Best Lesbian Erotica 2013

AFTERMATH Valerie Alexander

It had been over a year since Kai left me, when I drove over to her new house. My visit wasn’t intentional. She’d ordered takeout from the Thai café where I worked, but I didn’t realize the address on the delivery slip was hers at first. The thick August heat had fogged my glasses, and when I took them off and squinted at the slip, the name GRUNDER at the top jumped out at me.

I started to shake.

Visions of everything she could possibly say to me filled my head. Apologies, explanations. I knew she was still living with the woman she’d left me for, Venetia Dale, because every dyke in town would have told me if they’d split up. I tried to imagine her opening the door and saying, “Come on in,” Venetia waving from the kitchen like Hey, it’s been a year, let’s let bygones be bygones. Once I would have said Kai was too sensitive to do that, but that was before the night she told me it was over, and asked me seven minutes later to cry in the bathroom because I was upsetting Slater, her dog.

I turned the corner. I could have gone back to the café and made someone else deliver it, and I probably should have, but instead I pulled up to her new house. It was a big gray Victorian, shaded by towering elms. There seemed to be a large fenced-in yard, which complicated the mystery of why she had left Slater behind with me. I pulled up to the curb, adjusted my sunglasses and got out, bag in hand. There was a taste like cardboard in my mouth as I walked up the porch steps and knocked.

Venetia opened the door.

I had disliked Venetia Dale for years, before Kai even met her. Everyone in town knew of her; she was a performance artist and she performed everywhere she went, from long, melodramatic stories at the salon to holding court at cocktail parties to theatrical speeches at the gallery where she worked. She was a walking spectacle of artifice, from her white-blonde hair to her made-up name to her fluttery, actressy gestures. Practical Kai falling in love with her was an insane idea, I would have said once, but that was what happened and it upended everything I knew.

Venetia leaned against the door in a black polyester slip. Her platinum hair was in disarray around her shoulders and her mascara had flaked under her eyes. Her bare lips looked oddly flat and pale without their signature dark-red, creamy lipstick.

She looked like sluttiness crossed with heartbreak. It was the first time I’d ever seen what everyone found so beautiful in her.

“Hello.” I held out the bag like I delivered food to her all the time. “That’ll be fifteen eighty-three.”

“Come in.” Venetia swept out her hand like a conquered sovereign conceding defeat.

I’d never wanted to see their house. I didn’t want to know where Kai ate breakfast or what new dog she had adopted when Slater had watched out the window for weeks after she left. The shades were pulled, but I could see the house looked like an empty Pottery Barn set, exposed wood beams over cream walls and hardwood floors. I tried to picture Kai living here, her surfer girl muscles sprawled on the sofa and her ruffled leonine hair on the throw pillow, and couldn’t.

A scratchy old Van Morrison album was playing. I remembered it well. Kai had an immense LP collection. “Nice house,” I said.

Venetia’s thin shoulders moved in a shrug as she moved the turntable needle to a different song. She slumped on the sofa. “You won,” she said, and picked up a green glass. She swirled the liquid around before drinking.

“I what?”

“Come on, Becca. You were dying for Kai to leave me.”

They were over. Now I knew why I was so calm in this house: Kai’s absence. “I didn’t even know,” I said. “Not everything revolves around you, Venetia.”

She gave me an I deserve that nod. Narcissists always know how to feign humility.

“So,” I said. “That’s fifteen eighty-three.”

She looked up at me with tragic eyes. “Don’t leave. Please? You’re the only one who knows her like I did.”

I started to bristle, but got control of myself. “I can’t help you.”

She finished her drink. “It’s been two weeks. She didn’t even take her records with her.” She started to cry.

I was surprised at how little I cared about this. They had broken up, so what. Kai was still gone. It was only amazing that it had taken me this long to find out.

But I sat down on the other sofa and listened to the Van Morrison song fill the almost empty room. I could see into the kitchen from here, another magazine room of exposed brick and copper pans, and I tried to picture Kai having her daily breakfast burrito with Diet Coke in there. I couldn’t. There wasn’t even a ghost of her in this house. She was so gone.

“I went to a party last night—I have to leave the house at night or I go crazy—but all I want is her back. You’re the only person I can think of to talk to. And now…” She gave me a crafty look. “Here you are.”

I couldn’t help it: I smiled. I thought of everything I had lived through this last year and what now awaited her.

“Amazing that this happened,” I said. “Who would have thought Kai would be the type to just walk out on someone.”

She wiped her nose. “I know you think I’m an asshole—”

“I’ve thought that for a long time.”

“But I am not a home-wrecker—”

“You are totally the type who loves to think of herself as a home-wrecker. Femme fatale, Venetia Dale.”

“You don’t even know me, Becca.”

“Just stop. Even right now, you’re making it about you. You don’t know how not to be the center of attention. Who cares what I think of you?”

But I was talking too much and showing that I did care about this situation. I got up and walked into the dining room and looked out the varnished oak French doors. The backyard was slightly overgrown, a deathly afternoon stillness hanging over the grass. A half-grown black Lab puppy was watching the doors with his chin on his paws, and he got up, tail wagging, when he saw me. A woman with short hair, finally come back to him.

I walked back into the living room. She swallowed and made a visible effort to be composed.

“You’re not what I expected,” she said. “I thought you’d be more femme.”

I ignored the implication that she hadn’t known what I looked like. She had known where to order her lunch from, after all. Instead I pushed the bag of takeout at her and said, “I’m sorry you’re so upset. You should eat something. But I have to get back to work, Venetia.”

“You could come back later,” she persisted. “And talk to me.”

“Except I don’t want to.”

Her eyes narrowed in speculation. I had just lied and she knew it. I felt oddly riveted to this house that was a mirror world to my own, one year ago. Some pang of nostalgia recognized the fresh grief and bewilderment hanging in the rooms. This was my house when I was only weeks past coming naked in Kai’s arms. When her socks were still in the bureau, her conditioner in the shower, signs that she hadn’t really left for good. Nights when I refused to change the sheets so I could still smell her in them, humping the bed facedown as I fingered myself and buried my face in her pillow.

I looked at Venetia in her black slip and smeared mascara. She was foreign to my world. Yet she was also Kai’s most recent sexual landscape, the last recipient of her mouth and body. It was Venetia’s sheets that smelled like Kai now. I wondered if Kai liked to come on Venetia’s tits the way she liked to come on mine.

Venetia got up and moved the needle again to the start of the album. “Tell me what’s going to happen,” she said. “You obviously know her better than I do.”

“If she left her records behind, I don’t know her at all anymore.”

I walked into the kitchen, despite a vague awareness that it was rude to wander the house like it was my own. And there it was under a surfboard magnet on the fridge: a picture of them toasting the camera with shot glasses, Kai sunburned and grinning. It was true. Their relationship had really happened. I looked at another picture, more formal, of Venetia in a vintage dress and pouting at the camera like an Old Hollywood star. Unbidden images of their first date flooded my mind. How it must have felt for Kai to fuck a woman so different from me, so skinny and feminine and artificial and demanding. Prom queens and actresses had never been my taste or hers and I wondered exactly what she found down that rabbit hole that was so enticing it lured her away from her entire life.

I walked back into the living room. “Sorry,” I said. “I do have to get back to work. Eat something, you’ll feel better.”

Venetia leaned back against the sofa cushions, swirled her drink around and finished it. Then she glanced up at me, calculating.

I knew I had to leave right then and failed. Instead we looked at each other for a long moment. Then she straightened and pulled her slip over her head, throwing it on the hardwood floor. She leaned back again and opened her legs.

A fierce and carnal curiosity roared through me. How revolting: I was attracted to Venetia Dale. I couldn’t stand her and yet it was like a piece of Kai watching me from the sofa. Venetia was my amalgamation of loss and sex and answers made flesh.

My heart gave an odd thump. “Okay.”

She didn’t take her eyes from me as I moved toward the sofa. I looked at everything that had been Kai’s: long legs, small pointy breasts, a bit of slack to her stomach. Venetia had such a long, hipless body, not at all like mine. Her skin was so pale against the dark blue sofa that she didn’t look real. She didn’t look like anyone I had ever slept with.

I unzipped my shorts and took off my tank top with the desultory detachment of changing at the gym. But my heart was pounding. Venetia avidly examined my every detail for what I knew were the same reasons I’d stared at her. Leaning forward, she ran her fingers down my leg, squeezing my knee slightly. She took my hips in her hands and looked up at me. “I can picture you two together,” she said.

“We were together for almost five years,” I said. My clit was so hard it hurt. I took her chin in my fingers. “No performance.”

She gave me a clever look one moment before her tongue lashed over my clit. Her small hands fluttered between my upper thighs in a spread gesture, then got to work, lifting up the hood of my clit and parting my pussy lips. She was opening me up and consuming me like I was a piece of cake long coveted, efficient and hungry. My fingers curled in that white-blonde hair as her agile tongue worked me over. Three fingers were moving inside me, then four; then her entire hand was inside my cunt, filling me up with shockingly dominant pressure. This was the same head Kai had gotten for the last year, Venetia’s small hand in her pussy and her tongue on her clit. I was the interloper in a ghostly threeway they probably never intended to have. But Venetia’s dark-blue eyes met mine and I knew that Kai was the ghost here.

Something long frozen in me was thawing and breaking up, relief and warmth flooding my body. I pushed Venetia back against the sofa and knelt over her, brazenly humping her face. I’d fucked four women since Kai left me but this was the first time it felt real, an acute awareness of her small breasts and soft hot mouth filling my senses. We weren’t going to be done here until I’d mapped and devoured every inch of her, fucked her every way possible. Raw lust suffused my nerves, a tumult of grief and sex building into an insistent tension, and as Venetia sucked my clit, I came in six brutal waves that I rode out shamelessly on her mouth.

I leaned over the couch, breathing hard. My body felt so incredibly light and hot, as if I had restructured the laws of time and space.

Venetia caressed my damp hair. “I knew you wouldn’t play games.”

I was exhausted and exhilarated. I pushed Venetia on her back. She spread her long legs wider than I’d ever seen any woman spread, offering up her pussy as if it was the holy grail that had lured Kai away from me. I pulled at her longish pink lips and rubbed her tiny clit, thinking of all the other women we’d slept with before Kai and all the women waiting in our future. Nothing meant anything but what was happening right now.

I slid three fingers inside her. Her cunt closed around me, tight and quivering. She groaned but I took my time, absorbing her warmth and her smell. I stroked her clit and her front inner wall in tandem, slowly, making her kick the cushions in frustration. Then without giving her time to adjust, I fucked her hard and rapid until she was bucking and panting beneath me. Venetia gripped the sofa cushions, groaning out unintelligible sounds and writhing until her small tits bounced in time with my hand. I’d always assumed she would fuck like a pillow princess but she was exploding under me, all wetness and heat.

I withdrew and slapped her thigh. “Get on all fours.”

She obeyed, unexpectedly elegant as she looked at me over her shoulder with those mascara-smeared eyes. I ran my hands up her lean thighs and then took command of her pussy and ass, fucking both in a seesaw rhythm. She dropped her head and howled. How I wished that I was packing, but then again, watching her cunt close around my fingers was spellbinding. Liberation flooded my mind and it mixed with the smells and cries filling my senses until I felt electric with power. Venetia rocked her skinny hips back to engulf my hands and then she groaned as her pussy squeezed around me, a rhythmic release that ended when she collapsed onto the sofa in a cloudburst of tears.

I stroked her back. The album had played out to the end, the needle repeating its rhythmic coda: bump and scratch, bump and scratch. Venetia crawled into my lap and hooked her arms around my neck and we began again.