The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica (53 page)

“Bathroom’s down the hall, girl; that’s why you be gettin’ this one so cheap,” the manager had said. A polished noir Buddha, she’d sat, rocked back on a low
stool by the front door. A simple white dress, all lace and tiny red stitching, covered her great body. She was a momma, like a primordial soft bosomy comfort made into a breathing person. As she
spoke, she’d cooled herself with a fan lettered with a gospel hymnal – too slow to deliver a good breeze, but too fast for Amina to see what it said. “But you be gettin’ a
sink, so you ain’t bein’ completely uncivilized.”

Amina hadn’t argued, and yet hadn’t agreed, either: the redbrick building across the street from the iron pickets of the cemetery had neither been her destination or even a way
point. She been walking since dawn, a shocked sonombulation that had started with Stanley’s note on the kitchen table, and ending with this big black woman calling to her: “Here, girl;
rooms for a tired lookin’ lady.”

Money had been exchanged. How much Amina didn’t care. Not many thoughts inhabited her mind during that long walk, and even after she’d climbed the stairs under the simply lettered
sigh: Rising Sun. Only a few thoughts had managed to make themselves known to her as she’d leaned over the balcony – wishes to be anyone but Amina Robinson.

Then, as the sun set and the not-hot, but-warm night had started, she thought a few more. Not words, really, just a cool rationalization: she’d not brought anything with her. no razors, no
gun, not even some pills. She was only two floors up, too low to jump. The ceiling fixture didn’t look strong enough to support her, even if she had anything like a rope. The mirror was
obvious, razor-edged cracks promising – even without a handy bathtub.

In the end, she retreated to the mildew-sink of the too-soft bed, old springs complaining as she settled into it: not avoiding the escape she so desperately wanted, but rather not wanting to
face even her fractured reflection.

Amina sat on the bed for a long time. Listening with half an ear to the architectural mumblings of the old building: the hissing of water through pipes, the rolling creeks of
footsteps next door and up above, the flapping of the shade in the open window.

Like a toothache she couldn’t help tonguing, she replayed Stanley – hurting herself with his absence. Each act – the last fight, the daisies he’d brought home from work
one day, the way he’d looked at her when she undressed in front of him, the colour of his nipples, his laughter – seemingly to press harder down on her shoulders. She cried, after a
time, but her tears were long since used up.

She couldn’t go on. She knew that, felt the truth of it somewhere down deep inside herself, but – still – she sat on the edge of that bed in the House of the Rising Sun and did
nothing, except weep without tears.

Night: warm darkness pushed back by street lights, diluted by flickering advertisements. The sounds of passers by seemed louder, as if the sunlight of only a few hours before had done its own
kind of pushing back, their volume increased by its absence. Now free, their voices and the sounds of their cars, bikes, and trucks echoed up into the small room.

Amina stood and went to the window, intending to close it. She stopped, though, in mid-stride.
What did it matter?
she thought to herself in sentiment if not in those exact words;
I
won’t be able to hear anything very soon.

Then she did. Hear something, that is: a knock – thunderclap, pistol shot loud in the small room – and a voice: small, quavering, weak, helpless. “Hello?” someone said
from the other side of her door. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

She didn’t have to. Still, she did: turn, walk to the door, slip the cheap chain, turn the knob, and open it just so much.

“Thank God, I thought someone wasn’t in here.” She was small, young – maybe twenty to Amina’s thirty, with hair as straight as dried pasta and as yellow as polished
gold. Freckles dotted her pale cheeks, and her eyes were puffy and swollen from tears. “Please, can I come in – please?”

She didn’t need to, but Amina did: open the door wider. Stumbling over the first words in many hours, “S-sure” sounded like gravel pouring out of a coffee can.

“Thank you, oh, thank you—” the young girl said, hunching down and moving quickly into the room. Then she turned, and before Amina could do anything, had wrapped her thin,
surprisingly warm, arms around her.

Wet tears seeping through her dress, onto her shoulder, Amina’s arms moved without her. The girl was so slight, so small, putting her arms around her was like hugging a doll.

“I just – I just didn’t want to be alone,” the girl said. Then she repeated, as much to herself as to Amina: “I just didn’t want to be alone.”

Amina patted her warm back, feeling – distantly – the knots of her spine and the planes of her shoulder blades. “I’m here,” Amina said, without really feeling like
she was.

“Can I . . . can I stay with you for a while?” the girl said, pushing herself back just enough to look up into Amina’s eyes.

Amina still wanted to leave, just not be . . . there or anywhere else. But the girl’s eyes, tugged at her, needed her. She didn’t want to stay – in that room, in this world
– but she also couldn’t leave this sad, lonely girl, either.

Midnight: the darkness still warm, the sounds of sunset and early night chased away by the weight of hours. Twelve, it seemed was too deep, too back, to allow anything but a
single wandering drunk who tried to sing – and failed – a song Amina didn’t recognize.

Under the blankets they were warm. How they’d gotten there seemed so quick as to be part of a half-performed dance. One step then another: “I just don’t want to be alone any
more. Please, I just don’t want to be alone.” Then, “Thank you, thank you for opening the door. Thank you for being here.” Her sobs had turned to shivers, and between her
sobs she’d managed to slip, “Please, hold me close.”

And so, in bed. Curled around each other under the thin blankets against a turgid breeze – shivering, ever so slightly until their mingled heat stilled the tremors.

Amina didn’t speak. Instead, she stroked the young girl’s yellow hair – a soothing motion that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside herself. She thought about saying
something, the first real thoughts she’d had all day, but didn’t. Words wouldn’t have been enough – so, instead, she just stroked the young girl’s hair.

The girl, though, spoke – or rather mumbled sleepily into her shoulder: “I don’t want to be alone any more – don’t want to be alone. Hold me, please, hold me.
Don’t want to be alone any more . . .”

Sleep started to tug at them, then pull in earnest. Before she was even aware of it, Amina’s eyes closed and to the soft, rhythmic breathing of the young girl, she drifted off.

She dreamed of Stanley, of a time when the two of them had rolled around on their tiny bed in the back of their little house. It was like a slippery body memory, the touch of Stanley’s
rough hands on her thighs, the weight of his hips on hers, the slight tang of beer on his breath, the slight burning of his stubble as they kissed. The way his sharp toenails occasionally grazed
her ankles.

From this she drifted up, floating away from the dream and back into that warm, dark room. The girl, invisible under the blankets, was molded on top of her – the gentle weight of her small
body pressing lightly down, pushing Amina into the thin mattress. One of the girl’s hands cupped Amina’s right breast, her fingers calmly stroking the sides, delicately pinching her
nipple.

Stanley had been a ferocious lover, a two-armed, two-legged thrust needing something to penetrate. When his lips found her nipples, Amina usually paid for this nurturing need of his with an even
more vigorous than usual fuck – as if he was forcing his prick through herself and into his own weakness. A fuck like that was more a demonstration of his force than a need to come. After a
time, Amina had feared his chapped, thin lips near her breasts and had taken to wearing at least a T-shirt to bed, and sometimes even a bra.

Sometime during the night the temperature had risen – and buttons had come unbuttoned. The girl’s lips were too soft, too delicate: it was as if a hint, and not firm reality, was
kissing – then sucking – Amina’s nipples. The ghostly memory of Stanley’s rough lips, flashed through her mind – then faded with a great surging wave of tingling
pleasure. Even the deep reflexes of fear that usually accompanied any kind of contact with her nipples was stilled by the loving touch of the girl’s gentle lips. With the wave, the swelling
bloom of her body’s response -nipples knotted, heart beating faster, breath shallower, muscles tightening, cunt liquefying – Amina found Stanley fading for the first time. A small
tongue ringed her crinkled tips, and against her will, she found herself arching to meet the accompanying gentle suction.

It wasn’t so much a girl’s lips and tongue on her body – for Amina didn’t really think of her in that way. In the darkness of the room, with the hole that Stanley’s
cruelty and departure had opened in her, it was just contact. Someone had looked down, saw the fragile, broken woman at the bottom, and had extended a hand down. Lips didn’t matter as much as
the though of being seen, and desired – who it was incidental to that fact.

Distantly, through the hot, heavy haze of the girl’s breath between kisses, between sweet nibbles, between sucks, Amina caught the falling bass note of a ship’s horn sounding on the
river. The reminder of the heavy waters of the Mississippi, the still-turgid atmosphere of the night air, made it seem as if she were floating in bath water – buoyed by the girl’s
touches on her body. The sucking, yes, but also her thin fingers dancing along her sides, the curves of her heavy breasts, the tension of her thighs, the gentle quakes of her calves seemed to lift
Amina up, hold her above the bed, above even the sad exterior of the House of the Rising Sun.

Squeezing her eyes shut against a sudden sharp peak of excitement, young teeth grazing her so-tight nipples as the girl’s fingers playfully pinched at the underside of her tits, brought
stars to Amina’s eyes – completing the illusion of flight. Deep into a warm night, hanging above a vibrant tapestry of blue and purple starbursts, she floated on the girl’s tender
desire.

When those hands fell to the inside of her thighs, Amina parted them without a thought – save to be propelled higher into that starry canopy and away from the harsh earth, away from small
rooms in run-down hotels, away from the pain of breathing, away from the pain of loneliness.

The first kiss was a lighting tear across that velvet darkness, a quick flash of desire that made Amina grit her teeth and whistle a breath. The first lick, the girl’s tongue cautiously
starting at the top of Amina’s already wet cunt – just shy of her throbbing, pulsing clit – was a shivering rush through her body, a chiming that seemed to race through her. Toes
to nose, Amina’s body tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed to the accompanying strokes of the girl’s strong, stiff tongue along her labia.

She crashed – down, down, down, through the ceiling, wham! into her body. Amina was a woman, on a smelly mattress, under a thin blanket, in a dive somewhere near the French Quarter, with a
girl she’d didn’t know. Her legs were spread, her nipples were hard, and her cunt was very wet. She almost brought those legs closed to keep the girl away from her and the shimmering
pleasure she was delivering. She even tensed in preparation, lifting a hand – feeling it drag and catch at the scratchy blanket – to put it on the girl’s head, and half-formed the
words no, please. But she stopped, hand only raised, legs only slightly tensed, words completely unspoken.

At first she didn’t know what it was. Later, in the morning and days beyond, Amina would look back at that moment with some sadness (too long) and much joy (looking forward to more)
– but there in that little hotel, in the middle of a warmish night, it was just good. It was the best kind of good, a whole, pure, brilliant, good.

The moan escaped Amina’s lips without permission, escaping from tension and loneliness – a long struggle that made its release all the more intense. Soon, the moan turned to gasps,
which evolved into sweet murmurs – cresting once, twice, and more, many more times in more sharp cries, more deep moans.

What the girl was doing was a mystery. But Amina didn’t care. She was there, in that sad hotel, on that warm night, under that cheap blanket, and she didn’t care. She was desired,
and – best of all – she was loved.

They came even faster after that, as if the way had been opened and the coming flowed through that opening in herself. With each, her liberation released her body, and her hands rubbed the
girl’s head between her legs, stroked her tiny ears, and allowed her legs to squeeze – ever so slightly.

How many was a mystery – one of many. In the end, she slept – the opening and the outpouring exhausting her. As she slept she dreamed, but on waking she couldn’t remember
anything about it – except she hadn’t been alone. Stanley hadn’t been there, but she hadn’t been alone.

When she awoke, hard morning sunlight beating through the open window, the girl was gone.

The front door was closed, but just barely: a narrow seam of hallway showed between the thin wood and the jamb.

Amina’s dress was twisted and bunched. Standing quickly, she turned it, buttoned it, and smoothed it where it had crept up the cheeks of her ass.

Then she opened the door wider. The corridor was empty – quiet except for the muffled conversations of static-laced televisions talking to themselves. As she walked, then trotted, then ran
towards the stairs, she wanted to call out, to cry the girl’s name . . . and felt a deep tug down inside herself when she realized that she didn’t know it.

The manager, the Buddha momma was outside, as if the black woman had not moved from her seat near the front door. As Amina trotted down the threadbare hall, the woman kept her rhythmic fanning
– steady and undisturbed.

The street was just waking, slow pedestrians and the unearthly quickness of those used to the early hours. Faces approached and the silhouettes of bodies retreated but, standing on the narrow
street, none of them was the girl.