I wanted to bring Miriam a gift, but I had no idea what to get her. Flowers seemed too obvious, too date-y. I didn’t even know how she felt about me. Was she crushing? On the fence? Totally platonic? She probably just wanted to be friends. Maybe this was how normal women made friends with other women. They invited them to do shit like eat in public.
I stopped at a beauty store after work and bought her a red lipstick, Ruský Rouge. I told myself I was getting her the gift as a thank-you for how generous she had been with the sundaes. Really, I knew that I was testing her, seeing how far she was willing to dip into my side of modernity, at least aesthetically. I assumed that she never wore makeup because of religious reasons. But if she’d be willing to put Ruský Rouge on her lips, what else would she be willing to try? It seemed significant that the gift was a girly one: a sexy, creamy tool passed from woman to woman.
The first time I’d ever masturbated, I’d straddled my pillow and fantasized that I was being passed between women this way. I imagined a roomful of women, each a different classmate’s mother, moving me from lap to lap, thigh to thigh, taking turns rocking and soothing me. Their gestures seemed nurturing, rather than lusty, and so, when I came, and came again, I was able to avoid thinking about what my pleasure could mean.
Over time, this fantasy became more overtly sexual—escalating from lap sitting into kissing, dry-humping. Every time I came, I would think, Oh god, please don’t let me like women. I forced myself to change the narrative, imagining the women with their husbands instead of me. I imagined the married couples rubbing against each other in abandoned offices, or the men eating their wives’ pussies in their backyards at night under the stars, poolside. In these fantasies, I got to be both woman and man: shifting my consciousness from the wife to the husband to the wife to the husband. This felt less shameful than two women.
In college, I’d been all bravado with Zoe and Cait, the adrenaline of novelty and the velocity of intrigue propelling me through my encounters with each of them. I was moving so fast that I didn’t really have time to be afraid. But now, going to meet Miriam, I felt the same Oh god I’d felt when I was young.
The truth was, I knew very little about Miriam. I knew that she was Jewish, a bit younger than me. I knew that she was very, very nice to me. I knew that around her, I felt like I could eat a sundae, or two sundaes, and maybe even Chinese food. I knew how she made me feel, which was full of confetti instead of blood. And so I reasoned, as I paid for the lipstick, that while my illusive pursuit of Cait had been based on an idea, at least with Miriam I was following a feeling.