Good Vibrations Magazine

“Did you fuck her?” she demanded, her seething eyes trained on the rosy blotch on
my neck. It was only a hive I’d been scratching on the drive home to our apartment, but I suppose to a suspicious mind, it screamed “hickey.”

“Of course not,” I answered with robust sincerity even though lately I’d become accustomed to lying out of self-preservation.

“Why are you home so late?”

“We were talking.” And we were just talking… talking and a little kissing, but that’s all. Since Amanda started working with me at the University in the accounting department, we’d done nothing but talk; for the last two weeks, talk, talk, talk. Until tonight when we kissed, softly, passionately, too briefly. She knows I’m not free at the moment, but she’s patient and certainly more understanding than I’d ever be in the same situation.

“Why can’t you come home and talk to me?” Trisha whined.

“You don’t listen, Trisha. We talk but you don’t hear me. Your attention span is far more reliable in the bedroom than in a patio conversation about life goals and dreams.”

“Are you accusing me of being shallow?” she challenged.

“No, just narrow. Not everything comes down to who’s right and who’s wrong.”

Her eyes flared with indignation and her shoulders stooped. I cringed whenever she assumed that posture because I knew how deeply she felt things. But if you
ask me a question, you’re going to get a straight answer. Most of the time.

“You’re cruel,” she spat. “You do this to me just to get a rise and after your senses have soaked in my torture, you change into your night shirt and drift off into a deep sleep. I hate that you can do that.”

“We’re just friends,” I replied and did exactly what she’d predicted I’d do.

In the morning, her eyes we’re puffy as though she’d cried herself to sleep. I was getting much better at handling the guilt after several failed attempts to break up with her, but her scowling face hovering above the kitchen table encouraged me to eat my Frosted Flakes just a little faster so I could retreat to the sanctity of the shower.

As I shampooed my hair in blackness, I envisioned the Trisha I thought I’d bargained for. Six months ago, she strutted around the nightclub with a self-assured air, purveying the idealized version of self we all manufacture when displaying our personas to the public. She was magnificent. Her slanted smirk, brooding brown eyes twinkling in the reflection of the disco ball and tight, curvaceous body enticed me upon first glance. That same night in her vintage 1968 vanilla Carmengia I knew this self-proclaimed over-eager beaver pleaser was the perfect match for a pillow queen like me.

“How does that feel, baby?” she purred, as she slipped her fingers below the scalloped waste band of my lavender underwear, cascading them down my labia.

I groaned with approval.

“You’re delicious,” she declared, licking the right side of my neck. I tried to caress her lower back, but she’d grabbed my hand and forced it behind my head as it lay against the headrest.

“Do you like how I touch you?” she whispered, still circling my clit in an infuriatingly slow swirl of her fingers.

“Yeah,” I gasped, as she dipped her middle finger inside me, which she then slid over my pulsing clit, sending a ripple of ecstasy thundering through me.

“I want to fuck you,” she suggested politely, certainly too polite for the nature of the request.

“What are you waiting for?” I replied, swallowing hard as I panted.

“I’m getting so turned on by watching your facial expressions; I don’t want to stop teasing you.”

That right there should’ve sent up a flare, warning of her insatiable craving for power, but it felt so damn good, I just wasn’t in a very analytical mood.

“Beg me,” she’d whispered.

“What?”

“Beg me to fuck you,” she then insisted, sliding her finger down my clit, stopping just short of penetration.

“Fuck me,” I gasped in her ear without hesitation. At that point she could’ve got me to renounce my religion.

She then plunged her fingers in, and as I whimpered she wiggled them in and out, slowly then faster, slowly then faster again, measured perfectly against the rising and falling of my breath.

“You’re making me so hot,” she gushed, her voice quivering with more vigor than mine. “Does that feel good? Yeah, that feels so good.”

I opened my eyes for a moment and noticed she was pleasuring herself right along with me. She’s a muti-tasker and a remarkably coordinated one at that.

In a polished, mint Carmengia parked by an overflowing dumpster behind the club, we climaxed together in the noisiest, most intense orgasm I’d ever experienced.

She then opened her droopy eyelids and licked the finger that had explored me, moaning with delight.

“Would you like to stay over? I don’t live too far from here.” She studied my face like it was going to be on an exam she’d been cramming for all night.

“I can’t,” I apologized. “I drove my friends, and they’re probably cursing me up and down right now. I better get back inside.”

“Okay,” she sighed with a frown that consumed her face; the definitive moment to cut and run.

But I didn’t. Instead I looked back, and noticed her abandoned eyes, black with discontent.

“Do you want to have dinner sometime?” I offered, and three months later I moved into her stylish one-bedroom apartment around the corner from The Limelight.

After I’d finished shaving my legs, I thought about Amanda and how I was in love with her. I knew it was love because it felt entirely different from anything I’d felt for Trisha. I was exhausted. After six months of saving Trisha from herself, there was little of myself left for me, and certainly far less for Amanda than she’d deserved.

I’d turned off the shower and stood there as the droplets rolled off my body.

Trisha was going to work at the hospital on a double that day, and that was when I’d planned to make my escape. I’d had a very enlightening chat with a therapist a few days earlier and learned that Trisha’s threats to “hurt herself” if I left were a variation of the same power play she’d used in the car that night we’d met only wearing a different disguise. She needed to control me and for the last six months I’d let her.

“I’m leaving in a few minutes,” Trisha announced through the bathroom door.

“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I lied, shaking the excess water from my hair. The door then creaked opened. Trisha ripped aside the shower curtain and ogled my nakedness from the superiority of her mauve scrubs. She then grabbed me around the waist and kissed me with the force of a drunken sailor. Warm hands veered out in all directions, sliding over my wet body before I could push them away. Her right hand cupped my breast as her fingers grazed over my nipple, tantalizing it to erection. Her left hand traced my stomach down over my thin patch of shaved hair before landing between my legs, where it stroked my damp clit until it was raging hard.

“No, Trisha, you’ll be late,” I protested through her adamant kisses and rigorous fingering, but she knew me and knew how I reacted to her touch. As I spread my legs wider, she knew she wouldn’t be late for work.

After leaving me shuddering against the cold tiles, she wiped her face and hand on my bath towel and turned toward the door. “I think we’re done here,” she drawled.

As I heard her grab her car keys off the kitchen counter, I thought to myself, “Finally, something we agree on.”