When Sara said you were the surprise coming to dinner, I was slicing cucumber for the salad. She said your name and the knife slipped. It didn’t hurt at first, but Sara was quick to grab my wrist and stick my hand under the faucet. I was shocked to see red under the water. I felt as if every drop of blood in my body had already charged to my face.
The cut’s hardly grave, but I split the nail on my index finger. Once she was sure it wouldn’t require medical attention, Sara wrapped the finger in gauze and banished me to the porch with a glass of Sancerre and orders to “chill the fuck out.” You didn’t really know her in college, but since she says you’ve been volunteering together for a few months now, you must’ve come to appreciate this coarse care that is her signature. You probably know now that Sara's the kind of person that, say, brings you breakfast on a tray with a cloth napkin and a little daisy in a jar and then tells you to “shut up and eat your fuggin’ eggs.”
All weekend she’s been dropping hints about a surprise—meaning you—and I’ve been pestering her about it. Sara and I have a long history of mild, deeply loving antagonism, but this weekend I’ve started to get the sense that our old mode has reified in some odd new way, a way that puts a distance between us that wasn’t there before. It feels like we’re acting out roles in a play: Sara’s the mom and I’m her kid. Last night we watched a movie after dinner, and Sara sat on the couch, tucked in the crook of Gray’s arm, while I lay on my belly by their feet, braiding the fringe of the Persian rug.
It’s not just distance between me and Sara. It’s imbalance. I’ve got this little life I’ve made, filled with big ghosts (ex-husband, ex-lover). I have my old job back at the restaurant I worked in straight out of college and a one-room apartment I can barely afford, with bars on the street-facing windows and boxes I can’t seem to unpack, plus some expensive, useless paper (my master’s degree, an Order of Dissolution with the ink still wet on it). Sara has the house with the gables and the wraparound porch and the chicken coup, the freelance consulting gig she can do from home while restoring the property and volunteering at the youth center. She has the husband who’s handy with a hammer, whose salary more than covers the mortgage. Who she’s crazy in love with. She’s got enough security to afford to be worried about me. The first night I got here, she flopped down on the wrought iron bed in the guest room and said, “Come on, talk to me.” I hadn't seen her since her wedding over a year ago. When we finally said goodnight a little after two, she put her arms around me and held me for a long time. Then she said, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
She’s right, as usual. Maybe surprising me with you is Sara’s way of getting me out of my head, shorting out the circuitry of obsessive self-reflection. It worked. For the first time in months, sitting here on the porch with my wine and my wound elevated above heart level, I’m definitely not thinking about my life in all the usual, fucked up ways (end of my marriage, the affair, the uncertainty of my future, etc). I’m thinking about you, Cyd.
I won’t pretend I’m not nervous to see you. So much time has passed, and you, we are so different now. But what an ordinary reaction. It’s so basic. You always were much cooler than me.
I felt that way from the beginning, and it’s always stood in the way of my being totally candid with you. I never told you, for instance, how flustered I felt the first time I saw you. Your bleached hair and dark roots, the dimple in your left cheek, which was rosy and crossed by a strand of hair the wind had looped onto your face. You asked if the empty seat next to mine was taken, and when you sat down you smoothed your platinum hair back from your face. No girl in the history of girls has ever rocked a pageboy with more style. You wore purple Doc Martens and ripped jeans and a silver ring on every creamy finger. You didn’t interlace your hands the way other people did. No, you hooked your left index and middle finger loosely inside the soft fist of your right hand. For nearly two hours I stole glances at those hands on your knee and hoped you didn’t notice.
You affected me, Cyd. No girl had ever done that before. Not like that. I'd certainly found many women lovely and charming and beautiful and vibrant. But I didn't desire any of them. I judged them “desirable,” meaning they had a quality of attractiveness that I admired or even aspired to, but it wasn't something that had me under its sway. You had that, too–desirability. I watched all kinds of heads turn when you walked through campus. But there was something else.
The first time you mentioned your ex-girlfriend I nearly dropped my tray in the dining commons. We’d become friends by then but that didn't stop me from turning pink every time I accepted your invitation to have lunch after class. I'd made a habit of saving a seat for you, and you made a habit of slipping into that seat mere seconds before the professor began to lecture. I never told you how I always made sure to start the ten minute walk from my dorm to the lecture hall some twenty-five minutes before class just to make sure I could get our usual two seats near the back.
You may not have had all the specifics, but I’m sure you knew that you had an effect on me. And you seemed to enjoy it, the way my color would rise whenever you tossed out the occasional teasing entendre or held my gaze for a few seconds longer than ordinary conversation would dictate. You toyed with me but didn’t pursue me, at least not in the way I’d come to expect by then. The handful of guys I slept with that first year in college didn’t flirt for sport—they fucked for sport. Banter wasn’t enjoyed for its own sake. It was exploratory, preliminary. If you showed any receptivity, it culminated quickly in an invitation of some kind—back to his room for a joint and a movie on his laptop, or to a party, where between the throbbing bass and cups of jungle juice, kissing and touching seemed to happen of their own accord.
But this was not your way, Cyd. I couldn't tell if you liked me or just liked making me squirm. You were hardly shy–one time I saw you at party pressing a tall girl against the wall in a hallway–but with me you never made a move. So after a few months, I tried to stop wondering what, exactly, you meant by every little look or comment. I tried to simply accept this kind of flirtation in much same way that I accept my gentle rivalry with Sara—as our particular mode of friendship.
And maybe it was. It just didn’t stop me from wanting you. All through the spring semester you wore those wifebeaters that showed off the ivy tattoo twining down your left shoulder blade. I anticipated those moments when you hoisted your bag over your shoulder and the shirt rode up to expose a segment of your pale, soft stomach above the waistband of your jeans. And then, about a month before summer, you stopped shaving. And you stopped wearing a bra.
There was no shortage of shock—or swooning—among the student body, but I knew you didn’t give a shit what anyone thought. You were taking a seminar on sexuality and gender. You were, you said, interested in performances of non-binary gender expression. I respected that, and of course in hindsight, it was a sign of things to come. But also I was crazy for the outline of your small, dark nipples through the thin, white fabric, thrilled by glimpses of the downy, dark hair growing in the milky hollows of your underarms.
I was so in thrall to you, but it never occurred to me to act until the day you forced my hand, wittingly or not. It was a week before finals, the day the FEM club put out their annual fundraising publication, a collection of anonymous student erotica. You came to my room while I was studying and flopped down beside me on the bed. Months earlier I’d copped to penning some smut over winter break, but I never fessed up to actually submitting it and you’d never asked about it. The minute you pulled a copy of the magazine from your bag, my face told you everything.
I was flattered that you remembered my offhand mention of my story. And mortified. You licked your lips like a cat, opened the magazine, and began to read. Aloud. After the first few lines of a story you’d pause and try to guess by my reaction if the words were mine. I flushed, giggled, begged you to stop. Even though I’d been proud of my first publication, I’d kept it a secret from everyone. The truth is, up until that moment the lewdness of the work had made me reluctant to claim the credit. And then suddenly, under your attention, the shame shifted. The story I’d written—an episode of hetero bathtub fucking—while perhaps competently steamy, or at least vivid enough to make it into the magazine, seemed totally vanilla and entirely unadventurous. I was terrified that you’d read it and think this was the extent of my sexual imagination. You read a line from the story that appeared before mine and studied my face, then turned back to the magazine. Before you could flip another page, I pushed you lightly, teasingly on the shoulder. When your arm shot out to return the shove, I grabbed your hand. You lifted an eyebrow. And I kissed you.
It wasn’t really boldness—I just couldn't let you find out how uncool I really was.
It was simple: I couldn’t bear my words on your lips, so I put my lips on yours instead. My heart was pounding. The kiss was more than a friendly peck, and it startled you. I can still picture your lips slack with surprise. But only for a moment before you grabbed me by the neck and pulled my mouth back to yours. You tasted like the clove cigarettes I knew you sometimes bummed from the campus maintenance guys. Of all the kids in the dorms, only you took the time to befriend them. I could tell by the way they looked at you that you’d achieved something astounding for girl: they liked and respected you as much as they wanted to fuck you.
There were so many of us in that camp, Cyd. And I’d never kissed a girl before. That’s why, even as your tongue parted my lips, doubt wormed in my brain. You sensed it and whispered into my mouth, “Don’t think so much.” You took the lead, and you took your time. I remember that as you kissed me, you seemed to become larger somehow. Maybe that was because my focus, sharpened by longing, by sensation, narrowed to just you. The strength of your hands as they clutched at my neck and scooped fistfuls of my hair was astounding.
Your hands eased me onto my back, roving everywhere else before they finally reached between my legs. At one point, one of your rings caught in my hair. Only you, Cyd, could handle a snag with such smoothness. You brought the finger to your lips and slid your mouth over the first knuckle, the second, all the way down to the jewelry, then you tugged it off with your teeth. You pushed the ring into my mouth with your tongue so I could feel the brush of your lips once more before I got to watch them, pink and stung-looking, repeat the process over the length of each one of your ringed fingers in turn. I remember the jangling handful of silver rings you dropped on my bookshelf and the way you brushed my lower lip with your thumb when you took the first ring back.
You were so sexy, staring me down as you traced the outline of my breasts through my t-shirt, the lips of my cunt through my thin jersey pants. I wasn’t wearing any panties, and I knew you could tell. You lifted my shirt and pressed against me, and I could feel your breasts, the hard little nipples, reaching for mine through the fabric of your wifebeater. But whenever I made a move to touch you, you seemed about to pull away. You made me lie still while you worked me over, peeling off my clothes, taking parts of me into your mouth. I remember that you didn’t progress to the pussy the way I thought you would—you tasted between my legs then returned to my neck or nipple or mouth before kissing down my stomach again. My cunt was swimming by the time you settled there and then you lapped softly, long licks up the length of my crotch.
When you slipped two ringless fingers inside, pressing against the front wall of my pussy, I know I cried out. It wasn’t just the pleasure. I wanted you closer, so I tugged you up to kiss me again. You added a third finger. Then a fourth. I’d never been so full of fingers. You fucked me slowly like that, rolling your thumb over my clit, your lips seashell silky with the taste of me. I thought I was going to hit the ceiling. You were grinding against the back of your hand. Desire finally seemed to overtake your control then, and you let me reach for you. I lifted the wifebeater so I could play with your nipples, brushing them against mine for a second before feeling the weight of your breasts press against me, the warm mash of flesh on flesh. Your belly was soft and hot and trembling. When I shoved my hand under the waistband of your jeans and pressed through the sopping hair and into your wet folds, we both let loose a sharp moan of almost identical pitch. That stereo sound of pleasure (yours and mine), the feel of pussy (yours, finally) made me cum, squeezing the orgasm out around your fingers.
I wanted so badly to taste you then. The button of your fly bit against the back of my wrist. I took my fingers from your cunt and slipped them into my mouth. You tasted like me but different. You tasted liked salted cream.
You were squirming now, clutching at me, and I was naked, leaning over you. I think I succeeded in getting you onto your back and a button undone before we heard the key in the lock and then my roommate’s little gasp as the door swung open. I’ve never forget the look of total astonishment on her face while you jumped up and snatched your bag and boots, the handful of rings. She just stood there in the doorway when you pushed past. Later, once she’d recovered her senses (she was from a conservative Guatemalan family), she apologized to me and suggested I use the “sock signal” on the doorknob the next time I was “entertaining a visitor.”
I never got the chance. A week later we took our finals, and then the semester was over. We all went home for the summer, and when we came back in the fall you and I’d both moved off campus. Sara had the attic room in the crumbling shared house I found on Craigslist. I think you and a couple of kids rented an apartment on the other side of campus. I lost track of you then. I guess that’s what happens. I met my future ex-husband that year—the same way I met you, incidentally—and he and I were living together by summer. I think you stopped bleaching your hair. I didn’t see you around anymore.
But I never stopped thinking about you, Cyd. I’ll admit that the memory of our encounter became for me a secret little jewel through the long stretch of my monogamous twenties. But it wasn’t because I saw it as evidence of some wild streak in me. It was you, how you made me feel. Over the years, I returned countless times to that afternoon in the dorms: replaying it, elongating it. I’ve squeezed my tits and tried to get my hands to feel the memory of cupping yours. I’ve touched my cunt and tried to recreate the feel of your soaked fur and puffy lips, the little bead of your clit. I’ve even extended my tongue to the air while I touch myself, imagining my mouth on your pussy as you come. Sometimes I nearly convince myself, but the taste of my own familiar juice always reminds me which fruit it is in the end.
I never stopped playing this little game with myself from time to time, even when, a few years ago, I heard that you came out as trans. I felt a mix of emotion at the news—a jolt of surprise, a swell of admiration. A stab of sadness and shame that I hadn’t known or noticed that you weren’t at home in the body that had so entranced me. And that’s the fucked up part. I would never wish you any unhappiness, but I guess part of me—the part that lusted after you when we were younger—can’t help mourning the disappearance of the girl-you, my first girl crush. My first girl lover.
A car has just turned up Sara’s long drive. It must be yours, a black, soft-top Jeep. Very rugged. The car, of course. I can’t quite make you out yet. But here’s that old familiar feeling, the heat, the heartbeat in my cheeks. Even at a distance you’ve got me blushing, Cyd. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed.
xoxo
© 2020 ROSEMARY CUMMINGS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.