By Jacqueline
Jillinghoff
For the moment, she was Sister Kristen. All it took was a pretend veil
she had made by laying a pillowcase across her crown and tucking the corners
behind her neck. She looked at herself in her dresser mirror. Her hands were
folded in prayer, with her fingertips touching her chin, and her sharp breasts
peeked around her forearms. Except for the veil and her gold cross, she was
naked.
“Sister Patrice,” she said, “I’m ready for my test.”
She crossed herself with her right hand and with the fingers of her
left combed the soft curls of her public hair. The flesh below was cool and
dry, but there it was, the rubbery bead that would keep her out of the convent
if she couldn’t control herself.
It didn’t overwhelm her the way it did when Sister grabbed it in the
classroom, but it felt good to rub it, and she quickly grew moist. The goo seem
to come from nowhere, flooding the gully that opened between her legs. She
dipped in her finger in and smeared the stuff around, tenderly, and the
heavenly feelings returned. She pushed the finger far inside herself, the way
Sister had.
Out in the living
room, she had the radio on. It was tuned to the classical station her mother
liked, and the music was pretty, with strings that died away in slow-moving
waves. After a pause, a clarinet burbled, and a deep-voiced woman began to
sing:
Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden,
drum tun wir die Irdischen
meiden.
Kristen didn’t
understand, of course, but something childlike in the melody made her check
herself. Don’t give in, it
seemed to say, and you’ll stay clean.
She stopped rubbing, but she didn’t take her hand away. She made up her
mind to teeter on the edge, between innocence and sin, for as long as she
could. This time she would pass the test.
The woman went on
singing. The twitching eased, but Kristen pushed her finger in higher and
circled that delicious spot with her thumb, climbing again to a millimeter
below the peak. She breathed through her mouth in shallow gulps, keeping as
still as she could. Any sudden movement now would set her off.
“There,” she said. “Stop.”
It was as though she
had jumped off a swing at its highest point and was hanging in mid-air. But she
didn’t fall. She defied gravity, floating unnaturally, the playground sand
below her.
“Ah
… ah.”
She smiled in triumph,
but as she began to withdraw her finger, it slid across the center of her
pleasure — lightly, but in just the wrong way. Gravity took over, and she fell.
“Shit, here it comes!”
No use. No use.
Resistance failed for the second time that afternoon. Her hands sprang to life,
one jiggering the swollen bump in her pussy, one clutching her breast. A sound
like a salivating animal rose from her crotch, and that delicious tightness
crushed her in its fist. Sister Kristen watched herself come in the mirror.
“My God!” she
murmured. “My God!”
Why have you forsaken
me? But
there was no earthly way to stop. The wicked thing had to run its course, which
it finally did. Kristen fell back on her bed. Her hand lay still between her
legs. She turned her head and nuzzled a pillow, panting stupidly.
It must be a strange
life the nuns led, praying all day and then playing with themselves, trying to
be strong. Maybe they all failed, and maybe failure was just a way to remind themselves that God forgives everything.
Next thing she knew,
the guy on the radio was telling everyone to give blood. She had missed him
saying what the music was. She couldn’t remember how it ended, either.
“Darn,” she said,
“what was that?”
She made herself get
up, and, after a moment to steady herself as the blood
rushed from her head, she went in and turned off the stereo. It was fun to
stand there with no clothes on. A warm breeze came through the open windows,
along with the sounds of boys playing hockey in the street —sticks clicking and
scraping on the asphalt, voices calling to one another. She grinned at the
thought that they didn’t know she was naked.
Then suddenly she was
frightened they did know, somehow, because the hockey noises stopped and an
obscene chorus began. The boys whistled. They made exaggerating kissing sounds.
One shouted, “Hey, girl, suck on my stick!”
Kristen scrambled back
into her bedroom. She tore the pillowcase from her head. Her gym shorts and
undershirt lay on the floor. She was fumbling into them when the doorbell rang,
and she understood what the commotion outside was really about.
Suzie had arrived.
Kristen pulled her top
into place as she walked back through the living room. It was a ribbed tank
that molded itself to her tummy and the inward curve of her waist and turned
her solid nipples into lumps of sugar. As provocative as she felt, though, she
could never match Suzie, who was standing at the front door in a black leather
halter and black ankle boots. Her denim cut-offs were stuffed into her crotch
and rode high in the back, giving the boys a generous view of her behind. They
glared at her from the street and clutched their big sticks, white-knuckled
with lust.
“Don’t say hi or nothin’,” one of them shouted. “Chink whore!”
Without turning
around, Suzie raised her right hand, pointing a single finger toward heaven.
“Why do you dress like
that?” Kristen asked, opening the screen door.
“Gives them a look at
what they’re never gonna get,” Suzie said.
She was carrying a
black canvas bag, which she dropped beside the sofa as she began to toe off her
boots. Even her socks were sexy: black and sheer, with vertical black ribs and
lace around the tops. She took a black kit from her bag.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
Kristen sat on the
sofa and pushed out the coffee table. Suzie knelt in front her and unsnapped
the kit, which bristled with clippers, files, emery boards and bottles of
polish arranged in square holes. She rested Kristen’s heel on her naked thigh,
and as she knelt, her shorts dug deeper into the V between her legs.
“Are you even wearing
underwear?” Kristen asked.
“What
for?” Suzie said. “You’re not, either.”
Looking up from the
floor, she could see right up Kristen’s gym shorts.
“I’m inside. You take
chances.”
“So
what?”
“Didn’t it piss you
off when that kid called you a whore?”
“It pissed me off more
that he called me a Chink — Ugh! You let your nails
go.”
She dug an emery board
under the down-turned corner of the nail on Kristen’s big toe. Kristen settled
back on the couch, luxuriating in the professional attention, the skill Suzie
had learned in her mother’s salon, and the dull
rasping that sent muffled tremors up her shin. The left cup of Suzie’s halter
slackened as she leaned forward, lost in concentration. Kristen could see the
rounded border of her nipple, rising like a black moon. Her conscience pricked
her: She was no better than those horny boys outside.
“So what did Patrice
do to you?” she asked.
“She dragged me down
to see Father White.”
“Oh
God! Did he look up your skirt?”
“He gave me his
‘brazen whore’ speech.”
“He’s such a perv.”
“He’s not the only
one.”
Kristen said nothing.
“What did Patrice do
with you?” Suzie persisted.
“She told me you’re a
bad influence.”
“And?”
“What?”
“Did you like it when
she felt you up?”
Kristen snapped her
foot away.
“How’d you know?”
Suzie calmly took hold
of Kristen’s heel again and went back to work.
“She came back, and
White heard her confession.”
“In
front of you?”
“She didn’t know I was
there.”
“How could she not
know you were there?”
“I was under the desk.”
“Ohhh-K?”
“Hiding.”
“Why?”
“If you have to know, I was going down on
him.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I was giving him a
BJ.”
“What’s that
mean?”
“I was sucking his
cock.”
“No freaking way!”
“Hold still!”
“You lie!”
“Don’t believe me. She
comes barging in, all wound up, and she told White she put her hand down your
panties.”
“Nooooo.”
“She said she has a
thing for you.”
“Uh
uh!”
“She said she’s been
resisting you all year. She loves you!”
“No! No! No!”
“We must bear witness
to the truth: Patty’s a hot lez.”
“Stop!”
“You should totally do
it with her.”
Kristen got quiet.
“You like her, don’t
you?” Suzie said.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Kris
— you a lez?”
“Oh, God, I don’t
know!”
“You know, if you are,
you can’t be Catholic anymore.”
“Why
not?”
“Because
God hates fags. White calls it ‘an objective disorder.’
You do anything like that, you go straight to hell.”
“All he thinks about
is sex.”
“All anybody thinks
about is sex. And you didn’t answer my question.”
“What.”
“Did you like it?”
Tight-lipped, Kristen
nodded. Slowly. Three times.
“Awesome,” Suzie said.
“But it’s bad.”
“They just say that to
scare you. What kind of polish you want? I got deep purple. Hot
pink. Cherry red.”
“Just
clear.”
“You are so boring. I
know: Glitter. It’ll get Patrice all hot and bothered when she sucks your
toes.”
“Stah – ahp!”
“Don’t fight it,
girl.”
Kristen’s toenails
sparkled like the Pearly Gates when the Para-Transit van pulled up in front of
the house, scattering the hockey players once and for all. The hydraulic lift
hissed over the throb of the engine. That was Kristen’s signal. She sprang from
the couch and locked the screen door open while the bus driver unfastened the
latches on the lift platform. Each had their allotted role in the homecoming
ritual.
“Thank you Simon,”
Kristen’s mom said, and she rolled up the front walk and the wooden ramp that
covered the steps. Her right hand, bent sharply at the wrist, held the joystick
forward.
“You girls have a nice
night,” the driver called, with a nod at Kristen.
She kissed her mother
on the mouth. Then she stood aside, and her mother trundled into the living
room, over the plastic runway that protected the carpet.
“Hello, Suzie,” she
said.
“Hey,
Wendy.”
It jarred Kristen every
time she heard Suzie call her mom by her first name. Wendy Lamb was a young
woman, not yet forty, with angelic skin and a broad smile, and her daughter had
been made in her image. They shared the same slender body, the same finely
boned face, and the same fine, teak-colored hair worn loosely to the shoulders.
She halted in the
middle of the room. Kristen came from closing the door and plopped a foot in
her unfeeling lap.
“See what Suzie did?”
she asked.
Wendy held Kristen’s
her foot in her good left hand, nearly toppling her into Suzie’s arms.
“Beautiful! Can you do
me, hon?”
“Sure,” Suzie said.
“How
much?”
“Thirty
for both.”
“You get more than
that, don’t you?”
“You get the friends
discount.”
“After dinner,” Wendy
said. “You girls are probably famished. Shall we order out?”
Kristen put her foot
down, and nearly fell again.
“Are you all right?”
Wendy asked.
“She’s goofy from the
nail polish,” Suzie said.
They had Indian, from
the one place that delivered. The kitchen was off the living room, and they sat
at a round table barely big enough for the three of them. Suzie ate the way she
talked: aggressively. She had the lamb. Kristen turned up her nose at the
consumption of an animal. She made a point of ordering the spiced chickpeas and
cauliflower. Wendy compromised. She ordered the red chicken.
It wasn’t quite dark
yet and already she was in her night things — green pajamas with a tartan robe
and slippers. It’s easier than changing twice, she had said.
“At first I thought it
would scare people off,” she told Suzie, who was curious about how Wendy
managed. “Part of being a counselor is putting people at ease. The last thing
you want is for them to feel self-conscious, especially when they already have
so much on their minds with the cancer. But once I start talking, they realize
it’s about them, and they don’t seem to notice. Or they’re too polite to say
anything.”
It all came back:
Staying Aunt Beth’s while her parents drove off for some grownup time, the news
of the tire that had bounced from the back of the pickup on the turnpike and
hit the windshield, leaving her mother a widow and a cripple. The relief — and
the guilt — she hadn’t been with them. The move to the
smaller house with only one floor. And now, Kristen realized, there was
something else to be sad about: did Mom have any feeling down there? Could she
ever again experience the pleasure Kristen had given herself, the pleasure she
must have felt with Dad? She never mentioned it, but why would she?
“You know you’re
supposed to fast during Lent,” Kristen said, changing the subject.
“That’s only Fridays,”
Suzie said. “Have some lamb.”
“Don’t tease her,”
Wendy said.
She put down her fork
and picked up a piece of the hot, puffy bread. It was too big for her to
handle. Kristen tore it in half for her.
“Does it cause trouble
at school?” Wendy asked. “Do they have anything you’ll eat other than pizza and
fries?”
“They have some good
stuff — salads and veggie wraps. One of my teachers says its
better for you.”
“Sister Patrice,”
Suzie said. “Kristen’s favorite teacher.”
Kristen gave her a
look.
“Is she really?” Wendy
asked.
When Kristen didn’t
respond, her mother went on.
“How are you getting
along with that other one, Sister St. Augustine?”
“Fine,” Kristen said.
“Auggie
hates her,” Suzie said.
Another
look. The girl was determined to spill all of
Kristen’s secrets, one at a time.
“What did you do now?”
Wendy said.
“She told Auggie she was wrong.”
“She was wrong,”
Kristen said.
“What
about?”
“You brought it up,”
Kristen said. “You tell her.”
“We were talking about
infinity.”
“Oh, yes, Krissie’s favorite topic,” Wendy said.
“And Auggie asked for examples of infinite shit. Stuff. And one girl said the number of atoms in the
universe, and Auggie said right, and tell her what
you said, Kris.”
“That it wasn’t true.”
“And Auggie said it was, and K. would not give in. And it wasn’t
even like a real argument. They just went back and forth. It was like ‘finite’
— ‘infinite’ — ‘finite’ — ‘infinite.’ It was fantastic. Nobody ever talks back
to Auggie.”
“And who won?” Wendy
asked.
“Auggie
got the last word, but Krissie kind of looked down
and shook her head.”
“Nevertheless, it
moves,” Wendy said.
“But I was right,”
Kristen said. “I read it in Cosmos.”
“Cosmo?”
Suzie said.
“Cosmos,”
Kristen said. “They figured it out. You divide the mass of the known universe
by the mass of the proton. It’s a finite number.”
“She brought the book
in the next day to show her,” Suzie said, “but Auggie
told her the discussion was over.”
“It’s amazing you
learn anything in that woman’s class,” Wendy said.
“She’s all right with
what she knows,” Kristen said.
Wendy and Suzie
glanced at one another as Suzie stuffed her mouth with the bread. Wendy placed
her hand on Kristen’s forearm.
“And what is the
number?” she asked.
“Ten
to the eightieth power!”
●●●
“Your mom is so cool,”
Suzie said, brushing her long black hair.
They were in Kristen’s
room, getting ready for bed. Kristen lay with her head propped on her pillow,
her knees up and her big astronomy book open on her thighs. She twirled a
strand of her hair absent-mindedly while she leafed through the chapter on
nebulas. The multicolored strands of gas — green, red, yellow, white — formed
ragged holes in space, like cosmic vaginas blown open by stellar orgasms.
Tonight, everything
reminded her of sex.
She was dressed for
sleep, in a pair of pajama shorts covered in pink rosebuds. She still had on
the tight sleeveless undershirt. She had changed her shorts in the bathroom,
but Suzie, unashamed and uninhibited, had stripped in front of her and was brushing
her hair nude. She was half-turned away, her hair hanging off one shoulder as
she brushed. Kristen’s admiration was divided between the mysteries of space
and of Suzie’s golden back and bottom. At that moment, in the far darkened
corner of the room, she could have been a painting, an exotic oriental at her
toilette.
“It freaks me out when
you ask her about her wheelchair,” Kristen said.
“She doesn’t mind.”
“But I do. It was a
hard time. I don’t like to think about it.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s OK.”
“Wendy says one of the
reasons we’re friends is that neither one of us has a dad.”
“You never told me
what happened to yours.”
“Who gives a shit?”
Suzie turned toward
her, and Kristen saw the yellow spot, like some sort of skin disease, above the
shadow of her hairless slit. In the dimness across the room, she couldn’t tell
what it was.
“Did you hurt
yourself?” she asked.
“What?”
Kristen pointed.
“It’s a tattoo.”
“How’d you get a
tattoo down there?”
“It’s just a rub on. I
told White it was real.”
“Why?”
“He gets off on that
kind of crap.”
“Let’s see.”
Suzie came around and
stood beside the bed. The butterfly came into focus in the lamplight. So did
everything else.
“Cool,” Kristen said.
“You got any more?”
“A
whole pack. We could put a snake on your tit.”
“No,
an angel.”
Invitingly, Suzie
separated her outer lips. Her own pleasure point, glistening and red, poked out
its head like a worm. She picked at it with one finger, studying Kristen’s
reactions. Maybe she was trying to turn her on, or maybe she was just testing
to see if Kristen really was a lez. Whatever the
motivation, Kristen felt herself failing again. The worm’s head was bigger than
hers, fatter. Did that mean it felt more?
“Sister Patrice asked
me if you and I ever had a lesbian experience,” she said.
“We should,” Suzie
said. “If you’re gonna get blamed for something, you might as well do it.”
“You
serious?”
“And if you’re gonna
do Patrice, you need practice.”
Suzie’s eyes shone
black in the light. Kristen reached out, palm up, and slid her hand into the damp
slot between Suzie’s legs. Suzie bent her knees and clenched her butt and
rocked, humping Kristen’s fingers.
“That’s nice,” she
said.
Kristen laid her book
aside. There would be no more reading tonight. Suzie jumped on top of her,
straddling her hips. Her face came down and they kissed. Suzie’s lips were
fuller than Sister’s, but not as soft. Weird! Kristen had never been kissed
before today, and now she was making comparisons. She smiled around her
searching tongue.
“What’s funny?” Suzie
asked.
“Nothing.
This is nice.”
She decided she liked
kissing girls.
Reaching around, she
grabbed Suzie’s ass in both hands. Suzie worked her arms behind Kristen’s back,
and they rolled over one another, coming to rest on a diagonal across the bed.
The book dug into Suzie’s back. She knocked it onto the floor.
“Shh!
You’ll wake up mom.”
“So? It’s not like she
can come in here and catch us.”
It was tasteless, but
it was funny. Laughing, they kissed harder. Kristen squeezed one of Suzie’s
tiny tits. Suzie put a hand down the back of Kristen’s shorts, grabbing her
butt. That made her think of Sister Patrice, too — everybody wanted a piece of
her.
She fell onto her
back, and Suzie pulled the shorts off. Then she crawled over her, hovering
above her on all fours, her hair spilling over Kristen’s head and shoulders. It
was fun, like playing cave.
Suzie came down again,
lying flat on top of her. Her thigh went between Kristen’s legs. She ground it
into Kristen’s cunt. Kristen pushed back, crooking her knee against Suzie’s weight,
and Suzie humped her, slathering Kristen’s thigh with pussy juice.
They necked and
necked, tossing about the bed, desperately seeking the best position to get off
on each other. They discovered it, finally, when they broke off kissing and
flung themselves apart, their heads pointed toward opposite corners of the bed,
their legs locked in a scissor grip. Kristen raised her ass and pushed. Her joy
button caught on something solid, and she rocked herself against it. Suzie
pushed back. They rattled their bare butts, mashing their pussies together.
Propelled by their exertions, the bed crawled away from the wall.
Kristen gazed across
Suzie’s body. Her little tits stood up in the lamplight like hills at the end
of a long plain, capped with dark moss. Between them was
her upturned chin, and her mouth, foreshortened to an oval, wide with
speechless pleasure. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. They
floated on either side of her head, the fingers crooked and stiff, like bare
branches. She drew in a shivering breath, held it, and blew it out again in a
trembling moan. Kristen knew what she was feeling, because she’d felt it twice
that afternoon, and in a few seconds, she felt it again.
Amazing
— so many ways to make your cunt feel good.
They lay quiet a long
while. One of them would shift her hips, and their pussies would meld again,
briefly. It was warm and slimy and comforting, the way a baby must feel,
Kristen imagined, when, still bloody from the womb, its mother held it against
her breast for the first time.
“You ever do that
before?” Kristen asked finally. Her voice sounded far away, dreamy.
“I’ve never done
anything with a girl,” Suzie said.
“You like it?”
“It was all right.”
“You bitch!”
They giggled, and the
tenderness was over. They disentangled themselves. Suzie had brought some
skimpy nightclothes, but she let them lie. She got under the covers naked.
Kristen kept her shirt on, but she didn’t bother to look for her shorts. She
turned out the light. They curled up on their sides like plastic spoons.
Kristen, much taller, took the outside, folding her legs under Suzie’s ass,
grasping her to her chest. She nuzzled her fragrant hair. Suzie turned her head
back a last time. They pecked awkwardly, but Kristen could barely hold her head
up. She fell asleep in the middle of a silent Hail Mary.
●●●
A bear grunted in the
forest. It got in her face with its open mouth and wet black nose, but it
didn’t show its teeth. It wasn’t going to bite her. It wanted her to pet it.
She caressed the blunt horn that grew illogically from its head. It grunted again,
and Kristen opened her eyes.
She was alone. The
hand that had patted the bear’s head was resting on Suzie’s vacant pillow. The
night air had turned chilly, and her naked butt, uncovered, was cold. She
twisted around and read the clock on her nightstand: 2:37.
Suzie had probably
gone to the bathroom, or the kitchen. Kristen grinned at the thought of her
friend padding through the house naked. She turned onto her back, pulling the
covers up, and was warming her ass on the mattress when she heard the grunt
again. This time it was more like a scream.
“Mom?” she called.
She was across the
hall in an instant, not thinking she was naked from the waist down. The bedroom
door was closed, but if mom had fallen —
“Are you all right?”
she said.
And she wished she was
still dreaming.
There was a narrow
skylight in the sloped ceiling, and the first full moon of spring filled the
room with a silver-blue glow. Beads of moonlight glinted on the polished
railing of her mother’s bed. Mom’s pajama top was unbuttoned, pushed to the
sides, her nipples blood-dark on her ghost-white boobs. Her shriveled legs hung
open in a diamond shape, and her bush, a featureless shadow, was split at its
lowest point by Suzie’s shiny nose. Mom looked at her with pleading eyes. She
said nothing. There was nothing she could say. It was up to Kristen to pass
judgment.
“It’s OK,” the girl
said at last. “It’s OK.”
Suzie’s eyes wrinkled
at her over Wendy’s crotch. She was smiling with her mouth full of pussy, as if
she knew what Kristen was thinking — Mom can feel down there. It’s a
miracle.
Suzie, curled up like a brown egg, went back to licking and sucking.
Mom closed her eyes. She tilted her chin toward the ceiling, sinking her head
into her pillow. Her breasts rose and fell, and she smiled with an otherworldly
bliss. Kristen had not seen her so happy since the accident.
She made up her mind right then she would do anything Sister Patrice
wanted.