Best Lesbian Erotica 2012

TOUCHED Amy Butcher

“I know it sounds wicked strange,” Sharon whispered, “but I think I’ve been touched.” Her thick Boston accent pressed a staccato emphasis into the final word. She rocked slightly as she said this, her heart moving toward me then away. Something ached inside me with each pull.

Sharon had been agitated, so we’d skipped fourth period French, escaping to the top of the bleachers overlooking the football field. We sat cross-legged, knee to knee, the September sun purring against our skin. We were hunched forward like old women, the weight of our emerging adolescence hanging around our necks, bending us forward.

Years of Catholic schooling had indoctrinated me into the war of Good versus Evil but never had the battlefield felt so tantalizingly close. I swallowed hard, daring to lift my eyes toward hers. “By the Devil?” I asked, a mixture of terror and thrill sliding out alongside the words.

“No. By God!” she said, fingering first the hem of her own plaid school jumper then moving across to mine. “By God…” she repeated quietly, taking a whole handful of the material and clenching it in her fist. I could feel her hand trembling through the fabric.

I sat back, relieved but confused. “Well, that’s great, right? First off, God is definitely better than the Devil, right?” I struggled to understand her distress. “And second, this means you’ve been chosen. That’s a good thing. I mean, Sister Abigail is always saying that only a few of us will be… chosen, that is.”

Sister Abigail, our gym teacher and self-appointed guard against all things pleasurable, regularly prowled the hallways to admonish every possible transgression: from patent leather shoes (boys can see the reflection of your underwear) to makeup, from hand-holding to straddle-vaulting over posts (you might slip and damage your “womanhood”). Her mission: to eliminate everything that could lead us down the path of temptation.

“I know, it’s supposed to be a good thing, but it isn’t working out exactly as Sister Abigail described it.” Her rocking continued. She placed one hand on my knee as if to counter her own movement.

“Ow!” I flinched, “That’s the bruised one… remember? From when you tackled me the other day, jerk?” I stuck out my tongue toward her and gave her a wide-eyed stare. She lightened her touch in response but didn’t let go. “So what do you mean ‘isn’t working out’?” I asked.

“Well, you remember how she said that if you were chosen then you’d feel the Holy Spirit inside?”

“Yeah…”

“That you’d feel a calling, almost like a stick up your butt making you stand super straight?”

“Well, yeah, although I don’t remember Sister Abigail actually using the words ‘stick up your butt…’”

“I know, that’s just how I pictured what she meant.”

We both laughed and leaned forward, touching forehead to forehead, before sitting back again.

“Well, anyway, that you’d feel some sort of buzz or zing, like being struck by lightning. That God would call you, whisper in your ear, that all of a sudden you’d rise above it all and become detached from the material world.”

“Okay, I’m with you. Although I think if God ever decides to speak to me, he better speak up nice and loud. I’d hate to miss whatever he had to say but…” I turned and dug into my backpack for another piece of gum, held the packet out to Sharon, but she shook her head no. I chomped hard on the gum until it merged with the rest and I could blow a decent pink bubble that popped with a crack. “I mean, how would I ever hear him over this?” I asked, peeling the sagging bubble from my nose.

“Will you get serious for a moment?” Sharon said, placing her other hand on my other knee, nailing my attention in place.

“Okay, okay. I’m with you. So continue, my divinity incarnate. So what’s the problem?”

“Well, I feel the zing and all, but by no means do I feel detached. In fact, just the opposite. It’s like God has filled me full of warm honey, I feel it sliding and oozing all throughout my body. When I walk, each step feels like I’m touching an electric fence with my feet. It makes my whole body shake. The birds all look at me differently, like I’m one of them and they’ve been waiting and wondering where I’ve been. I want to hug all the trees, lick all the flowers, stick my nose in gym towels… I know it’s crazy but everything just feels so rich and”—she paused, struggling to find the words—“makes me ache all over.”

I looked at her, wondering if I was missing something. “So what’s so bad about that? Seems like maybe dry old Sister Abigail just missed the juicy parts.”

“I know, I thought about that… until the thought of her and juiciness started to make me gag.” We laughed again, bubbles rising from just below our ribs. “See the problem is, it’s making me want things that I never heard of God wanting. It’s firing me with a sweet hunger!”

“You mean like wanting a big old slice of hot apple pie, a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting and slipping and sliding off the side? Pretty sure Jesus never placed that order.”

Sharon closed her eyes and I could see her thinking, her mouth watering so hard that she had to swallow, licking her lips with the extra wetness.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, what then?” The bench was pressing hard into the bones under my butt. I unfolded my legs and let them drop to either side, straddling the rough board. Sharon’s hands remained on my knees as she leaned forward conspiratorially.

“It makes me feel carnal,” she whispered.

“You’re just horny, dipshit!” I said diagnostically. “Totally normal, according to People Magazine. We’re in our ‘hormonal phase’ so we’re supposed to be lusting after guys. It’s our duty!” I made it my business to stay educated—watching Oprah, reading Cosmo Girl and Sugar—and from all I could gather, we were supposed to be a cauldron of bubbling hormonal angst. Not that I was feeling much of that, but that’s what the experts said. Seeing that this information hadn’t calmed Sharon, I went straight to problem-solving mode, “So who do you think is cute? Kevin from Calculus?”

She shook her head. “I get all that you’re saying, honest I do, but something about this feels different, much more important than Kevin could ever be.” She paused and looked down at the narrow stretch of plank. Her thumbs pressed into the inside of my knees as she spoke across that bridge, “See, I feel all that… but I feel it toward you.”

I seemed to have stopped breathing. I could feel a shallow pulse at the point where my butt hit the bench. In the distance, a bell rang and I could hear our classmates spilling out of fourth period. Her palms burned into my thighs, the heat at that point of contact chilling the rest of me.

“Okay.” I swallowed, finding just enough air in my lungs to speak.

“Okay?” she repeated back, questioning.

“Okay,” I repeated, trying to pull myself back into my head, back into the place where Oprah and People and Sister Abigail made everything make sense. “Okay, we can figure this out. I don’t think you need to worry. I think you’re just a little confused is all. You don’t need to get all bent out of shape. I don’t even think it’s even God or anything ‘touching’ you. I think what we have here is a case of ‘hormonal verum obvius nefas locus!” I said, proud of myself as much for my cleverness with Latin as for having navigated us back to the safe shores of generalized adolescent angst.

“Okay, eh?” she repeated, with a dare in her voice. Looking me directly in the eye, she slid her hands up along my thighs, her palms tracing each rise of crisscrossing muscle over bone as her thumbs traced an ever more dangerous course along the soft inner edge. A jolt of energy vibrated through my body when her wrists hit the edge of my jumper, gathering it like a wave, pushing it toward the surf line at my hips. “I can hear God whispering—I can, with all my soul—and he’s telling me to do this.”

She leaned forward even farther, lifting her hips slightly off the bench, the weight of her body pressing deep into the crease where my hips split thigh to pelvis, and pressed her lips directly onto mine. I tried to lean back but her hands were leveraging my spine, holding me upright. At first, her lips were hard, the tautness of muscles just beneath the flesh, insistent on my own. But then something softened, a fullness came to both our mouths and I relaxed into the gentle press. Like church bells, something called me, compelled me in, and I felt our lips part and the sanctuary of her mouth, my mouth, our tongues, come alive. Her thumbs slid deeper, pressing into the surprising wetness of the cotton fabric in my crotch and I felt myself arch forward to meet her. My tongue slipped into the bejeweled cavern of her mouth, teased with the dangerous sharp edges of her teeth, slipped gently across the pinkness of her gums. She took my lower lip between hers and pulled, swallowing me into her mouth, making me wish she could inhale all of me. She held my lip between her teeth for just a moment—danger and delight—and then released. I pulled back and gasped for a breath, staring at her wide-eyed. In my ears, a ringing silence. For a moment there was nothing but this: a feeling, a thing, a whole world that had sprung into being only seconds before yet had existed for all eternity.

“See?” she said, “You can feel it too! I think this is what God really is.” Her moist eyes penetrated mine, offering an enormity that unhinged me. A bell rang marking the start of fifth period. A car alarm bleated anxiously from the parking lot. I teetered on the edge between worlds then tipped involuntarily. Even as the heat of her hands worked at my hips, I could feel a cold rod move up through my butt toward my head, filling the space she had just revealed in me. It pushed me upright, as Sister Abigail said it would, and forced Sharon’s hands away. Pressing my skirt back along my legs, pressing the rough fabric back into my skin, I swung my legs across the bench and pressed them together to face the proper direction out toward the field.

Sharon stayed straddling the bench. She reached one hand toward my back, sensing the coldness that had filled me, but I shook it off. For a moment all was quiet as I rehearsed carefully in my head. The words that finally formed had such certainty that I knew they must be true. “This is not God working through you, this is confusion, the Devil, temptation… but this is certainly not God. We must be strong.” I spoke all this toward the field, as if giving a sermon. I could imagine Sister Abigail nodding her affirmation from below. I knew Sharon would be devastated and ashamed; she’d need my compassion. I was holding God’s will and he would guide us through this. I turned to face her finally, prepared to be strong enough for the both of us, even as I expected her to be in tears.

She was not.

She shook her head as she stared at me, those same brilliant eyes fiery and not the least bit ashamed.

“You’re wrong! This is God… in all his glory!” she shouted, tossing her arms and gaze skyward in imitation of a holy-roller preacher. “And you felt it too! You felt the sound of the bleachers cheering vibrating up through your ass. You felt the heat from a thousand suns flow through my thumbs into your crotch. You felt the sky unfold on my tongue, the earth compost us through the press of our lips. You felt the world screaming with delight as we touched… and it scared the shit out of you!”

“Did not!” I said defensively and looked away. “Sure, it felt nice but it’s not real, Sharon. It’s not how it’s supposed to be.” She was quiet so all I could hear was the sound of my own breath, air flowing into the top of my lungs and then quickly back out again. I felt safe in this tiny container.

“Don’t do this,” she said, gently placing her hand on my back once again. This time I didn’t shake it off. “You know, there are moments when we make choices that matter. Like when the football players are down there,” she said pointing to the empty field. “Run or pass? Cut upfield here or over there? Dodge that tackle or run right through it? They never know for sure but they’ve got to choose, or the game chooses for them. You’ve got to trust your instincts too, or you’ll never know what could have been.” She pulled her hand away but I could still feel the heat of it searing through to my heart.

“You know now, you’ve felt it, but you’ve got to choose for yourself.”

Sharon stood and shook herself nose to tail. She ran her hands down along her sides and across her butt, smoothing her jumper. Reaching down, she pulled up her kneesocks, smoothing them into place with a slow touch that made my belly ache hollow.

“This feeling, this is God, and nothing you or Sister Abigail or anyone else can say will make me feel any different.” She grabbed her book bag and hopped down the bleachers then trotted back toward school.

Despite the heat of the fall day, everything seemed to wither and turn cold before my eyes. The green of the grass dulled and a thin haze washed the blue from the sky. The wood of the bench turned silvery and a splinter tore at the back of my leg. I sat steely, straight and still, watching her depart, yet inside I could feel some crazy longing still cupping the tiny ember she had ignited in my belly, protecting it until a day I too would catch fire.