(Contains graphic depictions of a sapphic woman's first experience with f/f oral sex, grinding, touching, and breast play in a strip club. All characters are consenting and over the age of 18. Enjoy!)
***
I think I was more nervous about being the "Best Woman" for Glen's wedding than Glen was about getting married.
Which made some sort of sense, I guess. All Glen had to do that week was show up and marry the love of his life.
I, on the other hand, had to put together a perfect sendoff for my best friend's bachelorhood, while explaining to everyone I interacted with along the way what a "Best Woman" was, and how the bride could possibly be okay with one existing.
Apart from appointing me to this role, Glen made it clear that he wanted a pretty traditional event. Strippers, too much drinking, questionable decisions we'd talk about in coded, haunted whispers for the rest of our lives, the whole bit.
The bride, for her part, didn't mind at all. Gemma was probably the most fun-loving, least insecure person I'd ever met, and she'd jumped on the excuse to track down some male performers to treat her and her bridesmaids to a roughly similar experience.
And if Gemma didn't mind, who was I to argue?
So, I threw myself into it. All the way. I spent months on research and planning. I made a list of every club within a twenty-mile radius of Portland and combed through reviews, which ranged from intriguing to gross to obviously fabricated by the competition.
I made dozens of calls verifying which ones served drinks (a surprising number didn't), what their "private party" specials actually involved (the descriptions were frustratingly yet promisingly vague), and which ones would even let me in the front door (almost all of them, to my pleasant surprise).
I researched the etiquette too, for my own reference, and in anticipation of playing referee to Glen's three groomsmen. I wasn't planning a once-in-a-lifetime night of debauchery just for us to get kicked out in the first half hour.
The groomsmen made no end of jokes about this. They called me "den mother" a lot, and jokingly solicited my approval on their outfits, their colognes, their dollar bill-throwing technique. It was in good fun, mostly.
As usual, Tom pushed it about fifteen percent too far, which prompted Evan to ask Glen why we kept taking Tom out in public. The answer, as always, was a half-joking, "I dunno, habit?"
The five of us had all known each other since elementary school. The guys were awkward, airheaded, way too in love with how edgy they all thought they were, and it was no wonder at all that Glen was the only one of the bunch to pair off so far. But they were generally harmless.
Still, when we got to the lobby of the Angel Room club, I took a little pleasure in realizing that I wasn't the only one who was nervous about the whole thing. Tom kept wiping his palms on his suit pants, and Mark looked like he was expecting to spend the rest of his life in a secret prison when the security guard found a metal ballpoint pen in his pocket.
Finally, we were past the door and inside the dim, windowless, surprisingly mellow-feeling club. The walls and ceiling were all painted sky blue with clouds. Imitation candles bobbed their little plastic flames on every table.
The main stage was low enough to be surrounded by a tight ring of armchairs and a convenient surface for resting drinks. There were only a couple of men already settled there, quietly watching a beautiful, willowy woman in purple lingerie spin dizzyingly fast around one of the poles, holding on with her thighs.
I'd imagined having to elbow our way in, just to find somewhere to stand where we could
see
the main stage, based on the few times we'd gone to watch live entertainers in bars.
We all glanced at each other, a few eyebrows pricked up with excitement, and the five of us jumped in to claim all of the chairs along one of the short sides of the stage. Glen was smack in the middle, on my right.
The blaring dance music reached a break, and the DJ's voice cut in over the speakers, quick as an overcaffeinated auctioneer.
"Once again, that's Violet on the main stage, Violet on the main stage! New song starting now, for all you lovely souls enjoying your three minutes, seven minutes, or more in heaven!"
The next song began with a heavy beat. Violet spread her legs into an upside-down splits in the air, and then flipped herself down into a crouch on the stage. She walked her hands up the pole until she was in a standing position, leaned against it, and teased the edges of her bikini top with her fingers.
On the perfect dramatic beat, she pulled the bikini cups aside and pushed herself off of the pole. Crossing each foot slowly in front of the other, she sauntered across the stage, bouncing her small, completely exposed breasts in her hands.
I didn't know how anyone could possibly be so confident walking in those ten-inch heels after how fast we'd just seen her spinning, let alone doing it partly naked in front of a crowd. Her inner ears had to be more finely tuned than a jeweler's laser.
Just watching her from the comfort of my chair, I had an off-balance, unsettled sensation through my whole body.
A year ago, back before I realized I was bi, I would have converted that sensation into blistering jealousy faster than you could blink.
Thankfully, I'd found I was much more comfortable looking at beautiful women (and talented women, and effortlessly cool women, and all-of-the-above women) now that I understood why I reacted to them so strongly. I could admire Violet with the awe she deserved, without giving a second thought to how her awesomeness reflected on me. I let my eyes follow her, soaking in everything about her, from her rhythm and balance, to her powerfully muscular arms, to the way she smacked her pleasantly rounded ass against the pole as if she had no fear whatsoever of her own jiggly softness.
Watching her was easy, liberating, even relaxing, until she turned her head, and started watching me right back.
She swished those impossibly long heels back and forth, carrying her right toward me. Without giving me a moment's break from her eyes, she knelt down on the edge of the stage, picked my hand up off the drink counter, and pressed it right to her breast.
All the guys erupted with laughter, whoops, and wolf-whistles.
I could feel all the blood rushing up to my face, and down to other places. Part of me wanted to sink through the floor, but I was smiling too, so widely that it hurt, and I couldn't stop.
We hadn't been sitting here two minutes, and already I'd broken what I'd thought was the most essential rule of strip club attendance, the one I'd drilled into all the guys accordingly: we were here to look and maybe be touched, not to do the touching.
But I supposed that was up to the dancers, when to make exceptions.
I wondered how often they did this, how often
she
did this. Was this a scripted move aimed at whoever happened to be sitting in this seat at this particular moment of the evening? Or was it just what Violet liked to do when she caught an abjectly slack-jawed sapphic woman staring up at her, from among all the playing-it-cool men? How often did that happen? How much did she already know about me just from recognizing a type?
Could she tell that hers was the first breast I'd ever touched that wasn't my own?
More importantly, what did I do now?
I really wanted to move my fingers, to explore more of the enticing springiness of her breast -- so different from the you-could-literally-suffocate-someone-with-them weight of mine -- but I didn't know how far this implicit permission she was giving me stretched.
Reading my uncertainty, she guided my thumb back and forth, right over her nipple. My own nipples tingled, like a sympathetic vibration, as I felt the firmness of hers.
"First time?" she asked, effortlessly dialing in her volume to be intimate yet audible over the pounding base.
