Stolen Moments Read online

  Synopsis

  A new entry in Bold Strokes’ Erotic Interludes collection, this anthology offers no-holds-barred erotica from some of today’s best lesbian authors. Love on the run, in the office, in the shadows… women stealing time from ordinary life to make passion a priority, if only for a moment. Fast, furious, and almost too hot to handle.

  Erotic Interludes 2: Stolen Moments

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  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

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  Erotic Interludes 2: Stolen Moments

  © 2005 Bold Strokes Books. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-272

  This electronic book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.,

  New York, USA

  First Printing: September 2005

  Second Printing: March 2006

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editors: Radclyffe and Stacia Seaman

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Photo: Radclyffe

  Cover design by Sheri ([email protected])

  Introduction

  Radclyffe

  By its very nature, an anthology is a study in similarities and contrasts. Despite a common theme, diversity is inherent since the work consists of a collection of pieces by different authors—different styles, different language, different vision of the topic. That’s one of the things that makes reading anthologies so much fun—you never quite know what the next page will bring. Adding the element of erotica to the mix creates the potential for even greater surprises. Merely attempting to define the term “erotic” usually leads to considerable debate. What may be erotic to one person may not be to another.

  My goal in choosing the selections for this anthology was to have a final work that encompassed a broad interpretation of both the theme, in terms of setting and circumstance, as well as the sine qua non, eros. Happily, the task was not difficult. Erotic Interludes 2 includes works from a talented array of writers from around the world, and whether first-time writers or established authors, they all have one thing in common—they write sizzling erotica with style. With settings as diverse as “love in the stacks” and “mile-high moments,” and with flavors ranging from hot stranger-sex to steamy long-term-couple love, these are the stories of women who can’t wait a minute longer for their pleasure. Once you start reading, neither will you.

  Radclyffe 2005

  For Twenty Minutes or Forever

  Marie Lyn

  Michelle opens the unlocked door to the Park Slope walk-up and I am immediately assaulted by the piney smoke of incense drifting from someone’s first-floor apartment. It’s the kind of incense you can buy on the street, the kind that runs pungent through the air outside of the Astor Place K-Mart, a block from my present apartment—a block from the apartment and the life I am leaving.

  But it’s not my apartment anymore, not really. It’s Rebecca’s, and it holds the scent of a sadness so salient that living there is something like suffocation.

  “This one will be ready by March first,” Michelle tells me as I follow her up a flight of stairs. She knocks tentatively at the door, then unlocks it. “Warning knock,” she explains, laughing that unbearable giggle that strikes me as artificial as a cartoon.

  The apartment is small—a main room with a kitchen and a couch, another door perhaps leading to the bedroom. It’s a “glorified closet,” as Rebecca would say. She is convinced that by leaving her, not only am I leaving behind the “love of my life” but also the only inexpensive apartment in the entire city that has enough room for all of my crap. And I’m not just talking physical crap, Hannah, I’m talking all of your crap, all of your mental crap.

  Those are the kinds of statements that make me want to slam every door of every insufficiently housed couple in the city with a noise that wakes all the neighbors and sends them grabbing for brooms to pound on ceilings and floors. Shut up, Cut the Noise, Cut the Crap.

  This place is furnished. But it’s not the layout I’m staring at now.

  The current occupant is on the couch, eating macaroni and cheese from a plastic bowl and watching some makeover show. Everything inside of me rises and turns soft like a hallucination in a movie, like the one-bedroom is an underwater tank and the girl on the couch is the fake mermaid with breasts covered in aqua seashells, and I, in my layers and my sensible slacks and my sensible shoes, feel as sexy as seaweed.

  “Hi! I’m so sorry—is this a bad time?” Michelle asks the girl.

  “No.” She shrugs. “You just called me. I said it was fine.”

  Michelle giggles again. I am embarrassed to be here with this woman with her nervous laughter and her pink tweed jacket.

  “I’m sorry—what’s your name again?”

  “Vivian.”

  “Vivian—Vivian—right! Vivian, this is my client Hannah. She’s thinking about taking this place off your hands.”

  Vivian gives a half smile. “It’s all yours.”

  It’s all yours. All yours. Speaking of things that could be all mine—

  In college, my first (and last) serious boyfriend told me he loved me the most in my sweatpants. He wouldn’t say why and so I asked a friend why and she laughed in my face, her eyes wide like gumballs. “Easy access, Hannah! Hello!”

  I had blushed then. I blush now because Vivian is wearing sweatpants. I blush because I can see the perfect circles of her nipples under her tank top. I am hoping that she can tell, you know, tell that I’m into girls, tell that I am desperate for a fuck, that I’ve only got half an hour before I have to meet Lenny—a gay friend who makes fun of me all the time (Did you forget how to read a clock, Hannah? Do you understand how time works, Hannah?)—at a bar on the corner. And he lives in the neighborhood and wants me to live here too, and so he is buying me a drink as if he is in cahoots with Michelle, presenting promises of the grand life I could have here in the boroughs.

  I think Michelle is talking.

  Vivian’s sweatpants are gray, an athletic seal by her left hip that I can’t read. Michelle talks about exposed brick and I am imagining exposing Vivan’s pussy lips, parting them like the Red Sea, lowering an eager fingernail over the ticklish sensitivity of her clit.

  “Any questions?” Michelle asks me. “This is it for today—so you might want to think about making a decision.”

  “Um…” I pause. Vivian is looking at me now too, as if she too wants a question. Where do I begin? “How much?”

  “Fourteen hundred,” Michelle responds, looking at her cell phone.

  “Huh.”

  “It’s a good neighborhood,” Vivian offers.

  “Yeah?” I am pathetic, I am the girl at Girl Scout camp being pushed away by her bunkmate, sloppy and full of hate. “Is it?”

  “I like it. It’s just so far from work for me—”

  “Where are you moving to?” I ask her, trying to be conversational, trying to sound like a woman in a bar, a woman on the street, a woman with my eyes pulled like gravity to her cunt. Vivian is young, brilliant green eyes, short dark hair, and she looks fresh and showered and like something I could lick, without regrets.

  “East Village.”

  “That’s where I’m moving
from, actually.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, it’s great—it’s just…pricey and—well, I was sharing a one-bedroom with someone—and I can’t afford that on my own—you know?”

  Vivian nods, and maybe smiles. After three years of reading Rebecca’s facial expressions like a practiced translator, the codes of other women are frustrating, baffling, a sort of crippling that makes dating feel like tourism.

  Michelle is ready to go, manically looking around the place like an owl.

  “You like this one, then?” she asks. “I have to meet another client in Red Hook in a half hour—you want me to draw up the papers?”

  Does the girl come with the couch? “I don’t know.”

  And then we are back on the stairs, walking down, and there it is again—the incense from the first floor, a faint smell of marijuana, and I pause by the door. Rebecca. Rebecca with her joints on the fire escape, Rebecca with bath towels that smell like that, sex that smells like that.

  I need it. I need sex. I need sex right now. I need my nose nestled in the petals of her pussy, surrounding me with the scent that lingers on my fingers for hours after masturbation.

  “Um, I have to make a phone call, so you go ahead,” I say to Michelle, hoping she will leave me inside the building while I assess my own courage.

  “Um, okay.” Michelle hands me her card again, for maybe the tenth time. “Call me.”

  In the space under the stairs, I catch my breath. I know by the crescendo of my cunt that I can’t leave Vivian up there without at least giving it a shot.

  For a moment I think perhaps I can forget—forget about Rebecca and her demands, her sadness, about the careful division of things, the inevitable fallout of a relationship that built us together like a house connected to another house with solid material like brick and mortar—of the melancholy thicker than smoke that coats our conversations and makes everything foggy and unbearable.

  For a moment I can think, fully, of someone else, someone who can grab me by my cunt and send me elsewhere, leave love dangling in the other room.

  And I can’t let that moment go.

  I walk up the stairs but I am shaking, my knees are weak, I didn’t know I could do this, didn’t know someone could turn me to jelly without saying anything, by just sitting on a couch in a wifebeater and gray sweatpants eating macaroni and cheese and watching bad television with her dark pageboy hair hanging in her eyes like she needs a haircut and her eyes—God—her eyes—dark green like moss, the kind of dark that I could get lost in forever, forever or for twenty minutes or both or at least twenty minutes that feel, after all, so much like forever.

  I knock on the door. Vivian answers it. I can’t read her, but this close to her face with its few tentative freckles and skin the color of stationery, I don’t even want to try.

  “Do you mind if I…look around again?” I ask.

  She says nothing but steps back, closes the door behind me. I walk to the window and look out; the view is of another building, of bricks and windows. I nod like I am making mental notes. I walk to the kitchen. I turn one dial, then the other, like a health inspector at a restaurant. Do people do this, I wonder? And then one of the faucets won’t turn back off and suddenly I feel Vivian behind me.

  She wraps her arms around me slowly and I back up, feeling the bones of her hips against the curve of my ass.

  “Let me help you with that.” Her voice is husky like a lounge singer’s. The feeling of her arms over mine turns the dial of the faucet of my pussy, which is brimming over, and I am wet, wet, so so so wet.

  “Got it,” she says as the sink’s water slurps to a close.

  I lean back, taking this uncalculated risk, so my neck is by her lips. She goes for it, kisses me there, sucks, the rim of her teeth grazing the taut skin of my neck. I want her to take a bite out of me, take all of me into her mouth and let me live there, safe and soaked forever, I mean, for twenty minutes, or forever.

  I turn to face her, breast to breast, mine covered by a sweater and a scarf and a T-shirt and hers almost there, practically all the way there, the flimsy cotton of her tank top doing little to protect me from the dark nipples I see erect beneath it.

  I put both my hands on her neck and take her mouth into mine; our tongues tangle.

  “This is…” she pants, separating her lips from mine for moments to speak, “a really…really great apartment.”

  “I see,” I say, and I slip my hand under the elastic band of her sweatpants—easy access—to the soft bush of her pussy underneath, no underwear. I am empowered by her brazen sex, by everything about her that is as raw as I am damaged.

  My finger slides between the lips of her pussy, my fingertip resting above her opening, and I try not to think of Rebecca, of how she liked it, of when she first told me I’m sorry, hon, but it’s hard to compete with Duracell, and I am charged when Vivian lights up like new batteries when I touch her, my finger vibrating the base of her clit like the best, most expensive kind of classy sex toy.

  My breasts feel full as cantaloupes against hers, and I am ready when, still writhing from my finger, she removes my shirts like a lover discarding old habits, each layer falling neglected and useless to the floor.

  This, I remember, is why I love women, the dance of tit against tit, the smell of her like almond soap, of almond hair gel, of anything so sweet and nutty at all.

  She pulls my finger from her pussy— “I’m not ready to come yet—let me show you the bed—” and I follow her, my breasts bouncing as I walk. Yeah, I like your breasts, sure, I love breasts, I guess, Rebecca would say, but really I’m an ass girl, I love your ass the most, I’m just not that into breasts, and I would wilt with neglect, pinching them myself like clothespins while she would eat my cunt with the clinical knowledge lovers have of each other’s cunts, the knowledge that gets you every time but that’s just it, it gets you every time, in that same dry, educated way.

  Her “bedroom” is hardly a glorified closet, just a plain old closet, just room enough for a bed with a dark purple comforter that she throws me on top of.

  She takes my nipples into her mouth. At last, the touch of tongue to tit. It’s been so long since someone gave them the attention they deserve, and I am relishing it.

  I don’t feel huge or weird as I usually feel with new lovers, I feel like a pinup girl ripped from a magazine and into a bed, my admirer shifting her hand from her own cunt onto mine.

  Then she kisses down my stomach, undoes the belt of my pants and pushes them to the floor. Her teeth grab the rim of my cream-colored underwear and then she teases me, hot breath against the crotch of my panties that makes me so wet I know I could be leaking through onto her lips.

  I reach down and take off my own underwear. She stands up and takes off her sweatpants, then her tank top, and I lavish in the presence of her nakedness like a man at a strip club and she bends down to get something from under the bed.

  She is beautiful, firm, clean.

  She emerges with a dildo, red and rubber and thick, holding it in her hand like a bottle of champagne. “You wanna play?”

  “Hmm—let me think about it—” I tease, but she stops me when she shoves the phallus into my cunt like she’s popping my goddamn cherry.

  She batters me with it until I burst, my climax sending me into convulsions and making time stop.

  She crawls up to lie next to me and hold me as I come. It’s been a festering orgasm, I know it’s been weeks since the last time I had one, and it’s brilliant and worth it.

  “Damn,” she grins. “So you’ll take the apartment, then?”

  “I’ll take you,” I whisper, inching down to her cunt and sticking my head between the tight muscles of her thighs. She grips me there, my ears growing hot and red, as I eat her salient cunt like chocolate.

  She moans, her voice in a register I haven’t heard before. I could lick her pussy like ice cream melting, and I would.

  I stick my thumb just inside her pussy, my
middle finger clawing her asshole as I lick, and she thrashes around and I can feel her cunt muscles tighten and squeeze my fingertip when she comes. I roll over, my head by her hip, and breathe. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her alarm clock—I have five minutes.

  “Fuck,” I sigh, “I gotta go.”

  “Where?”

  “Excelsior.”

  “Fag bar?”

  “To meet a friend. He’s trying to sell me on the neighborhood.”

  “That place won’t help,” she laughs. “I can sell you on the neighborhood, if you’re interested—there’s a lot of girl bars around here—a lot more than there are boy bars. We should—you should go to Ginger’s.”

  I kiss her thigh. “You’ve already sold me.”

  She laughs. “Have I?”

  “You had me at ‘got it.’”

  I get up then, looking for my clothes, and she stays on the bed, naked, her perfect body like a supplicant sculpture beneath my wandering eye. As I dress, she talks about the neighborhood, about her work (she bartends, I make a note to visit her, stare at her, overtip her, sometime soon). My pussy and my panties are wet.

  “Can I—I’m sorry—” I blush. “Can I borrow some panties? Mine are—”

  “Wet?”

  “Yeah—wet.”

  “No problem. But—then—you might have to return them, you know?”

  I smile and blush again as she opens her drawer and sorts through her colorful collection. She pulls out some athletic-looking boy-shorts and tosses them to me. “Will these do?”

  “Anything, sweetheart.” I smile. “Anything.”

  She isn’t moving, and so I dress while she watches, feeling kind of flushed and too much all over.

  “I have to go,” I say. “Can I—”

  “Your broker has it, right?”

  “You’re making this hard for me, aren’t you?”