I got a chill as the sweetness filled my mouth and she watched me lick the edges. There was so much desire in her eyes, as if I was a piece of candy myself and she wanted to eat me completely.
Brushing away my hand that wore the ring pop, she kissed me again, licking and nibbling the sugary strawberry flavor off my lips.
The vibrations from the rubber ducky were almost becoming too intense. My head was starting to throb. I started to push him back a little, but Sarah must have thought I wanted something else. Turning him off, she pulled him out from under my skirt, propped him on the dashboard and slid her hand back under my skirt, where she pushed aside the crotch of my panties.
With her eyes nearly closed, she petted me as if I was one of her little stuffed animals. For a moment it felt strange, as if she was taking this to some weird place in her head, but then she found my clit under its hood. Pressing her fingertip just inside my lips, she got it a little wet and brought it back up to my clit. I gasped as she made little circular motions on top of it, massaging it much the same way she had paid attention to each one of my knuckles during her hand massages.
Every time she made several rotations, she dipped down further inside me to remoisten her fingertip. She was getting so close to actually entering me that I was beginning to squirm with anticipation.
The moment she entered me, she stayed there, sliding in one finger and then two. Keeping her thumb on my clit, she slowly finger-fucked me. My breath caught short. It was hard not to clamp my thighs down around her hand.
“Suck the ring,” she said. “I want to hear it.”
With the ring pop back in my mouth, I sucked loudly. She moaned and pressed her lips back to my neck. I could feel her teeth against my skin and the candy. She cracked the little sugar disks with her teeth, the thread getting moist as she reached over with her free hand and gave my breast a hard squeeze.
Suddenly, I felt the sensation of my clit exploding like a firecracker. It was unlike anything I had felt before.
Pow!
My entire body shuddered as the sharp feeling washed over my skin, and then just as quickly as it had come, it was gone.
Sarah was so caught up in what she was doing she hadn’t even noticed that I had an orgasm. Her fingers were trying to go even deeper inside me. It was too much. I was becoming too overstimulated. I could feel my blood pressure beginning to pound in my ears. I was going to get a migraine any second if she kept it up.
“Stop,” I cried.
She didn’t stop.
Pushing my hands against her, I tried to break her grip on me.
“Let go of me,” I cried.
Suddenly, there was a rap on the window. We stopped and looked up. To my horror, our supervisor stood at the passenger door, a concerned look on her face. She must have heard my cries.
“Are you all right?” she asked me through the glass.
Quickly, Sarah jerked her hand away from under my skirt. Smoothing down my clothes, I rolled down the window, wondering what I looked like—out of breath, face flushed and clothes disheveled. Not to mention the half-eaten candy necklace around my neck and a soaking wet ring pop on my hand.
Words failed me as my gaze met hers.
“We’re playing with her rubber duck,” Sarah volunteered.
Our supervisor gave me a quizzical look. I knew what she was thinking. I had asked to have my desk moved because I wasn’t getting along with Sarah, and now here I was in her car, candy everywhere, doing who knew what with her.
Still, I could salvage this. I could tell her that Sarah was still bothering me, but glancing over at Sarah as she pushed her glasses back onto her face, I felt a surprising affection for her.
Picking up the rubber duck, I wiggled it in the air at our supervisor.
“Quack,” I said.
FRENCH HANDWRITING
Zoë Alexandra
It is pouring buckets in front of Beatrice’s steps where I sit beneath the overhang, pants already soaked at their bottoms. I am used to this. Bike messengers must learn to bear the elements. Bea is not home but her telephone number is smudged on the paper so I can’t quite make it out now. I want to call her. The pay phone is a block away. I could walk there and get even wetter, breathe into the receiver, say her name as if it is a blessing, a mantra.
When I was little my mother used to tell me to cross my legs. The skirt was made of wool and scratched the insides of my thighs. Catholic school is the best place to meet whores or become a lesbian. I did both. In the bathroom I used to bum cigarettes from this blonde girl named Molly. I used to smell the tips of her hair as she walked away. They smelled like fresh mangoes and blackberry sherbet. She would always play hard to get. I would tell her I had to show her something important. It was in the bathroom stall. She would come in there with me, rub against the front of my skirt, kiss the insides of my wrists and bite my neck like a vampire. That bitch was crazy but I loved her. But this isn’t about Molly, it’s about Beatrice.
I met Beatrice on the R train. My hands were locked around the pole I was holding on to. When the train stopped short, my bike would jostle around and so would I. She appeared like some fucking angel. Black hair, straight as a pin and the skinniest thighs I’ve ever seen. Her voice was paper thin and she carried a large backpack that wasn’t much bigger than she was.
“Can I hold on here?” she asked.
I nodded. I was thinking about Molly. Molly’s lips were bubble gum pink and her tongue tasted like oil pastels. I never tasted oil pastels but I’m sure that’s what they’d taste like. Beatrice held on next to me. Her hand brushed against mine. It was rough like sandpaper. My stop came. Astor Place. Beatrice spit and followed me out the door. I was halfway down the block before I noticed her there. She lit a half-smoked cigarette and looked up at me with those huge blue doe eyes.
“You have a buck?” she asked.
I did have a buck, but I didn’t want to just give it away.
“What do I get if I give you a buck?” I asked. She shrugged before she spoke.
“I work on Forty-second Street, you could give me a ride there on your bike and I could show you something.”
I thought about it. I had errands to run. I had to stop on Waverly Place and then 42nd Street.
“If you want to run my errands with me you could tag along,” I said.
I amazed myself with how agreeable I was being. I was a stone-cold butch dyke and I made no apologies for it. I didn’t need some cute femme to come along and fuck up my shit.
“Get on,” I said and she did. I gave her my helmet which was too big for her tiny head and we rode on into the night. Well, actually it wasn’t the night. It was midday, but riding off into the night sounds better so for this purpose we’ll say it was the night.
I did my drop-offs and pickups and then we flew down Sixth Avenue and onto 42nd Street until we reached the Kitten Inn.
Beatrice walked in and I followed her, past a mean-looking bouncer with enormous snake tattoos across his arms, and into the dressing room. She put on these shiny red platform heels and a big blonde wig that made her look like Dolly Parton without the huge breasts.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Ian,” I said.
“That’s a boy’s name,” she answered.
“No,” I said. “It’s my name.” I think she understood.
“I’m Beatrice,” she said. “But here, I’m Venus.”
I looked up at her as she slipped into a rhinestone thong and bra. Her arm had a giant heart tattoo on it. I grabbed a sharpie out of my pocket and wrote my name inside of it. “Now, you’re mine.” I said. She smiled and nodded. Her two front teeth were crooked like swans’ necks. It made her look even prettier. She smacked her lips together and applied vampire-red lipstick to them. She walked over to me, reached down my pants and sighed. She had found it, the softee. Okay, so it’s not mine and maybe I do have a Napoleon complex but it was necessary to maintain a sense of power which only the softee could provide.
“Sorry, it’s not hard,” I said. “I wish it was but I left that one at home. I didn’t plan on meeting you today.”
“It’s okay.”
An older woman came over and nudged Beatrice’s shoulders. “Venus, you’re on in four,” she said. The woman was thick and fat like a cheeseburger. Her eyes were lined in kohl and she was wearing very unflattering giant fake eyelashes.
When Beatrice went out into the box, I decided to leave. The box was impersonal, clear with a bubble machine inside that blew tiny bubbles into the girls’ hair as they danced around. The windows in the box were two-way so they could see out, could watch who was watching them.
Sadie always waited for me, on the bench smack-dab in the middle of Washington Square Park. Her blonde wig sometimes sat crookedly on her head but she was beautiful. There was no way around that. Her ample thighs and voluptuous breasts made her more woman than most actual women. She opened up her red patent leather purse and pulled out a heart-shaped flask, took a long swig and held it out to me.
“It’ll do you good,” she said as she lit a Gauloise. Sadie would only smoke French cigarettes. “Live like the French, die like the French,” she’d say. They were hard to get. There was a tiny tobacco shop on Madison Avenue that had them, but whenever Sadie walked the blocks between Park Avenue and Madison Avenue it was always like a scene from
Pretty
Woman
. “I’m just waiting for them to tell me I can’t shop here,” she’d say.
Sadie sighed; her dress was made out of that bizarre hologram material and had tiny comic book characters saying racy things like,
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.
It glimmered under the streetlight.
“You know what I want more than anything?” Sadie began.
I shrugged.
“I want a sugar daddy to take me shopping. I saw this show on television. It tells you how to be a gold digger. See, you have a guy take you out to eat near a store you like. Then you walk by the shop and say, ‘God I love that dress, but I could never afford it.’ When he offers to buy it for you, which he inevitably will as this is a test to see how much of a man—a provider—he is, you have to say, ‘You can’t buy that for me, it’s way too expensive.’ Then of course he buys the dress. It’s all a big game,” she said before laughing so hard it caused her to make this terribly guttural cough.
It was getting late. I decided I should probably try to pick Beatrice up from work, so I kissed Sadie’s cold cheek and got back on my bicycle.
The door guy took my three dollar entrance fee, and I walked down the dark corridor. The place was made to make its patrons feel smarmy and perverted. The passageway led to the booths. There was a plump Italian-looking girl bending over in her box, thrusting and shaking like a robotic doll. I tossed a dollar through the crack in the window. She smiled and came toward me, blew me a kiss and proceeded to spread her legs. I asked her if Beatrice was here but she shrugged as if she couldn’t hear me. I grabbed a receipt from my bag and wrote
Is Venus here?
on it. She pointed to the dressing room.
I knocked on the door and a high-pitched voice said, “Just a minute.” The door swung open and a young-looking girl in cutoff shorts stared blankly at me.
“Is Venus here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Come in and look around if you want.”
The vanity mirror with the big fluorescent lights stung my eyes. There was a tiny blue piece of paper tucked into its corner. I picked it up. The letters were written in perfect cursive. The kind of handwriting you thought only French girls had. It said:
Ian. Come meet me in Union Square on the steps facing 14th Street.
I got back on my bike and pedaled hard and fast. I was going to be late. I sped through intersections and some taxicab driver screamed, “Watch out you fucking dyke!” but I didn’t care. For once I wasn’t thinking about Molly. I was thinking about Beatrice. The park was quiet and dead. There was a homeless guy asleep on the bench but other than that it was completely silent. I walked to the steps and saw her. Her back was turned to me but her black bob made her look like a 1920s film star. She was drinking a 40 from a crumpled paper bag. I held in that moment for a second before approaching her. When she saw me she looked up and held out the 40 to me. I took a sip. It was slightly warm and tasted like piss but I was nervous and it helped.
“So how come you wanted me to meet you here?” I asked.
“Well…” she said, pulling out a wad of dollar bills. “Do you think this is enough to take a plane?”
I took another sip of beer.
“A plane to where?” I asked.
“To France?” she asked.
“Probably not,” I answered. I felt bad disappointing her like that.
She closed her eyes then opened them looking me dead-on. She had such cartoonish blue eyes like Betty Boop or something and her lips were so small and pouty, like if she asked she could have whatever she wanted. No one could say no to her.
“Je suis morte parce que je ne ressens pas de désir. Le désir me manque parce que je pense posséder. Je pense posséder parce que je n’essaie meme pas de donner. Lorsqu’on essaie de donner, on se rend compte que l’on a rien. Comme on a rien, on essaie de donner de soi, et alors on se rend compte que l’on n’est rien. Quand on est rien, on désire devenir. C’est à ce moment là que l’on commence à vivre”
she said. “It’s broken French, but I will tell you what it means. ‘I am dead because I lack desire. I lack desire because I think I possess. I think I possess because I do not try to give. In trying to give, you see that you have nothing. Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself. Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing. Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become. In desiring to become, you begin to live.’”
I smiled.