Eve drives as if the devil is after her, chasing her along the interstate. Off to Colorado. The sun slants low, bruising the dry landscape with a golden glow. The color reminds her of Murphy, their Labrador, who no doubt is sprawled on the couch, his head in Teri’s lap.
Eve’s heart skitters like a rabbit, making her lightheaded. She sweats a film of nerves even though the air-conditioning is on high.
She’s going to lose her virginity. That’s what it feels like, even though she technically lost that nearly twenty years ago, the day Teri cornered her in the storeroom of the bakery where they both worked on Saturdays, kissing her sweetly and stickily, touching her in places that took you straight to hell. On that day, age seventeen, going to hell seemed a long way off.
Hell seems closer now. She’s driving to Denver to commit adultery. She’s going to kiss another woman, touch her, lie with her and find out how she tastes.
“I could come too, honey,” Teri had said, as Eve flung jeans and shirts into a sports bag with pretend haphazardness— clothes she’d carefully picked out the week before.
Eve had given her a quick kiss and put as much sincerity as she could manage in her voice. “I wish you could. But it’ll be dull. Talking food.”
“Imagine if you get the contract!” Teri’s enthusiasm was genuine, and Eve felt a stab of remorse. There is no contract. There is no company in Denver wanting to distribute her line of preserves. There’s only a woman she met on the Internet and the allure of the forbidden sucking her in with silver tentacles.
Eve imagines she’s dying, imagines she’s facing her maker. It will be a dusty plain, where the land is as unforgiving as the god who made it. She imagines he can prize open the crannies of her mind so the cold plains wind blows her secrets out to paint the landscape. He’d say to her then, at the moment of her death, “Why did you not do it? Why did you not taste another woman? You wanted it so much.”
Eve knows the god will shake his shaggy head, and pity her for her denial, even as he elevates her to heaven.
But after tomorrow, she’ll go straight to hell.
She negotiates the Denver rush hour, weaving across the lanes of I-25 to take the downtown exit to find her hotel.
“They must think a lot of you,” Teri had said, impressed, when Eve told her where she was staying.
“They probably put everyone up there.” The lie rolled easily. It scared her a little, how good she is at the lies.
She wanders through her room examining the toiletries, the minibar, the wide-screen TV. Teri would like this, she thinks, but suppresses the thought. Teri is outside these two days of her life, which are moments out of time, an alternate reality. Afterward, she will return to Wyoming and live happily ever after with Teri.
They are happy, that’s the thing Eve finds strangest in all of this. She doesn’t want to change her life; she just wants a yardstick to measure it by.
She’s too wound up to settle. She takes a swift shower and dresses in worn jeans and a white T-shirt. There’s two hours before she’s due to meet LeeAnn—time enough for a beer.
She finds a bar, sits by the window, and watches the people parade past: cowboy boots, bright shirts, and the smart black suits of office workers. Denver is an uneasy city, she thinks, not quite cow town, not quite metropolitan. She turns to share that observation with Teri, and she’s three words into the sentence before she remembers Teri isn’t there.
The dark woman who sits where Teri should be lifts an amused eyebrow when Eve apologizes. “Don’t worry, honey, I do that all the time. Is your partner joining you shortly?”
There’s a not-quite invitation in the gender-neutral words and Eve is surprised. She knows every lesbian by name in the small town where she and Teri live. All eight of them. She’s forgotten it’s different in cities.
“No,” she says. “I’m here alone. On…business.”
The woman smiles. “Welcome to Denver. May I buy you a drink?”
There’s a subtle flirtation in the other woman’s voice, in the closeness of her hand to Eve’s on the counter. Laughter bubbles inside her. She’s here to meet another woman, and in minutes a stranger is chatting her up. A very attractive stranger, she amends to herself. “What about your partner?” she asks.
The woman inclines her head. “I should have said I used to do that all the time. My partner died two years ago. But sometimes I still turn to where she’d be to share something with her.”
“I’m sorry.” The words are inadequate, but what else is she supposed to say? “I’d love a drink. Pale ale, please.”
The woman signals the server, and then holds out her hand to Eve. “I’m Justine.”
Eve introduces herself, and takes Justine’s hand, holding it for three heartbeats too long. She’s practicing flirtation, because it’s been so long since she tried the moves—the tilt of the head, the slow smile. It’s different on the Internet, where she has the veil of anonymity and can be someone she’s not. Until later this evening when she is to meet LeeAnn, the not-quite-stranger. LeeAnn is blonde and statuesque, with a figure like a model in a men’s magazine, and she wants to eat Eve’s pussy, to munch it. She’s typed the words in private chats, words that have Eve snaking her hand into her pants to bring herself off with short, quick rubs, fearful of Teri catching her.
Eve tries the head tilt and the smile on Justine to see if it works, and is rewarded with a flicker of Justine’s eyes down to where her breasts barely swell the white T-shirt. The pale ale arrives and Justine’s gaze breaks when the barman sets it down.
Justine smiles, slow and knowing. “Here’s to new friends.” She clinks her wineglass against Eve’s beer and drinks as her gaze seeks out Eve again. “So tell me, Eve who is not from Denver, what is your business?”
For a second Eve thinks she’s been caught, that Justine knows there is only dirty business. Her smile freezes as she realizes Justine’s noticed the hesitation.
“You said you were here on business,” Justine clarifies. “I’m asking what it is you do.” Her direct stare seems to pick Eve’s true intentions out of her brain. “Are you an accountant? Maybe a vacuum salesperson.” Her smile makes it obvious she knows Eve is neither of those.
Eve hesitates. Hide the truth, she thinks, evade, tell lies if you have to. “I sell handicrafts,” she says, in an approximation of the truth.
“That you make?” asks Justine. “You and your partner at home, maybe?”
“Something like that.” Eve’s short in her reply; the paranoia about what she is really doing in Denver puts rudeness in her voice.
“It’s okay, honey,” says Justine. “You can keep your little secrets.” Her smile is feline, and she places a hand on Eve’s leg. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re really doing in Denver, but I thought you might be open to some…company.” Her fingernail drags small circles on Eve’s thigh.
Eve sees knowing in Justine’s dark eyes. As if Justine has been in Eve’s position, sitting, jittery and on edge, about to do something that puts everything that is precious on the line. The urge to confess rises in her throat. Justine is not her god on a dusty plain, but Eve wants some sort of judgment. Maybe Justine is a smooth swinging city woman, who will laugh at the insignificance of what Eve plans. Maybe she and her partner had an open relationship, sucked and fucked with strangers. Or maybe she’s a church lady, bound to her partner until death did them part, and she’ll demand they drop to their knees to pray.
“Actually…” The neutral look on Justine’s face encourages her. “Teri and I have been together all our lives. But I’m here to meet a woman I know from the Internet.” She steals a glance at Justine. Her expression—open, encouraging—makes her forge on. “I’ve never slept with another woman in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I love Teri, but I want to know what it’s like with someone else.”
“You could have gone to a sex worker.”
“True, but that’s not for me. I need a connection with someone. I met LeeAnn in a lesbian chat room. Physically, she’s everything my partner is not. She’s tall, blonde, immaculately presented. She knows it’s just for one night, she’s okay with that.”
“And then you’ll go home and carry on as normal?”
“Yeah. That will be the end of it.”
“Will it? What if it’s just the start?”
“No.” There’s conviction in Eve’s voice. “I won’t let it be. I love Teri. She’s my soul mate. This is a onetime deal.”
“What about guilt? Will you be able to look Teri in the eye?”
“I don’t know,” Eve admits, “but I still have to do this.” She looks down at her hands, wound tightly together in her lap. Justine’s fingers still rest on her thigh. Eve could stretch her own fingers and brush them across Justine’s, but she doesn’t. Things are complicated enough. “LeeAnn wants to do things to me that Teri won’t. She wants to use…toys. And she wants to munch my pussy. Teri loves going down on me, but that word, ‘munch,’ it conveys such enthusiasm.”
Justine is silent for a moment, then she says, “When are you meeting LeeAnn?”
Eve checks the time. “In about twenty-five minutes. I should go. I have to get back to the hotel.”
Justine stands. “I’m coming with you.”
Startled, Eve stands as well. “There’s no need for that.”
Justine’s dark eyes are inscrutable. “I think there is. You need someone at your back. Don’t worry, I won’t interfere, but not everyone is as they appear on the Internet. You meet LeeAnn in the bar. I’ll be sitting across the room. If you like what you see, I’ll leave after thirty minutes. If you don’t, then you can make an excuse and come and join me.”
Eve hesitates, but Justine’s words make sense. But she’s only known Justine for less than an hour—she’s known LeeAnn for months. It will be okay. “Come on then.”
They don’t speak as they walk to her hotel. Eve gets a drink at the bar—red wine, not pale ale—she wants to look sophisticated, and besides, too much beer and she’ll be peeing all night. She looks around. LeeAnn isn’t here yet; there’s a couple in one corner, two businessmen deep in conversation at the bar, and a man reading The Denver Post alone at a table. No LeeAnn. Eve settles into a chair where she has a clear view of anyone who enters the bar. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Justine doing something on her phone at the bar.
The minutes tick on. The businessmen leave, the couple order food, Justine is watching the Rockies game on TV. The man is watching her over the top of his paper, she realizes. She looks away to discourage his gaze. Her glass is empty, and it’s twentyminutes past the time when she was to meet LeeAnn. Eve orders another glass of wine. As the server sets it down, the man folds the paper and leaves it on his chair. He rises, and walks across to her, stopping in front of her chair, uncomfortably close.
Eve looks up, and lets her glance flick away dismissively.
“Eve?” the man says. “I’m LeeAnn.”
She remembers little of the next few minutes. There was a blur of raised voices, of red wine roiling in her stomach, and anger lighting her blood. There was the slap, startling and sudden, his red cheek, her shaking legs. Then there was Justine, her hand underneath Eve’s elbow, urging her to leave, asking for her room number.
When her mind clears, she’s sitting on the edge of the big king bed for which she had such hopes. Justine emerges from the bathroom, presses a damp washcloth into her hands.
When Eve can speak without her voice shaking, she says, “I guess it serves me right.” She looks at Justine. “Did you know? Or guess?”
“A bit of both. When you said ‘munch’ it sounded familiar. It’s an unusual description. Then I remembered something online about a man who posed as a lesbian to pick up lesbians. He used that term.”
“What’s the point of that?”
Justine shrugs. “Power? The age-old idea that a lesbian is just a woman who hasn’t met the right man?”
“I feel so fucking stupid.” Eve’s voice is small, weak. She can’t think of the past weeks without shame—mainly that she was so stupid, falling for the oldest Internet trick in the world. The buzz of arousal that shaded her actions for the past weeks has withered and died.
Justine sits next to her and takes Eve’s hands in both of hers. “Don’t beat yourself up, honey. It happens. You’re not the first, you won’t be the last.”
“Maybe, but it’s the last for me. No more chat rooms, no more cybersex…” She shudders, caught in the falseness of it all. “That man, getting off on… I’m going home tomorrow. I’m obviously not cut out for adultery.” The god on the plain will send her to hell, for her intent was there, even if there was no action. And Teri…the guilt will come. She will go home and give Teri all the love in her heart, too wracked with the guilt of her betrayal to consider straying.
She just wishes she had experienced something to make that guilt worthwhile.
Justine shifts, and takes Eve’s hands in her own, leans in and kisses her. Her lips rest on Eve’s, a breath of hesitation. Eve feels the curve of Justine’s lips as she smiles. Justine stays still, their mouths touching, their hands entwined. There’s an offer in the kiss, an offer to salvage something of the evening. With a thrill, Eve realizes she’s considering it—more than considering it. She wants it, wants Justine with an urgency. It’s not just the situation, or the timing, or even the knowledge that it’s now or never; Eve feels free again, and the thrill beats an urgent tattoo in her belly.
She deepens the kiss, parting lips, seeking with her tongue. This is the only woman she’s kissed since Teri, only the second woman she’s kissed in her life. There’s heat and the taste of red wine, but it’s how Justine kisses that sets her alight. She kisses deep, and the taste and feel of the body under her hands take her breath.
Justine breaks the kiss and arches an eyebrow in question. Eve doesn’t stop to consider; indeed the decision to sleep with another woman was made weeks ago. It’s only the focus that has changed. She stands and sheds her clothes with the economical movements she uses at home. There’s no seduction in undressing with Teri, it’s merely something she does before bed. When she unhooks her bra, she pauses. She’s been naked with other women, of course—in the gym, at the doctor’s office for the impersonality of medical exams, and once in a giggly drunken riot of skinny-dipping women after an evening out—but this is the first time in years she’s undressed in front of someone in a sexual way. She feels she should slow it down, add some allure to the process.
Justine rises and stops her hands. Her lips trace a line down Eve’s collarbone, down to where the bra cuts a satin line across her flesh. Justine’s lips close over Eve’s nipple through the bra, the damp suction shooting arrows down her belly. Her bra falls away—when had Justine unhooked it?—and then Justine’s mouth is on Eve’s naked flesh, teasing her nipples into hard points.
Eve focuses on the moment, on the way Justine’s mouth is making her feel, on the dampness of her panties against her cunt, on the throb and pulse of her clit. Justine is still dressed, but when Eve moves her hands to the buttons of Justine’s shirt, the dark woman shrugs her aside, drops to her knees and presses her mouth to the crotch of Eve’s panties. Eve lightly trimmed her bush for this evening—it’s not something she usually does, but, aware of current trends, she didn’t want her luxuriant curls to be a turn-off. She must smell musky down there, even through the satin of her panties, but Justine presses her face closer, pulls the gusset to one side, and traces the outline of her pussy with her tongue.
There’s a bucking bronco of sensations riding in Eve’s stomach. A stranger’s touch. Teri knows what she likes, but Justine is learning as she goes. She’s not tentative in her movements, but it’s the wrong sort of friction for Eve. She likes it on the side of her clit, she needs a steady pressure, she has to have rhythm, not this touch, withdraw, touch, withdraw that Justine’s doing. But then Justine tickles a circle with her tongue, and Teri flies out of Eve’s head, and what she likes is being redrawn with each movement of Justine’s tongue.
There’s white noise in her head, and when she closes her eyes there’s a whole universe behind them. This is what she wanted. Her stomach clenches and she thinks she’s going to come, and suddenly she’s scared at how instantly she’s aroused, how urgent the pressure and how she’s going to peak in only a few minutes, when it normally takes longer. She opens her eyes, and her knees shake. The sight of Justine’s dark body on the floor in front of her, face between her legs, is overwhelming, and she sits abruptly on the edge of the bed and removes her panties with trembling hands.
Justine rises, sheds her clothes, and crawls up alongside her. “Touch me,” she commands.
Eve’s fingers want to fall into familiar patterns, but she halts them with conscious effort. Instead, she bends and takes Justine’s nipple deep into her mouth, swirling and sucking. She bites lightly. Justine’s answering arch of her back, pushing her breast deeper into Eve’s mouth, is her reward.
She concentrates on the newness, the sensations, the differences. Justine’s skin is springy over hard muscle. There’s resilience to her body, a lack of fragility in her limbs, a robustness that seems to come from within. Eve’s used to leading, but as she’s learning the contours of Justine’s body—biceps, dimples, curves, planes and the places in between, like highways to be traversed between attractions, Justine takes her hand and shoves it between her thighs, as if she’s impatient to get to the climax.
Eve’s fingers still. This is the part that will take her to hell, this is where there is no coy evasion about motives, or intent. This is where the evening has been going, and this is the moment where there is really no going back. She can feel the heat and slickness and this is what she has wanted, what she’s risking everything for. She explores, mapping the contours of a different pussy, learning the shape of puffy outer lips, of slick inner folds, learning that one woman is as different from another as night and day. When her finger pushes inside, as she adds a second, she falls into the pattern of strokes that Teri likes.
Justine raises a thigh so that Eve has better access. Eve looks at her hand, how it rests against a different pussy, the dark crinkly hair that is so harsh against her hand. The allure of the forbidden steals her breath momentarily. She pistons her fingers, watching Justine’s face, the tiny movements that signal her delight. This level of concentration on the act is strange for Eve; something that normally is a welter of learned moves is now tentative.
Justine holds Eve’s wrist and directs her movements, with nudges, and encouragement in her voice. “There, honey, a little faster, a little harder, oh, honey, now you’ve got it.” There’s an authoritarian tone to her voice, like a schoolteacher explaining something for the first time, but Eve ignores it. When it’s her turn, she resolves, she will be just as direct.
Justine’s orgasm is an explosion of sound, a flurry of movement, as her voice keens in pleasure and her hips shudder and jolt. Her pussy clamps hard on Eve’s fingers, and in delight, Eve feels the internal shivers and spasms.
This is what it feels like, she thinks, these are the sounds, the smell, the taste, the joy of sex with someone else.
Justine rises onto her elbows. “You’re a fast learner, honey. Your Teri is a lucky woman.”
At the mention of Teri’s name some of the pleasure seeps from Eve’s head. But she pushes the thought away, as she needs to taste, and her own clit is throbbing an insistent rhythm for release. She bends, puts her mouth to Justine’s cunt and tastes. She’s not trying to make her come again, this is for her, to know the sensation of another pussy on her tongue. Justine is spicy-sweet, and her juices are thicker than Eve is used to. She pushes her tongue inside the other woman’s cunt, eager to experience.
Justine lets her for a few moments—maybe she remembers their conversation of earlier—before she pushes her away, and in a quick reversal, Eve is on her back on the bed, Justine kneeling over her.
“How d’you want it, honey? I have long fingers and an agile tongue.”
The buzz of expectation is back. “Both,” says Eve, in a voice dry with need, “fuck me with your fingers, suck me with your mouth.”
Justine pushes her thighs so wide apart Eve feels she might split. She is open, exposed, and the way Justine studies her is unnerving. But then Justine kisses each nipple, and her mouth works downward, over Eve’s belly, down to where the curls start. Eve is wet, and her breath comes in thick pants of anticipation. Justine’s fingers outline Eve’s cunt lips, and then with one push she slips two fingers deep inside. Her lips descend, and she sucks Eve’s clit with her whole mouth. It’s different from before, different from anything Teri does, it’s rough and it’s raw, and it overwhelms Eve. The evening coalesces in her head, a blur of euphoria, anger, disappointment and lust. It’s like a patchwork of weeks shoved together into the space of a few hours. So when her orgasm rises as fast as a hurricane and just as fierce, she goes with it, riding the tide, letting it buffet her, letting it wash the guilt and worry from her head and replace them with the immediateness and physicality of the moment.
Now I know, she thinks, in the aftermath of the storm, as Justine wipes her mouth, and presses a kiss to her belly. This is what another woman is like.
After Justine has left, Eve lies on the bed that smells of sex, with her hands behind her head, and although she’s watching the ball game on TV, she’s thinking of home.
Teri and Murphy come barreling out of the shabby ranch house before the car has come to a halt. The weak sun paints Teri’s eager face with warmth and Eve looks at her as if for the first time, sees her tip-tilted eyes, the curve of her cheek with the downy hairs Teri hates catching the sunlight. She is beautiful.
“How did it go? Did you get the contract?” Teri runs to the car, Murphy on her heels, and pulls the door open.
Eve blinks at her, stupidly. Contract? Her brain connects once more and she remembers the lies she spun as the reason for the trip to Denver. She has to swallow hard, once, twice, before she can trust her voice. “I don’t think so. I think they thought we were a bigger operation.”
The words she rehearsed as she drove up I-25 have evaporated into the mist in her brain and all she can think of is how much she loves Teri. She thinks of their bed, and how they lie there together, Murphy on their feet taking up too much room, and she longs for the taste of Teri’s mouth, the delicate shiver of her pale skin, the hot clasp of her pussy.
She thinks of all she found so mundane, before Denver, and now it seems so fragile and wondrous, something to be treasured. Eve exits the car, and holds out her arms. Teri walks into them, and Eve realizes that it will be all right, that Teri doesn’t—can’t—know.
She kisses Teri, pushes her hands into her short hair, holds her close, and rocks her. “I missed you so much,” she murmurs and the words are the truest thing she’s ever said.
“Told you I should have come too.” Teri settles her face against Eve’s shoulder, and sighs. “Murph and I really missed you.”
Eve holds her lover and thinks about all that she could lose if Teri were ever to find out. For she will hold the secret now, afraid of slipping, afraid of what its revelation could bring. Already it sits in her stomach, in the back of her throat, a hard ball of words threatening to break free.
Eve pushes the words away and holds Teri close, settling into her lover, all that they have been together, and all that they can be.