I began my walk to Beth's I saw my car as I passed the little lot by my building. I wondered if I should move it, put it somewhere else. Whether it could be something that would tip Ingrid's husband all the faster to my whereabouts. But then of course I knew he'd find us easily whenever he bothered to try.

I got to Beth's still edgy and distracted. I couldn't tell how she was and it seemed forever since I'd seen her, what with all that had come in-between. She looked different to me, but then she did look different during the week. More distant and composed even if just on the surface.

“You didn't go to work again.”

She said this just as a statement of fact, while I was still standing. Running my fingers over a glass paperweight full of trapped, dead flowers. This object sat on her desk and I surprised myself to notice this meant I was standing right behind her—something I'd never done before.

She didn't turn to look at me when she talked. Instead she looked straight ahead. Looked at the chair where I ought to be sitting, and I might've sat down if I didn't know that soon as I did she'd find anything else to look at but me.

Having Ingrid in my home gave me some kind of false something. I guess bravado, because I felt less like I needed Beth, though I suppose really I needed her more, if only she'd ever been someone I could talk to.

I'd moved quickly to the other side of what I'd just been feeling. Began feeling so swiftly small and afraid that I did sit down and when I did I astonished myself. I said, “I think I'm in trouble.”

She looked at me, for real she did. She said, “Tell me what's happened.”

I had enough sense to know I couldn't do that, not exactly. I said, “I can't go back to that job. There's some way I just can't. There's too much else…”

I expected a lecture, something standard she'd shift into from habit but instead she said, “Do you want to do the other thing more?”

“No, I don't think so. I don't know. I just know I can't play store any longer. I don't belong there. I don't know who I am there because I'm never there, not really, not me.”

“You belong where?”

“I don't know. Maybe the hooking suits me better. It's all clearer.”

I didn't know why I was saying these things to her and I believed I'd better stop because it seemed dangerous. She seemed dangerous if I let on what really went on inside me.

I waited for her to argue with me but she didn't, she said, “Why do you think that?”

“Because I know what to do, what's expected of me.” And then I thought of Burt and said, “Most of the time, anyway.”

I sat there unable to say anything more, and as I looked at her, this longing for her seeped into every space in me. It gave me a strange solid feel, but with a weight to it. I didn't believe I could get to my feet if I tried. But she was on hers and holding her hand out to me, and when we walked to her car, she kept her arm around my waist and I leaned into her and the heaviness of my body just felt pleasant.

She drove us to a park near her house. No one much was there, it being later than dusk and cold out. I pulled the coat she'd given me tighter around me and it was odd to be among swings and slides, things children play on, but the cold air felt good and she felt good, still with her arms around me, still guiding me around. The sweetness of all of this made me want to cry and the funny thing of it was that's what I did.

I cried in her arms for what seemed forever until I really couldn't stand up anymore. And so we sat on top of a picnic table, her still with her arms wrapped around me. And then it somehow seemed time to get back in the car. I wanted her to turn down the street to her house but she didn't. She drove me home.

My place did make more sense, what with her having a husband, but then here I was with someone else's wife, so what could I do? She said, “Will you be all right? Do you want me to come in with you?”

And of course I did. I wanted her more in that moment than maybe I ever had. And Ingrid upstairs? I couldn't tell Beth about that. There was nothing to do. I said, “No, I'll be okay. I'm all right.” And then I said, “Thanks.” And before I got out of the car I put my arms around her neck and held on for a little bit, and when I went up my stairs I felt okay again. For a little while I really did.

 

Ingrid was on the couch and dressed. She really did look like a wife all of a sudden and she'd somehow fixed us dinner, or bought it somewhere and so we ate and had some drinks and it began to seem normal to have her there. And though I'm not proud of it, it crossed my mind she might take care of money for me for a while. Postpone my having to go out again.

We were drinking still and smoking and the phone rang and my instinct of course was not to answer it, except for knowing it was Beth.

I picked it up and she said, “I just wanted to make sure you're all right.”

I walked with the phone into the bedroom and closed the door to Ingrid, but I still couldn't shift gears so fast. I felt the jerky guiltiness in my voice when I said, “I'm okay, really.” And everything about the way I was speaking made plain my impatience. She couldn't know why, just sounded sort of confused and what she wound up saying was, “Tomorrow, why don't you come later than we said.”

“When?”

“Six, I guess. That would be better I think. I have a full day and…”

She didn't bother to finish as if she remembered who she was talking to.

“Six is fine,” I said. “I have some things to do, too,” and I didn't know why I said this last thing and wished I hadn't.

“Oh,” she said. “All right. Six, then.” And I felt her lingering and it felt brutish to edge toward hanging up, but in another awful way it seemed to be working in my favor.

“Okay, I'll see you then,” I said. And then I hung up the phone and went back to Ingrid.

She still sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, staring at her drink on the coffee table.

“Who was that?” she asked like she'd had years of practice, which of course she had.

It startled us both though. Her more than me because she quickly said, “I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. It's none of my business.”

I didn't attempt to explain, though a part of me wanted to. Here I was again with all this inside me I wanted to tell but with the absolute wrong person to tell it to.

Instead I held out my hand and she took it. We went into the bedroom, me not knowing who I wanted exactly, only knowing too clearly it was Beth who'd started me needing someone.

Ingrid and I lay down together, and it seemed at first it might be like last night, with us just lying around, and, in a funny way, recognizing that this was maybe most what I wanted from Beth, or would've tonight anyway, this drove me past it. I couldn't lie there thinking about her. If I did, it might start me crying again, from that same place I didn't understand, and that'd give Ingrid all the wrong sorts of ideas of me. I'd be the last thing she'd want.

I undressed her and then undressed myself and she turned the covers down on the bed she must've made and I wondered at what I was doing, not just this minute but with the whole of my life. Wondered how I'd come here and from where.

These thoughts must've stopped me entirely because I heard Ingrid's voice. Heard her say, “Nina, what is it? What's the matter?”

And I discovered myself standing stock still by the bed, but breathing hard and what I was wishing was that I'd told her my real name because maybe then I'd feel like we knew each other.

“Nothing,” I said as I got under the covers with her. But it wasn't going to work. I could tell this already; couldn't get rid of all the things I was thinking and when she began to touch me, at first just my neck, stroking a line under my jaw, then I knew I'd never keep from the feelings either. And so with neither my mind or my body a safe place to be I looked to her body. Turned toward her and began touching her in return and for a short while this worked.

I kissed her shoulders and then her breasts. Did these things until all I felt anymore was her and not me. And this lasted until I pulled the covers back, saw the bruises on her side, by now purpley and still reddish.

The sight of them caught me up, nearly stopped me, and for an instant it ran through my mind to ask her how it'd happened. But I knew this too was about me. About keeping me from myself and I knew it wouldn't work and besides I knew exactly how she'd come to be hurt in this way. Could see it all—her on the floor and him kicking her—and I knew that the one or two times I'd had this done to me I'd felt the least human of all.

To make her revisit this just to spare myself, this seemed close to something he'd do. Instead I put a pillow behind her so she wouldn't have to lie flat, and she sank against it while I wrapped my arm around her thigh.

I kissed her forever—her belly, her thighs—and I felt her hands in my hair, heard her saying little things, murmuring in a way I couldn't make out and didn't quite want to, afraid it might sound too much like what Beth said. And if they were both saying the same kinds of things, how could I believe either one of them? How could it be any more than the things people
say when they're together like this? And this was made all the more tangled by my wanting to believe Beth but not Ingrid.

So in this way I came back to Beth just as I got inside Ingrid. And I listened to Ingrid now because it was only sounds and breaths and my own breathing was changing but not in the right way. In a way that forced me to take my mouth from her and just fuck her and try to choke off my own sounds, which might end up in sobs if I didn't get hold of myself.

Ingrid tried to turn—first toward her bruises but crying out when that hurt, and so she turned toward me. I pulled another pillow, let her onto her stomach, got myself up and behind her, got my hand back inside her, with her asking all this time now for more of me, of my hand.

I grew afraid of myself in this, afraid I'd get carried away, carried off to where she wanted me to go and then I stopped worrying this.

I fucked her until she was the one crying—out of a place I both knew and didn't because usually when she got here she stayed silent and away from me. But this time, when I was starting to stop, she cried at me to keep on. She said, “Please, don't. Please don't leave me.”

She'd never said anything like this and so I listened. I put my hand further into her and held it there, tried to get further inside and she held herself very still and then I did this too, I held her, still with my hand there, stayed just this way until she turned again, toward me, and her face looked a way I'd never seen. She looked young and afraid and I opened my arms and she held on.

 

It was a long time before she quieted. I felt helpless. Thought of all the stupid things to do—bring her a drink, a cigarette. I kept myself from doing these things until she got to the place of asking me to, and then I was glad to have actual tasks. To be able to get up from that bed.

I brought these things back with me—the bottle, our glasses. Made a separate trip for the cigarettes just to have more time with myself. I tried to drink the way she did—in the long swallows that were helping her—but for me it just brought back the choking, and the cigarette I tried did this too, even more. I stubbed it out halfway finished and that's when she noticed me.

She curled up near me and put her hand between my legs and I lay back, opened my legs because she told me to, and it felt like what I wanted.

She stroked me and stroked me and I felt a calmness begin near her hand and then follow it. She trailed her fingers up my body to my throat and back down, and I couldn't not know Beth had done this too, and not so long ago. And so I wondered, what is it about me that lets women know to do this?

My breathing grew steadier and deeper and she talked to me in a way that said nothing. She said things like, “There, now. You're all right. Sweetheart, everything's all right.” And I could see how it wasn't because I'd begun to believe her and when she put her hand in me I couldn't be anywhere else but with her. Couldn't do anything but feel what she was doing. And it was all slow and gentle and I wanted more of her than I could take. Tried hard to ask for her but now I was the one who could only make sounds and cries.

She knew anyway. We were enough alike in these ways and so I felt her get very far into me and felt myself close around her, wanted to put my legs around her too but couldn't move them. I felt limp and wonderfully exhausted, so slack and peaceful and she seemed to find comfort in this because when I looked she was smiling. Not in a large way, but this small change in her face that I hadn't seen in a long while, or maybe ever.