Appetites Page 7

“Now you really owe me. Poor cookies. Brace yourself against the sink, little miss. Your ass is mine.”

  Jaw dropping open, Nadine stared. “You just got here.”

  “I think making up for lost time is going to take a while. Now are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way? Any girlfriend of mine is going to have to know who holds the spoon.”

  Nadine’s eyes lit up. “Girlfriend? You want me to be your girlfriend?” A warmth gathered in her belly and moved between her thighs.

  “Ana told you didn't she?” Nadine nibbled on her lip. “I was going to ask you to move in with me today.”

  “No.” Faith stilled, laying the spoon on the counter.

  “She didn't mention that part. Just that I needed to stake my claim on you or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else you might escape my clutches and then what would I do.”

  “Oh.” Nadine twisted her fingers in the apron, unsure of what to do. She had an elaborate speech all in her head and now it was as burnt and crispy as the cookies smoldering in front of her.

  “Come here.”

  Nadine switched off the oven and let Faith envelop her in her embrace. Her fingers wound themselves into Nadine's hair, tugging at the clip that held it in place. Faith's breasts ground against hers in an effort to get as close to her lover as possible. Her lips were soft and sweet.

  “Goddess but I want you.” Nadine breathed.

  “Ummm. Good.” Faith reached down and slid her hand underneath Nadine's shirt. “

  You have five seconds to get naked. Except that.”

  “What?”

  “Leave the apron on.”

  “Oh...” Nadine giggled. “That’s kinky.”

  “It is, isn’t it? Now move.” Faith picked up the spoon and whacked it onto the palm of her hand.

  Nadine pulled her t-shirt over her head and tossed it onto a kitchen chair. She bent over, reached under the apron, and unbuttoned her jeans. Pulling down the zipper, she shimmied out of them, letting the denim fall to the floor. Nadine reached behind her back and unclasped her bra.

  “How’s that?” Nadine thrust her breasts forward, drawing Faith’s eyes to her tightening nipples.

  “Panties.” Faith rasped, her voice raw. “Take them off.”

  Nadine smirked. “Yes, Ma’am.” Hooking her thumbs under the apron, she slid her pink cotton panties down her thighs and kicked them onto the pile of clothes.

  “Lovely. Now, bend over the sink. I want to see that gorgeous ass.”

  “Oh...I love it when you talk dirty.”

  Faith moved behind her. “This is for blocking me yesterday.” She smacked Nadine’s right ass cheek.

  Whack!

  “Ouch!”

  “This is for burning my cookies.” Faith raised the spoon again and gave a double smack on Nadine’s left cheek.

  Whack! Whack!

  “Owwwwww!” Tears gathered in Nadine’s eyes. “That hurt!” Fire spread from one side to the other, straight into Nadine’s pussy. Moisture pooled between her thighs and she moaned.

  Faith’s voice grew husky. “This is for being sexy as fuck all and making me wait.” She raised her hand again and popped Nadine on both sides of the ass. “And for telling Ana before you told me.”

  Smack! Smack!

  “Oh!” Nadine cried, tears sliding down her cheeks. “I’m sorry!”

  One more smack to the ass and Faith set the spoon down with a clatter.

  “That was for elbowing me in the arm.”

  Faith spun Nadine around and pulled her into a kiss. The burn from Nadine's ass merged with the steady throb in her clit. She sucked back a sob and reveled in the sensations at war within her.

  “It’s okay, baby.” Faith breathed against her lips.

  “Oh God. If you don’t fuck me now, I’m going to die,” Nadine panted, her voice thick. Her hands roamed over Faith’s body hungrily.

  Faith grinned, drawing back in surprise. Her lids were heavy with desire and she kissed Nadine deeply.

  “Such a naughty little mouth.” Faith reached over to the counter, grabbed an unburnt cookie, and bit into it. Faith fed the second bite to Nadine. She waited for her to swallow and kissed her again. “I think I like your brand of naughty cookies. Just not the burnt ones.”

  “Ummm.” Nadine sighed into her mouth as the kiss deepened. “Chocolate...”

  Faith guided Nadine until she could brace herself against the counter. “Pretend I’m going to spank you.”

  Nadine spread her legs apart, thrusting her ass in the air. Faith slid her hands around her, stroking and caressing her breasts. She kissed the back of Nadine's neck. Faith's hands roamed over Nadine’s mound, pressing her body against her. Reaching between Nadine’s legs, she slipped her fingers against the slick folds of Nadine's hidden recesses.

  “Wider, pet.”

  Nadine complied and the fingers so eagerly caressing her delved deeper still, teasing and flicking her clit.

  “Oh God.” Nadine hitched her breath in a choked gasp, almost losing her grip on the counter top.

  “Too much?” Faith whispered against her back. “Do you want me to stop?”

  “Hell no.” Nadine panted. “If you do, you’ll be meeting that spoon yourself.”

  Faith chuckled. “Oh really?” She took two fingers, entering Nadine from behind. Faith took her time as the fingers widened Nadine's eager channel. “Is that a promise?”

  “Oh!” Nadine sucked in a breath, stilling against Faith.

  “I thought so.” Faith plunged her fingers inside of Nadine’s sopping pussy, driving them in relentlessly. Thumbing her nub, Faith moved faster until a keening cry erupted from Nadine’s lips. She didn't stop. Electricity fired under Nadine’s eyelids as a raging orgasm tore through her body. Waves of fluid gushed from her pussy, coating her inner thighs and Faith’s hand.

  Nadine howled, bucking wildly. She closed her thighs on Faith’s hand, twisting and inadvertently ramming Faith’s sore arm into the counter.

  “Ouch.” Faith disengaged herself, wincing.

  “Sorry.” Nadine drew in a steadying breath and tried to stand on rubbery legs. “Are you okay?”

  “You clamped down pretty good there.” Faith grinned and rinsed her hand off in the sink.

  “Oh God.” Mortification, thy name is Nadine.

  “Come on. I can use a shower. You can wash my back.” Faith waggled her eyebrows at her, leading the way out of the kitchen and down the hall toward the bathroom.

  “Ummm. I second that motion.” Relieved, Nadine followed, admiring the way Faith’s ass filled her jeans.

  “I might even kiss your owie.”

  “If I let you.” Faith entered the bathroom and stopped abruptly. “Nadine...”

  “What?”

  “Were you really going to ask me to move in with you today?”

  “Yes.” Nadine looked down at the floor afraid to meet her lover's eyes. If Faith said no, she didn't know what she'd do. She reached into the pocket of the apron and held out a single key, a symbol of the longing she felt in her heart. Nadine closed her eyes and waited.

  Faith lifted her chin with her hand. “Open your eyes.”

  The weight of the key was gone. Faith met her gaze with tears in her eyes. “Happy Valentine's Day, baby.”

  Faith wrapped her arms around her. Then her fingers plucked at the apron and it drifted to the floor.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” An impish smile curved up the corners of Faith's lips. “Last one in the shower does the dishes.”

  The Tomb of

  Radclyffe Hall

  Bonnie J. Morris

  “I’m going to England next month,” Isabel said. “To an international meeting of wenches and tavern keepers—basically, women who own or run lesbian bars. It all ends with a big masquerade party in a secret pub only we know about, in deepest London.” She set a vodka martini down in front of Hannah, tucked Hannah’s generous tip into her apro
n, then paused for the tiniest minute, summing up the tired women’s history professor who had been a regular patron for eight years at Sappho’s Bar and Grill. Then Isabel, having made up her mind, added, “I have a two-for-one flight. I know it’s your birthday that week. Would you like to accompany me to London?”

  Would she! Dozens of emotions played across Hannah’s face: surprise, gratitude, thrill, panic, anticipation. “You look like one of those children’s flip-books, where thumbing the pages speeds up the character’s changes of expression,” laughed Isabel.

  “Yes, coming into your bar always animates me,” Hannah teased back. But it had been a dream of hers for so long: England. Finally, England. To walk in the streets that gave birth to the English language, which, after all was her medium, her literary tongue, her wordlife as an author. This was a particularly important birthday, too: forty-five and she’d made no plans, still being single. Now the plan peeled open around her like a tantalizingly sweet onion. She’d turn this opportunity into something mystical, meaningful, scholarly: A pilgrimage to the grave of author Radclyffe Hall.

  Once, doing research in San Francisco’s gay and lesbian archives during a Pride Month trip, Hannah had been allowed to look at an old letter that Radclyffe Hall had mailed to another lesbian author in the 1930s. Sealed in a protective sheet and kept in a climate-controlled archive room, the letter was paired with its original envelope, and Hannah had carefully copied down the return address: 37 Holland Street, Church Street, Kensington W8, London. Later she’d written the long-dead lesbian novelist a letter, expressing clumsily what Hall’s life had meant to her, and impulsively mailed it to the London address with no return address of her own so that it couldn’t be sent back. I wrote to a ghost, thought Hannah. Now, at least, I can set flowers on her grave.

  “I’ll be with you as far as Heathrow,” Isabel was saying. “Then I have a side trip to meet up with some mixologists.” She smiled as she wiped down the bar with a clean towel. “I’ll let you prowl in London for a few days, then I’ll be back and meet up with you for a night of fun before we fly back.” Hannah raised her glass, glowing.

  ***

  When she stepped off the bus from London that May afternoon, still reeling slightly from jet lag, Hannah found Highgate Cemetery to be green and lush, yet cool and remote. If there were any pilgrims seeking the grave of Karl Marx, the most famous permanent resident of Highgate, they weren’t in evidence; at least, Hannah saw no cluster of day-tripping socialists as she approached. But almost immediately, she found herself in an argument with the grim attendant at the front entrance, who was demanding an enormous admission fee for the “group tour.”

  “I’m really fine just walking through on my own,” Hannah tried to explain, thinking: I’d rather put out my eyeball with a shrimp fork than join a tour group for my secret moment of homage. But the matron snarled, “Ye can’t poke about on yer own. We can’t have it, visitors tramping up and down. Ye stick with the guide and no wandering off the path or yer out.” So Hannah presented the right number of pounds, and only after receiving a stamped admit ticket remembered to ask, “Will the tour take us to the tomb of Radclyffe Hall? That’s who—that’s the site I’ve come to see.”

  “No promises,” snarled Matron.

  Obviously grave desecrations by cranks and the risk of damage or graffiti from vandals could only be avoided by sensible restrictions on all visitors, Hannah realized. But the meek young man who led their eventual small party to historic tombs responded to Hannah’s desperate pleas with, “Right. Then. Here we have the tomb of Radclyffe Hall, a famous lady writer. Quite controversial really.” He wiped his sweating pate with a pocket handkerchief, then turned toward the next tomb further up the path.

  It was too much. She’d come all this way. No: she’d come out all this way. “Lady writer?” Hall had to be spinning in her tomb. “Sir,” Hannah interrupted, “I’d like to add a few words about this one. I’m a women’s history professor, myself. If you wouldn’t mind?”

  “Ooh!” one of the other patrons in the tour group exclaimed, and their guide gave a quick, reluctant nod.

  So Hannah launched into the familiar homage she knew by heart from class lecture notes, used over and over every fall, every spring, every year.

  “Okay, so this is the tomb of the famous lesbian author, Radclyffe Hall, whose novel The Well of Loneliness became the central lesbian classic of the twentieth century,” she began. “Published in 1928, the book was instantly banned and vilified in the English press. It received the same treatment across the pond in America. Obscenity trials painted the book as dangerous to youth, and one judge famously said, ‘I would rather give a healthy young woman a vial of prussic acid than this novel.’ The heroine, Stephen Gordon, is a rich and privileged butch girl forced to leave her family’s estate, who falls in love with a rather clueless young woman against the backdrop of World War I.

  “Lesbians across many generations have found the book disappointing, due to its self-loathing portrait of an outcast ‘invert’—it’s not at the top of the list of what you’d call Gay Pride literature, and there sure aren’t any descriptive sex scenes, but for all that the book was a scandal—the one line that left critics gasping was something like ‘and that night, they were not divided.’ But overall, millions of women smuggled paperback editions home, to read at least one in-print testament to lesbian love. And the book raised questions about everything from homophobia to disinheritance to cross-dressing to lesbians’ roles as ambulance drivers on the wartime French front. So some of the most enlightened feminist educators and social scientists of the pre-World War II era read and debated the book. It trickled down to curious readers of all backgrounds and ethnicities.”

  She swallowed. “Like many a young lesbian, I read The Well of Loneliness during my coming-out period, although by that time there were women’s history classes and lesbian literary critics interpreting the book for me. I understood that, for all its flaws, this once-banned book was part of my cultural inheritance as an English-speaking lesbian. That’s why I’ve traveled to Hall’s gravesite today...to pay homage to her...on my birthday,” she finished weakly.

  There were a few automatic mumbles of “many happy returns.” Other members of the tour group had grown restless by now; a few looked downright embarrassed and resentful, although one tweedily dressed woman was taking notes on a green file card. But the guide put a trembling hand on Hannah’s forearm.

  “You know, miss, this tomb is indeed the most visited spot in Highgate. Young ladies regularly leave bouquets here. I’m grateful for the expertise you shared. Quite frankly, I’m not up to it.”

  “I didn’t mean to show you up,” Hannah apologized. “It’s just that I came all this way just to see her tomb and worried that we’d pass it all too quickly.”

  Her guide regarded her from behind stiff brown-rimmed eyeglasses. “Well...it’s in violation of our rules, really...but I see you’re sincere. If I can trust you to behave yourself,” he added with a surprising amount of twinkle, “would you like a few moments alone at this tomb? I have to insist that you rejoin the group within five minutes. No more than that. Agreed?”

  “Agreed!” Hannah couldn’t believe her luck. Yes. Alone with Hall. The instant the guide moved tactfully away (the other tourists having scattered far ahead), Hannah fumbled both her journal and camera out of her knapsack and began wildly sketching and photographing Hall’s tomb. There wasn’t much to see: an imposing rusty door with a tenderly inscribed plaque attributed to Hall’s longtime partner Lady Una Troubridge: “I will but love thee more.” Hannah made a quick pencil rubbing of this plate, moving so fast that she accidentally tore a bit of paper from her journal.

  Then she noticed the keyhole. There was a keyhole in Radclyffe Hall’s tomb. Whatever for? Who went in and out? Karl Marx and the other ghosts of Highgate? But they wouldn’t need keys. The matron, the shy tour guide? Did they come in and tidy the dust of a lesbian life? Drink with Hall, after work? Her mind raced
through the macabre possibilities. But the tour guide was waiting. Quickly, before she could change her mind, Hannah wrote on the scrap of torn journal paper, Radclyffe, you are not forgotten, and she rolled it into a slender joint-like arrow and pushed it through the keyhole. Into the tomb.

  A rush of cold, cold air blew back into her face. Hannah dropped to her knees. It was a still, warm day in May with no wind. But the icy blast came from the other side of that tomb keyhole, a shift in atmosphere and form that seemed to whisper, I received your note. I am reading it now.

  Gasping, drenched in cold sweat, Hannah ran to rejoin the tour group, the guide giving her a look that said it all: Now do you understand what we have going on here? She looked back. There was nothing to indicate any tinkering with the tomb. As promised, she had not disturbed the site...just, apparently, the atmosphere.

  ***

  Isabel’s voice on the other end of the phone sounded amused but not too surprised as Hannah spewed the story of her afternoon at Highgate. “Look, there’s that party at the bar I told you about. You’re in luck. This year it’s actually a bold Radclyffe Hall theme, so I knew you’d be interested. It’s a literary event, everyone joining in a group reading of The Well of Loneliness. Perfect for your birthday night if you don’t have other plans.” She knew Hannah had no other plans. And it was their last night in London.

  The bar was called Lady Una’s. Motorcycle after motorcycle (and a few Rolls Royces, too) purred up to dismount party guests, the riders all dressed in the style of Radclyffe Hall, top hats and monocles replacing crash helmets and chaps tonight. All of a sudden, Hannah realized this was a fancy-dress party where every invited guest was in a prescribed costume except Hannah herself: the clumsy, underdressed American on the trail of Hall’s legacy. Whether the odd setup was Isabel’s idea of a joke or a sort of present for Hannah’s birthday, she wasn’t sure. She only knew that she was caught alone in Kensington W8 London wearing her Lucy travel pants, her green walking shoes, and an old polo shirt that felt unbearably out of style.