Best Lesbian Erotica 2010

LIVES OF THE SAINTS Holly Farris

Miranda’s knees straddle butch PJ’s salt-and-pepper hair. PJ had emerged from her shop an hour before, hauling the kneeling bench, clamping one of Miranda’s filmy bras in her teeth. “Tie me,” PJ had said, “I added pickets.”

From her delicious vantage, PJ sees a drop of sweat trickling toward Miranda’s crimson lipstick. Because Miranda, in all her years prior, had not touched a saw or sander, nail gun or carpenter’s glue, PJ had mentored her construction, but Miranda had not let her see the finished product. There is a glowing top rail to anchor cuffs and studs, and sumptuous velvet to pad their knees, amplifying how the partners contrast.

“Up my cunt,” Miranda says the way PJ likes to hear. She hangs over her love’s wet face. This stop in the foyer is as far as the cushioned kneeler has gotten inside their home; the bulky thing barely fit through the door. As PJ taps the dimple behind Miranda’s knees to beg for a better angle, Miranda’s auburn braid spanks her own ass. That sacred backside has been PJ’s romp, using fingers and strap-on, until this blasphemous play with the new furniture. The saintly femme Miranda takes PJ’s tongue straight up, a cocktail, no rocks.

PJ cuddles a light arm that Miranda has thrown across her waist in bed that night. She is grateful that Miranda praises her eyes, which are small and close together, but where PJ shines, what Miranda says inspires her considerable lust, and a vanity that PJ has begun to feel, is her hair. Other women have curls or a flip, but PJ’s hair jags into a point. Each silver or black shaft tapers to a needle, and her reflection in the mirror is sleek, designed, industrial.

Where the couple rests is their personal Mission-style magic carpet of a bed. PJ made it by herself, as she has all of their furniture—except the bench. “This little piggy,” she says as she counts Miranda’s fingers, smashed or torn on the kneeler. Pink Band-Aids are on three of ten fingers, and PJ will drive her to the orthopedist in the coming week to recheck a broken metacarpal bone.

“You make woodworking look easy,” Miranda grumbles.

“Because I kept my fingers?” PJ kids. “Your kneeler turned out great, Randi. I’m beginning to warm to it myself.”

PJ remembers tongue-rasping Miranda’s clit and hole, how the cushion cradled her busy jaw until Miranda ripped the bra untying her wrists. PJ had scrambled up top, intending to thrill. She stretched Miranda the full length of the kneeling bench, staging her partner. Quick little sobs became shrieks. Furniture fired her beloved more than the fuck.

“Seriously, Randi,” she says in bed, as if it’s not a game. “Explain the attraction again.”

As soon as she’s spoken, PJ watches for Miranda’s nipples beneath their pilled sheet. She knows at just which point in the telling the dusky tips become hard.

“I’m talking about my first come,” Miranda says. “Or what I decided later was coming. I was in the pew beside my mother.” PJ considers, solemnly, how she and Miranda spun in parallel parochial universes as children.

“High Mass,” Randi says.

PJ wants it to have been Christmas, imagining chocolate and toys and excess, but she grimaces, certain it was more likely one of the year’s other 364 days. “Incense in clouds,” Randi says of the memory, setting up her vignette.

The sheet lifts as Miranda’s nipples react. “I was good for a while,” she says, “but I got bored.”

PJ loves this part, the moment when her good girl first turned bad, beneath the eyes of God. Randi’s voice strangles. “My mother didn’t notice when I scooted along the kneeler; she was listening to the sermon. The velvet cushion rubbed so nice.”

Randi’s eyes close, and she tickles an uninjured fingertip over her own forearm. Autoerotic, PJ labels. Miranda draws out the original zing.

“Hearing the priest’s voice booming from the pulpit,” she says, “my butt on cold tile, I got tingly, or dizzy, and I looked between my legs. Know what I saw? White cotton underpants with a wet spot! Lace on my white anklets.”

PJ’s mad this time, frustrated that Miranda is stuck in this childhood jolt not even properly called sex. She wants fisting before she sleeps, impossible because of the bandages, and is hair-on-fire jealous of the kneeler. She jerks a thumb in its direction. “Does it have to stay here?” she whines. They have moved their treadmill to the side of the bedroom to make space. PJ had piled her boots on it, to demystify the thing. Miranda would not have it.

“Where else can it go?” Randi says. “This is our sex room.”

For a week, they fuck in every way PJ can think of using the kneeler. She bends Miranda over the wood to flog her; Randi returns the favor. PJ spoons along its length while Miranda brings herself off. She pinches the crushed velvet, licks its leather border.

Around midnight of the seventh day, PJ pretends she’s dozing. Miranda muffles their vibrator’s buzz when she turns out the light, her knees tensed against the mattress. PJ bites a lip to distract herself until Randi has finished. She feels her do what she’s been told enhances the tingle. She throws an arm wide, poor acting, hoping to contact skin, but her lover has left their bed. Opening one eye a slit, she sees her stretched out on the floor beside the kneeler.

When PJ gets up early, Miranda, still deeply asleep, holds her own braid in one fist. The other arm lies between the pickets of the bench. Unaware though she is, the position fondles her body and varnish at the same time.

PJ decides they must talk. I know these fantasies are strong, she practices, but how about me already? I feel like an outsider. I mean, this silly nailed-together thing intrudes. Sure, we both appreciate a good Gregorian chant CD, Randi, but you’re scaring me. She rehearses a speech while in the shower, thumping against the fiberglass wall to annoy Miranda, to wake her up for the intervention.

In the kitchen, PJ, dressed in worn sweats and still alone, makes coffee for two. Employing a trick of Miranda’s, she sprinkles cinnamon on top of both cupfuls when it’s ready. She takes butter from the freezer, hopeful it will soften by the time Miranda gets up. She hauls their toaster off the shelf, stumbling over the cord and trailing stale crumbs across the waxed vinyl. “Not a butch’s job,” she growls.

“Certainly not.” A voice, although sympathetic to PJ, and coming from Miranda’s place at their breakfast table, registers as a stranger.

“I’ve been up since the year 363, give or take,” the interloper continues. “Yawn.” She says this word aloud, and doesn’t seem sleepy.

Sue me, princess; I woke you up. PJ is on the verge of saying this when she actually looks at the woman sitting where Miranda usually does. As if the drop-in has researched their routine, she stirs the coffee in Miranda’s cup. She wrinkles her nose when PJ turns around. She snorts, and says, “Gag. Cinnamon.”

“Best a dyke who hates the kitchen can do,” PJ says. “And you would be…?” For a crazy minute, she believes the mail carrier has taken their kitchen hostage. She should be social to the visitor, or leave it for Miranda to be when she finds they have company. A leafy branch in flower pushes against their pottery salt and pepper shakers. Petals mash sticky spots they haven’t cleaned up from Chinese carryout. What is this woman, PJ thinks, an environment freak come to call?

“I’m PJ,” PJ says, rushing to anchor herself in her own kitchen. The woman takes a sip from the mug.

“You’re making toast? I’m starving,” she says. PJ sees the woman’s hands curve, expressive as a dancer performing on a stage that the stained tablecloth makes. PJ looks above the cabinets, over the door leading to their carport. Reality TV gets away with all kind of shit, she thinks, scanning for the camera. Has a webcam photographed her and Miranda in the bedroom over the last week? They’ve done wild things with the kneeler, until PJ got pissed.

“Bibiana,” the woman says, extending a hand. “Call me Bibs.”

The stranger twists rolls of fabric at her neckline, gauzy stuff woven too loosely to hide that she wears no bra. To PJ’s eye, the woman’s vague erogenous zones sag. She is an Earth Mother past her prime. Her tattered and unwashed textile flutters as she gets to her feet for a proper introduction. Her shoes slip on the vinyl as she stands, and PJ notices Birkenstocks. Florida style with three straps: the woman’s are the same as Miranda’s.

The nickname, Bibs, sounds too friendly to be an invader. PJ catalogues Miranda’s family who just visited for Thanksgiving. She thought Randi put the whole lot on a plane to leave from Sea-Tac. The holidays had gone pretty uneventfully, and PJ assumed Miranda’s family was back in Oswego. PJ, thinking widely, wagers that this auntie in their kitchen must have gotten left, though she could swear she hadn’t served her a plate of tofu turkey.

Bibs clarifies. “I’m new here,” she says.

Reassured that Nature Woman doesn’t know her either, PJ is direct. “Just visiting?” she says, and her voice sounds a little higher, stressed. This is someone who will crash at their house for too long, disrupt their routine, break their washing machine doing her laundry.

The woman has never seen the sun. Her hair is mostly white, a hue PJ mistakes for gray initially, but it is, instead, blonde corn silk. Blue veins, as faint as charcoal sketch lines, converge on her smooth forehead. PJ thinks of the line that palm readers call the lifeline, and how that particular trail tells everyone’s past and future. She frets. What does this immediate future hold?

Of course.

The odd woman is down on her luck, and looks frowsy because she has exceeded her limit at the homeless shelter. Since PJ habitually leaves the kitchen door open after pulling off her boots in the carport, the stranger just wandered in. The woman will request a bus ticket, which PJ prefers, or permission to crash on their futon. Soft-hearted Miranda will probably agree to the latter, and they will argue in bed. PJ dreads that Miranda will tour the woman about their home, another misplaced intimacy she is ready to resent.

“My wife”—PJ tosses this out in case the woman is coming on to her—“she needs her beauty sleep.” PJ needs a dose of her own coffee. Rude in front of the vagrant, she drinks half of her coffee in one gulp, spoons in sugar she never uses, and guzzles the rest.

“She’s beautiful already,” Bibs says, “your lover. Randi is exhausted from fucking.”

“You’re leaving now,” PJ says. She hurries around the table to escort the bitch out. The phone on the wall is within reach, and she will call the police if she must. The woman’s head-to-toe peignoir stops her, or maybe it’s what Bibs says next.

“Trouble is, PJ—cool name, mind if I say it again?—PJ, look around. Your Randi is humping the furniture.”

PJ collapses against the table as if punched. All the air for her voice escapes her, and she makes a sound like an animal giving up.

“Fuck you,” she hisses with the breath she gets, a curse better delivered standing. Her shaky hands rattle a chair, and she tumbles into it.

“No one did,” Bibs says. “Pity.” She flutters her eyelashes seductively. “Fuck me, I mean. Here’s the deal, PJ; see if you can read along. I’m Saint Bibiana, emphasis on the title. I go where no dyke has gone before. Want my bio?”

“Whatever,” PJ says, a lame comeback.

“From the 1955 edition, Lives of the Saints, page four-seventy-three, edited by Reverend Hugo Hoever, S.O.Cist., PhD: After spending their time in fasting and prayer… yadda yadda. Saint Bibiana was reserved for greater sufferings. She was placed in the hands of a wicked woman called Rufina, who in vain endeavored to seduce her.”

“Jesus!” PJ says.

“Long story short, sweetie, they’s a martyr in yo kitchen.”

Where is Miranda? PJ gags, and it’s not the cinnamon. Can this witch float in the air near the stove hood? Can she kill Randi in her sleep, take their beloved rice cooker back with her to eternal life? The doorbell rings, not a coincidence. PJ vows not to run.

“That would be Rufina,” Bibs announces gaily. She turns her back to PJ so she can face the door. PJ notices what could be bones under the woman’s gauze, a slight comfort. I can take them both, she thinks.

A woman with more fashion sense walks into the kitchen. She, unlike Bibs, has ruddy skin, which makes her appear substantial. PJ resorts to logic. If this second time-traveler has real blood coloring her face—she thinks of Miranda’s lips under a Maybelline pout—maybe the beings in the kitchen can’t float.

Or kill.

Or steal.

The newcomer is radiant in a red jacket. That is, a red robe or scarf partly covers her filmy nightgown of a dress. She has a knotted rope sash at her waist, as does Bibs, but Ruf’s is more decorative, gold fringed. Whereas Bibs has eye globes that might as well be marble (white and shiny and flat even where they should curve), Ruf has wildly green eyes, crimson lips and loose red hair. A scent, of cardamom and black pepper, of raspberry and caramel, precedes her.

PJ is transfixed by the vision. As soon as she is aware of Rufina in the room, all the skin she spies on her own arms and hands goes translucent. PJ counts pulses in her own wrists, a beating triangle in her neck below each ear, behind her knees, in her wet crotch. Her clit is hooked to her ankles in sensation, to the nails on her fingers, to the back of her throat. She tastes Ruf’s presence, as surprising as the perfume that accompanies her. PJ leaks syrup. She devours a woman for the first time.

“Hey, slut, you going out on me?” Ruf says to Bibs.

PJ is in her own world, awash with sensation. One hand down the front of her pants, her thumb rakes the slit. Between her legs it is spongy, a juicy citrus. Her little spike pushes between the outer labia. Inside, the fragile lips glue along the shaft. It is, at once, the first time she had touched herself, the first time fingering Miranda.

“Lady, this better not be your new piece,” Ruf gripes to Bibs. PJ melts to her knees, sliding the sweatpants to midthigh, tearing the drawstring. Wagging her naked ass, she could crawl on the floor, eat the toast from a dog dish, and wait to be spanked for being so vile.

“Ménage?” Ruf says. She spreads her arms and fingers like the bizarre Bibs. PJ remembers an art history crush: it’s the pose artists favor for statues, as if everyone worthy of being cast in stone bestows blessings with a wan hand. Which the visitors can do, PJ assumes.

Answering her own question, and in spite of PJ’s display, Ruf whips her harlot tongue the length of Bibs’s jawline. After a very slow and penetrating kiss, she flicks over the tip of the other woman’s nose, over both her dead eyes, and finishes up suckling her ears. PJ has yanked up her sweats, voting no to a threesome, while Ruf has eaten, drunk, and belched Bibs in public.

“Thought you died a virgin,” PJ says to the love object. She revs herself up to be impertinent, unsure of etiquette with ghosts.

“Yep,” Bibs says. “A sad fact, best forgotten.”

Ruf has thrown her scarlet drape onto the kitchen tile where PJ sits. She takes hand lotion from the shelf above the sink, sits down at the table, and moisturizes her bare feet. She has a lovely pedicure Miranda would envy, a gold seal lacquered on each big toe.

“But I made up for it, see, the virginity,” Bibs says. “Over the last sixteen hundred years.” She looks around for more coffee, and then settles into her tale. “Poor baby, she tried her best with me,” she says. “The book I quoted fails to mention, PJ, because such books don’t trade in scandal, the fact that when Ruf couldn’t get my cherry she sold me as a prostitute. She pimped me. Talk about the oldest profession!”

Bibs snorts, punctuating a laugh line fresh through millennia. She scrunches the gauze to her elbows on both sides at once, and continues with the sordid spin.

“I fought johns off, and I died intact,” she says. “But I had gotten a taste. So, I waited for Ruf. To die. I had my legs spread as soon as I got word she’d been short-listed to kick. We’ve been doing each other ever since, a tango that I like to call postmortem poking.”

Ruf crows. “She never looked back,” she says to PJ, winking. She kneads the ankles she has moisturized lovingly. “We’ve been afterlife partners for nearly two thousand years, Bibs and I,” she says. “True, we were impolite not to beg your pardon, but we don’t believe in wasting time.”

PJ allows them a make-out round. She measures more coffee into the machine, adds water from a screw-cap bottle. Water underground for two thousand years, if she believes the label’s print. She pushes the cinnamon back into the spice rack. When PJ turns to face the phantasms, Ruf sits primly in the chair, and the never-sated Bibs lolls across her lap.

“Let’s get to why we came,” Bibs says, and Ruf snickers at the adolescent pun. “Is this church kneeling bench a problem?” The woman had called Miranda by her nickname, and had known PJ’s spouse was trysting with the décor.

“It is, for me.” PJ feels guilty talking about Miranda, but the grievance is what started her morning. The sting is fading like a fight from years before, and she doesn’t intend to be peevish.

“Fetish,” Ruf says knowingly.

She clucks her tongue against her teeth. Holding her lover in one arm, Ruf shifts her body, allowing Bibs to suckle a high breast she flashes out from a red fold. With her free hand, she reaches underneath the skirt Bibs has hiked up. At intervals she removes her hand, and sucks the palm to the tip of every finger.

“Back to the furniture,” Bibs says when they quit. “Does it feel good?”

This ravishing woman is taking her, but Bibs pauses for an answer. “Yes,” PJ admits, “the furniture feels good.”

Whether it’s due to the scent or the sex or the schemes, PJ pains for Miranda now, wants to wake her and taste her and feed her and bathe her. She will tune her partner for sixteen hundred years, invent treats for body and mind on the hour. The kneeler, however it fits their physical fervor, is welcome.

“Let’s put it this way,” Bibs says to PJ, “and this is the reason we’re here. Sex is life. I was dead, literally, then electrified after Ruf took me. From our perspective across time, we see you and Miranda. Nothing she has done over the last week diminishes, excludes, or nullifies you, PJ. She awakened with the first kneeler. A girl could do worse.”

Bibs lies facedown on the kitchen floor among old toast crumbs, and Ruf grinds her until their robes wear sodden streaks. Flaxen and red hair tangles, sashes unravel, sandals flip, fingers intertwine. When they are done heaving and shuddering, PJ, who had crept off to look in on Miranda, cuts brown bread and stands it in the toaster’s slots. She wonders if the women will vanish like vapor, dry up like a puddle, or be obscene in front of Miranda.

“Toast?” Bibs says from the bottom. “It’s about time.”

“Did you burn something?” Miranda strolls into the kitchen naked, and PJ is at eye level with her crotch, almost covering the tan spot on the vinyl. She glances into the sink, checking for ashes.

“Look what I found,” she says. “In the drawer under my bras. It’s a book called Lives of the Saints.”

Miranda carries a stubby volume between her hands. A snake’s tongue of a red page marker draws an arrow to her pubic hair.

PJ flashes to the morning after they had torn each other up in a hotel bed. Miranda had peed in the bathroom in pauses, sat at the table stiffly. She had rubbed coffee-flavored saliva on the chafe between her legs when PJ wanted more. Ever after, PJ has wanted more.

The book she holds is a calendar of saints, and Miranda runs a finger to check. It is the season between holidays, of family and friends departed after Thanksgiving, due to arrive for Christmas. “December second,” Miranda says, naming the fresh day. “Feast of Saint Bibiana,” she reads. “Patroness of mentally ill people and single laywomen. Know anything about her, PJ?”