Lawrence Block - Warm and Willing

“I don’t know myself.”

“How do you feel?”

“Beautiful.”

“You should feel beautiful. Because you are.”

The morning had hurried by; the afternoon crawled. She kept waiting for it to be five-thirty so that Megan would come for her. Now that she was set to move in with Megan, the idea of remaining for an extra moment in her furnished room was horrible. The squalor of the room did not bother her. The room was sterile and shabby compared to Megan’s apartment, but this shabbiness had never seemed to depress her unduly. It was more that the move was a move from the old life to the new, from life alone to life with Megan.

She remembered the apartment she had shared with Tom during those years of marriage. It had been a pleasant place in a good neighborhood, expensive to rent and expensively furnished, although the decor had been generally unimaginative. And yet she had never liked that apartment. There were times when she actively loathed it, times when she was on the verge of begging Tom to move to some other place in some other area of the city.

The apartment itself had not been at fault. It was the life she led there which made her loathe the place itself. A reaction to an apartment, she thought, was an intensely personal thing. It was based less on the place itself than on the life one lived there. She had spent a bad two years with Tom; it would have been inconceivable that she could have liked the place where those two years were spent. And she had spent a lonely and wretched batch of months on Grove Street, so that room could only emerge as a symbol of loneliness.

She had spent the finest night of her life at Megan’s apartment on Cornelia Street. How could she help falling in love with the apartment, as with Megan?

Megan was there at five-thirty. They hurried through crowded streets to her rooming house and climbed the stairs and went into her room. Megan looked around the little cubicle and shook her head.

“This isn’t you,” she said.

“It was. For awhile. I was someone else before last night.”

“A bud that hadn’t opened.”

“I’m open now.” She felt giddy, ready to break out into foolish laughter. She danced into the middle of the room and threw her arms wide apart. “I’m a flower,” she said. “See my pretty petals? I’m a flower in full bloom.”

“You’re a little idiot whom I love.”

“So kiss me. Be a bee and steal my precious nectar.”

“I think you’re a little bit crazy.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not very.”

“I feel so young,” she said. She got a suitcase from the closet, opened it on the bed and began throwing things into it. “I’m twenty-four and I feel about seventeen. How old are you, Megan?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Just a year older than me. You know so much more.”

“Clean living.”

“You make me feel like a child, sometimes. Have you slept with very many girls?”

“You’re the only one.”

“Seriously. Have you?”

A pause. “Not so many.”

“Is that something I shouldn’t ask? I’m sorry. I just want to know everything about you, that’s all. Were you ever with a man?”

“Yes.”

“You weren’t married or anything?”

“Hardly.” A long sigh. “I was young, very young, and in college, and there was another girl, and we made love. I was too young to know what I was doing, I guess. And then I was very scared. You know how it is at that age. The most important thing on earth is to be like everybody else, and here I was so obviously different from everybody else. I couldn’t let myself believe that I was really different. I managed to convince myself that it was a question of adjustment. That I could be perfectly normal if I tried hard enough.”

“Heavens.”

“Uh-huh. Oh, I tried, all right. I very nearly got pregnant in the process. I tried with half a dozen different men, tried my damnedest to feet something more profound than boredom and disgust while they grunted over me.”

“And it didn’t work.”

“Of course not. It took a while for me to understand what I am, and to accept it. It may be hard for you.”

“It isn’t now.”

“But it may be.”

There were three suitcases and an armful of coats and dresses. They carried everything downstairs and Megan hailed a cab. They rode to her building. Rhoda paid the driver and they carried the suitcases and loose clothes inside and upstairs to Megan’s apartment. Their apartment now. The Apartment of Megan Hollis and Rhoda Moore.

She took half the closet and one of the two dressers in the bedroom. She hung her toothbrush in the holder in the bathroom, put one of her towels over a towel bar. She came out. Megan was holding two glasses of red wine. She took one and they touched glasses.

“Hello, roommate,” Megan said.

“Hello, lover.”

They drank deeply.

Megan did not refill the glasses.

They turned and looked at each other, and Rhoda felt passion flow through her flesh like an electric current. From that moment on neither of them spoke. Words would have been in the way.

They walked to the bedroom, bodies brushing lightly together as they walked. They left the lights on, undressed quickly and efficiently, and they turned to look at one another, and passion caught Rhoda by the throat and shook her. She looked at Megan, at Megan’s body, and she thought that she had never seen anything beautiful or so desirable. She moved toward the blonde girl, her hands outstretched, groping. Megan stood still, waiting. Rhoda’s hands fastened on Megan’s shoulders, moved down over her bare arms, slipped over silken skin to embrace Megan’s full and beautiful breasts.

They sank together to the bed, wordless, breathless. Their mouths met in a kiss, and their tongues tangled and the world went black and white and black and white. They kissed, and their bodies were drawn sharply together, breasts against breasts, belly against belly thighs urgently drawn against thighs, loins speaking love to loins.

Rhoda was caught up in it all, unable to think of anything, unable to do anything at all but surrender herself entirely to the waves of desire that dominated her. She moved on the bed, aching to embrace the totality that was Megan, mad to touch everything, to kiss everything, to give pleasure and get pleasure until the world sank under the sea. Her lips found Megan’s breasts and teased them into a turbulence of love. Her hands stroked the sheer silk that was Megan’s hips and thighs. Her fingertips were alive with the shimmering glory of Megan’s secret beauties.

Her hands were fierce with Megan’s breasts. Her mouth was busy, planting a trail of burning kisses along a perfectly formed leg.

Pleasure screamed in the night. The bed rocked urgently. The peak of passion was sharply etched, clear and beautiful, and sleep came fast on its heels.

The weekend had the quality of a dream. Time was suspended, thoughts were never pressing. Sometimes they strolled together through Village streets, walking easily side by side. And no one could tell a thing by looking at them, Rhoda thought. They walked together like two friends, and nobody could guess that they were so much more than that.

The walks were an education in themselves. She had lived in the Village for several months, had walked back and forth over these streets, but when she went walking with Megan she felt as though she had done that walking with her eyes closed, or wearing blinders. There was so very much she had simply failed to notice.

The men and boys who loitered by the western rim of Washington Square at twilight. “Gay boys,” Megan told her. “Male prostitutes, mostly. Young ones who sell themselves to older men, for a meal or for money. They tend to have a more cavalier attitude toward sex than we do, kitten. They’ll go for hit-and-run love or even buy it on the market place. Pickups in filthy men’s rooms-that sort of thing. You rarely find girls like that. We tend to be more long-term in our love affairs, we sensitive lesbians.”