Best Lesbian Romance of the Year Read online

  Audra chuckled as she continued setting up the camera. She had a great smile. The butterflies in my stomach calmed when she smiled.

  “Just move how you feel comfortable,” Audra had said.

  I’d snorted. I so did not feel comfortable. Maybe Erika was right. There wasn’t anything interesting about me except my thoughts on postmodernist theory.

  Changing up the scene from a living room setting to a faux bedroom scene hadn’t helped either. I still slumped like a log on the mattress.

  “I’ve been looking at New York University, actually.” I tried to sound casual. It’s difficult to sound casual when you’re on all fours, ass-up to the room. Even if boyshorts do hide all of your business. If I dipped my head, I could watch Audra, although she appeared upside down.

  She inverted her mouth in a considering way. “Isn’t that where Bishop taught?”

  I winced. Even Erika had missed that detail. In truth, I had no idea where I wanted to go. I’d only settled on NYU precisely because Bishop had.

  “Would it help if I suggested a few poses?” Audra said.

  I nodded.

  “Okay, how about you just…” She bit her lip, studying me. “I like the all fours, but try crossing your ankles. Bring your knees a little farther apart? Good. How about unbuttoning your shirt?”

  It was Audra’s shirt, a white collared button-down. She’d given it to me in place of my sweater set. She’d asked me to keep on the black boyshorts. I hoped the color hid the evidence of my arousal. I couldn’t stop thinking about peeling her out of her top and tonguing her nipples, about pressing my face into her softness.

  “Oh, I like that,” Audra said and started frantically snapping shots. Without looking at me, well, looking through the lens, she said, “It’s a tragic romance, isn’t it?”

  Lost as I was between my imaginings and this surreal scene, I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Lowell and Bishop?” She smiled. “I mean, these two great poets, the greatest of their generation, working to create new material in the wake of the postmodernists. Great intellectuals, best friends, they write each other, spend years being one another’s sound board for their art, ideas, all this shit. And they couldn’t have been more different. It’s so obvious they’re in love with each other, but just can’t get it together. Can you move to the left a little? Widen your knees?”

  “Like this? But it’s more that they were in love with one another’s work,” I insisted. “He carried ‘Armadillo’ with him for years. Not to mention that he was a chronic womanizer and she was a lesbian.”

  “Yeah, that’s good. Try relaxing your shoulders, maybe roll your hips, arch your back, like yoga, just go slow, adjust the pose, until you find what feels good and what’s reaching. That’s great. Dip your chin? Awesome, awesome. Maybe that was because they kept getting with people who were all wrong for them instead of the one who was right.”

  “You can’t change your orientation,” I said.

  “No,” Audra agreed. “Can you pull up your shirt a little? But sexuality is fluid, don’t you think? It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, you see someone attractive and you lust for them, don’t you?”

  She had a point. For some that was true.

  “Can you take that clip out and let your hair fall over the side of your face?” I did. “Perfect. I don’t know, I’m a romantic I guess. It still feels like he was the great love of her life.”

  “He might have been,” I said, “but I think she loved her art more.”

  Audra smirked. “Don’t we all?”

  She took some final photos and let the camera down. “Okay, I think we’re good. Did that feel good for you? It’s awkward, I know, but you get sort of used to it. Do you think it’s, well, something you’d like to do for the next few months? And before you say no…”

  She hurried over to the computer with its television-sized flat monitor and plugged in her camera, dumping the pictures she’d taken. I approached slowly, wrapping the shirt tight around me, arms crossed in front of my belly, suddenly feeling exposed, like a newly peeled egg.

  I was keenly aware of my bare toes curling against the cold floor.

  I’d have to look at myself too? I hadn’t considered that part, perhaps the most mortifying thing of all. I hated it when Erika made me fuck in front of a mirror, hated the sight of my mouth hanging open, skin flopping and sweaty. My gut clenched.

  Maybe this had all been a colossal mistake. Maybe Erika was right and I should just go be a museum curator somewhere. I belonged while caring for art, not being art.

  “Okay, check this out,” Audra said.

  Reluctantly, I raised my eyes to the screen.

  My eyes widened.

  It was me, but not me as I’d ever seen me. For one thing, I was hot. For another, see point number one.

  She had me on all fours, ankles crossed, hands braced beneath my shoulders. The white shirt fell unbuttoned to either side, contrasting with the black underwear. My hair obscured my face, giving me an anonymity that felt comfortable and sexy at once. The muted white light shone in the window in front of me, contrasting with the dark all beside it. I was every woman, the ideal, softly sensual, imbued with a deep carnality that I hadn’t known I possessed. Audra had plucked it from me, a musician honing her instrument. She’d taken the raw me, boyshorts and all, and made me look…well… hot.

  Audra swiveled in the computer chair, biting her lip. “What do you think?”

  I recognized, with a shock, the artist’s vulnerability. She liked it, obviously. Or she wouldn’t have selected this image to recruit me to the project. But she also wanted the artist’s reassurance that what she’d created was good.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Audra smiled with such enthusiasm that it made my pussy twitch. I bit back a groan when she hugged me briefly.

  “Good,” she said.

  The portfolio grew.

  Each day we worked through one or two settings, where Audra would have the room arranged when I arrived with what she thought might work, as well as an outfit laid out for me.

  “I don’t photograph my aunt Mildred,” she said on the second day, when I showed up wearing yet another sweater set, which she cast aside with a look. I’d have asked what was wrong with my own clothes, but could just picture her arching her brows at me. And I already knew the answer.

  They were boring.

  And I had to admit, Audra’s taste in clothes was amazing. Her choices for me were even better. If I had any doubts about the photos themselves, once she showed me a picture of my shoulders and back, down to the crack of my ass, a skirt at my hips, zipper undone, my elbows bent, as if she’d caught me a moment before slipping out of the garment, my doubts evaporated. From that picture, I trusted her judgment absolutely.

  Slowly, images started collecting. First the initial shots she’d done, from our first day together, and the skirt picture. Then a similar back shot, my face hidden, facing the wall this time. She crouched below me as I stretched up the wall, naked, except for a pair of black tights bunched a third of the way up my ass. Then there came a series of shots, with panties clinging to the contours of my pussy; with tights stretching over the bridge of my hip bones; with my hands clutching and pressing up my bare breasts, my collarbone sharp and vulnerable.

  It was hot—to see what she saw, to feel her eyes on me through the lens, her voice guiding me with subtle instruction how to move. I left our sessions increasingly flushed, feeling as though I’d been teased to the point of orgasm and denied at the last moment. My skin burned from the inside with this curbed lust.

  “I’d like to try something,” Audra said, considering the pictures. She worried at her lower lip with her teeth. We weren’t finished for the day, but she’d grown increasingly unhappy with the day’s shoot and had called a pause to reevaluate our game plan for the rest of the session. “I’ve been thinking.” She swiv-eled in the chair to look at me. “This is about a journey, right? Well, there’
s a distinct sensuality in your photos, but I think there’s an untapped element of sexuality there also, and I’d like to challenge that.”

  That was how Audra talked about the project. “Challenge” this, “push” that, “explore” something else.

  “Our talk about Bishop the other day made me think of it, actually. How she’s always so shy and appropriate, always seeking perfection. But sexual awakening is messy—I’m just thinking out loud now,” she warned, “but I feel like there’s something here. I want to take pictures while you masturbate. I think it’s the next progression. We’ll start with nudes and if you don’t want to go any further, we’ll stop. What do you think?”

  I looked at the thumbnails on the screen. I thought of Audra, of her photographing me with my fingers in my pussy, stroking my breasts, watching me while I fantasized about her. I was far too shy to ever admit this attraction to her, so if I wanted her, this was likely the only way I would ever have her.

  She’d lent me her robe for the respites we took during the shoot so I didn’t have to wander around the loft half or fully naked. I twisted the belt of her robe in my hands. “Can I think about it?”

  “Where do you go?” Erika asked me one day.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tuesday afternoons. You’ve missed coffee every Tuesday for a month.”

  I shrugged. I hadn’t told her about Audra or the photographs. It felt wrong somehow.

  “Do you have a lover?”

  I laughed. “When would I have time for a lover?”

  It was true. As the semester progressed, the strain was beginning to take its toll on me. I slept little, ate less, reading constantly, voraciously, mentally ticking through my academic to-do list, crossing and dotting every t and i constantly…except when I was with Audra. I looked more forward to our sessions than all my other classes combined. She pushed me, challenged the ideas I held in front of me like some kind of protective talisman. Even Erika noticed the difference.

  “I thought you always argued against the publication of Bishop’s drafts. You said it was revealing the woman behind the curtain.”

  I shrugged. “I can change my mind.”

  She snorted. “You don’t change your mind.”

  It wasn’t cheating, I reasoned. Erika had kept me at arm’s length our entire relationship. Besides, it wasn’t that I had any intentions of sleeping with Audra. I just genuinely enjoyed her company. And her arguments made me laugh. Like how she insisted Lowell got masturbatory pleasure out of flinging his poems at the world at hurtling pace.

  “No, really,” she said, “think about it. He writes these things in a great creative rush and before his hands are dry from the keyboard he’s got them in an envelope and off to a publisher. That’s like literary masturbation.”

  She had me laughing so hard I could barely catch my breath.

  “Well, I don’t like it,” Erika was saying, “I don’t like playing second fiddle to whatever bohemian extracurricular bullshit you have going on. If you’re with me, you’re with me and I won’t cater to absurdities. And what are you wearing? That shirt makes you look like a lesbian.”

  The shirt was Audra’s.

  “It looks better on you,” Audra had said, waving aside my arguments when I’d protested her giving it to me.

  “I am a lesbian,” I said to Erika.

  She flung her hand in dismissive wave. “You know what I mean.”

  I thought of Audra, of her mischievous smile as she photographed me. The way she thanked me each day when we finished shooting.

  Erika had never thanked me for so much as passing a red pen.

  I thought of Audra’s smile and how it ignited a warm glow inside me. And how it made me immediately want to think of ways to make her smile again.

  Then, to Erika, I said softly, “Maybe I don’t need to be with you.”

  After the non-fight with Erika, I went to Audra’s door and rang the bell. We hadn’t done any pictures since the day she asked about shooting while I masturbated. Audra answered the door in a hastily tugged-on camisole, which she was still pulling down, and silky, clinging shorts.

  “Eliza?” she said. “Is something wrong?”

  It was only then I realized it was after midnight.

  “Let’s do it,” I said, then had a moment of panic when I thought Audra might not know what I meant.

  I should’ve known better.

  “If you’re uncomfortable, at any time, we can stop,” Audra said.

  “You’re a librarian, not a model,” Erika-in-my-head said.

  In answer, I removed my top.

  The first picture she took during this exchange showed me in profile, crouched in a yoga-like child’s pose, arms by ears, hair falling out of the way over the top of my head. The light came in from behind me to make a silhouette of my breast with erect nipple. My lips were parted, eyes closed.

  It was a less vulnerable pose than many of the others, and not just because this was the first one to show that I actually had a head. There was a latent sense of power in this picture, like the essence of femininity at rest.

  We didn’t speak. Audra had been nothing but professional and friendly during our sessions. But that didn’t stop me from imagining how her skin would glide against mine, or wanting to wrap my arms around her waist, kissing her ear while we looked through photos at the end of the day. I was far too shy to ever make a move toward her. It wasn’t appropriate. I wanted to be like Bishop, keep my dignity intact.

  So I intended to use this session to exorcise this immense attraction I held for her, by indulging in it once and for all.

  She shot me curled on my back, ankles crossed, fists clenched tight to my chest.

  She shot me with my hand reaching for my pussy, a white thong stretched taut between my thighs, mouth parted, eyes closed.

  I thought of how I wanted her, how hot it felt to be seen like this, to be noticed, to have her capture something about me that no one else had seen. I thought of all my fantasies from the past few months, where Audra entered the scene she’d set. She’d uncurl my crossed ankles, ease my fisted hands to the side. She’d slip the white panties down my legs. Her tongue would be on my pussy, and her fingers would plunge inside me and she’d lick and fuck me while the camera went on shooting—click by click—until my back arched off the futon, as my entire body, racked with orgasm, twisted beneath her touch; until I came so hard I lost time and woke only to her kissing me.

  She shot me lying on my back on the bed, naked with a book open but obviously disregarded on one side of my abdomen, fingers lazily stroking one bare thigh, knees beginning to fall open.

  She shot me with one hand at my breast, the other at my cunt, a set of vertical blinds between the camera and me, as though I was unaware of being observed.

  She shot me close up, finger in my pussy, one drop of moisture dripping down the closely shaved lip.

  For this, I imagined Audra lowering herself down on my face, the swollen, soft lips of her pussy full and luscious, their wine-red depths exuding an intoxicating sweet musk. I tried eating her slowly, but she would have none of it. She rode my face, thrusting shallowly with her hips, showing me how she wanted me to make her come, her juices soaking my face and running down my chin. Her breasts bounced above me, two luxuriant orbs, and when she came, she squeezed her knees around my ears, spasming above me with sharp jerks, pants and sighs that made me wet all over again.

  “Good, that’s good,” Audra said. The camera ate up the images. “I love that look on your face.” As she watched, she slowly stopped taking pictures. I rolled onto my stomach, looking at her. “What are you thinking about?”

  “You,” I wanted to say, but instead I rolled onto my back and began rubbing my clit. I looked directly into her eyes, something I don’t usually do with people. And I began to masturbate in earnest. Audra didn’t begin shooting right away. She licked her lips, transfixed by the slow circles I was making with my fingers, until she seemed to remember herself and too
k up the camera again.

  I closed my eyes.

  My pussy was wet, slick, I could feel the glide of my lips against one another between my legs. I envisioned reaching for her and her breath hitched as I touched her hair, touched my lips to hers, but she didn’t resist. I embraced her, letting our bodies mold against one another as I kissed along the side of her neck. The sexy noises she made purred from the back of her throat and I felt those moans against my cunt.

  I came softly, writhing against my hand, squeezing my eyes shut, all the while imagining that it was Audra bringing me, Audra stroking me, Audra holding me after.

  A tear ran from the corner of one of my tightly closed eyes.

  And all the while, the camera captured it all.

  We shot and shot, posed and reposed, until, at last, spent, we collapsed together on the futon. I was left shaken by my imaginings and hoped she couldn’t feel me quivering beside her as we lay with our heads together, like girls at a sleepover, flicking together through the LCD images. It’d all come in such a creative rush that it left us both too drained to expend the energy of sitting at the computer.

  The sheets on the bed smelled like her and twisted me inside. I felt dirty, having used her to fuel my own masturbatory fantasies. But it was done. Hopefully she had all the pictures she needed to finish her project. We’d never have to revisit this again.

  I bit my lip, feeling tears prick my eyes.

  Audra let out a dramatic sigh, letting her hand with the camera in it flop to the side. A moment later her other hand followed, landing on my thigh.

  “That was amazing.” We lay on our backs, but turned our heads so we were virtually nose to nose. “You like them, right? You’re not sorry?”

  I shook my head. “They’re beautiful. I never…never knew I could look like that. You made me so beautiful.”

  “You are beautiful, luv,” she said. “I only documented it.”

  She smiled and there was that awkward moment, when on a date we would have kissed. The moment stretched too thin and broke when Audra looked down at her hand on my thigh.

  “I have an idea,” she said huskily.

  I was shaking when she bounced up, newly invigorated, and began setting up the camera.