Stolen Moments (2 page)

I knock on the door. Vivian answers it. I can’t read her, but this close to her face with its few tentative freckles and skin the color of stationery, I don’t even want to try.

“Do you mind if I…look around again?” I ask.

She says nothing but steps back, closes the door behind me. I walk to the window and look out; the view is of another building, of bricks and windows. I nod like I am making mental notes. I walk to the kitchen. I turn one dial, then the other, like a health inspector at a restaurant. Do people do this, I wonder? And then one of the faucets won’t turn back off and suddenly I feel Vivian behind me.

She wraps her arms around me slowly and I back up, feeling the bones of her hips against the curve of my ass.

“Let me help you with that.” Her voice is husky like a lounge singer’s. The feeling of her arms over mine turns the dial of the faucet of my pussy, which is brimming over, and I am wet, wet, so so so wet.

“Got it,” she says as the sink’s water slurps to a close.

I lean back, taking this uncalculated risk, so my neck is by her lips. She goes for it, kisses me there, sucks, the rim of her teeth grazing the taut skin of my neck. I want her to take a bite out of me, take all of me into her mouth and let me live there, safe and soaked forever, I mean, for twenty minutes, or forever.

I turn to face her, breast to breast, mine covered by a sweater and a scarf and a T-shirt and hers almost there, practically all the way there, the flimsy cotton of her tank top doing little to protect me from the dark nipples I see erect beneath it.

I put both my hands on her neck and take her mouth into mine; our tongues tangle.

“This is…” she pants, separating her lips from mine for moments to speak, “a really…really great apartment.”

“I see,” I say, and I slip my hand under the elastic band of her sweatpants—
easy access—
to the soft bush of her pussy underneath, no underwear. I am empowered by her brazen sex, by everything about her that is as raw as I am damaged.

My finger slides between the lips of her pussy, my fingertip resting above her opening, and I try not to think of Rebecca, of how she liked it, of when she first told me
I’m sorry, hon, but it’s hard to compete with Duracell,
and I am charged when Vivian lights up like new batteries when I touch her, my finger vibrating the base of her clit like the best, most expensive kind of classy sex toy.

My breasts feel full as cantaloupes against hers, and I am ready when, still writhing from my finger, she removes my shirts like a lover discarding old habits, each layer falling neglected and useless to the floor.

This, I remember, is why I love women, the dance of tit against tit, the smell of her like almond soap, of almond hair gel, of anything so sweet and nutty at all.

She pulls my finger from her pussy— “I’m not ready to come yet—let me show you the bed—” and I follow her, my breasts bouncing as I walk.
Yeah, I like your breasts, sure, I love breasts, I guess,
Rebecca would say
, but really I’m an ass girl, I love your ass the most, I’m just not that into breasts,
and I would wilt with neglect, pinching them myself like clothespins while she would eat my cunt with the clinical knowledge lovers have of each other’s cunts, the knowledge that gets you every time but that’s just it, it gets you every time, in that same dry, educated way.

Her “bedroom” is hardly a glorified closet, just a plain old closet, just room enough for a bed with a dark purple comforter that she throws me on top of.

She takes my nipples into her mouth. At last, the touch of tongue to tit. It’s been so long since someone gave them the attention they deserve, and I am relishing it.

I don’t feel huge or weird as I usually feel with new lovers, I feel like a pinup girl ripped from a magazine and into a bed, my admirer shifting her hand from her own cunt onto mine.

Then she kisses down my stomach, undoes the belt of my pants and pushes them to the floor. Her teeth grab the rim of my cream-colored underwear and then she teases me, hot breath against the crotch of my panties that makes me so wet I know I could be leaking through onto her lips.

I reach down and take off my own underwear. She stands up and takes off her sweatpants, then her tank top, and I lavish in the presence of her nakedness like a man at a strip club and she bends down to get something from under the bed.

She is beautiful, firm, clean.

She emerges with a dildo, red and rubber and thick, holding it in her hand like a bottle of champagne. “You wanna play?”

“Hmm—let me think about it—” I tease, but she stops me when she shoves the phallus into my cunt like she’s popping my goddamn cherry.

She batters me with it until I burst, my climax sending me into convulsions and making time stop.

She crawls up to lie next to me and hold me as I come. It’s been a festering orgasm, I know it’s been weeks since the last time I had one, and it’s brilliant and worth it.

“Damn,” she grins. “So you’ll take the apartment, then?”

“I’ll take you,” I whisper, inching down to her cunt and sticking my head between the tight muscles of her thighs. She grips me there, my ears growing hot and red, as I eat her salient cunt like chocolate.

She moans, her voice in a register I haven’t heard before. I could lick her pussy like ice cream melting, and I would.

I stick my thumb just inside her pussy, my middle finger clawing her asshole as I lick, and she thrashes around and I can feel her cunt muscles tighten and squeeze my fingertip when she comes. I roll over, my head by her hip, and breathe. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her alarm clock—I have five minutes.

“Fuck,” I sigh, “I gotta go.”

“Where?”

“Excelsior.”

“Fag bar?”

“To meet a friend. He’s trying to sell me on the neighborhood.”

“That place won’t help,” she laughs. “I can sell you on the neighborhood, if you’re interested—there’s a lot of girl bars around here—a lot more than there are boy bars. We should—you should go to Ginger’s.”

I kiss her thigh. “You’ve already sold me.”

She laughs. “Have I?”

“You had me at ‘got it.’”

I get up then, looking for my clothes, and she stays on the bed, naked, her perfect body like a supplicant sculpture beneath my wandering eye. As I dress, she talks about the neighborhood, about her work (she bartends, I make a note to visit her, stare at her, overtip her, sometime soon). My pussy and my panties are wet.

“Can I—I’m sorry—” I blush. “Can I borrow some panties? Mine are—”

“Wet?”

“Yeah—wet.”

“No problem. But—then—you might have to return them, you know?”

I smile and blush again as she opens her drawer and sorts through her colorful collection. She pulls out some athletic-looking boy-shorts and tosses them to me. “Will these do?”

“Anything, sweetheart.” I smile. “Anything.”

She isn’t moving, and so I dress while she watches, feeling kind of flushed and too much all over.

“I have to go,” I say. “Can I—”

“Your broker has it, right?”

“You’re making this hard for me, aren’t you?”

She smiles and gets up. “Stop by sometime, if you want another look at the place. Whenever you’ve got—twenty minutes, or whatever.”

“Right.”

“Let me see you out.”

And, delicately, I follow her to the door, which she opens for me. There is so much I want to say—could say—but instead, I slip quietly out, the fabric that used to house her ass now rubbing softly against mine. It is the feeling that reminds me, as I pass through the scent from the first floor that brings me all the way to the East Village and back here again, as I flee down the block to my date at the fag bar, that there’s still a place for me in this city, even if it’s farther away on the L train and nothing—nothing like anything I have ever felt before.

The fast, rhythmic beat of a high-energy song faded into the softer tones of a romantic ballad before I finally took a break and walked up out of the dance pit at Atlanta’s hottest lesbian club, Triple Tips. The back of my shirt and the waistband of my pants were soaking wet. Sweat was running down my face, dripping from my short brown hair. I had been dancing for more than an hour.

Rianna, my friend and one of the club’s owners, met me at the top of the steps. Placing a cold Budweiser in my hand, she said, “It’s about time you took a breather, Nicky. If everyone in here danced as much as you did without buying beer, we’d go out of business.”

I knew she was kidding. She and her partner, Claire, were making money hand over fist. Lesbians were lined up outside waiting for a chance to get in. After pushing aside a slew of empty beer bottles and cocktail glasses, I rested my arm on the railing overlooking the dance floor. “Rianna, my friend, I think you’re going to do just fine, even if I never pay for another drink. This club was a great idea.”

“Maybe too great!” Rianna laughed as she leaned against my side so I could hear her over the music. “We had no idea how popular it would be. We’ve already gotten two citations for overcrowding, and Claire is talking about expanding. She wants to buy out the bookstore next door and tear down the walls.”

We stood in companionable silence as we watched the women in the club. The final notes of the sultry ballad ended and the slow-dancing couples broke apart, many of them leaving the dance floor as the rapid bass beats of a new song began. My body began to move again of its own accord.

As a professional photographer, I prefer to spend most of my time in the wilderness. I love capturing images of the pure, untainted beauty of nature that has not yet been destroyed by the hands of man. I’m lucky enough to make a living from it. I was in Atlanta, far from the small, Tennessee cabin that I call home, only because Rianna had begged me to accept a temporary job for the city’s new tourism campaign.

The money was good, and I wanted to see my friends, but the true draw was the music. I could live the rest of my life without a fast food restaurant, a shopping mall, or even a blacktopped road, but I need the music. The console of my truck is crammed with CDs and my stereo at home is always on, but a radio can’t duplicate the feel and smell of a dance floor crowded with sexy women.

Rianna nudged my shoulder. “There’s someone else who prefers to dance alone.”

I searched the crowd, only seeing divisions of two, until she poked me again, pointing to a woman near the back corner. From my vantage point above the dance floor, I could clearly see the lone dancer, and I felt an immediate appreciation. She was beautiful, with long, silky blond hair that cascaded like one of nature’s most perfect waterfalls. Her eyes were closed as she allowed the music to fill her, to move her with sounds and tones that were obviously stirring deeply inside her.

I felt a rising, a swelling in my body, as I studied her sleek, trim physique. Black stiletto heels cradled her ankles, and the strongly defined muscles of her calves were flawlessly clear as she moved her long, sexy legs to the rhythm. I followed her thighs upward until they disappeared under the hem of a tiny black leather miniskirt that clung to the curves of her perfect ass.

My eyes were glued to that skirt, mesmerized by the way light reflected from the fabric. Her midriff, bare above the skirt and below a tiny little top that lifted her breasts high, called to me. I wanted my hand on that skin, but I drew back abruptly as another hand, the hand of a stranger, trailed across her flesh.

My girl—that’s what I called her because I already thought of her as mine—drew back as well, which pleased me. With the flick of her wrist, she dislodged the unwelcome hand from her body and resumed dancing. I clutched my beer bottle by its neck and watched. Women of all shapes and sizes were moving in on her. There were butches, femmes, and those in between. She was drawing them like flies to honey, but one by one, she shot them down. She continued to dance alone.

I had tuned Rianna out. I might as well have been isolated on top of one of the world’s most remote mountains, because all that mattered to me at that moment was watching the blonde. Even though she was in the dance pit and I was high above her at the railing, our bodies were already moving as one. We had the same natural rhythm in our bones.

My beer bottle was empty and I set it down among the others. A waitress would find it later. I had to go to her.

“Where you going?” Rianna shouted as she pulled the sleeve of my shirt. “Ah, Nicky! She just wants to be left alone.”

I ignored her as I made my way to the steps and down to the multicolored, flashing squares of the dance floor. Strobe lights bounced off a disco ball that hung from the ceiling, and others played festively over the dancing throng that was brimming with raw sexuality. Hands were clinging boldly to lovers’ asses, disappearing under shirts to tweak jutting nipples that begged to be tweaked. The music, along with dark lighting, was the catalyst; it made everything possible.

I skirted along the edge of the dance floor, allowing pulsing music to move me closer to her. I was watchful, hoping that no one else had moved in. She was still alone, her eyes closed, her head tossed back as she danced. I moved cautiously, making no attempts to touch her. I settled in beside her, having no intentions of leaving.