Fucking Daphne (31 page)

For months, she would slip love notes under my door, poems—silly parodies of Byron and more serious verse—calligraphed with the pen set I bought her for Valentine's Day. I walked her the three miles home from my place at least once a week and stayed over, sleeping next to her on the futon mattress on the floor, trying not to burn my bare toes on the baseboard heater. Daphne's bed held two, while mine was only wide enough for one; that was the excuse for the arrangement. She cooked me egg salad and microwaved whole potatoes with butter and sour cream before I went to work.

Later she would say to someone else, right in front of me, that she liked boys for sex and girls for love. I should have been flattered, I guess.

The next time I saw Daphne, I drove out to meet him, hundreds of miles. Well, I didn't do the driving; a friend did.

We camped out on the living room floor of his best friend's house. I spent a lot of time sleeping in nests on the living room floors of people I barely knew in those days. Also hotel room floors, dormitory floors. Bare basement mattresses and more couches than I
could count. I'd listen to people having sex beside me, whispering to each other that “it's okay, she sleeps like a rock.” Sometimes those people were my lovers.

That time with Daphne, though, it was my turn to keep someone else up all night, as our friends stayed in the kitchen, talking, trying not to hear the sounds of our tryst. Daphne was in his fifties, gone gray in the temples and through the beard, but still vital, tanned, strong. He was more than twenty years older than I, still the oldest lover I've ever had.

We'd been corresponding for months. He'd sent me love notes, usually quotes from old songs, nearly every day. I was still young enough, green enough, to soak up the attention without question. To assume I was special, the only one he was flattering—that we had a special connection.

I know that he looked surprised and vulnerable beneath me when I rode him, snapping my hips, coming so easily around his cock. A combination of eagerness and release and comfort. His body was comfortable, his big hands steady on my breasts. The look on his face—it had to mean something.

I called his number one night, late, without warning, and a woman's voice answered. It took me days to understand. Days, and sympathetic friends to break the news to me with compassion. That was why we had to meet at a friend's house. That was why Daphne never took me home with him.

The next time I saw Daphne, I was staying with a guy I had met who refused to fuck me because he said he fell in love with anyone he touched
with his dick. We had long, passionate arguments on outdoor benches after dark. He burst into tears when I gave him a flower I bought from a streetside vendor on impulse. Nobody had ever given him a flower, he said, hugging me. But he still didn't kiss me or let me into his bed.

Instead of fucking him, I went on a date with Daphne. If you can call it a date. It was really a sex party at a big house in the middle of the California woods. When I arrived, she was sitting on the porch, leafing through a stack of bondage magazines and sniffing. Not her thing.

I'd put on a dress for her, as we'd discussed. It was a fancy party dress, a Christmas dress, a prom dress. I'd put on stockings, although I had not shaved my legs—fishnets are perfect for this purpose. I'd put on lipstick and heels.

Then I stood in the living room, facing the window, while she whipped me.

She used a single-tail, which left welts all across my ass. I yelped and squealed and writhed under the sharp crack of leather. I loved it. I was high on pleasure and pain. But the rest of the party saw only pain. They saw my face through the window, and they flinched. They heard me gasp and shriek, and they ducked their chins.

Eventually, Daphne drew blood, which was technically against the rules. With a second stroke, she broke open a welt laid just moments before. Immediately, she hustled me into an adjacent bathroom and pressed a wad of paper towels to the wound. I giggled and tottered on my heels as we tried to cover up the evidence.

Later that night, she took me into the woods and pressed up against me from behind, held a knife to my neck and fucked me. Once again, Daphne drew blood—I pushed back against the sharp, sharp blade, and didn't even notice when I nicked myself.

She drove away maybe an hour later. I stumbled down the gravel drive in my shoes to kiss her goodbye. I slept, like so many times before, on the couch.

Once I walked Daphne to her car after a meeting. She had organized the presentation, on sex workers and dykes. At the time, she worked at that San Francisco bastion of politically conscious sex-worker dykedom, the Lusty Lady. She had done a “private pleasures” demo for the class that involved two dildos, a mirror, and a lot of hair-tossing. Her real hair, not a wig. After the class, she was still scantily dressed and wearing five-inch heels. She was parked six blocks away. She had no date and no escort, and a very heavy bag full of props and costumes. All her friends had headed to the bar without her.

I was a perfect gentleman, keeping my hand lightly on her elbow to steady her gait, opening the car door for her, never making a move. Not even to ask for her phone number.

I took Daphne to a party. It wasn't just any party; it was the biggest and most popular women's sex party on the West Coast. Two floors, countless rooms, packed with women. We were standing next to each other on the second floor, leaning over the railing to watch the women come and go. Most of them were dressed to the nines in their fabulous fetish outfits. I was wearing black jeans. Daphne wore a black knit skirt with white men's briefs underneath. They were pulled tight across her very generous bottom, one of her best assets. She liked to joke that she was born butt first, and that explained a lot
about how she moved in the world. Her favorite kink was spanking. Her second favorite was Daddy/girl.

I wasn't Daphne's daddy, but I would happily paddle that tremendous bottom of hers while she told me made-up stories about daily discipline at her house. Sometimes I was the storyteller instead. Other times I made up punishment games for the both of us.

I had my hand on her ass, stroking the cotton of her briefs, when the monitor came up and whispered harshly in my ear. “Put a glove on that,” she said. She stepped away before I could respond that I wasn't doing anything that needed a glove, not yet anyway.

So instead, I leaned into Daphne's shoulder. “You got me in trouble with the party staff,” I said in a low voice. “And this isn't the first time, is it? You're going to get us kicked out of here before the night is over.” I leaned in to speak low into her ear. “I think you need to be punished.”

She wiggled against my hand, still under her skirt and above her briefs.

“How do you think I should punish you?” I asked.

She looked at me and with utter sincerity replied, “Cookies?”

Instead of cookies, I made Daphne stand in the corner, holding a penny to the wall with her nose. I still remember her bouncing on her heels, grinning and staring straight at the wall.

Daphne showed up for our coffee date in full leather: harness, bar vest, chaps, and immaculate engineer boots. He had a weathered face and a graying Vandyke beard. He looked like everybody's fantasy of a leather daddy. He even drove a pickup truck.

I was looking for exactly what he was offering—someone who would make me lick his boots while he spanked my ass, and who, if I was a good girl, would reward me with a cock to suck. A trope, but still a powerful one. More powerful because I wore a female body and he wore a male one. A gay one. Those men, they weren't supposed to be into women. I wasn't supposed to ever come within a mile of their boots, much less the bulges in their denim jeans. So when I did, it was a rush of transgressive victory.

Only I never got near either boots or crotch. We talked about it; I thought there was chemistry. Daphne was interested. He'd played with girls before. He was playing with one now, someone very different from me, a mutual acquaintance, tall, thin, tomboyish, also a dyke. He liked dykes. He liked cross-orientation play. It was queerer than queer, and that was hot. He smiled at me, with an edge to that smile.

I can't remember a single specific thing Daphne said. Only the connection, hot and true.

I gave him my number. I let him give me a ride home in his black pickup, even though there was a voice in the back of my head screaming,
Unsafe!
He could kidnap me, drive me anywhere; and if not, now that he knew where I lived, he could stalk me if he wished. But he was a perfect gentleman. Too perfect. He never called.

I learned later that he was carrying on multiple relationships and lying about playing safe. In other words, he was barebacking with one lover and not telling another. I convinced myself that maybe it was a good thing he never called back. A near miss with disaster instead of with ecstasy.

Daphne propositioned me by email. She sent it to my work address; I was working at a sex magazine, so it wasn't inappropriate. She told me I was cute and she wanted to meet me for a drink. She invited me out to the local dyke bar after work.

When I arrived, she didn't recognize me, but I recognized her. Years before, I had gone to a party in my black jeans and my black T-shirt and met a gorgeous tranny girl in tight corset, leather miniskirt, heels. She'd made eye contact with me while I was hanging up my jacket, a look I thought was unmistakable in intent. But when I turned to her, prepared to make small talk and maybe more, she looked me over and said, “You're not really dressed for this, are you?” I quickly made my excuses.

Daphne didn't remember me, clearly. But I remembered her.

This time, she confessed she'd confused me with a coworker of mine. “I thought you were the femme one,” she said. “I like femmes best.” She paid for my drink anyway, and accompanied me to the train station, chattering about
Star Trek
and separatism as we walked. She gave me her card. I threw it away as soon as I was out of her sight.

We'd spent the entire night on a mattress on the porch, cuddling. Lesbian cliché number one: All we did was hug each other and nuzzle each other's ample chests.

The cliché value was actually worse because she was black, I was white, and otherwise we were built almost the same: top-heavy, thick in the waist. For once, I had met someone whose breasts were
as large as mine were. We must have made a pretty picture at the party, holding each other on the damp futon mattress, giggling.

I was sorry, later, that I hadn't been more bold. I thought,
There will be other times. I see her every other month at this sex party, and we know each other's names; I have her email address already because Daphne always volunteers.
On that mattress, I thought,
This is so glorious in and of itself.
I thought, honestly, that I was being nonlinear and non-goal-oriented and nonpatriarchal and going with the flow. It's still sex even if neither of us touches each other below the waist, right? And it wasn't like I had anything to prove. I'd had my whole hand inside a girl or two, more than once. I had sucked plenty of silicone. I'd had the juices of a woman smeared across my cheeks. I'd made her come. And her. And her. And they'd all come back for more.

The Violent Femmes were on the stereo. I was so much more experienced now, and still I held back.

I thought,
I never want to stop kissing her. Kissing her is glorious. Kissing her is enough.

I thought,
If she wants more, she will tell me.

I thought,
It's impossible that we've been doing this for hours. Surely the party isn't over yet.

I treasure this memory the most. I have never shared it with anyone.

We always had sex in the dark, Daphne and I. Whether we were alone in the apartment, or our mutual girlfriend was out in the living room, or all three of us were asprawl in the bed we'd made by pushing two full-size mattresses together.

We were living together, all three of us, for the length of a summer lease. In the fall, the students would come back into town, and we'd have to move. We tried not to think of what would happen in the fall. I had just graduated and so had he; our girlfriend had just gone back to school and was halfway through her program. She had finals the week after our lease was up.

But we'd been spending so much time together, the three of us, that the living arrangement didn't seem so temporary. We'd been sharing a bed on and off, four or five times a week, for almost a year. Instant household—just add lease.

Daphne was tall and broad-shouldered and liked to wear eyeliner, but only for special occasions. His hair was chopped on a new-wave angle and dyed maroon. He danced to Nine Inch Nails while howling made-up lyrics—“Chow down on a cone of soft serve; you're going to get a bad pinched nerve.” Both my girlfriend and I had crushed out on him the very first time we met him. She was the one who suggested inviting him to dinner, at her place, and then dragging him off to bed. I'd been dating her for maybe a month, and then suddenly we were a threesome.

This time he was waking up from a nap. I knew he liked to masturbate a little afterward. I was waiting for him. He had only a thick sheet draped over his body, for it was the height of July in the Midwest, and our apartment had no air-conditioning, only a cooling breeze from the river. Another reason we stayed in the dark.

I found Daphne with his hand on his cock. Such big hands. I loved to see them work. His legs were spread. I crawled up between them. He looked at me, but didn't say anything.