She was right again. The stars twinkled like diamonds on black felt in a Tiffany showcase. I reclined against the side of the hot tub, letting the thundering jets massage my upper back.
“Remember that stud hockey player, Rob Milner? I recently ran into him at a gay bar in Boston.”
“Really?” Katrina said. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since he made a ritual out of shoving boys into lockers and calling them faggots. Remember Lucinda Coleman? I always thought she was a lesbian.”
“I wish,” I said. “I had the biggest crush on her all through high school.”
“Her?” she screeched, nearly piercing my eardrum. “She was the biggest bitch in cleats—softball goddess, prom queen. ‘Hi, Purina, meow, meow,’ she always said to me in front of everyone. God, I hated her.”
“She was still hot.”
Katrina sipped her pinot noir and giggled. “I hope she developed cankles.”
Our cackling over Lucy Coleman’s cankles drowned out the shrieks of cicadas echoing in the night. I stretched my leg out midlaughter and accidentally brushed up against Katrina’s. She hadn’t moved hers, and since I was feeling my third Corona with lime, this time neither had I.
“How does one know one’s gay?” she asked with the graveness of Diane Sawyer probing a death-row inmate.
I laughed. “What do you mean? You just know.”
“Then what about all those women who get married and have kids, then end up divorcing the guy for a woman?”
“Do you know any of those women personally?”
“Yeah, Gail, my secretary. Married seventeen years and now she’s with Maria. She said she had no idea until her twins were in high school.”
I shrugged and sipped my beer. “Clearly, it’s different for everyone. Why are you asking me this?”
She absently ran her fingers over the surface of the bubbly water.
“Kat, what’s going on?”
“I’ve just been very contemplative lately—since my divorce, your breakup with Tara.” She paused, staring out into the night sky. “I’ve also been wondering why my feelings for you seem different now.”
“Different? How?”
“Well, for one thing, I don’t want you to leave.”
Suddenly, my head was spinning and it wasn’t from the beer.
“And the other thing?”
“I want to know what it’s like to kiss you.”
A chill shot through me in the hot water. She wasn’t kidding, but I still couldn’t grasp it as true. “Shut the hell up,” I said laughing as I flicked water in her face.
She giggled and shoved a palm full of water back at me. “You’re such a bitch. You know I could drown you and bury your body in the cliff dwellings, and no one would ever know.”
Challenging her with a smug look, I said, “Yeah, right. Girly little you thinks she can take on a butch dyke like me and win?”
She laughed, enjoying the teasing. “You’re not butch, and if I recall, I beat your ass getting up that mountain. You were huffing and puffing like the Little Engine that Could.”
“Oh, yeah?” Suddenly, we were in ninth grade all over again. I grabbed her by her calf and yanked her under the water. When she surfaced, she pushed me back onto the seat and straddled my lap, double-handing water in my face. I finally gathered her hands and when the water drained from my eyes, there was her taut, tanned stomach staring me in the face. She had an amazing, athletic body. It’s no wonder she kicked my ass up that mountain.
“What? Do you want me or something?” she joked, trying to twist her wet wrists from my grip.
“Said the woman sitting in my lap,” I replied through giggles. Katrina was making me throb like crazy, but I didn’t want her to get off me. Her skin felt so good rubbing over my thighs in the water.
She wrenched free from me but didn’t move, just stared into my water-clouded eyes as we both caught our breath. Suddenly, her wet lips met mine. She braced herself against the side of the hot tub, fencing me in with dripping arms, her kisses light, tentative, unbelievably tantalizing. I struggled to restrain myself from devouring her.
“I like this,” she whispered and kissed me harder, more brazen and sensual.
I placed both hands around her waist, ever so gently, in case she suddenly realized what she was doing and wanted to spring out of there.
She began caressing my arms, like they were too hot to touch. She wanted to but was afraid she might get burned.
I slipped my tongue in her mouth, just slightly, and then out of nowhere, hers plunged in. It was full on, open-mouthed making out with my best friend, straight friend, and I couldn’t say which one of us was more bewildered by the turn of events.
My hands crept up her ribs toward her bikini top, waiting to be pushed away. The intense arousal washed away any of my remaining inhibitions. As I slowly pulled the string of her top open in back, she moaned softly. Her breasts were cool from the water and night breeze as I cupped them and gently squeezed. I rolled my fingers around her jutting nipples, making them even harder.
“I can’t believe how turned on I am,” she said. She rubbed herself over my thigh as I played with her nipples and flicked them with my tongue.
My pulsating clit made me squirm in my bikini. The entire scene revved me up like a teenager getting some action in a public place—I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, but it felt too good to stop.
I looked up at her pleasured face and said, “Let me give you the whole tour.”
She released her grip around my neck and allowed me to navigate her through the water to her side of the tub. I slipped off her bikini bottom and lifted her to my mouth. Cradling her ass in my hands, I dove into her pussy, eating her slowly, patiently, making sure she got the most out of her first experience. Secretly, I hoped to spoil her for every man after me.
“Oh, Ally,” she sighed, “this feels so good.” She cranked her head back against the side of the tub and wrapped her legs around my neck, letting my arms support the entire weight of her body. Her round, glistening breasts bobbed in and out of the water like buoys, nipples reaching skyward.
Her whimpers and short, uneven breaths kept me apprised of every inch closer she got to climaxing. I swirled my tongue around her clit, sucking and licking, until her moans threatened to disturb the neighbors about a half mile away on each side.
As she lost herself in uninhibited groans and grunts of pleasure, to my surprise, I felt my own throbbing building toward climax. The growing sensation began distracting me until Katrina clutched the side of the tub and cried out, “Oh, Ally, oh, god.”
We came together in explosive, effervescent ecstasy.
Still naked and glistening, she raked her fingers through her wet hair and sighed deeply. “Damn, why did we wait so long to do that?”
“Because I thought you were straight.”
“I did too.” She slipped on her bathing suit and got out of the tub. “I’m gonna take a shower. Just shut it down when you’re through.”
“Katrina, are you all right?”
She tightened the belt around her mini terry-cloth robe. “I think I might be gay.”
I wanted to reassure her. “Just because you had one experience doesn’t mean you’re gay.”
“What if I want you to meet me in my bedroom in twenty minutes?”
I smiled—big. “Then I guess we’ll have to discuss the matter in more detail tomorrow morning.”
“The scented candles are on my bookshelf.”
Over the last two days of my vacation, we were noticeably low-key. Although we enjoyed an intense, extremely satisfying all-nighter, neither one of us was brave enough to face the emotional fallout. Katrina and I still joked around and had fun, but I hated the idea of leaving us an unfinished book and having to imagine the ending.