“Oh.”
“May I?”
I have no will. I have odd presences in my throat and chest. I have a dry mouth and wet eyes.
And this pretty little blond girl reaches out for me like a phototropic plant for the sun, reaches out butterfly arms and a petal mouth, and I close my eyes, I close my eyes, I close my eyes, and our mouths meet.
A voice in the brain: There, see, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t turn you into a handsome prince, it doesn’t do anything but feel a little good. Except that it does in fact do more. It gives peace. It takes all the tension and sends it away somewhere out of sight and out of mind.
Her hands clinging to my shoulders, her head tossed a little back, her eyes half-lidded, her lips parted, curved in the merest shadow of a smile.
I think she is beautiful.
I want to kiss her.
We kiss, and our lips part, and our tongues touch. We slide deeply into a kiss, her tongue in my mouth, our arms around each other. Our breasts touching.
I am filled with a sudden longing to see her body. I want to look at her breasts and between her legs. I want to see all the parts of her body.
And to do what with them? To kiss, to touch, to — what?
She reaches out, opens a button on my blouse. I sit, legs curled under me, while her hands work idly, undoing each button in turn. She puts both hands inside my open blouse and takes my breasts in her hands. I have long since stopped wearing underclothing. Her hands settle on my bare breasts like birds on their nests, and I start to close my eyes but force them to remain open, and my eyes meet hers, and we drink each other like glasses of spiced wine.
“I am in love with you, Jan.”
“Oh, Susan.”
“Mommy. Sister. I love you.”
“God!”
We undress each other, slowly, lingeringly, with many stops to cling together in urgent kisses. I am kissing a girl, my mind notes. I am kissing a girl who is saying that she is in love with me.
Her body, revealed to me in stages, is incredibly beautiful. Skin like cream and honey, like warm living velvet. So rosy pink and clean. Breasts, beautiful luscious pears, and oh, I touch them, and oh, her nipples stiffen against the palms of my thin hands, and oh, she gazes into my eyes, moved by my touch, soft and liquid in her eyes and in her flesh.
Her pubic hair is a tangle of the finest golden fluff, neatly confined to her private parts, not sprawling all over as mine tends to do. I love her body, it is so clean and neat and precise, it has fresh little girl smells to it, I love it.
I want her.
And this revelation, echoing in my head in verbal form, is somehow far more shocking than the fact itself. The idea of wanting a girl is jarring; the reality that one is confronted by this delicious body, that one is healthy enough to respond to its appeal — is acceptable enough.
Life is infinitely easier without words and those thoughts which form in words. Animals fuck in the forest and walk away in stolid contentment without putting words to their actions. Only people need words, and only people have invented the sickness of civilization.
We should all fuck in the forest, like animals.
Nude now, both of us, in the bed, his bed. We have established, through words and gestures, that I am to lie still, that I am to be done to. I am to be the fuckee, the ballee, the suckee, as you will. I am to be soft and moist and passive, and Susan, sweet Susan, is to make love to me.
And so she does.
(Odd, this. I want to put down what happened and how it happened and what it was like. I feel certain that it is very important that I do this. That it is altogether fitting and proper that I should do this. But something stops me. As if this were private — and somehow more private than all the other private things which I have dutifully described and recorded on these pages.
(Do I fancy myself in love with this girl? I don’t think that’s it, and yet, and yet, there is something there, something between us unlike anything between me and, oh, anyone else. Does this mean in some strange way that my fears were well founded, that I have opened myself up to a possibility I dimly foresaw — what stilted prose comes today from this pen! — and that I am indeed a lesbian? No, no, nothing of the sort. Labels are nonsense anyway, and I’m not.
(I am, though, a little different than I was a day ago. Which is understandable, but which also seems in some way to inhibit the flow of ink from this pen.)
To press onward—
I lie on my back, eyes closed. She is partly alongside me, partly on top of me, and we are kissing, or more accurately she is kissing me, her mouth on mine, lips so soft, so infinitely softer than ever a male mouth could be, and our bodies are together, and her breasts touch mine, and our flesh merges all the way down. She is shorter than I am; when she extends her feet, lying on top of me like this, her toes reach to my ankles. I feel the contact there, and the joining of our thighs, and the sweet warmth where our loins do not touch, and the sensation of her pubic hair so beautifully golden, against mine, brushing me, and our bellies touching, fitting one into the other, her convexity into my concavity (or is it the other way around, I confuse the words, concave is like caved in, no?) and her breasts against mine, and our mouths, giving and receiving.
She gives a small pelvic thrust. I arch to meet it, and we touch.
It is like — I was going to write that it is like a plug going into a socket, but the phallic connotation of that metaphor is utterly wrong here, is it not? It is, rather, like the contact of two sockets, but with a great interchange of energy. I think that is what I mean. I am not too sure what I mean.
(Perhaps, Giddings, you ought to let the facts speak for themselves. Metaphor is not your forte, Metafor is not your phorte. Just give us the facts, ma’am.
(Ma’am. Who called me that? Oh, the schmuck with the snow shovel, half a hundred years ago. The connections, unbidden and unwanted, that the mind makes.)
Again and then again she works herself against me, works her pretty blond pussy against me, and then her body glides down mine, but moving so slowly that I would not be aware of the movement were I not so overwhelmingly aware of everything being done by her to me.
She moves downward, and rains kisses on my neck, and kisses the deep hollow of my throat. Her tongue touches the pulse there. She licks me like flame. My hands want to touch her but remain at my sides as if weighted down, as if nailed in place. She moves lower. Her hands are on my breasts and her mouth kisses their tops. She uses her tongue on my breasts, drawing wet lines from the outside to the center, starring each breast with lines radiating outward from the nipples. Each caress is not merely preparation but an act, satisfying and delicious, in and of itself. She spends a long time with my breasts. She becomes wildly involved with my breasts, and while her mouth and hands delight me and excite her as well, her legs straddle my thigh and I feel her pussy against my thigh, wet and warm, and she fucks herself gently against my thigh, so gently, that little moist open clam sucking at me as she rocks herself against me while she sucks my breasts, my breasts.
Oh, God.
I cannot recreate this scene. It hurts me to write it. I can summon up everything, every moment, every touch, every gesture, and I could fill this book all the way to the last page simply with the recollection of her progress down my body with mouth and hands until she magically reaches my secret place and eats me for months until I come like a star going into nova. I could write all of this and use thousands upon thousands of words and still not exhaust what I can recall. It is all still going on in my mind, it is all still happening as it happened then, but I cannot write it.
I must, then, summarize.
So.