Reading erotica, it often seems to me that many writers don't actually seem to know much about actual sex, rather than writing about it, and it comes across as artificial. "Star", about whom I'll write in this episode of my memoirs, had plenty of experience of hetero sex, but had fought shy of writing lesbian scenes for this reason. After our two weeks together, though, she is now adept at writing them as well. Her readers can thank me for that.
Her flight had been delayed the previous night, and I let her lie in late before calling her hotel.
Apparently I wasn’t quite late enough. Her voice was thick and muddy with sleep on the phone.
“ ‘Ullo?”
“Your escort awaits, ma’am,” I said.
“Juliana!” I could hear the sudden surge of energy in her voice, as though she’d only actually woken up just now. “Is that you? Really you?”
“Kittykat,” I said, grinning with pleasure into the phone. “Were you expecting someone else?”
“I can’t wait to meet you. When are you coming over?”
I went to the window and looked out over the city. In the distance, I could see her hotel, a block of grey and white concrete towering over the skyline. Perhaps we were looking at each other across the kilometres, all unknowing. “You tell me. I await your pleasure.”
“Come over right now. I’ll go have a bath and freshen up.”
I looked down at the street and estimated the time it would take from the traffic conditions. “I’ll be there in three quarters of an hour.”
Driving across the city, I felt a pleasant tingling in my breasts as the distance between us shrank with each turn of the tyres. We’d met online, in a writing group on a website now long dead. I’d not fit in particularly well with the rest of the members of the group; people who apparently wrote only for the sake of the praise of other members, not to improve their own writing or give honest criticism which might help me improve. I’d been on the point of quitting the group altogether when I’d got a private message from her.
I still recall frowning at the computer screen as I read the name on the message. Star? Who on earth was Star? Was this some kind of scam? I was on the verge of deleting it unread, and then decided to open it anyway. If it was a scammer, I might at least get some harmless fun out of stringing him or her along.
It wasn’t a scammer. “Hi,” she wrote. “We haven’t met before. I’ve been busy at work these last weeks and didn’t have much time to come online – so I only just got the chance to read your submissions. They caught my attention at once. We need to talk.”
We talked. “This group isn’t much, I know,” she said. “I don’t like the narcissists much either. They seem to demand worship rather than actual readership, if you know what I mean.”
I’d chuckled when I’d read that. It was exactly what I’d been thinking, only I hadn’t put it into so many words. “Besides, they’re mostly prudes and get offended if I get racy, so I have to tone it down,” she added.
“Racy?” I’d asked. “What do you mean?”
“I write a lot of erotica,” she’d informed me. “I like sex, and I like writing about it. You aren’t put off by that, are you?”
This time I’d laughed aloud. Put off by erotica! “Not at all,” I’d assured her. “Why would I be?”
“Good. I’m glad you aren’t. So let’s do this: we’ll ignore the rest of these peoples’ carping and carry on with reading each other and commenting on how we can make our writing better. Is that all right?”
“That’s more than all right,” I’d said.
That had been years ago. Shortly after, the moderator of the writing group had thrown a hissy fit and blocked us both without a word of explanation, which didn’t matter much because by then we were communicating with each other mostly by private messages and email anyway. She was an excellent editor, with a keen eye for redundant verbiage and a good sense of how a story might be improved. What I brought to the table I really didn’t know; it seemed to me that her stories were mostly beyond criticism, but she assured me that I was a great help.
“If you say it’s all right,” she told me once, “I know it’s all right. Do you get my meaning?”
Back then we’d both been in other relationships; relationships, as it happened, which were crumbling to dust. Hers ended first, in a messy divorce, and I let her sob on my virtual shoulder until the ache eventually faded and she healed. My own boyfriend, meanwhile, decided, after five months together, that I wasn’t the person he wanted to share his bed with, and dumped me by text message while I was at work; and you can imagine what that made me feel like. It was Star who’d held out a hand to pull me out. (Regular readers of this series will be well aware that Star is not her real name.)
“You’ve got to live again,” she’d said. “Find pleasure in what is, not what was.”
“How?”
“Let’s write a story together.”
And so, little by little, I came back into the light. By then I’d named Star “Kittykat”; I have an inveterate habit of giving personal nicknames to people I like, nicknames which have meaning only for me. She’d laughed when I’d called her that for the first time. (And Kittykat isn’t the actual nickname I gave her, either, in case anyone’s wondering.)
“Kittykat? Why Kittykat? Do I look like a Kittykat to you?”
“What’s a Kittykat supposed to look like?” I’d challenged. “Anyway, you’re Kittykat now, so you might as well get used to it.”
And then there was a time when we’d both got very busy with work and other things, and our conversations had slackened off. When I had a little time free, she had none; when she was free, I wasn’t. Months passed, and dragged on for almost a year.
One evening I found myself sitting in front of my computer, going through old files, when I found that first story we’d written together, and it sent a pang through me. I’d gone online and straight to my email account, meaning to write her a mail.
An email from her was already there. “Thinking of you...” it began.
“I’m finally done with all this,” she wrote. “All the craziness, the months of insanity, it’s all over. Now, at last, I can take this holiday I’ve been dreaming of for years. And guess where I want to go? Will you make yourself free to spend time with me?”
“Whenever you want,” I’d replied at once. “Your wish is my command, my queen.”
She knew, of course, that I was bisexual, and said that though she’d only ever had sex with men, she had often wondered what it might be like to sleep with a woman. She’d even been made advances to by women a couple of times, but backed out because she wasn’t sure what to do.
“Also,” she said, “I’m used to being naked with men, but I’m not certain what it’d be like to strip in front of a woman. Women can be so judgemental, and I’m getting old and fat.”
“I won’t be judgemental,” I promised her. “Why don’t you send me a couple of nude photos if you want an honest opinion?”
After some hesitation, she did. One was of her standing naked in front of a fireplace, hands behind her head to thrust her breasts forward, with a shy smile on her face. The other was from below and between her thighs, looking up past her vulva at her face framed by her breasts, nipples outthrust.
“You’re extremely good looking,” I assured her with complete honesty. The sight of her labia, dark brown and peeking out from her pubic hair, had made me go wet between the legs. “You don’t have a thing to worry about.”
“At least I won’t be ashamed if I need to get naked in front of you,” she responded. “You’ve seen everything already.”
The rush of memories had occupied me right across town, so that the usual insane traffic hadn’t even exasperated me as it usually did. When I drew up at the hotel, the pleasant tingling of anticipation had intensified into a hammering of my heart. Absurdly, I felt like a teenager on her first date. I took a deep breath to calm down before reaching for my mobile phone.
“I’m here,” I said when she replied. “Are you ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” she said. “I’m coming down.”
I was waiting in the lobby when she emerged from the lift. The photos I’d seen of her, clothed and otherwise, hadn’t done her justice, though, not fully; they hadn’t shown how regal she was, how she carried herself like an empress. An empress of the night, her black skin offset by the green and purple dress she wore.
Then she saw me and the almost intimidating queenly air was gone, wiped away by a huge grin. “Juliana! There you are at last.”
I held out my arms and she rushed into them, hugging me tight. It had been a very long time since I’d hugged someone, and I held her, taking in the pleasure of feeling her warmth, the smell of her hair and perfume, and the pressure of her breasts against mine.
“Let’s go,” she said at last, breaking the embrace. “We’ll go eat something first. I’m starving.”
That’s how the day started. We had breakfast sitting opposite each other in a little cafe, the waitress darting puzzled looks our way. She was probably wondering what we were doing together, the tall black woman and the younger brown woman who’d kicked off her sandals as soon as she’d sat down. We ignored her, ate our pastries and drank our Cappuccinos.
I don’t recall much of that first conversation; perhaps I might have seemed stupid to her. I just sat across her, listening to her husky voice, telling myself that after a long, long time I was with a friend, someone I could be comfortable with, someone I didn’t have to always feel as though I was walking on eggshells around.
At one point she put her hand on the table, and I reached out and took it, almost afraid that she would snatch it away. She let me hold it, and even squeezed my fingers gently.
“Don’t look so tense,” she said. “I’m not going to bite.”
Later we drove around the city. It was only the first day of her holiday, and we had the whole two weeks ahead of us, so we didn’t enter any of the museums and the old cathedral which stood to the south, its huge spire always reminding me of a titanic shark fin cruising out to sea. And then we drove down to the beach out of town, where the waters of the ocean heaved back and forth and crashed ceaselessly on the shore.
She was surprised at the beach. “Why, it’s almost deserted!”
“That’s why I brought you to this one. It’s not a tourist trap...yet.”
She loved the beach. She lay in the sand and made angels with her arms and legs, laughing. She made a small sand castle with as much glee as a child, and put a tiny pebble on top. “That’s the king,” she said. The king promptly fell off his perch and the castle crumbled back into sand.
“And that,” she informed me solemnly, “is a revolution.”
I took photos of her standing in the surf, laughing and holding her arms out as the waves crashed around her bare feet. We took selfies, holding the camera at arm’s length as we held each other close. I was very conscious of the swell of her breast touching mine.
She prodded my foot with her toes. “Closer,” she said, pressing her breast into me. “You aren’t fully in the frame. That’s it.”
My knickers were uncomfortably soaked by the time she broke the embrace. “Are you all right?” she asked me. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing wrong,” I said. My head was still swimming a bit and I needed to get myself under control. “How about going to a movie?”
So we went to watch something. It doesn’t matter what it was. The theatre was mostly empty, and the last three rows were totally unoccupied except for the two of us.
She sighed and laid her head on my shoulder, wrapping her arm round mine. “I’m so glad I came,” she murmured. “It feels so good to be with you.”
I could feel her cheek, nuzzling the side of my neck, and wondered if she could feel the thundering of my heart. “I’m happy you came, too,” I said inadequately.
The actress on the screen, Nordic to the fingernails, pulled off her shirt. Her breasts were small and pert, with round pink nipples reminiscent of little rosebuds. Her tiny shorts followed, revealing, for an instant before she turned away, a bare cleft like a sideways smile.
“She looks almost prepubescent,” Kitty said in my ear. “Do you like your women shaved or natural?”
My throat was so dry that I had to wet my lips before I could murmur an answer. “Doesn’t matter to me, really,” I said. “As long as she’s comfortable with who she is, it’s fine.”
“And...” I felt her hesitation, her nerving herself up to ask. “Just, er, out of curiosity, since I haven’t seen you unclothed...”
“I got a Brazilian wax done yesterday,” I said. I had got it done specifically for her visit, but I didn’t tell her that. “It’s more convenient when I’m in a bikini.”
“I can’t wear a bikini,” she said mournfully. “I’m too fat.”
“You’re fine for me,” I assured her. The Nordic actress was preening in front of a mirror, her hands cradling her breasts, and then slipped between her legs as she pretended to masturbate. Her gasps of simulated pleasure were so artificial that they were off putting rather than erotic. I found myself wondering what Kitty’s face would look like in arousal and orgasm. “You’re much sexier than that woman on the screen, and I’m seriously having a hard time keeping my hands off you. If only you knew...”
I didn’t get to finish the sentence. Kittykat’s face shifted on my shoulder, her cheek sliding up mine, towards the corner of my mouth. I turned to her, our lips merging, slipping over and around each other. Her tongue, warm, moist, alive, found mine.
How long that kiss lasted I have no idea. It seemed to go on forever and ever. It was as though it was the first time I’d ever been kissed. When we finally broke for a breath, her eyes were shining.
“My word,” she breathed. “Oh my word.”
“I...” I opened my mouth to say something, I don’t know what, to explain, perhaps even to apologise. But she leaned across and put her finger on my lips.
“Not a word,” she said. “Let’s go. I can’t bear another minute.”
“Go where?”
Kittykat smiled, a slow wide warm smile. “I believe the correct form of the question is, ‘your place or mine?’ “
As we drove back to my flat, she stroked my thigh with her hand, her fingertips grazing the insides of my thighs. “It’s been a while since I last had sex,” she said. “And now I’m so wet my knickers are soaked.”
I didn’t trust myself to reply.
“I hope you don’t have any plans for the evening,” she said.
“No other plans,” I managed.
“Great.” She pressed her fingers to the joining of my legs. “I love feeling this. It’s so warm. I never knew touching another woman would be so wet and warm.”
I finally found my voice as we were riding the lift up to my flat. “I’ve a bottle of wine, all chilled and ready. You like red, right?”
“Screw the wine,” she said. “The wine will wait. I want you, and I can’t wait.”
I fumbled the lock open and we entered my flat. The door had hardly clicked shut behind us and she was in my arms.
“Kiss me,” she said urgently. “Kiss me hard.”
We kissed, our lips crushed together so tightly I could feel her teeth against mine. Her tongue and mine danced, pressing and touching and tasting each other. Her heavy breasts pushed against mine, her hands roved up and down my back.
“God,” she moaned into my mouth. “You can kiss, can’t you? Take me to your bedroom and fuck me.”
We kissed all the way down the living room to the bedroom. Her hands were busy, pulling my T-shirt out of my slacks, pushing them down off my hips. “Take off my dress,” she said urgently.
The green and purple outfit hit the floor with a rustle of silk. She kicked off her shoes, hooked one leg round my calf, and pushed me down on the bed on my back. Contained only by her bra, her heavy breasts hung over me. I felt her hands, tugging impatiently, and my knickers slipped down my legs and off my feet. She stood looking down at me.
“You’re so lovely,” she said, crouching down between my legs. “I’ve often imagined what you might look like naked but I never really thought you’d look like this.”
“You could have asked me to send you a photo,” I told her. “You’d have known then.”
“I was embarrassed to,” Kittykat said. Her fingers fluttered between my legs, spreading open my vulva. “What should I do now?”
“It’s better that I do it to you,” I said. “Then you can do the same to me. After all, I’m the experienced one here.”
“Um.” Kittykat slid up the bed and crawled up me, her hands fluttering over my belly and breasts. I raised myself off the bed so I could take my bra off. “You feel so good,” she said, looking down into my face. “So warm.”
She did, too. My hands slipped under her bra. Her nipples were large and stiff with excitement.
“Wait a second,” Kittykat said, rising. “Let me take this damned thing off.”
In the amber light of the bedroom, her body was like a sculpted statue of mahogany. The curve of her back, the hollow limned by the reflected light, arched gracefully down to her flared hips, which tapered down to her surprisingly elegant thighs. Her arms, fingers long and dextrous, unhooking the bra and flicking it away, clad now only in her pale pink knickers. Her bare breasts swung, drawing my eyes after them. She slid onto the bed, rubbing her stiff nipples up my torso as she lay beside me. Her hand touched my cleft, unsurely, and then moved away.
I pushed myself down the bed until my face was level with her breasts, and touched the tip of one nipple with my tongue. She shivered. “Oh. That feels...oh.”
I took the nipple in my mouth, gently sucking, and pushed her breasts together so I could move my mouth from one nipple to the other and back again. Her hands were on the back of my head, rhythmically pushing my mouth on to her breasts. I could feel her chest rise and fall with the increased pace of her excited breathing.
“Harder,” she murmured, pushing down on my head. “Suck harder”.
As I sucked on her erect nipples, lashing my tongue around the nubs of her areolas, I slipped one hand down the gentle swell of her belly to the soaked fabric of her knickers. Through the thin cloth I could feel the wet heat of her sex. I passed my fingers inside the waist of the underwear and down the groove of her cleft. Her labia parted before my fingers, and the soft moist tunnel of her vagina enfolded them. I pushed them in and out while I sucked on her nipples, but the little undergarment limited my movement. She arched her back.
“Please,” I thought I heard her murmur. “Come on, come on. Please.”
Trailing kisses down her belly, pausing briefly to dip my tongue into the dimple of her navel, I pushed myself down between her thighs. I could smell her sex now, a salty warm tang. It had been a while since I’d last been with a woman and I’d desperately missed that unique aroma. I kissed and nibbled the insides of her thighs, edging up towards the knickers. She bucked her hips.
“Get them off me,” she whispered.
Hooking my fingers on the waistband, I pulled them down. The fabric was so soaked with her juices that the cloth stuck briefly to her tissues. She sighed as they slid down her thighs and fell away from her body. Her pubic hair was a dark thick triangle between her spread legs.
As I parted her labia with my fingers, her clitoris sprang out at me, a nub like a little turret pushing out of the top of her cleft. When I touched it with the tip of my tongue she almost jumped. “God!”
“Relax,” I said, remembering that this was her first time with a woman. “Just relax and enjoy what I’m doing to you.” Her vagina was deep pink shading to purple, reminding me of a hibiscus flower, the tissues slick with her moisture. I put my fingertip at the tip of her clitoris and began moving it in semicircles. She sighed and laid her head back, her breasts rising and falling fast. Moisture dripped out of her vagina to form tiny drops on her labia.
“God,” she repeated. “Oh god.”
“It’s just the beginning.” I pointed and stiffened my tongue and began licking up and down her cleft, dipping into her vestibule and vagina to taste her salty juices before going back to her labia again. She clamped her thighs around my head and began to heave, her hips rising and falling in time to my licks.
It was time. She was almost at her orgasm, I could feel it. I put my tongue on the top of her cleft, flicking it side to side across her clitoris. With a cry, she came, shuddering all over as she bucked frantically, thrusting her vulva against my mouth, grinding her hips side to side. On and on her orgasm went, seeming to reduce in intensity only long enough to let us both catch a breath before it flared again. On and on, until we both lost all sense of time. Her vagina, my tongue, her thighs around my head, her soft cries, the drumming of her bare heels on my back, these were the only things in the world. And yet she came, again and again.
At last it was over. Her thighs loosened their grip and fell apart. She lay on her back on the bed, gazing up at the ceiling, a stunned expression on her face. Her breasts rose and fell as she gasped for air.
“Kittykat?” I asked. “Are you all right?”
Her lips hardly moved. “That was...I never knew it could be like this. It was never like this before.”
“We’re just getting started,” I said. Putting my right middle finger in my mouth to moisten it, I slid it – my hand palm-upwards – into her vagina. Her tunnel, hot and moist, clutched at me. She gasped.
“Am I hurting you?” I asked. “Let me know if I hurt you.”
“No, no,” she said quickly. “Don’t stop.”
“I won’t,” I promised her. My finger began stroking back and forth, rubbing inside her. Suddenly I found what I was looking for as she moaned and went rigid. I began pressing my fingertip rhythmically on the front wall of her vagina, rubbing it back and forth, and she began thrashing, her hands clutching at the bedspread as she cried out and her hips bucked against my hand so hard I had difficulty keeping my finger inside her.
“What was that?” she whispered when she’d finally stopped coming. “What on earth was that?”
“Your G-spot,” I said. “Here it is.” I pushed in another finger, in a corkscrew motion, and rubbed the backs of my fingernails against it. She shuddered.
“Give me a chance to catch my breath,” she said. “You don’t want to orgasm me to death right at the start.”
“Not a chance of that,” I laughed. “I need to get off, too.” Taking my fingers out of her vagina, I took a pillow and nudged it under her hips so that they were raised off the bed. I then crawled up her body, my nipples rubbing on her belly, then knelt over her and lifted one of my legs over hers.
“Spread your legs,” I commanded. “As widely as possible. Then hold your vagina open with both hands.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked, obediently spreading her labia apart with her fingers.
“You’ve heard of scissoring, right? Tribadism?” Spreading my own labia apart so that my clitoris bulged out from under its hood, I lowered my vulva to hers. “This is how it’s done.”
It had been a while since I’d scissored with another woman, and I’d forgotten the unique sensation of one’s own moist membranes kissing someone else’s, our labia meeting like mouths. Kittykat, who’d never felt it before, gasped, but I think I did too. Holding myself apart with my fingers, I began rubbing my clitoris against hers, first slowly, and then building a rhythm as I speeded up.
“Try not to move,” I said. “Let me do all the work.” With every thrust of my hips her wet pubic hair rubbed deliciously against my clit. “Let me...” my voice trailed off as I felt the first rush of my orgasm approaching, and then it struck. Crying out, I ground my vulva against hers and was hardly even aware when, with a small scream, she came too. Then my strength gave out and I fell forward on her, our sweat-slick bodies touching.
She held me to her bosom, both of us breathing hard, waiting for our racing hearts to slow down. Her fingers slipped through my hair. “That was incredible,” she said quietly, “I never knew sex could be like this. No wonder you go for women.”
“It’s not always that lesbian sex is better,” I said. “It’s like hetero sex, you have to work at it and practice, and sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s perfect.”
“Oh, right. It must be true what they say – that it’s who you do it with that matters most of all.”
“Also, look at this from the educational point of view,” I grinned. “From now on, you can include lesbian sex scenes in your writing, and knowing what you’re writing about.”
“Ha. I can see the dedication. ‘For Juliana, who showed me how to have sex with a woman.’ That should interest readers.”
“You make it sound as though I used a chalk and whiteboard.” I laughed. “You’ll stay here now, of course? There’s no need to waste money on your hotel.”
“I’ll stay,” she said, with a slight smile. “If you want me to, that is.”
“Shall I show you how much I want you to?” I asked.
“Show me,” she challenged, and I drew her to me again.