The Gift of Girls (13 page)

She ran her arms under my yellow jacket and over my shoulders, peeling the garment from me then tossing it on to a chair. Patiently and without haste she undid the buttons on my blouse and I watched as if I were not a party to this, as if this were a scene from one of those girl-on-girl internet sites we had discovered with unadulterated relish at school. Did the nuns look at those sites in secret? I’m sure they did.

Milly eased the blouse from my waistband and it slid from my shoulders to the floor. Her arms went round my waist, dextrous fingers unclasped the button at the back
of
my skirt and she lowered the zip. She pulled, I wriggled my hips and sighed as my skirt fell about my feet.

‘Mmm. That’s better,’ she said.

I nodded again, dipped my toe into my skirt and kicked it away from me. My knickers were drenched. I could smell sex in the air. I had been lifted on the wings of those erotic activities in that high vaulted hall among those men in black suits, lifted and lowered and lifted again. Watching sex is wanting sex.

Milly unsnapped my bra, the cups fell away and she balanced my breasts in her white hands as if taking a cake from an oven, or holding a tray with treats, or an offering at an altar, and that’s how I felt, that I was an offering being offered a second chance.

She was staring into my eyes and I realised suddenly that Milly’s eyes were my own eyes, the same colour, the same shape, the same intensity; our eyes were dark mirrors that held each other. As I looked into her eyes I was seeing inside myself. I was meant to be here. Milly was meant to be here. The stars were in alignment. I had been so confused, so filled with doubt, but as I looked into her eyes it was like the sun burning away the morning mist and revealing a golden landscape.

Her palms left my breasts, moved to my ribcage and down over the curve of my sides to my knickers. She nipped the elastic between her thumbs and forefingers and pulled my knickers down to the floor. I stepped away from that sopping little triangle of ivory silk and sighed once more. I was naked again and a tremor of relief ran through me as she rubbed her pubic bone against mine, as she circled my shoulders with her arms and kissed me again.

That kiss was long and breathless, as if each of us was transferring the breath of life to the other. I had been one person a few minutes ago. Now I was another. I had been full of anxiety and doubt. Now I was brimming with desire and passion.

As we broke away, I stood back and gazed at Milly, her long body with the straps about her neck and wrists and ankles, the wide leather belt with its pattern of rings, the light tracing shadows over her curving thighs, over the ripples of her ribcage, over her vermilion-flamed nipples. I touched my own breasts instinctively and the hard little buds darkened with blood between my curious fingers. I looked up.

She stood back, taking my hands, and we looked into each other’s eyes as if in them we would find clues to our own destiny. Milly’s breasts were pulsing and I had an urge to reach for them. As that urge passed through me, she took my hand, placed my palm on the firm swell of her flesh and I could feel the blood racing through her veins. She let out a low moan, as if the air had been pressed from her lungs. My mouth was dry. I could hear the motions of the sea pounding outside, the wind rattling the glass in its frame. I could smell something sweet and delicious, a tropical flower like frangipani.

Milly bridged the distance between us and kissed me again, her lips alive with unfamiliar sensations. My lips opened and, as Milly’s tongue slipped into my mouth, a bead of sweat ran down my back into the crack of my bottom. Between my legs I grew sticky and the lips of my vagina opened as the wings of a butterfly open when it is released from the cocoon. Milly drew back. Our lips parted, and parting was such sweet sorrow.

She led me across the room and I lay back on the small bed and opened my legs. She gazed down at the sweet sticky goo leaking over my thighs. She kissed my forehead in the centre, in the place of the all-seeing eye, then ran her tongue over my face, my chin, down between my breasts. She paused, popped one erect nipple in her mouth and bit gently down until I squealed with pleasure. She tasted my other breast before continuing her journey, her tongue painting a shiny wet stripe over my tummy,
through
the dark forest of my pubic hair and into my wet throbbing sex.

At that moment, I seemed to rise off the bed and float away, my body light as a feather, reborn with new sensations. I understood at that second, really for the first time, that I was born to give and receive pleasure, that it was the multifaceted geometry of entwined limbs that I was born for, not the cold arithmetic of accountancy.

Milly buried her head between my legs and made herself comfortable, sliding her body across the bed and spreading her thighs over my head until I was gazing at the most gorgeous sight I had ever seen, all the coils and spirals leading to a neat, pulsing bud I wanted to caress with my tongue. As I did so, somewhere far away at the other end of my damp body Milly made the connection complete.

We were joined, tiny tongue to pulsing rosebud, pulsing rosebud to tiny tongue, and we rocked like some wondrous machine, tasting and savouring each other’s juice, and I discovered that the smell of frangipani was the smell of Milly, the perfume of her deliciously oiled labia. We drank our fill from the chalice of each other as if supping the stuff of life, changing positions, me on top, Milly below, side by side, each drinking from the holy orifice, the silky liquids flowing over our soft white thighs and coating our bottoms.

I understood now the value of the belt Milly was wearing and regretted that I wasn’t wearing my own. With that belt there is something to cling to, and I pulled at the leather strap, the purchase making it easier to reach the soft membranes in the depths of her vagina, her thighs bucking and thrusting greedily as the vibrations rocked and quaked her eager body.

The constellations beyond the windows shattered and re-formed. Shooting stars appeared and disappeared. Others came. The planets circled. My senses were more alive than they had ever been. I could feel a tingling
sensation
like sparklers or tiny fireworks fizzing at my nerve endings. It was like being fully awake after a long sleep and seeing some undiscovered place. I was Magellan or Simon Bolivar striking out across a new unexplored continent of eroticism and lust. Milly was my guide and I wanted to see and feel and touch everything.

When Milly climaxed a sprinkling of warm nectar, like some elixir sprayed from an atomiser, touched my taste buds and I realised there is nothing like the taste of girls, a taste that is salty like seawater, but as sweet as ripe figs, sticky as peach juice, yet smooth as satin, fragrant like saffron, like a tropical night, as soft as baby’s breath. The taste and smell and feel of Milly in my mouth sent messages whispering down through my inner core and I jolted as a vast rolling orgasm made my body burn and break into sweat.

We were gripped by this miracle of total connection, this photo-finish, this cosmic explosion. There is something marvellously gratuitous and invigorating tonguing another girl and being tongued, in this mutual act of autoeroticism. I had often wondered if I were a lesbian and I realised at that moment that I wasn’t, that the concept meant nothing. I was a sexual being and sex, like the rainbow, comes in many colours and shades.

From the drawer, Milly removed the phallus on the pink leather harness and fixed it into place. She slid two straps between the cheeks of her bottom and buckled them at the back. There were two short straps on the harness which she connected to two of the rings on her belt and, again, I marvelled at how practical the black leather bands were, how a girl dressed in anklets and bracelets, a choker and a belt was dressed for anything.

The phallus bobbed up and down above her belly as if with some intent of its own. Milly smiled. ‘It looks so silly,’ she said. I smiled too.

I was about to get done by a dildo and the very thought was terrifying but thrilling, too. It was something
I
would never in a million years have imagined doing and now it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Once you divest yourself of clothes and walk naked among those who are dressed, there is no telling where it might lead. Once you break this taboo, is there any taboo that might hold you back?

I don’t think so. It seemed to me that, where there’s a taboo, it’s perfectly normal to go right out and break it. The big no-no at school was opening the buttons on your blouse to allow your cleavage a glimpse of daylight and, of course, that’s what we all did the instant we got the chance. By going naked in the grand hall at Black Spires, I had reached the logical last step on the path of disobedience, I had unclasped all my buttons and done away with my clothes.

Girls fantasise about sweeping away taboos and living the dream of posing naked for the newspapers, stripping off for television soaps, having sex on
Big Brother
, albeit surreptitiously, and being seen in the homes of millions. Up to a certain point, transgression in public is possible, the barriers keep getting pushed back, but there is always an invisible point which is not crossed. That point, it occurred to me as Milly placed her hands on my knees and opened my legs, did not exist at Black Spires.

The creature bounced before her, thick and erect. I am not sure why, but I wanted to kiss it, to kiss this inanimate thing because it was joined to Milly. It was a part of her, and I drew it towards my lips and took the round head into my mouth. I licked the sides, up and down, then lay back, knees spread wide, and invited the pink dildo into my body. It was long, hard, inflexible. It reached deep into my womb, touching the edge of my soul, and withdrew, in and out, in and out. Milly’s breasts slapped gently against my own making my nipples tingle and buzz like points of an electric circuit.

Deep inside me there was a reservoir of oily juices. The
pink
phallus burst the banks and, as the floodtide of warm oil gushed from me, all my tension and doubts came flooding out in a warm syrupy deluge. If I had been betrayed by Simon and Sandy, it was only because I had willingly played the role they had created for me. They saw in me the wanton girl easily aroused, a girl ready for their erotic and esoteric world. Like Milly, I belonged at Black Spires.

She went up on her knees. The pink prick slipped from me with a slurping noise and hovered in the air. A teardrop of discharge clung to the tip and I licked it off.

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘Turn over,’ Milly whispered, her eyes mesmerising and bright.

I did so obediently, willingly, pushing my bottom up and my knees down into the thin mattress, arching my back. Milly rested her left hand on my side and, with her right, guided the penis into the small winking eye of my bottom. It seemed so big, so hard, so demanding. The muscles at the entrance to my anus grew tense and pushed back, rejecting the beast’s admission. She pushed harder and I grew tense.

‘Milly, please …’

She ignored my pleas and quietened me with a slap on my bottom with her left hand. Milly was just as patient as she had been undoing the buttons of my blouse. She pressed in and released, pressed in and released, until with a popping noise like you make by putting your finger in your cheek and pulling it out quickly, the bulging head of the phallus slipped between the slippery walls of my ass.

Ass. Ass. Ass.

I loved that word. It was so American, so graphic, and I whispered it to myself as slowly but surely she forced the long pink dildo down, down into the heart of my being, in and out, in and out, ass, ass, ass, deeper and deeper until she reached the end of her journey and it was like a pin bursting a balloon as all the air escaped from
my
body in one long rush. My moment of doubt had gone.

‘Yes. Yes. Yes,’ I cried.

She was clutching my thighs and drilling into me, the motion opening my body, but opening my mind, too. When Sandy Cunningham that night in the hotel pierced my bum the experience had seemed shocking, painful, vaguely awkward. Milly driving the phallus into my bottom felt natural, elegant and suddenly painless. I had been imprisoned by a morality imposed on me by school, by convention, by my mother. With each thrust of that artificial cock strapped about her waist, Milly was hammering down the walls of that prison to set me free.

I could hear the flamenco clap of flesh on flesh, but beyond that rhythmic beat there was no sound but the ghostly silence one imagines existing in deep space. We were alone in our own universe, two girls encountering the gift of sex, the gift of girls, I thought briefly, a thought I was sure would come back into my mind again and again during the thirty-one days of my ascent on Sodom.

I had been fighting my natural instincts, my feminine intuition, that innate desire at eighteen to know everything I could possibly know about myself, my hidden self. I had not been born with this ripe rounded body for it to languish unseen and unappreciated in dreary clothes in dreary offices, in the lacklustre light of a computer screen pulsing out numbers and statistics.

Like a stripper on stage, I had been revealing my body in enticing parts – my legs in short skirts; the ripples of my spine in backless blouses; hipbones and bellybutton in low-slung jeans; neck and breasts in skinny tops, and no top at all last summer when Daddy rented a house at Puente Romano in Marbella, before the Chinese man disappeared and the money ran out.

Just as we open the windows of an Advent calendar in the days leading up to Christmas, I had been uncovering my body a piece at a time, preparing myself for the
ambiguous
pleasure of going naked. Stripping for Simon Roche in the diffused light of his office seemed merely inevitable, the next step on the stairway in Marcel Duchamp’s
Nude Descending the Staircase –
the nude’s journey, like all journeys, not taken in bounding leaps but one step at a time, as the Buddha did, we’re told, on the road to Nirvana.

Duchamp’s painting features on the cover of a book of nudes Melissa had given me on my eighteenth birthday, an encyclopaedia of girls in drawings and photographs from Helen of Troy to Marilyn Monroe, all revealed in nothing but their silky flesh. Girls want to be naked, ‘girls like me’ want to be naked, and no matter how much we fight it, circumstances will conspire to tear off our clothes. It seems ingrained in us to want to overstep the limits, to find our regressive, ancient self, the shaggy avatar within, that triangle of matted hair on our lower belly the last vestiges of the animal self straining constantly to break through the thin veneer of society’s conventions and domestication.