


You fuck, it seems, everywhere: beds and tables and floors over the phone. You don’t know what is more of a miracle: her body, or her love of your body. She loves wearing a harness you suck her off that way and she comes like it’s real, bucking and lifting off the mattress. She shaves her cunt smooth, and it glows like the inside of a conch shell. When you are ebbing, and try to inhale but can’t, she lets go, and you can feel the lingering tingle of unlanguage.Īfter this, you ask her to talk to you in a low, raspy stream while she fucks you, and she does: switching effortlessly between English and French, muttering about her cock and how it’s filling you up, pushing her hand over your face and grabbing the architecture of your jaw to turn it this way and that. She does, pressing a firm palm against your crescendoing howl, and it’s as if the sound is being pushed back into your body so that it might suffuse your every molecule. In the late spring, you surprise yourself by asking her to cover your mouth as you come. Maybe you really do believe that women are different. All these years of telling him he’s full of shit, that he needs to decolonize his mind and lose the gender essentialism, and here you are learning that lesbian relationships are, somehow, different - more intense and beautiful but also more painful and volatile, because women are all of these things too. Suddenly you find yourself wondering if you’re in the middle of evidence that he’s right. He never said it in a bad way, exactly - though the implication is always there. You have spent your whole life listening to your father talk about women’s emotions, their sensitivity. And why wouldn’t you? You trust her, and you have no context for anything else. And so when she walks into your office and tells you that this is what it’s like to date a woman, you believe her. She is the first woman who yokes herself to you with the label girlfriend. But she is the first woman who wants you in that way - desire tinged with obsession. She is not your first female crush, or your first female kiss, or even your first female lover. Photo: chainat prachatree/Getty Images/iStockphoto Dream House As Noir
