Where Lizza goes, I follow.
She’s not like me. She’s the most beautiful girl I know. She has hair as blonde as highway grass. She wears terrible clothes and is still the epitome of cute. She smiles at people and they give her everything she wants, except she only wants adventure. She eats whatever she wants and fits into her size two yoga pants.
She’s wonderful.
I’m gangly and I lean forward too much when I walk. I own two pairs of shoes: sandals for summer, hiking boots for winter. My eyes are different colors, which I can’t even name. I never lost my high school acne. I smile at people and they ask me if I’ve thought about brushing my teeth.
I’m awful.
But Lizza loves me.
So I follow her into the musty crawlspace. It smells like dead rats, just the smell we had to cover up with incense when I was a kid. In college, my MCU boyfriend Kato burned a lot of incense. He said it was for sex trances. I was still pretty sure it was to cover up the smell of rats.
MCU wasn’t my school, by the way. MCU is mutual cover-up. We were both gay and not really ready to traumatize our families. He met Reis around the same time I met Lizza, so our breakup was hones to god mutual.
She’s squeezing my hand and I’m here and now—she’s saying it, too: “Here and now, babe.”
“Sorry.” The fog starts clearing, though. When she first figured it out, Lizza insisted on setting a mental safeword for me.
“When I say ‘here and now,’” she’d said, her limeade eyes glowing across the dorm room at me, “you have to stop worrying. It’s my promise that it’ll be okay. Okay?”
That was when I’d known I needed her. “Here and now,” I tell her, “I’m okay.”
“Are you sure? We don’t have to do this.”
“I just—a crawlspace? Couldn’t we take a swim in a nasty community pool or something instead?”
“Bluejane,” she says. I hate her for using my favorite nickname. “I think it’s where the ring went.”
We both heave a sigh. Her mom came to visit us last week, mostly to scold. Her ring disappeared just before she left. She walked out of the door calling me a thief at the top of her voice.
“So you want me to go in there for your mom.”
“No,” Lizza says, somehow turning around in the tunnel, because she’s got my face in her hands. I melt. I always melt. “For me.”
Every time she kisses me, I want to write her name a thousand times in a notebook, surrounded by hearts and wedding bells. She’s that intoxicating. We’ve been kissing for eleven years.
Shy as fox, I pinch my lips together and intertwine my fingers with hers. “Lizza, we’re almost those thirty-somethings. We’re supposed to hire nice muscley men to do this stuff.”
She ponders that, tilting her head and catching her lip under her just-too-big front teeth. I stare at her lips. She giggles. “You really wanna spend a little bit of savings just so you don’t have to go under the house?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “Mostly because I want to go inside and cuddle the fuck out of you until you want to eat me out.”
“Oh.” It’s too dark to see it, but I hear her blush. Her silhouette gets slinky and her voice is naughty-girl, and if I had a tail, well, it’s wagging. “Do it. Wait. This is why you were downloading Game of Thrones this morning.”
I start crawling backwards. I can see my hair frizzing out of my ponytail. “Maybe.”
“You know I love you for many reasons. This is merely the most obvious at this moment.”
“Come kiss me,” I say. I’m out of the crawlspace. The fresh air smells amazing and I don’t even throw pebbles at the squirrel chattering on our oak tree. I run to the door, breathless like recess. I love that I hear her feet swishing in the grass behind me. We never mow. We’re too busy kissing.
Where I go, Lizza follows.
I think about this every day. Four thousand, three hundred and eighteen times, at least, I think about why Lizza follows me. Not one of those times did I think of a good answer. But she does: through the grocery store. “You have magical veggie-picking powers. Hippy cred to your momma.” Into the house. “I can never get the stupid door unlocked. Also my brother always told me as a kid that the Skog would get me if I went in first, because he wanted to be first. I have no idea what the Skog is.” To church on the three big ones, Easter, Christmas Eve, Christmas. “Look, it doesn’t hurt to bribe all the deity-things, and if there’s a one reason why I might believe in a loving god, Bluejane, it’s you.”
Me. The androgynous tangly geek spending half her time watching anime and Invader Zim and the other half learning about marine biology. Somehow, we were stuck together in a dorm room, and she stuck with me for a year before I found out she was gay. It didn’t take me long to remember I was, too.
That first night, we slept together.
That wasn’t first. First, we lay in the dark in our bras and underwear, staring at the red numbers on her alarm clock. She reached for me and my whole body was on fire where her skin pressed against mine.
“There’s a reason I’m doing this,” she whispered against my forehead. “There’s a reason I say what I’m about to say.”
I held my breath. I probably felt like a dog on the Fourth, I was so tense. I thought of all the worst ways it could go.
“I love you, Jane Lee, because you really, truly don’t give a fuck.”
I never swore back then. I thought she was angry, so I started to cry. She sort of laughed, sort of said, “Aww,” and hugged me tight. Her hands wandered up to the back of my head and sifted through my oily hair.
“No, Bluejane. Okay, I want to be serious, but that’s what I’ve called you in my head all this time, and I’ve really wanted to call you that out loud, too, but—I didn’t know if you loved me. Now it doesn’t matter.” She kissed my forehead. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever done that, but it was the first time it made me tremble. “I’m telling you anyway, you beautiful girl. Well!” She squeaked with delight and my arms squeezed involuntarily, because my heart seized up when she laughed like that. “There’s another thing I’ve waited too long to say. No, listen to me.”
I did. I could barely believe my ears.
“I’ve always thought I was good at not caring what people think, and then I met you. First thing I noticed about you was your Zim notebook. Really,” she insisted when I frowned, “and I thought it was really…I couldn’t believe it. Cute. I thought it was adorable, and amazing. I started following your lead sometimes, speaking my mind and really not caring. Then I realized you were adorable, and amazing, always there across the room from me. Especially when you came under the blankets.”
Ohhhh.
I started to shake again. “Shit,” I said in a tiny voice. I never swore. I wasn’t angry. The tears started up.
Lizza put her face very, very close to my cheek. We just barely didn’t touch. Her lips burned my ear. “I love you, Bluejane. I love you and everything you do, and you should never be ashamed of yourself.”
She began to kiss her way down my cheek. Her tongue took my tears away, one by one, like a soft sponge. She found my lips and I drank her in. She had a little bit more spit than I expected. I didn’t know what was hotter, my face or my desire to put her nipples in my mouth.
“Lizza,” I breathed into her flowery hair.
“Mmm,” she said. She kissed my neck now, my collarbone now. I braced when she kissed where the car accident had broken the bone, but she was so gentle. My chest heaved under her.
Without another word, I reached behind her back and flipped her bra clasp open. The shape and lace fell away and I saw her breasts as if I had never seen them before. They were mine now. I hadn’t seen them that way before.
They swung away from her, the perfect size for my hands. I fumbled like a bad receiver but I got a nipple to my mouth. I imagined what I would want her to do with mine and I did it.
She rose and fell over me like a snake. I kept a determined hold on her breast and flicked my tongue in every direction. She was stronger than I’d thought. She lowered herself on top of me slower than I could see, and then my bra loosened too. Her hands didn’t stop their slide down my back. I tugged her panties off too.
For a while, we didn’t really move. I wanted to remember how it felt to be a lesbian for the first time for—forever, I guess. I thought very hard about how I would describe the moment. I thought about Lizza’s exact smell: lavender lotion, cornbread, the air after a rain in May. That’s what I thought about hardest.
She began to slide down me like a fireman’s pole. I still couldn’t believe what was happening, so I let her. She kissed above my bellybutton. Kissed my bellybutton. Kissed my little lumpy tummy. Kissed above my hairline. Kissed the hairy places, and then spread my lips with her fingers. The warm, hard tip of her nose touched my wetness.
She made the sound again: “Mmm.” Then her velvety tongue began to move across me in tiny strokes. In my head, in my heart, I promised her everything.
Sometimes, Lizza lifted her head just long enough to say, “I love you, Bluejane.” She always went right back to me. Sometimes she slipped a finger inside me where I was wettest. Mostly she sucked me and licked me and stroked me with her impossibly soft tongue.
I was afraid to come. Just at the right moment, she said, “Come, or else,” and I had to. I did a lot of coming under covers, but this was a new level of tender satisfaction.
I heaved and squirted. I arched my back while I hoped I wasn’t splashing her chin. I heard Lizza’s perfect lips smack together and her giggle filled my ears as she tumbled forward onto me. “You are delicious.”
I touched her over and over. I kept trying to think of ways to assure myself she was real, but only her skin satisfied me. “Oh,” I said. Shame was the most natural reaction. “Do I need to—”
She put a finger to my lips, then kissed me like a butterfly. I tasted my lips and my own orgasm—unafraid, I thought. I don’t care what she thinks. “I don’t mind that,” I said.
“Then whenever you’re ready,” Lizza said, “we’ll see if you like how I taste too. But I don’t care if it never happens. I want to taste you and kiss you forever.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t feel afraid with her.
She pulled the blanket up around us and tucked it beneath my other side. “Forever is a long time,” she said. It was the only time that night she sounded anything but happy.
“This is the best thing I’ve ever had,” I said. It was true. “Until further notice, I’m going to keep it.”
“Okay,” Lizza said, wriggling like a puppy in my arms. “Lucky me.”
Lucky me, I think. Every day, for four thousand, three hundred and eighteen days, I’ve thought about these words. I still can’t believe it.
She’s in the house now, too, shutting the door. I walk backwards towards the couch, watching. She loves to pounce. “Cheat,” Lizza says, and laughs and pounces anyway. We tumble onto the couch in a tangle.
I squirm so I’m behind her all the way. I’m usually the big spoon. “Consider yourself cuddled the fuck out of.”
“That’s a terrible sentence.”
“Shut up.”
She giggles and I squeeze her tight to me. I feel so protective of my little Lizza. I’m small, too, but I’m wiry. My brothers forced me to learn how to fight. She only had one brother, and he was always sick, so she knows how to be gentle.
She settles in. My fingers just barely roll her nipple between them through her shirt as she flips on the Apple TV and we start debating what we are least against watching.
To be continued…