Dex felt herself giving up. She would go through with it. She would risk showing everything to Ryan, her passion for a kid, her silliness. She began to undo the pants belt.
"That's better," Gena said. "Show us that lovely body of yours."
Dex ground her teeth and kept silent. She wanted sex. She did not want trouble or complications. Least of all did she want to be teased for her impulsive weakness. What was Gena really driving at? She flicked her glance to the girl's face. Gena, grinning and clicking her tongue, looked like one of the Pepsi People. There was no hint of malice. No hint of evil. No sigh of anything beyond a pure, spirited love of fun. She couldn't believe it. No woman could be so callous. Gena moved forward.
She poked two fingers at the belt buckle and drew it open. Then she grabbed hold of the zipper tab and flicked the zipper open with a twist of the wrist. Her face was so bright and consistently open it seemed that she might have been beating an egg instead of undressing one woman's lover before the other.
Yet Dex knew better. The condition of Gena's nipples gave away the fact that she was just as excited by the prospect of sex as Dex. The thought now crossed her mind as to what they had been doing there naked when she arrived. They must have had sex. They couldn't have stripped down just to wait for her to arrive.
Dex's mind raced through the possibilities. She had assumed that they needed her to have a good time. She was the butch one. But times had changed, if Dex had not. And Gena was not part of the generation that seemed to think in terms of butch and femme, just fucking.
Now as Dex looked at Gena's nipples, they began to harden, as though the look were a touch of fingertips or of tongue.
Dex had tasted that body once, but she knew it well, as well as if she had sucked it up in her mouth over and over. Looking at her firm, young flesh, she could smell her cunt again in her nostrils.
Now, as she devoured Gena with her eyes, the girl was quick to respond. She needed no coaxing into the liquid well of desire. She seemed to live in it constantly. Her feelings were continually balanced on the edge of passion, a flower ready to bloom, heavy inside with the promise of pollen. She was all things. And changeable, depending on the mood of the beholder.
Without protest, Dex let Gena take off the polo shirt and open the bra beneath it.
Gena put her palms to each other nipples and began to rub them in slow, fondling circles.
"How cool they are," Gena said with a hint of admiration.
"Take that for a warning," Ryan put in. "She's steel all the way through. Don't let her kid you for a second."
There was a sulky quality in Ryan's tone. It advertised the fact that she regretted losing out on a good thing. Dex felt a twinge of victory, but it tasted bitter.
Dex refrained from looking at Ryan. Thoughts of Ryan and of their relationship faded beneath the insisting pressure of Gena's touch.
"I can melt steel," Gena's voice was just above a whisper. "Can't I, darling?"
Dex felt herself come alive with a jolt. Gena was showing off. She was demonstrating to Ryan that there was no contest.
Dex put her hands up to grab hold of Gena's wrists and stop the motion exciting her nipples. It was one thing to be had. Quite another to be owned. And, already, Gena was beginning to sound possessive.
"We'll see who melts who first."
She grabbed Gena hard and pressed her tongue into the girl's open and waiting mouth.
CHAPTER SIX
Dex felt Gena's body bend, like a sapling, to her own. But Dex had learned a lesson. She knew that Gena could give her body without yielding up her feelings. This time she wasn't going to be fooled by Gena's eager passion.
Gena's sigh warmed down the side of Dex's neck and seemed to nestle there for a moment, then drift lower along her chest.
"I need you," Gena whispered. "You know that don't you?"
Ryan said, "Hey, none of that." She sounded irritated, as though Gena were reneging on a promise.
Dex reined in her own response. She remembered that there was a conspiracy going against her. She lifted her mouth away from Gena's face.
"I want both of you in the bedroom," Dex said, her voice insistent. It told them both that she would not take no for an answer.
Ryan put her knuckles on her hips. She began to smile the wide, languid smile that showed off her glinting teeth. The professional smile that carne across so well on television. It was a smile that Dex hated, because unhappiness oozed through the dazzle.
"You'd better not argue with me," Dex said to Ryan. "Better play the game, honey."
Dex felt the rise of cruelty from the pit of her gut. A cruelty aimed directly at hurting Ryan. Dex hated herself for whipping into Ryan yet she could not control, did not want to control, herself.
Ryan, still smiling, slunk off toward the bedroom. Dex watched the firm ass wiggling with defiance. This was one of those times when Ryan craved authority. She was ashamed of herself and needed to be told what to do.
Gena put her hand to Dex's cheek and drew the face down again to her own. She plunged her hot pointed tongue into Dex's mouth, wiggling it around provocatively. Dex felt the heat rush up her spine from the wet hollow between her thighs. The girl pulled away, but kept only a few inches between their two faces.
"Don't mind her," Gena said. "She's my friend now. And I understand what you see in her."
Dex laughed aloud. Gena, too, was reading lines from some unwritten skit. And the presumption of her lines was mind-boggling. Any fool could see how a person could love someone as beautiful as Ryan. But no one, especially no kid, could know the depth, the intricacy of that love in a few hours.
"You couldn't possibly understand," Dex barked.
Gena pursed her lips and slid her arms up and down along the sides of Dex's arms.
"Why not?" she said, watching the movement of her own body, how the tips of her erect nipples and the bushy tangle at her crotch grazed Dex's body, teasing her. "Why couldn't I understand?"
"Because you don't know the first thing about love. And if you're lucky, you never will."
"Maybe I could love you," Gena mused, a smile playing in her eyes like sunlight on water.
"Sure," Dex replied. "Sure you could."
Gena flashed annoyance now at the sound of Dex's raw skepticism.
"All right, I'll prove it," Gena flounced.
"You do that."
With amazement at her own capacity for punishment, Dex heard her voice and manner remain aloof. Gena had no inkling that the playfulness, the hard and fast replies, were a facade. She neither saw nor heard the writhing in the pit of Dex's stomach. Dex knew that Gena could not even imagine the half-wild urgency that could drive a person past the barrier of normal sense.
Dex pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth. She felt a burning streak through the rims of her eyelids. With Ryan out of the room, her savageness toward Gena began to rise and grow in strength. She grabbed Gena by one arm and yanked her in close.
"You're hurting," Gena whispered, the smile still playing in her eyes but waveringly uncertain now.
"And I'll hurt you more," Dex breathed.
"Why?"
It was an honest question. Dex swallowed her frustration, aware that not in a thousand years could she answer so that Gena would understand. How could she force Gena to want her? How could she change Gena's disposition from that of a playful child to that of a serious adult? How could she make a baby understand that the firecracker toy was going to explode in her own face?
"Where are you all?" Ryan called from the bedroom.