“If it doesn’t come out, do you promise to pay for a trip to the salon?”
I felt a grin nearly split my face. “Anything.”
* * *
Oh, Vee. I don’t think I was meant to find this quite so soon. I have a feeling you were going to come back to this notebook while I was in my office, writing, but it has been a busy few days.
Right now you’re asleep, sprawled out in bed, oblivious to the world. You sleep like a child still, though you are an adult. Is it because you’re so carefree? I can just see the back of your head from my spot in the worn leather armchair you love so much. Your dark auburn hair cascades over the pillow and it still doesn’t seem real.
I did help you dye it, even though I mourned every strand of blue covered by the conservative color. But I did it, wiping the dye from your ears so it wouldn’t stain, making sure we covered every inch. I didn’t recognize you when we were done—the sophisticated young woman. Once we found you some clothes to fit your new look, you could have been someone else. And in subtle make-up, dark, muted lipstick, you could pass among the young professionals of Wall Street or Fifth Avenue with ease.
I stopped writing for a moment and rose from my chair, tiptoeing to the side of the bed, watching your chest rise and fall. I smoothed your hair off your forehead and you smiled in your sleep.
My own hair, now a dark purple with a few strategic pink highlights, falls over my forehead as I sit writing again, for you. I’m glad I did it, though I still have that twinge of worry that I look ridiculous, like some poor old lady trying to re-live her youth.
“If Betsey Johnson can do it,” you’d reasoned as you made me sit on the edge of the tub, applying hair color with the skill of a master, “so can you.”
“Betsey Johnson has an excuse,” I’d replied. You stuck out your tongue and I started to laugh.
“Don’t move!”
The purple speckles on the bathroom wall will always make me smile. I didn’t think my laughter was so physical.
While I showered, you tidied up—or so I thought. I’ve obviously been writing too much if you had time to dig in my closet and find the old combat boots I’d tucked away. Don’t think that I’m angry, because I’m not. It just means that we ought to spend more time doing things. When you read these words, come tear me away from the computer. I’ll probably need it.
You had an entire outfit laid out for me when I emerged, and it brought back memories. Torn jeans, safety-pinned together. A skin-tight black tank top. A studded belt. And, a leather jacket almost exactly like the one I’d had, the one stolen from me a few weeks after Lucie died. You’d studied that one photo of her and me, and recreated my entire look.
My hair is better now than it was back then. It’ll grow on me, likely just in time for it to fade back to my normal color.
You watched as I dressed, anticipation in your eyes, lips parted. I could see the lust, the appreciation. You licked your lips as I slid the jeans up my thighs, over my bottom. When I was fully dressed you came over and we looked into the full length mirror at the end of the bed. If you’d had your purple hair, we’d have been punk rock bookends.
We made quite the impression at the party. The managing editor at the magazine sidled up to me while you were getting our drinks.
“Very old-school,” he said, looking pleased with himself with his use of modern slang. The man is seventy-five if he’s a day. “But who is that young thing? She’s not your usual type, Alex.”
I turned to watch you, poised and elegant as you moved through the crowd of expensively costumed drunks. “You’ve met Sylvia, haven’t you, Robert?” I asked, laying on the innocent surprise.
I had to tap his chin to remind him to close his mouth. He looked properly chastised and he was discomfited enough that the tips of his ears went pink.
When you arrived with our drinks, I’d never been so relieved—in another moment I would have laughed at poor Robert, and then where would I be? That man without his dignity would be a shell of himself, and I’d never get another job from him.
I spent the rest of the party itching to leave, to take you home and get you naked. And now that we’re here, I’m going to stop writing, and go wake you up.
* * *
You did find this earlier than I wanted, but it’s worked out better than I thought. Maybe I have some talent as an erotica writer, since you came to bed so ready. I wish you could wake me up every night with your tongue flicking my clit. Even better that you held my hips so I couldn’t move. And afterwards, falling asleep together, tangled in the sheets—I couldn’t ask for anything more.
And now I’ll stop. The coffee’s perking and you’ll be awake soon. I love bringing you coffee in bed, seeing your tousled hair and drowsy eyes, the beautiful disarray. If I didn’t love you already, I’d love you just from seeing you like that.
But I forgot to tell you… my hair dye is temporary, but yours isn’t. I double-checked the label on the purple. So in another week, we will be punk bookends after all. If I find you a silver dress like Debbie Harry’s in “Heart of Glass”, will you model it for me?
Love, Vee.
Safer Places
Ariel Graham
She’s got muscle the way other people—the analogy fails me every time. I find myself wanting to say something ridiculous and absurd, something that’s not a compliment but a confusion. She has muscles the way old houses have mice. She has muscles the way smart people have ideas.
She is muscle. That’s what defines Sadie. No, not muscle. Strength. The muscle is there, those toned, bronzed forearms, a little darker than the rest of her arms because she rolls her uniform sleeves up when she’s on patrol. Not officially against protocol—Northern Nevada gets hot in the summer and rural county sheriff deputies can go a good long while without seeing anyone. And frankly, ranchers and truck drivers don’t care. They’re either in need of assistance or too pissed off at being confronted by a woman in uniform.
“Fuck ‘em,” Sadie says, and then she fucks me instead.
Sometimes I think the uniform is Sadie, and everything else is a mask. Close as we’ve become over the years together, there’s still a distance. I think that I know Sadie, that Sadie is defined by her job, her muscle. But there’s more to her than that muscle. Something hidden under the toned, sleek flesh, the biceps I love to run my tongue over, the hamstrings and quads that trap my head in place so all I can do is struggle, giggle and lick.
There’s more. It’s in her dark eyes and her ferocious dedication.
And the way some nights, she wakes up crying.
* * *
“So, what’d you do today while I was off saving the world?” Sadie asks and I choke on my lemonade and sputter.
Saving the world is meant to make me laugh. We live in a county that’s all of two hundred and sixty four square miles and houses more deer, wild horses and grazing cows than humans.
Just after six p.m. The sun’s still nearly overhead. It’s early July and it’s quiet and dry and hot. We’ve set up a child’s wading pool on the deck of our tiny cabin, but neither of us has our feet in it. We’re desert rats and love the heat. A bead of sweat rolls down Sadie’s straight nose. I watch it, wishing I could follow it with my fingers, my tongue. Down to her lips, her mouth.
I know what I want to answer, too. I’d love to tell her I spent the day painting the distant dusky Sierra and turning the mountains into a fantasy land, maybe a dragon sweeping around a peak, maybe a knight in armor climbing Peavine. No one who sees my work knows the disconnect between the reality of the Sierra and the fantasy worlds I paint.
That’s what she wants to hear. That I followed my heart. I painted. I got so wrapped up in distant imaginary lands that there’s no dinner waiting for her post-shift, post-run, post-gym and pre-sex.
But I can’t. She could support us both. I could paint. My own sense of honor means I spent the day calling quasi-law enforcement agencies and state demographic keepers and county DA offices and court clerks, ferreting out interview subjects for an article on domestic violence, its prevalence in Northern Nevada, cause and effect, occurrence and result. Reasons and revenge. For a women’s magazine that pays pretty well, likes my work, and has little to do with my passions.
“You worked, didn’t you?” Sadie’s tipped her head back against the cheap mesh lawn chair, which is snagging her hair into the weave. She watches me from under mostly closed eyelids.
“I started,” I tell her. “I painted the background, and blocked some features, and I worked up the concept.”
Lame. Lame. Lame.
Sadie purses her lips, stares up at the sky, less like she’s inclined to buy this nonsense than as if she can’t believe I’m asking her to. “Seriously?” she says finally, rolling her head across the back of the chair and opening deadpan eyes to look lazily at me.
Well, I did.
“Didn’t you once tell me that background is, I don’t know, background and that you can do damn near anything because it just gets covered up?”
My turn to smirk a little. I love that she listens to me. From somewhere on the alternate highway heading between city and county, I can hear a pack of motorcycles snapping and downshifting. Overhead, a couple of military jets scream toward Fallon. Somehow, otherwise, the day is utterly silent. We don’t get cicadas in Northern Nevada, so there’s no street-light-on-the-fritz buzz, and the crickets don’t start their summer death knell until August. We can see our nearest neighbor’s house from here, but just barely and there’s a grove of cottonwood along a tributary of the Truckee River between us and some haphazard willows that this evening move gently in an almost non-existent breeze.
“Didn’t you also tell me,” she continues, since I haven’t spoken, “that concept is what you do when you’re bored? Test yourself. Block out paintings. Daydream them up.”
She’s looking at me over the top of her lemonade bottle held carelessly between long fingers. The sides of the bottle will only sweat in Nevada’s dry heat where they’re touched, then moisture gathers and streams.
I squirm a little in my scratchy chair.
“So while you were working on…” She eyes me. “A business journal article?”
“Women’s magazine,” I fill in.
“While you were working on the women’s magazine article, did you happen to finish the laundry? Or make dinner? Or—”
My scrunched up face makes her stop. She’s only teasing, and at any rate, we have more than enough of everything to make damn near anything for dinner and it’ll be too hot to eat for several more hours.
I focus on the bottle in her hand again, and think of moisture gathering.
“What am I going to do with you, Jill?” Without taking her eyes off me, she runs her tongue up the side of the bottle I’m so fixated on. “Come here.” And when I start to rise, “No. Crawl here.”
Sun-warm boards under my hands and knees. I skirt the pool, distracted for an instant by a wasp buzzing just above the still water. I wish she’d ordered me to strip. Being way out here in a tiny cabin with intermittent internet and no delivery, and no backup for my sheriff’s deputy, means a twenty minute drive to the nearest grocery store when some essential ingredient is missing and dinner prep is in progress. It also means being naked outside feels decadent, but isn’t likely to result in arrest. Over the years, Sadie has bent me over the porch rail and used her mouth, her hands, her imagination and once, memorably, a willow switch. She’s tied me to corner posts and ordered me to do chores wearing only Crocs, a hat, sun screen and a smile.
Now I daydream that my waving ass is naked as I crawl to her. By the time I reach her, Sadie herself is naked, sprawled in the lawn chair with her hips on the rolled metal edge, her legs spread wide and her invitation evident. She smells musky, thick and deep and wet, and like the shower gel she used at the gym, and like her own personal Sadie smell.
So many things I want to ask. With Sadie I always want to ask. What do you want tonight? What would make you happy? Happiest? May I? Can I? Let me! But I only wait until she growls and pulls my head up, not down, her mouth on mine, hot and tasting sweet from the lemonade. She bites my lip and only then does she let me go, pushing me down, pulling the back of my head in tight. I’m surrounded by her and this is when I feel safe. This is when I’m happy.
She’s drenched, soaking wet, the way I know means she’s been thinking of this for a long time and sometimes I like to tease. A few tentative licks, my tongue grazing the outside edges of her labia, just flicking by her already hard clit.
Not tonight. Tonight she pulls me down hard when I try to play, all those muscles coming in handy for her. My teeth graze her mound, tugging flesh, biting a little. I didn’t mean to, but Sadie makes a sound deep in her throat that’s unmistakably approval. So I bite. Graze. My teeth run over her lips, the inside of her slit. I lick hard up the center of her, bite at her clit, then settle to a rhythm of licking and biting and fucking with my tongue. All the while her legs tighten convulsively around my head, shutting off sound, muffling crow song and desert wind and her rough panting until all I can hear is my own movement, my own steady drumbeat of heart.
I never know when Sadie comes. It’s always an inside thing. She freezes, goes still, as if she’s afraid of scaring off some wild animal she’s trying to get close to. She stops breathing each time, just long enough for me to start to wonder if I’ve somehow killed her. Then a gasp, a slight tremble, a sigh as every single one of her golden muscles loses tension. But that’s after. Post-come.
Anything else would be letting her guard down.
The sun hot on my shoulders, on my ass which is still covered in jeans, and Sadie’s legs, pinning me close, all of that’s a distraction and I miss the exact instant. I would anyway. But I know when she sighs, and slumps, limp, and pulls away. Just enough that I can kneel and rest my head on her lap.
“Damn,” she says, and I absolutely agree.