Lacey and I started researching for the Sugar Club’s new services: hand stuff and oral—that’s where Lace drew the line. No penetrative sex.
We watched a lot of porn. Regular as our very own religion. We sat on my bed each Sunday, scrolling through misspelled titles, obscure fetishes, leaked celebrity sex tapes. While other kids did their history homework, memorized the dates of the fall of the Roman Empire, the names associated with the Nazi regime, we watched girls suck dick with such vigor they got sick. We took notes on erogenous zones, the earlobe the armpit the back of the knee the nape of the neck. We drew graphs, curves to depict pacing, we calculated the standard deviations between foreplay and ejaculation, we committed the names of obscure moves to memory: the butter churner, the snow angel, the Swiss ball blitz. We watched men coat faces in layers of fake semen, and we found the recipe to make it ourselves. Corn starch, by the way.
We trained our tongues like athletes, worked them around any phallic symbol we could find, and we learned to eat pussy too. I held Lacey’s head between my legs as she touched her tongue to different spots. “Here?” I shook my head. “Here?”
“Closer.”
“Here?”
“Fuck.”
Sometimes kids at school called us lesbians. They thought we were together. We were whatever about it. Maybe we were lesbians or maybe gender didn’t make much of a difference to us, or maybe we believed in the power of desire over and above anything as simple as genitalia. We didn’t really think much about it; didn’t really care. We let them call us lesbians because what we really were was soul mates.
* * *
We ate pussy for $250 apiece. The sales started out slow because, no doubt, those girls thought they were straight, but after our first couple customers, word got out. We could give them what their boyfriends couldn’t. We were artists about it. We were masters of our craft. Self-taught sensations. We’d take half the payment up front and the other half upon orgasm.
Lacey fell for one of the customers. Whitney Hughes. Mean and white and thin, she’d been popular from the moment she was born. She’d broken up with Oliver van Ness and was dating someone new, a college guy, she told the whole school. She booked with Lace and told her that the reason for the appointment was that her boyfriend kept assuring her he was making her come, but she didn’t really feel anything. Lacey spent a half hour in the closet with Whitney, and when they came out, Whitney was smiling and her eyes were all blurred and spacey and she kept thanking us and giggling. Lacey kissed her cheek goodbye.
“I have a boyfriend,” Whitney said.
It’s what they all said, afterward, clumsying their way back into wet underwear. They’d say, “I don’t like girls.”
We assured them of their heterosexuality every time.