THE LAST TIME

Annabeth Leong

I should tell her this is the last time. I’ve never done that, but I could.

Every time she texts me, Thea says we won’t see each other again after this one final fuck, but then she also claims, to anyone who asks, that she’s straight. She has her reasons, but that doesn’t make this any easier.

I can’t trust myself either. Her text comes through after ten, but my phone is turned up loud and the ping gets me out of bed. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t waiting for it. Even while I think about how I’m not going to put up with this forever, I’m finding her favorite skirt and buttoning it on, stuffing my bag with lube and toys she likes, crumpling up my pride and shoving it into a corner of my mind well hidden by my lust and our history.

I can’t follow the speed limit on the way to her place.

Thea used to be my actual girlfriend. In college, she sported a buzz cut to die for, rocked flannel shirts and steel-toed boots and took me to see Tegan and Sara for our first anniversary.

Outside Lupo’s, downtown, after the show ended, we waited in an alley by the tour bus in the cold, hoping for a glimpse of the musicians. There was a whole crowd of us there, sweat from the press of people inside drying and freezing in our hair as we stood on our toes to see over each other and crammed our bodies into awkward spaces.

Thea helped me climb onto a narrow concrete wall that divided the alley from the parking lot beside it. From there, we had a great view of the tour bus and the side door of Lupo’s, but the footing was precarious. She hooked an elbow around a lamppost for balance and held me around the waist with her other arm.

Our increased height exposed us to the cutting wind. I pressed closer to her, shivering in my short skirt and leggings, greedy for the warmth of her body. She folded one side of her oversized motorcycle jacket over my right shoulder and tightened her grip on me. I settled into the animal scent of leather, and of Thea.

There is a way that being in a crowd can make you feel private—almost secluded, though in fact you are the opposite. I drifted into that place as the minutes stretched into half an hour and beyond and my lower legs began to numb from holding the same position.

That trance was probably the reason I didn’t stop her when the hand on my waist shifted and started crawling up my skirt. Instead, I remained perched on the wall, depending on her to help me stay in place, as her fingertips brushed first my outer thighs, then my inner thighs, and made their slow, determined way to my pussy.

She tapped my clit with her half-curled index finger, as if pointing it out to me. Each light impact sent a shiver through me. She paused, pressed more firmly and gave me a circular rub through my leggings and underwear. I gasped, and then immediately looked around to check whether anyone had noticed what she was doing to me. I felt Thea smile into my hair.

Shifting her mouth to my ear, she murmured, “We’re going to be standing here for a while. But I want to fuck you now.”

I whimpered and pressed my ass against her. Before I met her, I didn’t believe people could need each other chemically, didn’t understand doing foolish things for the sake of sexual gratification.

Hooking an arm back over her neck for balance, I spread my legs a few inches, too focused on her fingers and my clit to care how shaky that made my position on the wall.

“Do you like these leggings?” Thea asked. “Would you be upset if something happened to them?”

She tugged the stretchy fabric. I wanted her fingers back on my clit.

“Do whatever you want.” I barely recognized my voice. It was so full of naked need. “I bought them to impress you, anyway.”

“I’m impressed,” Thea said, and used a corner of one short fingernail to open a hole along the seam, just over my pussy. “Now let’s see if I can impress you, too.” She gripped the edge of the ripped fabric and tore. Cold air hit my inner thighs, and I cringed at what seemed like a loud, obvious noise. My thin, silky thong felt like it wasn’t covering me at all.

A second later, Thea made sure it wasn’t, yanking the fabric to one side and plunging a finger into me.

I clenched my jaw to keep from moaning.

“You know,” Thea whispered into my ear, “I’ve only ever felt your pussy wet. I never have to get you ready. Your body is always begging for me to fuck you.”

It was true, but I didn’t want to admit it. “Don’t be cocky,” I muttered.

“Why shouldn’t I be? You’re about to come all over my hand, and then after that you’ll let me do anything I want to you.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but my cunt had already begun to ripple around her fingers. I twisted my head to one side as I struggled not to cry out, and when I did, I caught a glimpse of someone watching us, smirking.

In any other situation, I would have cared. I would have stopped. Thea was still touching me, though, tearing the hole in my leggings even wider so she could get more of her hand into my pussy.

I don’t remember if we saw any more of Tegan and Sara that night. What I do remember is coming for Thea, over and over, indifferent to the cold, to who might have seen us, to anything other than her body and my need for it.

I had no idea it would be our last time together as girlfriends.

I park in front of her building, in my usual spot, and wonder if any of her neighbors recognize my car. I wish I had put on clothes that were more obviously gay, wish I had revved the engine louder on my way into the lot. She wouldn’t be happy if anyone noticed me, but I can’t help wanting to leave a mark that can’t be erased.

The night is too warm to be comfortable. I sniff as I pass under a stand of trees. Because it’s late, my allergy medicine is wearing off. The light in Thea’s window is on.

My body knew her at once, but my brain didn’t. I stood in the grocery store line trying to understand why I was so instantly aroused by someone who wasn’t my type.

I have mostly dated butches. I like muscular arms, the way boxer shorts look on a woman, and a whole lot of swagger.

The woman who had captured my attention had on a calf-length dress in a shapeless, conservative cut, wore her hair long and unstyled, and carried a tote bag emblazoned with the logo of a fundamentalist church. Not my type for a lot of reasons.

Her shoes were the gayest thing about her, but I knew I shouldn’t read too much into sensible flats.

Her arms, though… She had forearm definition, and her three-quarter sleeves seemed suspiciously tight. I couldn’t prevent myself from drifting into a fantasy of this woman above me using all that muscle to drive into me the way that really counts.

She got to the front of the line and turned back to pull groceries out of her cart. Impossibly, I recognized Thea.

That woman had been above me. I had felt the force of those strong arms, and I had loved every moment of it. My inner thighs quivered as my body relived the experience right there beside the tabloids, breath mints and deeply discounted beef jerky.

I couldn’t prevent myself from blurting out her name. She flinched at the sound of my voice.

I had barely seen her since the night of the concert, and not at all since college. She had gone over to her parents’ place without me the evening after Tegan and Sara, and the next time we met up, she avoided my eyes and made flimsy excuses. I never really found out why we went from wild passion on the street to nodding awkwardly at each other in the hallways.

Thea apparently did not want to give me a chance to ask any questions. After the cashier finished ringing her up, she pushed her cart out to the parking lot faster than a shopping-spree winner on a game show.

I dropped my basket of groceries at my feet and ran after her, ignoring people’s curses and startled exclamations as I pushed past them.

She had bags to load into her trunk, and even with her strong arms, she couldn’t do that before I caught up with her. I grabbed her car’s bumper, panting, grateful for every minute of cardio I’d put in recently at the gym.

“Thea, wait.”

“We shouldn’t be talking, Mel.”

“Why not?”

She gave me a significant look, but I refused to interpret it for her. Besides, the main thing I got from it was a fresh jolt of attraction when she met my eyes intensely. I could tell she felt it, too. She’d always had a way of tossing her head like an animal about to charge just before she kissed me, and she did it now, her strange new long hair floating around her face as she did.

“Why not?” I repeated.

She cleared her throat and dropped her eyes. “My parents will hear about it if I backslide.”

“If you backslide? I just wanted to talk to you, find out how you’ve been.”

“I’ve been well.” Her voice was reedy, less confident than I’d ever heard it. She moved as if to square her shoulders, but she wasn’t actually standing tall.

“For Christ’s sake, Thea.” She frowned, and I wondered if it was because I’d taken the Lord’s name in vain. “For…Pete’s sake, I guess. No, forget that. I have no idea who Pete is. How about for your sake? What happened to you?”

Was that a smile that flashed across her lips? If it was, it faded quickly. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Thea, we used to be in love. I still care about you. You can tell me, whatever it is.”

She flinched again, and I wished she would stop doing that. She glanced over each shoulder, and then turned back to me. “Lower your voice, Mel. Most people don’t know about my past.”

“ Our past.”

Thea bit her lip. “I’m straight,” she said, her voice wavering. “I’m sorry if that disappoints you.”

That hurt my pride. “Why would I be disappointed? Maybe I’ve got a superhot new girlfriend who makes me come way harder than you ever did. Maybe I think back on what you and I had, and it all seems childish to me.” I had to stop talking, because I found myself suddenly on the verge of tears.

Thea’s mouth twitched into a shadow of her old cocky smile. My face heated as my body reacted to it the way it always had. “None of that is true and you know it,” Thea said.

That was the woman I’d never been able to forget. I wanted to climb into the backseat of her sedan right then and there.

I grabbed for Thea’s hand, but she snatched her fingers away. “I can’t, Mel. Don’t you understand that I can’t?”

She ran for the driver’s-side door, but I didn’t chase her. I just folded my arms across my chest. “No,” I called after her. “Because I know you can.”

Tonight, I’ve got half a mind to slap her hands away when she tries to touch me, lift up my skirt, show her my lacy black thong and tell her she can only have my pussy if she cops to what she sees in our future. Does she think she can play straight forever?

I push the buzzer beside the main door of the building. My pulse races as I wait for the sound of the lock releasing for me. The elevator is too slow for my taste. I dart around the corner and yank open the door to the stairwell.

I hustle up four flights, but pause at the top. I’m always a little worried that I’ll get this close but she’ll decide not to let me in.

This time, though, the door is cracked for me. I swear I can already smell the rose and lime scent of her body lotion, even from out in the dingy hallway.

My strides get longer. I slip through the space she opened for me, and I don’t want to be furtive about it, but I am. Her entranceway and living area are dark. The only light in the apartment is coming from the bedroom, and that seems like such an appropriate metaphor for our relationship that it makes me a little sick. I head toward it. That’s all I’ve ever been able to do.

Thea’s first late-night text came two days after I ran into her at the grocery store. I had the same number I’d used in college, but she’d apparently changed hers.

She said she wanted to talk, and I was stupid enough to believe her.

I drove to meet her at IHOP, but before I could walk into the restaurant, a car in a secluded corner of the parking lot flashed its lights. Its passenger door popped open. I walked over and got inside, and Thea kissed me before I could say a word.

She was half starved, pawing at me with a shocking lack of coordination. I needed her just as badly, so I climbed over the gearshift, awkwardly inserted myself between the steering wheel and her body, and let her get away with touching me without explaining anything.

I choked on the humidity of her closed-in car and strained to see her face in the dim light from the restaurant’s sign. She kissed me as if the inside of my mouth contained water, air, light and food, but her hands stayed outside of my clothes, and soon my body was hot and wet while my mind roiled with confusion.

She tore a button off my shirt, and then froze and began to apologize.

“Stop it,” I said, and tore another button off myself.

I grabbed her hand. Looking into her eyes as best I could in the darkness, I guided her fingers into the space made by the missing buttons, leading her to the edge of my bra. Thea gasped, and her fingers fluttered. I helped her even more, tugging my underwire upward to let my breasts spill out beneath. One of them landed in her hand.

“Christ,” Thea said, and I grinned, because I hoped that meant she hadn’t disappeared entirely into that fundamentalist church. I opened the rest of the shirt, and she pressed her face to my chest.

Thea sucked my nipples, and I arched into it. She made a sound that was far too close to a sob, and I swallowed hard. Sympathetic tears started in my own eyes, unbidden.

To stop the emotion from overwhelming me, I focused on the physical. I found Thea’s other hand and pulled it under my skirt, trapped it between my thighs, let her feel how wet I’d gotten while we kissed.

“Fuck me.” I wanted to command her, but instead the words came out in the begging tone I’d used when we were together.

“I shouldn’t,” Thea moaned. Her fingers were already creeping under the elastic of my panties. I tilted my hips to give her better access.

“I think you should,” I told her. I wanted to go on, to scold her for pretending to be someone she wasn’t, but my words broke off in a gasp. The new Thea might have been tentative and guilt stricken, but she still had no trouble finding my G-spot. “Yes…”

I grabbed fistfuls of her hair for balance. I wanted to touch her, too, to drive her wild the same way she was doing to me, but the rhythm she set didn’t give me room to do anything but lean my forehead on the top edge of the driver’s seat and whimper. I’d masturbated since we were last together, hundreds of times, and I’d fucked and been fucked by other women, some of whom were good in bed. No one was like Thea. It felt like my body had been asleep since we were lovers, as if only Thea had the key that could unlock my truest, deepest orgasm.

I was well on my way to coming, but she pulled her hand away at the last second.

“No! Wait! I’m so close.”

“I know.” Thea lifted me off her lap, her arms as strong as ever. With only a little help from me, she propelled me back to the passenger side of the car, and then slipped down into the space between my legs.

Her tongue felt so good it hurt. I wanted to watch her, but the sensations were too intense. I squeezed my eyes shut, a few tears leaking out the corners. She had to hold me by the hips to keep me from squirming away.

I’d gotten too close and then stopped, and I couldn’t work up to coming again. My clit was trapped just on the edge of climax. The slightest heat of her breath made me jerk and tremble and tense, but nothing could take me over the edge.

She moaned softly as she played with me. I grabbed the headrest behind me and dug my fingers in for all I was worth. The moment was excruciating, but I never wanted it to end.

Soon, I found myself trying to hold back my orgasm, just because I wanted to keep her between my legs. Thea was much too clever for that, though. She slid fingers into me as she licked and then, ever so gently, began to toy with the entrance to my ass. No one but Thea had ever touched me there. A flood of memories rushed through me—of first times, of hot times, of intense times.

Then they all faded behind the force of this time. As the very tip of her index finger slipped into my ass, she captured my clit between her lips, sucking gently and tapping it with her tongue.

I sobbed as I came, clawing at her hair. I said foolish, stupid things in the moments afterward, about how I’d never stopped loving her, about how I needed her body always, about how I was glad we were back together.

She came up to join me in the seat, but she wouldn’t let me touch her in return, and she wiped her chin harshly with a tissue from the glove compartment.

“Thea, what’s the matter?”

“I have to go home.”

“Now?”

She pulled my head to her chest, stroking my hair with a touch too light for my taste. She took a deep breath. “You never met my parents,” she said.

I made a small sound of acknowledgment.

“The night after the concert, when I went to see them, they wanted to pull me out of school. They said college was corrupting me. Someone saw me with you, in that alley out back of Lupo’s.”

“They can’t have been up to anything super-pious themselves, if they—”

“That doesn’t matter. I was never a good liar. I couldn’t deny the story. I couldn’t…” She stopped talking, her grip tightening on me. “I couldn’t deny how I felt about you, what you were to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have helped you. I would have done anything.”

“Shh. I know. If it had been just about me, I would have told them to fuck off. But it wasn’t. My sister was a senior in high school, and they weren’t going to let her go to college at all.”

“Assholes.”

“I would have found a way to make it work, gone into debt, whatever. My sister didn’t sign up for that, though. I couldn’t put her through that just because of my selfish desires.”

“You’re not selfish.”

She tilted my chin up and kissed me like she owned me. “Babe. You know I am.”

I didn’t agree, but I didn’t argue.

“I asked them what they wanted me to do, and I’m—” She gestured at her long hair. “I’m doing it. All of it. I should have told you the truth. You deserved better. You still do.” She tucked hair away from my forehead. “What the hell are you doing here? Hiding with me in a parking lot outside of IHOP?”

“Thea—”

She shook her head, cutting off whatever I’d been about to say. I could have persuaded her that night. I could feel the power I had over her. I thought of Thea’s sister. Did I have the right to demand that Thea make a gesture that affected someone else, too?

“We can’t do this again,” she said. “This has to be the last time.”

“Neither one of us is selfish,” I said bitterly. I ran back to my car before I lost my dignity and begged.

Thea isn’t in the bedroom. I see it empty, mutter to myself and then hear something behind me.

I turn back to see her shape on the couch, mostly hidden by the darkness. “Thea? Are you okay?”

“No,” she answers.

I go to her, kneeling on the cushion beside her, touching her face and finding it wet. Then I freeze, because the long hair is gone. I realize that I can smell her old leather scent for the first time in forever, but there’s also something dusty that tickles my nose. My heart starts to beat even faster than it did on the way over for what I thought would be another intense but secretive lay.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“My sister came out. She basically gave my parents the finger. Says she’ll deal with college on her own, and they can go ahead and disown her if they want.”

“That’s badass,” I say. “That’s good, right?”

Thea pulls me into her lap, kissing me, crying on me, clutching at me. “I guess,” she says between sobs. “When I heard, all I could think about was you. What I did to you… The time we could have had together.” She takes my hand and puts it on her short hair. “I want to go back to how things were.”

That makes me want to join her tears. I lean my forehead against hers and fumble for the light. “We can’t,” I say. “We can only be who we are now.”

When I pull back, Thea’s face is swollen from crying, but it’s also bare and open. Her fingers are clutching my hips hard enough to bruise, but I don’t mind. Hope is rising in my heart.

I ease her hands away from me and walk deliberately to the big picture window cut into the wall of her living room. Standing in front of it, illuminated by the lamp behind me, I undo my buttons, slide out of my skirt.

“Mel?” Thea says.

“I never cared who saw us fucking,” I tell her, unclasping my bra, pushing my underwear down my legs. “Not at Lupo’s. Not at IHOP. Not anywhere.” I turn to face her. The way her eyes widen at the sight of me makes me feel beautiful and free. “Now neither of us has to care.”

Instead of the last time, this feels like the first. She comes to me, and I come for her.