Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica Read online

  But the phone does not ring.

  The fax machine is silent.

  Damn it!

  Click. The large-screen television in her office offers up the evening’s news: family shots, parties.

  Click. Couples going out for dinner and drinks. Fuck ’em all.

  Click. A diamond is forever.

  Click. The television winks out.

  She glares balefully at the phone. General Ping is over an hour late. Bastard better call—she isn’t about to go through this day without closing that deal. If she doesn’t sell this lot of blades, the CEO is going to hang her ass out to dry. She snorts once. That asshole is most certainly at the company party right now, smiling that ice cold smile of his, the one he’d taught her when she’d first joined the company, the smile she scares herself with in the mirror nowadays. She’s vice-president in charge of overseas marketing, and she can play hardball with the toughest of the guys. But tonight is going to make or break all of that.

  She shudders involuntarily and hugs herself—a gesture she hasn’t done for years. Her fingers trace the toned muscles of her forearms. No sign of the scars anymore—Doc did a good job. Ha! She’d paid him enough!

  Click. More parties, more people laughing, dancing, singing, laughing, kissing…laughing.

  Click. Silence.

  She doesn’t dare leave the office without this deal. Her eyes drift to the sample cases, and before she can stop herself, she opens each one. Revealing row upon row of gleaming, razor-sharp cold-forged steel blades.

  One more glance at her arms, scar-free now for…what was it? Four years, ever since she joined the company. Four years since she’d become as hard as she had, as cold as any of the assholes working here. No…colder. Four long years since she’d made herself bleed. She looks longingly down at the blades.

  “Yeah…yeah…what the fuck,” she says softly to herself. It’ll take the edge off waiting for General Whatsis-Ping to call. She barks a short laugh.

  “Or put the edge on,” she whispers.

  Slowly she draws a long, curved blade from the sample case—she cannot stop the small animal cry that escapes her lips. Holding the blade between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she lightly scrapes it across the fine down on the back of her forearm. Oh, yes: as sharp as she might hope. Hell, she used to do this with her father’s razor blades!

  She takes a deep breath and, eager and sure, cuts the warrior mark into her upper right arm.

  Ohhhhh, yes.

  The warmth of the pain spreads swiftly through the rest of her body.

  Yes, yes, yes. It really is a wonderful cut: blood dancing out behind the blade and trickling down her bicep. But more truly wondrous, it now seems to her that she is kneeling beside a small burning brazier with polished brass feet and intricate brass ornamentation. She can see the irons heating up to white hot. With a small whimper, she lifts her thighs to present herself for the brand when, lo! The blood from her mark stops flowing, the brazier and irons vanish, and she has only the red-stained blade pressed between her fingers to remind her of this vision.

  Breathing heavily, she shakes her head. Omigod, she thinks, I can’t go back into that space. No no no—I’ve got too much going for myself in this job, can’t give it up for that. Yet, even as she thinks no, she takes a second blade from the case and slashes more deeply across the first mark on her arm. She cries out in joy and pain, the blood pours willingly down her arm. And where one or two drops fly from her blade onto the wall, it becomes transparent as a veil, and she can see into the room beyond: a dungeon! Beneath bright lights, a young slave lies on a table, eyes closed, a ceremonial dagger piercing the upper thigh.

  Who’s that laughing with such pure delight? The creature on the table? Or herself?

  What is still more wonderful, the slave jumps down from the table, and hobbles across the floor, knife in thigh and all, right up her. But the bleeding in her arm ceases, and once again she is left alone in her darkened office.

  “Gotta stop this shit,” she says aloud, but she’s already grabbed the third blade and, crooning softly to herself, she cuts a deep circle into the top of the vertical slash on her arm. Blood seeps from her wounds, suffusing her with a warmth she’s not felt in years. A moan escapes her lips as she lifts her eyes to the next vision: herself, pierced with hundreds and hundreds of needles, each sparkling and dancing in the light of the now blazing brazier. Taller and taller she grows, this pierced apparition, till the needles themselves seem to her like stars in the sky.

  Stars indeed. The bleeding has stopped, and she’s looking out through the office window into the New Year’s Eve night. A star falls, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire. “Someone is dying,” she thinks to herself, for the woman who first collared her, the only person who had ever loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star falls, a soul was leaving the physical plane.

  She drags a fourth blade through her arm. Blinking, dizzy, she lifts her head to see…her first owner, the woman who had first put a collar round her throat and called her “mine.”

  “Ma’am,” she calls out to this vision, her voice hoarse with tears uncried for four long years, “Please, take me with you. I know you’ll disappear when my arm stops bleeding. You’ll vanish, like the branding irons, the slave with knife in thigh, and the girl who was pierced like the night sky itself.”

  She quickly takes blade after blade from the case, and cuts here and there, everywhere all over her body, for she wishes so deeply to keep her lover with her. Her blood flows with a heat that is more intense than the summer sun itself, and her lover, who has never appeared so large or so beautiful, takes the still-bleeding one into her arms, and makes a final cut: deep across her throat.

  “You knew I always wanted to do that, didn’t you love?”

  She can no longer speak to answer, only shake with ecstasy. And they both fly upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there is neither coldness of heart nor hunger of soul, for they are together and they are in love.

  In the dawn of morning, there lies the young woman, with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, curled up in her over-large leather chair; she bled to death on the last evening of the year; and the New Year’s sun has risen and shines down through the window upon a slashed and bloodless corpse. The woman still sits, in the stiffness of death, holding the blades in her hand, many of which are yet stained with her dark blood.

  “It’s because the China deal fell through,” said some, “She couldn’t take the pressure,” said others. And in the very highest offices, they agreed, “It’s a man’s job after all.” No one ever imagined what beautiful things she had seen, nor into what glory she had entered with her lover, on New Year’s Day.

  here

  Renita Martin

  call me james brown while i dance

  on the cum-stained floor of your

  steamy juke joint and let these legs be

  eyes seeing rhythms/dancing

  in shades of

  1

  maroon

  2

  black

  3

  pulpy

  4

  earth green

  5 6 7 8 toes already in the water

  and i’m still burning up

  the floor and burning up and

  burning up like when the sage stick

  becomes fire

  burning until your joint is smudged

  and there is nothing else. but the smoke of the rhythm of

  the color…

  until there is nothing

  else but us/here/in this

  charred slow drag called us/here.

  Lullaby for a Knife Sharpener

  Sarah Fran Wisby

  Jesse. Sharpen your knives on my long bones. The first time you came by with your bag of stones, sat at my kitchen table with all the contents of my knife drawer glinting up at you, dazzling me, slices of mirror refracting your beauty as you ran the long stones along each dulled edge of meta
l, making it fine again, I thought about cutting up chickens. How with a good sharp knife, the gristle slides off like butter, the slippery meat opens to you as if it had waited its whole simple life for this moment.

  Even after you’d finished, and laid the knives gently on a dish towel, all pointing the same way like teeth in a cared-for mouth, even after I’d paid you and you’d said “Thank you, ma’am” in a shy, self-mocking sort of way, we stayed at my kitchen table and drank half a bottle of wine. You never seemed to be in a hurry. Not that night, or any other when you’d come around. The trouble lay—and trouble is always lying coiled up someplace close by—the trouble lay in not knowing when you’d come around. And buying the toughest of meats, using my knives as often as possible, wishing them dull so I could call and ask you back only made me feel like the worst kind of woman, the kind who waits.

  I never wanted to be a waiting woman; who does? But at some point I realized I had spent my whole life in anticipation, a slightly parted mouth, red and superstitious, frozen in a state of readiness. Waiting, I suppose, for a kiss to end all kisses. The big one, ominous and delicious, where you melt and melt until you disappear. But when wanting itself becomes bigger than the thing that is wanted, well. My grandpa would say, if it was a snake it woulda bit you. Meaning: everything you ever wanted could present itself on a tray with dancing girls and you wouldn’t notice. You’ve got your eyes closed and your lips open and all that’s happening is your mouth is going dry.

  My mother never waited for anyone or anything, not as far as I know. She was a go-getter from the get-go. I always picture her with car keys in one hand, her pocketbook in the other, and a crazed look in her eye. Whenever I saw that look, I scrambled to do whatever it was that needed doing: getting my brother into his snowsuit, or mopping up spilled apple juice, or just getting out of the way.

  The second time you came over I knew I would seduce you. I made lasagna and garlic bread, and salad with red bell peppers and artichoke hearts. I was feeling poetic in the grocery store and I put my thumb over the label so it read “choke hearts”—it seemed appropriate to my mission. I asked the neighbors to watch Otto for the night—college girls, I buy pot from them sometimes.

  In the middle of dinner I took your hand and placed your first two fingers in my mouth, all the way to the back of my throat, the soft, spongy part that reminds me of a cervix. Your other hand found the wetness between my legs and I moaned, feeling the fullness of being entered in two places at once. “Oh, Annie,” you said. “I had hoped, but I wasn’t sure…” My hands found the curls at the back of your neck, the only place that wasn’t full of hair grease, and held on.

  I went back to work not too long ago, just a couple of days a week, and my first day back the other cooks were talking about some shrink they’d heard on the radio. Jeannine told us how he’d said that as soon as we become lovers with someone, as soon as we lay claim to them, we start expecting them to fill all the gaps our parents left in us, give us all the love we never had as children.

  Cathy started laughing, shrieking almost, pounding the counter with a floured fist. “That’s so fucked!” she wailed. “How ridiculous can you get? No wonder, God, no wonder the world is so fucked up.” I kept chopping up broccoli florettes, tossing them in a metal colander so large it always reminded me of a flying saucer. I didn’t think it sounded so outrageous to ask for those things from a lover. I mean, where else are you gonna get them?

  Seems like my heart is always tripping over itself trying to catch up to the way the world works now. You’re not allowed to own people anymore. They come and go and you’re just supposed to be okay with that. I want to belong to somebody, and if they don’t want me anymore they can just put me in a burlap sack with some rocks and throw me over the bridge. I’m tired of being free.

  All my knives at your disposal and you had to use your own pretty little hunting knife to mark me. This was the fourth time you came by, but only the second time you fucked me. It started out silly. I giggled when you pressed the flat side against my throat and told me to unbutton my blouse. I giggled when you traced circles around my nipples with the tip. I gasped when you pressed the tip between the bones that fence in my heart.

  I knew you weren’t trying to leave any permanent traces, just scratches really, a lopsided heart with angel wings. It took three weeks to fade.

  The first night you came by unannounced there was no booze in the house, so we drove to the Grand Union. I waited in the car watching snowflakes sizzle when they hit the windshield, watching my white breath fill the VW like ether, temperature fronts clashing in and around the car like religious armies, each trying to win over the other side.

  You came out of the Grand Union the way you burst onto any scene, shoulders back, chest up high like a bulldog, shy puppy grin on your face. Then your heel caught a patch of ice and you skidded, regained your balance for a second, then pitched forward to land with the bottle of whiskey smashed under, or rather through, your hand—your left hand, the one you live by.

  I ran to help you up. “I’m taking you to the emergency room,” I said firmly, putting my arm around your waist as if you might have trouble walking with an injured hand, and as if I could hold you up if that were true.

  “I don’t have insurance,” you stated, as if that would matter to me. We were already seated in the car. I revved up the engine to warm it back up. I was kinda revved up myself, excited by the prospect of being useful to you. I wondered briefly if it was fucked-up of me to take a small measure of delight in your dependence. I was pretty sure Cathy at work would think so.

  “They have to take you whether or not you’re insured,” I told you. “Jesus, you’re bleeding all over the place!”

  “I’m sorry.” This was said so earnestly that I wondered if you were in shock.

  “Oh, Jesse. That’s not what I mean. I mean it’s serious. I don’t care if you ruin the ripped-up seats.” The only towel in the car was full of dog hair. I didn’t want to give you that so I took the Indian-print scarf from around my neck and wrapped it around your hand tightly. You rocked back and forth holding it and seemed to be trying not to cry.

  “Look, Annie, I’m not going to the hospital, okay? I’ll figure something out. Take me home with you and I’ll make some phone calls, see what I can figure out.”

  By the time I pulled into the driveway I knew what I was going to do. I got out my sewing kit and some unwaxed dental floss, sterilized a needle and threaded it. Got out the rubbing alcohol and the Vicodin. Got to work.

  If there’s anything I know, it’s how to stitch things up so you can barely see the seam. Flesh isn’t so different from thick upholstery fabric, the satiny kind that stretches when you sit on it, and lord knows, I’d watched doctors sew me up enough times. Made my eyes focus on the surgical needle and black plastic thread that looked like insect parts so I could tune out my mother explaining why I was so accident-prone.

  Not that I didn’t believe her. I believed I was prone to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the wrong girl in the wrong skin, the wrong daughter in the wrong house. I would turn too suddenly and knock into something and that something would pound back. I would tumble into a wall, or into the hot stove, or against the edge of a paring knife. I rarely heard the words that accompanied my tumbles, for I had a thick layer of cotton that descended into my head at such times, and it kept my brain from colliding too harshly with my skull, but once I heard the words “little bitch”—they sounded squeezed out like sourness from a lemon and for a long time I heard nothing else.

  Sharpen your knives on my long bones. A tender anesthetic, your hand inside me, curled as if to grasp some brass ring, some key to some faraway lock. Your eyes locked onto mine, always a contest to see if I can hold your gaze without blushing or feeling my blood surge into tears. Since the baby, a fist is the only thing that can fill me to capacity: I’m a plowed field, I’m a workhorse, I’m a petunia coming apart at the petals, I’m a sucking wound, wrapped around your w
rist. Who is being bandaged here? Who is being healed?

  The hundred-and-twelfth time you came over—well, to tell the truth it was only the twelfth, but it felt like so much more. I was always counting, adding articles of evidence in my head, wrapping things up for safekeeping like wineglasses in newspaper. I just wasn’t sure how to measure things, what standards to use. My own obviously wouldn’t do; they got me in trouble more often than not. I’d expect a field of rubies instead of gravel and blood, that skinned-knee feeling, but all over. I’d mistaken a certain blistery rawness for love too many times.

  The twelfth time you came over you let me make you come. We had been smoking a little pot in the living room, tending the fire in the woodstove, and you lay back on the couch, unzipped your jeans, and said, “Come here, little girl.”