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  Rita’s vibrator sat on the coffee table. Rita had switched it on to check the batteries, and it hummed softly for a few seconds before she silenced it. It was the exact color of its owner’s nightie, a simple pink cylinder with nothing specifically penis-like about it aside from its overall shape. That made it less blatant than some anatomically correct device with a glans and veins, but it was right there where either of them could reach out and take hold of it.

  Rita’s legs showed clear to the tops of her thighs. They’d never hire her to model stockings, but they were nice legs all the same. And she’d already noted that Rita’s full breasts were nicely shaped, but the sheer nightie gave her a much better view of them.

  She took a breath and got the ball rolling.

  And she told all about Steve, and the diner in Phoenix. Except, of course, she had to change things. She relocated the place from Phoenix to Denver, situating it on one of the side streets off Colfax Avenue. She changed Steve’s name to George, and she made herself younger, putting the whole incident four years earlier, when she was a college student on summer break.

  More to the point, she changed the ending. There was no knife, no feverish thrusting with the blade, no blood spattering her clothes, no blood pooling on the kitchen floor.

  And it didn’t feel as though she was holding anything back, because the story changed first in her mind, and all she had to do was recount what happened with George, and how he looked and smelled, and how he fucked her. The first time was as it had been with Steve, but in the telling now there was a second time as well, and then he reopened the diner for the noon rush and she worked all afternoon, smelling of him, while his bodily fluids leaked out of her vagina and trickled down her thighs. Except she didn’t say vagina, she said cunt, just to make sure Rita stayed interested.

  And then there was a third time, after he closed the place for the day, and he took her in the kitchen again and made her go down on him, with his dick reeking of both of them, and then he fucked her like a mad bull, and she went home and took a dozen showers and burned her clothes and never went back.

  Early in the account, she’d seen Rita’s hand slip under her nightgown. It stayed there, but it wasn’t always busy, and she knew that Rita was holding back, keeping herself on the edge, wanting her own climax to coincide with the story’s.

  She almost made it. She held off until, during their final trip to the kitchen, she got off a few sentences before George did.

  “You never went back.”

  “Rita, I wouldn’t even walk down that block. I was afraid to walk past the diner.”

  “Like you’d be powerless to keep from going inside?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Wow. I have to tell you, Kimmie, this is tons better than phone sex with Paul.”

  “Well, sure. This way you got to use both hands.”

  “Were you watching?”

  “Of course.”

  “That made it hotter, somehow. Watching you watching me. But the main thing was you told it so well, Kimmie! It’s like I was right there while it was happening. I could smell him myself.”

  “Whatever you imagined,” she said, “the real George was worse.”

  “Gosh.” Deep breath. “I guess it’s my turn, huh?”

  “Your turn to tell all,” she said, and put her hand under her nightie. “My turn to play.”

  TWELVE

  Rita had married young. Her husband was her own age, and not much more experienced than she was, and their sex was all vanilla and white bread. He never went down on her, and when she demurred at his suggestion that she go down on him, he seemed almost relieved. So she never did, and he never brought it up again, and after half a dozen years during which they were unable to conceive a child—“And thank God for that!”—they were divorced.

  Eventually she started dating again, and the next man she went to bed with introduced oral sex into the relationship. At first she didn’t like it when he went down on her, but then she did. Like, a lot. So she couldn’t really pull away when he steered her face toward his dick.

  “But I didn’t know what I was doing, you know? And I didn’t have a lot in the way of natural aptitude. Maybe some girls are born knowing how, or these days with all the Internet porn you can at least see how it’s done, and maybe that’s a help. But whatever I was doing, he didn’t like it much. He actually made me stop.

  “And I thought, well, I’ll try to do better next time. But there wasn’t a next time, because he didn’t call me again.”

  There were other men, and she began to enjoy giving head, and didn’t wait for her partner to suggest it. She liked when it was small and soft and she could make it grow in her mouth. But when her mouth had worked its magic, transforming small-and-soft into big-and-hard, then she didn’t know what to do with it.

  Sometimes it worked anyway, sort of. “The first time a guy came in my mouth I loved it. Loved it! I was afraid I’d be disgusted, but I wasn’t, not at all, and I wanted to gulp down every last drop. I swear I could feel all that energy going right into the cells of my body.”

  But she still wasn’t good at it. What she needed was a course of instruction, and she was trying to build up her courage to hire a prostitute to give her lessons, when something better came along.

  “What is it they say, Kimmie?When the pupil is ready the master will appear? That’s exactly what happened.”

  The master was her hairdresser, Brian, a flamboyant queen who told the most outrageous stories and somehow invited confidences. “It’s not that I don’t like to do it,” she told him, “it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing.” And then, after they’d discussed the subject for a while, “I’ll bet you could teach me.”

  He showed up the following night with a present for her, and she knew what it held before she got it unwrapped. “A dildo,” she said, “and unlike my discreet vibrator, you could say it was anatomically correct, veins and all. They must have done a casting. Kimmie, if I ever meet the guy whose dick they used, I swear I’ll be able to recognize him, because it’ll be like running into an old friend.”

  Brian taught her what to do, and watched what she did, and commented on her technique. She was horribly self-conscious at first, but she got over it, and it began to seem natural enough, sucking on a rubber cock while her coach critiqued her performance. Then he left her to practice, and she sat up for hours fellating the dildo. “Then I took it and stuck it in. In my cunt, Kimmie, and after I got off I took it out and sucked it some more. Before, the one thing wrong with it was it didn’t taste like anything, and now it tasted like me.”

  She had a hand under the borrowed nightie, stroking herself gently while Rita went on talking. This was no fabrication, no improvement on the truth, like her transformation of Steve into George. She could tell that Rita was recounting her education exactly as she remembered it, but at the same time it was very much a performance, designed to excite her good friend Kimmie.

  And it was working. She’d been horribly frustrated, unable to seduce that moralistic moron Graham Weider, and thus unable to cross him off her list of unfinished business. And she’d have masturbated this evening, she’d have had to if she was going to get any sleep, but this was worlds different from fingering herself in the privacy of her bedroom.

  This was kind of gay, actually.

  She was listening to Rita, hearing how they’d had a second lesson, which concluded with Brian telling his pupil that she’d be able to make some lucky straight guy very happy. And she was watching Rita, watching her lick her lips, watching her put her own hand between her own legs and finger herself idly as she talked. And she was checking out the swell of Rita’s breasts, and the shape of Rita’s legs, and she could feel Rita’s eyes on her own body, and without really thinking about it she whipped the nightie over her head and tossed it aside.

  Rita’s story stopped in mid-sentence.

  “No, don’t stop,” she told Rita. “I was just feeling warm, you know? And if I’m going to sit h
ere jilling off in front of you, it seems silly to hide my tits.” She cupped a breast, and could feel Rita’s gaze on it. “Or my cunt,” she said, and opened her legs, holding the pose for a long moment before putting her hand back where it had been before. “Now tell me the rest,” she said. “Once you got your diploma from the Academy of Brian, who was the lucky guy?”

  The lucky guy, as it happened, turned out to be Brian.

  It wasn’t his idea. She had to suggest it, and then she had to talk him into it. “I’m gay,” he kept insisting. “It’s not as though I’ve never been with women. I have, on several occasions, but let’s just say I’ve been there and done that, and it’s just not me.”

  “I don’t want to get married,” she told him. “I don’t even want you to kiss me goodnight later. I just want to blow you. What’s so bad about that?”

  Nothing, as it turned out.

  He agreed, finally, and it turned out to be a lesson, because he offered suggestions and feedback as she went along. And somewhere along the way she graduated, because there was a shift in the energy and she was in command, she was in control, and what a delicious feeling that was.

  Afterward, he suggested that maybe he should open a school, an academy of fellatio.

  “Won’t you offer any other courses?”

  “Like what? Brian Van Horn’s Academy of Fellatio and Hairdressing? I don’t think—”

  “There must be something else you could teach me,” she said. “And I’m not talking about hairdressing.”

  Rita looked at her, took a deep breath, and took off her own nightgown. “And now you can see my tits, Kimmie, and watch me play with my cunt, while I tell you how he taught me all about rimming. Among other things.”

  So hot.

  She had never been with a woman. It was not as though it had never occurred to her. But whatever thoughts she’d ever entertained had stopped somewhere between speculation and fantasy. She’d certainly never thought about acting on them.

  Or acting them out, as Graham Weider would put it.

  It would be so easy now. They were both naked, they were both touching themselves, the whole evening was about nothing but sex, and all she had to do was cross the room. Let me give you a hand, Rita. Let me play with that for you. What a beautiful cunt, Rita. Can I touch it? Can I kiss it for you?

  And then what?

  Would she have to kill her?

  She considered the question later, lying alone in her own bed. She had stayed in her chair, and had confined her caresses to her own body. There had been that moment when they might have made love, and they hadn’t done so, and the moment had passed. Now they were in their separate bedrooms, and all that was left to do was sleep.

  But what if she’d made love to Rita? That was lovely, Rita. My very first time with a woman, and I have to say I liked it. Excuse me a moment, will you? I have to go to the kitchen to pick up something sharp.

  Or not. How could she be sure?

  When she stepped outside herself, when she allowed herself a little perspective, it wasn’t hard to see why she acted as she did. The signal event of her childhood and adolescence was the long affair she’d had with her father, who’d very artfully seduced her and then, ultimately, rejected her. And she’d erased that blot from her life by erasing the man himself, and once he was dead it was as if he had never been.

  Except, of course, that it wasn’t. But he wasn’t alive, couldn’t sit smirking, remembering what he’d done to her, what he’d taught her to do to him. He remained on the list, but there was a line through his name, and whenever another man had earned a place on that list, she’d seen to it that his name had a line through it.

  All but four names.

  If she had sex with a woman, would hers be the fifth name? And would she feel a compelling urge, an actual need, to draw a line through that name?

  No way to know. Not for sure.

  She didn’t want to kill Rita. She wanted to kill Graham, Christ how she wanted to kill him, and she thought of all the other men, most of their names metaphorically crossed out almost as soon as they’d been inked in. She’d wanted sex with them, and afterward she’d wanted them dead. For a while it was a matter of taking care of business, but when she thought of Steve in Phoenix, she realized that it had become something more than that. She’d reached a point where the sex act itself wasn’t complete as long as her partner had a pulse. That was the true orgasm: when she struck like a cobra, and the man died.

  Withheld, she was left with an itch she couldn’t scratch. Even now, after God knows how many orgasms, after she’d finished herself off with the vibrator, its surface still dewy with Rita’s juices, even now she found it maddening, infuriating, that she’d found a Graham Weider who’d become immune to her powers. Was he going to be on her list forever?

  Oh, for Christ’s sake.

  The answer came to her in a flash. With it she felt an emotional release none of the evening’s orgasms had managed to provide, and she drifted off and slept like a baby.

  THIRTEEN

  “Graham? It’s Kim. Please don’t hang up.”

  A silence. Then, “All right.”

  “First of all, I want to apologize. I don’t know what got into me yesterday.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s not all right. It was completely inappropriate and wholly unwarranted. I was disrespectful to you and made a fool of myself in the process.”

  “I’ve had plenty of apologies to make,” he said. “So it’s not hard for me to accept yours, Kim.”

  “Thank you.” She drew a breath. “Those apologies,” she said. “Would they be in connection with those meetings you’ve been going to?”

  “It’s a 12-Step program,” he said, “and yes, making amends is very much a part of the program.”

  “You told me the name of it, but I—”

  “Sexual Compulsives Anonymous.”

  “Right, SCA. Funny how I can’t seem to remember the name. Or maybe it’s not so funny after all.”

  He waited, and she let the silence stretch.

  Then she said, “My life’s not working so well these days.”

  “I see.”

  “Not just these days. For quite a while now. What was the term you used? ‘Acting out’? It seems like all I’m ever doing is acting out, or trying to, or thinking about it.”

  “I understand, Kim. I’ve been there.”

  “Can anyone go to these meetings? Or do you have to be a member?”

  “Would you like to come to a meeting?”

  “Would I like to? Probably about as much as I’d like to have root canal. But it’s that or lose the tooth. Graham, it’s not a question of would I like to. I think it’s something I have to do.”

  “Hold on a minute. Okay, let’s see. There’s a meeting in downtown Seattle this afternoon, but I’ll be busy. If you don’t mind going by yourself—”

  “I think I’d be more comfortable if you went with me.”

  “Well, let me see. How’s lunch time tomorrow? There’s a 12:30 meeting I sometimes go to in downtown Redmond near Marymoor Park. I could meet you there and we could walk in together.”

  “I’m not sure I could find it. And on a bike—”

  “No, that’s too far by bicycle. Maybe—”

  “Graham? Suppose I come to where you work? I could meet you in the parking lot. At twelve? Or maybe a little earlier, so you can tell me a little about it before we actually walk in?”

  She stayed out all day, ate dinner by herself at an Indian restaurant that served bland food dumbed down for the Western palate. She got the waiter to bring her hot sauce, and that helped, but she’d have been happier if the heat had been cooked into the food, not spooned on top of it.

  It was almost eight when she got home, and she steeled herself to walk in to the smell of a home-cooked meal, and a housemate who wanted a reprise of the previous evening. But she encountered neither; there’d been no cooking since last night’s dinner
, and no car in the garage.

  There was leftover coffee and she reheated a cup and drank it at the kitchen table while she read that month’s Vanity Fair. She’d almost finished the coffee when she heard the garage door ascend, and she stayed where she was until she heard Rita and a man in conversation. She rose quickly, scooped up her cup and the magazine, and was in her room with the door closed before the two of them had cleared the threshold.

  “Kimmie? Are you awake?”

  No one, not even a devout Crystal Methodist, could have been more thoroughly awake. But did she have to admit it? If she just kept silent—

  “Kimmie?”

  If she kept silent, Rita would walk right in.

  “I’m awake,” she said. “But kind of drifty.”

  “He’s gone. I sent him home.”

  Oh? Were you with someone? I never would have guessed.

  “I suppose you heard us.”

  “Just barely.”

  “He was a guy who hit on me a couple of times. I was never interested. But after last night — well, let’s just say I was in the mood.”

  No kidding.

  “Kimmie, you’re half asleep. We’ll talk at breakfast.”

  Footsteps receded. Rita’s door opened and closed.

  And she lay in bed, waiting for daybreak.

  A toasted English muffin and a cup of coffee. And Rita, wearing a belted housecoat, with her own English muffin and her own cup of coffee, and a full report.

  “We fucked on the couch,” she said. “He’s going bald, and he could stand to lose a few pounds, but he was okay otherwise. Nice circumcised dick, medium in size. We didn’t do anything you couldn’t find in the Kama Sutra, but it was interesting enough. I mean, I came a lot.”

  “I know.”

  “That was on purpose. The noise, I mean. I knew you could hear, and the idea of you hearing made it a lot more exciting. You know what I was wishing?”