Letting Go of the Girl

by Annabeth Leong

To find out if my writing has changed over the years, I went to my first published erotic story, which I wrote in December 2008. (Not as far back as Giselle's, and not as charming as the tale of the lovely Sophie, I'm afraid.) The story was called "Make It Last," and it appeared in the now defunct Oysters and Chocolate.

“Come on,” Lisa laughed. “You must have done something at some point with someone.” I wanted to kiss the corners of her mouth, at the spots where her lips went from thin to full.

Letting myself lie back, I took a deep breath and resolved to finish what I’d started. “I had this lover,” I began. Lisa made an encouraging sound in her throat. “Every time I got her close to coming, she would push my head away. The muscles in her legs would tighten up, and her clit would be this little rock under my tongue, and I would know she was about to do it. I’d wrap my arms around her waist and hold on hard, thinking maybe this time I’d get in that one extra lick, and she would be screaming and pushing at the top of my head with both her hands.”

I paused, trying to gauge how Lisa was reacting. Her breathing sounded a little faster than normal. My own breathing had certainly sped up. I struggled up onto my elbow and looked down at her. For once, I let myself drink in every lovely curve. I openly admired her long neck and the jawline that traced from a soft, round ear down to a dainty pointed chin, the red-brown lips above that, the wide nose that quivered delicately with each breath. I looked in her eyes again.

“What I wanted to do,” I said, “was tie her to the bed so she couldn’t push me away, and then see how long I could go. I wanted to lick her until the bed under us both was soaked and my tongue got cramped from exhaustion. But I never got to do that.”

I watched Lisa’s chest rapidly rising and falling. Her shirt rode up, exposing her belly button and the very beginning of the fuzz leading down between her thighs. She trembled, and her eyes followed my eyes to the top button of her jeans.

“You never told me you liked girls,” she said in a strained voice.

Another deep breath for me. It felt strange that all the lights in my room were on so late at night. It felt strange to look at her without disguising my lust. I bent over her and pressed my lips to the strip of bare skin between her jeans and her shirt. She jumped. I did it again. “It would have been awkward,” I murmured.

I wrote those words huddled on the loveseat in the living room of the apartment I shared with my first husband (now my ex). Lisa was entirely made up, but the longing in the writing about her is still palpable to me. And the story—"I had this lover"—and the wish that comes with it, is entirely true. (Alert readers will remember the girl I kissed while on top of a rundown train car.)

Lisabet has talked about how she poured all her desires into her first novel, and I've said that I played my cards closer to the chest. But when I read this story in its entirety (I'd give you a link, but it's no longer available online), I see the themes that have shredded me for years now. I may have danced away from this, but it was at the heart of things always. The girl I couldn't forget, the hopeless longing, the fear of revealing desire, and the fear of keeping it hidden.

There is a sort of fantasizing that I've always been able to do to get myself off, but it is cruel, faceless, and nameless. A few years ago, I started wondering: If I could see a face, whose would it be? It turned out to be hers, but when I pictured her and really let myself remember, I couldn't get myself off anymore because I would start to cry.

This is from Untouched, which I wrote from 2013-2014:

Slowly, Marie sat back down on the chair. "Tell me how you wish it had been. Tell me what you need me to do."

Celia sucked a breath in through her teeth and closed her eyes, trying to envision the alternate reality in which things could have worked out between them.

"We would have explored things together. We wouldn't have made such a big deal about prom, and we wouldn't have put so much expectation on that one night. Maybe we would have met at the hotel first so we could spend some time alone together before the dance. We would have ordered room service and I would have watched you eat. I could never stop watching you, Marie. All this time it's been the other way around, but I can still remember how fascinated I was by the way you moved, by every little glimpse I got of your skin. When your cardigan would slip off your shoulder in class, I would stare at the sliver of your bra strap that was peeking out and just drink in the sight of your skin beside it. In the hotel room the night of prom, eating with you, it would have been too much for me. I would have been so turned on by your lips opening and closing, sucking at your fingertips, that I wouldn't have been able to chew my own food—let alone swallow."

Marie laughed, delight on her face. "I'd forgotten that you used to want me, too. It's been so long."

That's still me writing about that girl. I dedicated the book to her, too, with the line, "I should have taken you to prom." And then I wrote another book last fall, under a different name, that is even more about her. So maybe my writing hasn't changed at all. I've done a lot of things, but I've also spent upwards of six years working out my feelings about a girl from my past, one tiny bit at a time. It's embarrassing to admit that, especially with my stated preference for making up characters. I never meant, for example, for Marie to become her, but she did.

Perhaps it's too soon to say, but I think I've finally put it to bed. Something in that last book I wrote felt final. I can talk about her now or think about her without crying. Her face is no longer waiting to ambush me in every secret corner of my mind. I see other faces in my fantasies. They are the same constellation of fantasies, but they feel wider and more possible. I wonder if more hope will come into my writing—I would like that.

I thought about that reading the last paragraph of that story from long ago. I wrote:

If this had happened ten years ago, I might have stopped and held her then. I might have placed my faith in the sex that we would have tomorrow. The years had taught me better. I wound my arms around her thighs and buried my face between her legs, sighing as I tasted her and breathed her in. I pushed my tongue into her again. I had to get enough to make it last.

That's the voice of a cynic, someone who knows there's no going back, there's no tomorrow, there is no such thing as later. And yet recently I've been learning to trust that I'm worth coming back to. I don't have to snatch every scrap of pleasure in every moment because I can see a person again. I can have another chance. I can't yet declare that my writing has changed because of this realization, but I want it to.

(In an unrelated note, I'm doing an online chat tonight in support of my new book Liquid Longing: An Erotic Anthology of the Sacred and Profane. I'll be available from 7-9 p.m. EST at this link: http://www.chatzy.com/FFP-Chat I would love to see any of you there!)

The Abandoned Train Car

by Annabeth Leong

In the town where I lived when I was younger, there's a stretch of abandoned train track that leads to a line of graffiti-covered cars. I used to sneak out of the house to walk on the tracks at night, enjoying the game of spacing my steps to line up with the cross slats, and the train, coming at the end of this walk like a divine surprise, was the most special, most sacred place in town to me.

On this particular night, she came to my house, and we were pretending to everyone that it was a friendly sleepover thing, but both of us knew what we were actually going to do. We were having a snack together late that night, and I offered her my drink apologetically, not sure if she wanted to share a cup with me. "If I'm worried about your saliva," she said, "I need to stop right now." And we laughed because that was the closest we'd come to saying any of this out loud.

After that, I took her on this walk with me, down the train tracks, to the train. We climbed up the ladder on the side of one of the train cars and sat on the top together. The night might have been a little chilly, but I was shaking for a different reason. I remember stars. We had a package of Skittles and a bottle of Coca-Cola, and I think we had talked on the way there but once we got to the top of the train we fell silent because it was obviously time.

We shared the soda, and then we played a game arranging the Skittles on each other's forearms, and then I got bold and ate one of the Skittles off her arm. We were still too afraid to kiss, so she lay on her back on the cold metal roof and I placed Skittles carefully around her belly button. I don't think I had the guts to try to eat those off, though.

Then she turned to me, and we were kissing. I remember her thick, curly hair in my hands, and the taste of the soda and candy in her mouth. It was tentative at first—we had an awkward discussion of whose lips were supposed to be on the outside of the kiss, the man role—but then it was so obviously right that we stopped hesitating.

I had heard so many warnings from adults about boys and how they wanted sex so badly, how they would go half-insane from hormones and I should never trust them and always be sure to guard myself whenever I was alone with a boy. I'd always thought that was bullshit, some sort of racket, that surely no one was actually losing their mind over sex. Despite the experiences I'd had with boys pushing and cajoling me, I felt that this raging hormones thing was a convenient lie.

Then I kissed her, and I went half-insane, and I understood what those people had been trying to describe except that I wasn't a boy. I didn't really know how to think about what I was doing with her. It felt like there wasn't a rational thought left in my body.

I wasn't a virgin in the technical sense. I'd been with a number of boys by then. But recently, I've been thinking that night was my real first time because it was the first time I wasn't performing a role. Until then, I was always acquiescing to various coercions, making deals, feeling charged with being either the sexual gatekeeper or the automatic dispenser of magical sex favors. With her, we were both doing what we truly wanted to do. We were both excited but awkward but sweet but scared. Sex had never felt so mutual to me before.

I went to visit that town just recently, and I made my pilgrimage. It was eighty-five degrees, which shocked me since I'm used to New England now. I surprised a black snake sunning itself beside the tracks and it rushed away through dead leaves, into the overgrown swamp trees that line the space that was once cleared for the railroad. Its motion was so loud that I cringed, and the sky was bright and wide and watchful above me. I didn't know how I'd once had the courage to come to that place at night.

My mother had told me the old train was gone, but she was wrong. It was still there. I wandered along it, wishing I could recall which car we actually climbed. There was fresh graffiti—new tags, badges of pride for kids I'm way too old to recognize. My husband was with me, and I sort of regretted taking him there because I wanted that place for her.

I've been thinking about that moment a lot lately. That started long before this topic came up here at this blog. I try to write about it in my journal, and I wind up circling it instead, leading up to it and giving endless back story, or analyzing all the things that happened afterward. I write her name and I start to cry, and then I ask myself what I'm crying about. Surely something about the moment, not about her—it seems too naive to be crying about her.

But I think I'm crying about all of it. All the things we didn't know, the things I never had the courage to say or do. There were notes scrawled instead of paying attention in class, boyfriends, all sorts of messes. There were the nights she came to my house and made me feel that wild need no matter how much I wanted to resist her, and there's the fact that I no long have any idea why the hell I was trying to resist her. There were the nights she got me drunk in desperation, and always, always there was my lack of courage, my fear of being seen with her in school. Then there was her conversion and the letters she sent me detailing passages from Leviticus. Years later, there was the time she came to visit me but insisted we stand outside, as if crossing the threshold of a doorway would take us back to that same old feeling. And the last time I spoke to her, she kept a table between us, as if, without the object, we would fly together again.