Appetites Read online

  Roberta has thoughts, too. “I’ve got an idea!” she declares, emulating Lucy’s stretched-wide surprise-eyes. Her hand flirts with the skirt of my gown. “Why don’t we polish off these sundaes and then finish off these formals?”

  Goosebumps dot my flesh like nonpareils and the ice cream begins to melt.

  I know the feeling.

  I gaze at her. Roberta’s eyes are pitch-black, like musical notes.

  I wonder if my lust looks the same.

  I grin, pull her in, her smile smothering mine as our lips link, and linger.

  Lucy kisses like no one can: strawberries-and-creamy and affectionately mine.

  Soon our gowns are completely demolished, reduced to fragments of fabric. That’s okay—we can always put them back together again.

  Roberta fits my hips between her hands, caressing my sides as she sprinkles kisses onto my skin.

  My fingers paint a Valentine on her back, heart on satin, and she shudders, her groan hushing her giggle.

  The dessert dishes slide halfway across the counter, and I’m reminded of those screwball comedies where some poor heel slips on a banana peel.

  Roberta gestures to the countertop. “Hop on,” she says, and I get right on it, because it would be counterproductive not to.

  Roberta scoops me into her arms. She holds me close, then closer than hot fudge on a sundae.

  Swirls of flesh, like ripples of whipped cream, press against mine as we make love—hands fumbling, words tumbling, inhibitions crumbling.

  I feel woozy. Fizzy, soda pop-type prickles tickle my feet, starting at the soles and whirling toward my ankles.

  There, they turn into something sweeter: little tingle-twitches that hustle along my calves, hurtle through my thighs, and catapult toward my cunt.

  I lean back a little, take in the view. Roberta’s expression is warped and her teeth are gnashed and she looks so authentically beautiful. Lucy always did give good face.

  Roberta’s lips seek my cheek as the pleasure peaks and ruptures like a maraschino cherry.

  I scream, you scream: honey, I’m home.

  Afterward, we cradle one another, limbs laced like a corset, and replicate the Ricardos’ signature smooch: peck, pause, peck, peck, peck.

  “Our bellybuttons are touching,” she says.

  “I know,” I murmur, completely at her Mertzy.

  I know she thinks I’m the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, the living end.

  I know her heart bangs out Babalú every time she sees me.

  I know she wants to hug me and kiss me and wrestle me in a vat of grapes.

  Well, what do you know?

  I love Lucy and she loves me.

  Two Meals and a Funeral

  Foxy Kettir

  Last Valentine's Day was an absolute disaster. I had tried to make my girlfriend of seven years a seven-course French dinner from scratch. One for every year we’d spent together. Even my amuse bouches of handmade, locally sourced pâte on toasted baguette completely failed to amuse Julianna. It probably did not help that I am a vegan and she is a hardcore carnivore. Julianna found my cooking across the board terrifying, but goddamn it, I tried. One would think that would count for something. So what if the kitchen looked like a Category 5 hurricane had hit it?

  The thing is, I’d taken the time to research the recipes, seek out the finest quality ingredients, labored over a hot stove for twelve hours after secretly taking the day off to cook after going through the horrific ordeal of having my legs and pussy waxed by an elderly Vietnamese woman humming to Macarena as she uprooted me, bought her roses and candles and all of that other textbook romantic shit that women are supposed to like.

  Julianna often joked that the dinners I make best are reservations. When she came home from work and I served her with a hand-calligraphed menu and an apéritif, an indistinguishable terror fell across her face. She got as far as the free-range chicken francaise and haricort verts before the vomiting began. By eleven o’clock we were in urgent care. The dinner did not go as planned.

  We were now thirteen months into our inevitable descent into the twilight zone known as Lesbian Bed Death. I think we both had even given up on masturbation three months in. No sex was the new normal. It was best not to dwell on it. There were always hobbies to fill the void. Birdwatching, kettlebell classes, loom weaving, cultivating heirloom seeds in our garden...anything to distract us from the fact that we had stopped fucking. It wasn’t deliberate per se. Julianna had an ovary removed some months back and was sore down there. My back went out once. It was a never ending parade of medical emergencies and just the trappings of busy lives, busy careers, long overscheduled weekends, weeklong visits from friends, family get-togethers, favorite shows on TV, being on the last chapter of a really good book...

  Neither of us was really to blame; the dreaded Lesbian Bed Death just happened to us, and it got to the point where we just stopped trying. I loved her with all of my heart, really I did. I knew that she loved me. We’d lay in bed and cuddle and joke at night, but be asleep by ten. Dowdy, pudgy women in our late forties, sweet as can be.

  It wasn’t always like that. We used to have daily sex, kinky sex, creative sex, hot sex. The bed would reek of pussy and lube and we’d collapse into a warm wet mess, limbs entwined. I loved our sex life. I loved her creative mind and the way her curves melted into mine and the way that she tasted and felt. I loved her full lips and her crinkly brown eyes and the way her hips curved and the color of her caramel nipples against her pasty skin. And I’m still incredibly attracted to her.

  But over time, things matured. We could get each other off in minutes having learned each other’s sweet spots from years of practice. Over the years, an afternoon of fucking mutated into a five-minute hand job before bed because we both felt too lazy to take showers. I missed spending the day fucking her, but practically speaking, we never had the time and energy.

  A few months later, early in the summer, we held a cookout (with Julianna cooking of course) for a few friends. It was your typical lesbian barbeque with burgers on one side, tofu steaks on the other, seven kinds of bean dip. Jules’ close friend Ava brought the girl she’d just started dating, an anthropologist who used to work as an escort and built her “radical new feminist” career on her “sordid” past.

  I detested Gennifer with a “G” pretty much instantly...absolute pretentious, beaky-nosed, bowl-cut bobbed blowhard, desperate to bring semiotic theory into casual conversation and constantly citing her own work. Not slapping her took restraint. My best friend Sharon and I devised a drinking game wherein every time Gennifer with a “G” said the word “discursive” we would take a shot of rum. We were shitfaced within twenty minutes.

  Get enough drunk dykes together in one place and the topic inevitably turns to sex. Gennifer with a “G” started ranting about polyamorous relationships and how monogamy was a symptom of the patriarchy, so that polyamory was the only natural way to express feminism inside a lesbian context. I smiled politely at her in that “you’re a blathering idiot” kind of way. Most of us did the same. Ava was just looking at her girlfriend with a mortified expression. Drunk as she was, Julianna listened intently, transfixed by the very idea of polyamory. I was kind of at the point where every time that Gennifer with a “G” opened her mouth, my ears would bleed.

  A week later, while Julianna and I were shopping for groceries at the food co-op getting ready to scoop up the week’s fill of quinoa in bulk, I noticed my girlfriend fidgeting with her fingers, looking nervous, flipping her short brown hair around, constantly styling and restyling it, and avoiding eye contact with me. She only did this when she had something awkward to say or was keeping bad news inside.

  “You need to tell me something. Out with it already, babes,” I exclaimed with a wry half-grin.

  “Okay, you got me. I really didn’t want to have this conversation here. I was hoping we could talk about it at home. I read a very interesting book this week.”

  Julianna’s
lips began to tremble a bit. “I think you should read it too, and then we should talk about it...you know, for us.”

  I asked her to elaborate a bit, but she refused to do so until we got home. I was a distracted mess until we got home. Jules still wouldn’t look me in the eye, and she kept doing that annoying thing with her hands. I grabbed her hands, told her that I loved her, and braced myself for the worst.

  “The book...bring it to me.” I said, trying to maintain composure.

  Julianna mustered up some courage and told me, “Before I show it to you, I just want to remind you that we haven’t been having sex lately. I’m not blaming you or anything. Life happens. I know we have theater tickets for a show that starts in three hours and I’m not saying now. I love you. I’m in love with you. This doesn’t mean that I want to break up or that I don’t find you attractive or that a day could pass that I don’t want and need you at my side. You are the love of my life. This does not mean that I want to destroy what we have or that I could ever every love you less.”

  I was dumbfounded. She hugged me tightly, brushed my hair behind my ears, and placed a gentle kiss on my mouth. My love then handed me a copy of Dossie Easton’s The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I was blindsided. “I’ll read the book with an open mind, but honestly the thought of you fucking another woman makes my skin crawl. And besides, it's not like I can even envision myself having sex with anyone else. I’m in love with you.” I’d begun yelling. “I’ve invested over seven years building a life with you, loving you, being there for you when it mattered. I hate this. A lot.”

  “Just read the book, baby,” Julianna responded, choking back her tears.

  I promised that I would, and I did.

  So we agreed to “date” other people and would discuss it with each other before going past “second base.” My hating the idea was an understatement, but when you are in love, you do stupid things. I didn’t want anyone else. I wanted Jules and only Jules.

  In the coming months, Julianna lost fifteen pounds, dyed the grey out of her hair and cut it kind of spiky and asymmetrical, bought trendier clothes as if she were a forty-six-year-old hipster, and most embarrassingly of all, put up an online dating profile or two under the pseudonym QueerButchCougar46 complete with a bathroom selfie (filtered through Instagram) as her profile photo. I wish to the Goddess that I was making that last part up, but I’m not. Inevitably, she’d go on coffee dates with girls barely out of diapers and come home defeated, telling me that they had nothing in common. It was apathetic and not entirely karmically unjust.

  I thought I would occupy my time with higher-minded pursuits. I made sure to keep busy so as not to consume myself with jealousy and resentment every time that QueerButchCougar46 was out on the prowl. I took classes to become a certified Reiki healer; I organized the closets, destroying clutter with a single bound; Sharon and I bought season tickets to the opera, which I loved and Jules hated, mostly so that I’d be out of the house on her “date nights.” It was no secret that this whole “polyamory” thing simply pissed me off.

  It was on one of these operatic girls nights out that Sharon talked me into learning how to cook for real. She handed me a pamphlet she’d gotten from the local culinary institute about their Saturday afternoon classes for home cooks. Xtreme Kitchen Bootcamp, they called it. Three months of intensive kitchen training to teach you to cook like a pro with a “100% money back satisfaction guarantee” if you don’t become a kitchen ninja by graduation. Sharon joked that with my natural cooking talent, at worst the classes would be free. How could I refuse free?

  The catch was that when I was all done, Sharon and her wife would have to come over and eat a dinner that I cooked. It was on! Three weeks to go before I turned Xtreme Kitchen Bootcamp on its knees. I swore Sharon to secrecy about the classes, as I was somewhat legendary in our circle for being the worst cook on earth.

  ***

  When November finally arrived, I bought a fancy set of German knives, a retro 1950’s housewife apron, and set out to bootcamp at La Provence Culinary Institute, which specialized in rustic continental cooking and was the alma matter of many a celebrity chef. The class was mostly filled with upper middle class middle-aged women like myself, and one newly divorced guy who very obviously was there to meet women. There were ten “recruits” altogether. Perhaps I had watched too many episodes of reality cooking TV shows, but I was totally expecting a screaming, pink-faced British guy in a camouflage chef’s outfit to come out and scream at us “worthless little maggots”.

  I could not have been further off the mark. This insanely hot, androgynous, Amazonian goddess of a woman in chef’s whites and combat boots walked into the room, introducing herself as Chef Samantha. She would be guiding us on a “culinary journey” over the next thirteen weeks. My mind immediately went to other places that she could guide me. Those strong, muscled arms, those full pouty lips, those long legs, those magnificent DD cups hidden behind the white coat. Part of me longed to decode that mystery. Truly exquisite eye candy. It did not help any that the first day of class was an overview of kitchen tools. My vastly underutilized kinky side gave me all kinds of perverse daydreams.

  Of course I came home to see QueerButchCougar46 had attempted to dress for her twenty-two-year-old date’s “Steampunk Party.” She had pinned a wristwatch to a brown Member’s Only jacket, which she was wearing over a turtleneck, and what looked like lederhosen, plus red and green plaid galoshes. The crowning detail was a pair of swimmer’s goggles—very steampunk. How did the woman I love mutate into the ridiculous spectacle that stood before me? I could only imagine the poor Applebee’s hostess’ chagrin when QueerButchCougar46 greeted her at the door in that picture-perfect steampunk look! I didn’t have the heart to tell Jules that she could not have missed the mark further with her absurd ensemble. I really just hoped that this stupid phase would end quickly and I could have my Julianna back.

  I did not mind having the house to myself that night. A bubble bath, some quality time with the family vibrator, and inappropriate thoughts about my new teacher would do quite nicely. I had a lovely evening in.

  Saturday finally rolled around, and with that came cooking class. I arrived to Le Provence Culinary Institute about fifteen minutes early, secretly hoping for some alone time with Chef Samantha. When I saw her pull into the parking lot atop her very cherry vintage Indian motorcycle (complete with an equality sticker on the rear bumper) in a very tight tank top with her nipples very hard from the autumn breeze, I got simultaneously hard and wet.

  What the hell was going through my mind? I was developing a full-fledged schoolgirl crush on somebody I hardly knew, somebody who I might not even have anything in common with. I had a wonderful, loving, intelligent, successful woman at home, who as soon as this mid-life crisis-induced attempt at “feminist polyamory” got out of her system, was everything I could ever want in a partner. I was not out there trying to find something better or cling to an illusion. Relationships ebb and flow, it's par for the course, and I had every intention of riding this out. Julianna was the person I wanted to spend my life with. Was this crush thing just displacement for the buffoon QueerButchCougar46 had become?

  Chef Samantha recognized me from class and waved hello. We made awkward, polite chit chat. Her emerald green eyes locked into mine. I’m sure I was blushing and sounding like an idiot. I could barely even process her words. She was even more beautiful up close: striking bone structure, thick shortly cropped grey hair, and insanely kissable lips. She smelled faintly of truffle. I really wanted to taste her. I learned that today’s class would be on basic knife skills. My inner pervert took over.

  In class, we learned about different types of steel and different cutting techniques. Chef Samantha would demonstrate and then we would stumble along, practicing on onions and potatoes. When she demonstrated the best way to cut ginger—with a Japanese santoku style knife—she w
ent around the classroom to help everyone with the knife work. When she got to me, she shook her head no.

  “Tamara, you have it all wrong. Here, let me help you.” She reached her hands around my waist onto the cutting board.

  I could feel her tits pressing against my back and her breath in my ear. “You need to hold the knife at a 45 degree angle, like this.” She placed her hand over mine, gripping the knife handle. Her hands felt strong and good. She tilted the knife into position. “Let’s try now.” She guided my hand as we diced the ginger, pressing her breasts tighter against my back. I could feel the softness of her tits and the hardness of her nipples.

  She was definitely flirting with me. Cooking class was way more fun than I thought it would be. Believe it or not, by the end of the class, I could actually mince an onion without bleeding.

  I returned to class week after week, learning how to sauté versus how to flambé, when it's better to poach than to steam, when to braise and when to broil. By the middle of the second month, I could julienne a carrot, dice a tomato, and mince a clove of garlic like nobody’s business. I looked forward to Chef Samantha’s hands-on teaching approach. My crush on her was fully realized. No doubt, I wanted to fuck that woman.

  Cooking class was going better than I expected; I impressed myself. I even made a traditional eggplant ratatouille at home so good that Julianna reached for seconds. Class would be over in two more weeks, and I debated if I should ask Chef Samantha out on a date and how the hell I would explain the whole “feminist polyamory” thing to her.

  I knew perfectly well that QueerButchCougar46 had not gotten further than a kiss on the cheek on any of her ill-fated internet dates, but I was actually seriously contemplating having sex with another woman who I did like, and did connect with in a real way, and did fantasize about, and did feel my heart beat faster the closer she stood to me. I should also mention that I had not gotten laid now in over fourteen months. How much of my feelings were real, and how much was just lust and anger and general horniness?