The last woman I’d had sex with had a tattoo of Barnacle Boy from SpongeBob SquarePants on her ass, and that was honestly the first thing I thought of when I woke up and glanced over at Tyler asleep next to me.
She was hugging a pillow like it was her best friend, her mouth slightly ajar with the tiniest pool of drool slipping out, and her bare flat ass up in the air as her knee was propped up beneath her abdomen. No tattoos to be seen, but the morning sun from her bedroom windows added a golden glow to her usually pale complexion.
I’m not a one-night stand type of lesbian, but I do have a history of fast and serious. My average relationship spanned maybe three months—if I’m being generous—and was usually near the proposal or move-in stage before things imploded. Isa likes to call me a U-Haul lesbian, and that would probably be true if I had lived alone the last decade. However, living with Mila and Rachel meant that they’d veto my suggestions immediately anytime I wanted a new girlfriend to spend more than a few nights in a row at our place. They were like my self-sabotage antidote, and now that I was living on my own, I had all the freedom in the world to shit where I ate if I wanted to.
Not that that’s what I was going to do with Tyler. But it didn’t feel entirely impossible given how things had escalated in the few days we’d known each other.
Last night had been…I’m not even sure I knew how to describe it. It hadn’t felt like just a random hook-up. It hadn’t even felt like some weird business deal. It felt primal. It felt predetermined. It felt like her body had always been meant to be pressed against mine, and now as I watched her sleeping in the small puddle of her own saliva and the tangle of sheets we’d worn through throughout the night, I couldn’t help but feel a throbbing in my chest that was somehow both unfamiliar and entirely familiar all at the same time.
And I was going to go into business with this woman.
I lifted my head and glanced around for my cell phone, remembering then that she and I still hadn’t worked out the details on how this whole plan with her father was going to work out to begin with. Or whether or not she even wanted to do it. Or if I wanted to do it.
Do I want to do this?
I found my cell phone in a pile of my clothes on the floor by the bed and scooped it up, checking my missed text messages. There were multiple in a row from Isa.
I found some listings in Clarendon and Ballston that might fit your bar idea better than Tyler’s place. Call me.
That had come in last night, and she’d followed it up thirty minutes later with another and two missed calls.
There’s zero chance you’re asleep right now.
I just checked your location, and I don’t know where you are, but that is not your new address.
Yas, you better not be with Tyler right now.
Do you remember our entire conversation about not opening a queer bar in a building owned by a prominently anti-queer White man?
After that onslaught of back-to-back messages, she had waited an hour and texted me one last time.
Call me in the morning when you’re ready to do damage control.
I held the laugh in my chest so as not to wake up Tyler, but it was always funny to watch Isa spiral into her crisis-public-relations mode. If there were two ends to the spectrum, she and I were at the opposite from each other. Everything was deadly serious for her, and I firmly operated under the concept that forgiveness is always easier to obtain than permission, and no one gives a shit anyway.
I tapped Isa’s name and shot off a quick text assuring her everything was fine, then went and clicked over to my other messages. One from my father asking me to return his call. Another from Mila with pictures of her daughter eating an ice cream cone upside down. And last, a message from a number I didn’t have saved in my phone that came in around one o’clock in the morning and just said, “u up?” I wasn’t even going to bother trying to figure out which of my past hook-ups that was from, and I deleted it immediately.
I was about to put my phone down when a notification from HER app slid down from the top of the screen telling me that someone had liked one of my photos. I clicked on it, and the dating app opened to the profile of a gorgeous woman posing on the steps of the Supreme Court looking fierce as hell. I recognized it immediately from the night Ruth Bader Ginsberg had died and everyone who cared about women’s rights and was able-bodied within walking or driving distance gathered on the steps to mourn together.
I clicked Like on her photo as well.
“Seriously?” Tyler’s voice still had that sleepy roughness to it, but there was also an undertone of aggression.
I glanced over at her and gave her a smile. “Good morning?”
“Yes, it’s a lovely morning to wake up to the woman in my bed swiping on a dating app for other women.” Tyler’s sleepiness had faded into active irritation now.
She tossed the sheet off her naked body and maneuvered to the edge of the bed to stand up, but I grabbed her forearm and pulled her back down onto the mattress.
“Yas—” She groaned angrily but didn’t fight me.
“Look,” I began, lifting my phone up in front of both of us and then turning it off entirely. I tossed it to the end of the bed out of both of our reach. “I’m sorry. I swear it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t even thinking.”
She was on her back on the bed as I leaned over her, so it was easy to see her roll her eyes with as much dramatic effect as I’d ever seen eyeballs do.
“Whatever.” She refused to make eye contact with me, and I couldn’t help but smile and let out a small laugh. “It’s not funny, Yas!”
“I know,” I replied, still laughing. “But, look—you’re jealous. It’s really cute.”
“I am not jealous,” she clarified, this time physically pulling away from me and wiggling her way off the bed. She walked over to her closet and grabbed a robe hanging on the back of the door, covering herself with it. “It’s just a respect issue, you know?”
I leaned back in the bed, resting my neck on top of my arms behind my head. “Sure, definitely not jealous at all. I completely buy that.”
She shot me an angry look, her nose scrunched up and her lips turned into a frown that somehow made her look even less threatening. “I’m not jealous.”
“Okay.” I sat up and reached for my phone where I’d tossed it. “I guess I’ll just go back to what I was doing then.”
The flames in her eyes said more than she did as she stomped out of the room.
I sighed and pushed myself to the edge of the bed, grabbing at my clothes and allowing myself to take some time to get dressed before I chased after her.
Dating women was always so dramatic.
When I walked out into the kitchen where our wineglasses were still sitting from last night, I found Tyler chopping the tops off a bunch of strawberries with all the ferocity of a lion attacking a gazelle. It was like a berry massacre on the counter, and she’d nearly juiced half of them at this point.
“Those poor strawberries,” I commented as I slid onto the stool I’d been sitting on last night. My previous glass of wine still had a few sips left in it, and I sniffed it and then downed the remainder. “Huh. Still good the next day.”
She wrinkled her nose as she leveled her gaze at me. “You know, I was nominated for People’s Choice Podcast of the Year last year.”
Not the direction I’d expected this conversation to go. “Congratulations?”
“And I was class valedictorian of both my high school and my university,” she continued, returning to smashing/cutting up the bowl of strawberries.
“Don’t forget prom queen,” I teased, tossing out a guess.
She paused and looked at me. “Actually, yes. I was prom queen twice in high school—including once at a school I didn’t even go to. I was voted president of my college sorority, too.”
I nodded along to her list; my lips set in a tight line. “Cool, cool.”
“I am not someone who gets tossed to the side after a hook-up like it was nothing.” She’d finished cutting up the strawberries and was now popping them in her mouth, talking in between juicy fruity bites. “I am someone who is pursued, chased, begged for their attention. I am a fucking catch.”
I placed my hand over my mouth to keep her from seeing me smile. And she really wanted to pretend she wasn’t jealous? “Well, okay, Ms. Adams. I hear you loud and clear. You are a goddess, and I should be kissing your feet to thank you for giving me the exclusive privilege of tasting that Grade-A pussy.”
Her cheeks tinged a darker pink than the strawberries. “That’s not what I meant.”
I stood and walked around the island, coming to a stop next to her and leaning back against the countertop. I reached into her bowl of strawberries and took one for myself.
“Last night you said you wanted to explore another side of yourself,” I started, grabbing a second strawberry. I didn’t miss the way her gaze followed my hand to my mouth and stayed there. “Maybe that other side of yourself is the one that doesn’t get everything she wants just because she wants it.”
“Now you’re making me sound like a spoiled brat.” Tyler huffed and placed the bowl down on the counter. “That’s still not what I meant, and you know it.”
“It’s not what you meant, but it’s what you said,” I replied, picking up the bowl she’d just discarded and helping myself to the rest of the strawberries. “I don’t beg for attention. I don’t pursue. I don’t chase. And, might I remind you, you invited me over here last night. You knew exactly what you wanted, and all I did was give it to you. You could start with saying thank you, you know.”
Her mouth fell open, and her eyes could have pierced through me in that moment. Instead of letting her talk and curse me out, I popped a strawberry in between her open lips. She swallowed it quickly, and I’m pretty sure that strawberry boiled in fury before it ever hit her stomach.
Good Lord, this was fun. It also felt a little harsh, but I’d committed to the role and there was no going back now. Even if a huge part of me didn’t want to leave at all, and instead desired to just drag her right back to bed and let her thank me that way.
“I’ll consider your business offer, Ms. Adams,” I continued, trying to keep my own thoughts at bay. “If it’s still on the table, that is. But this isn’t the beginning of a love story, and I’m not someone that anyone gets to lay claim to. We are not dating. Nor are we going to start dating.”
Something about that sentence didn’t feel entirely true, but I was sticking to it anyway.
“Anywho, I should be going.” I polished off the last strawberry and placed the bowl back down on the counter.
Without missing a beat, I took a step toward her and kissed her directly on the lips—the firm type that would linger just long enough to make her body go from rigid to leaning into me like she was begging me for more.
It took all my strength to not pick the more option.
Instead, I separated and stepped away from her, heading for the front door and completely ignoring the way her breath had hitched when I’d kissed her or the hard swallow in her throat. “In the meantime, you have my number if you’re willing to meet me on my terms.”
She was still staring after me, her mouth agape like she wanted to respond but didn’t know what to say.
I love to leave a woman speechless.