I’ve always found other women attractive. Ever since I was little, I’ve always enjoyed looking at them. Well, it’s the way we’re brought up, isn’t it? Fashion, hairstyles, ads, women’s magazines, that sort of thing - it’s normal, it’s what we do. And let’s be honest, I’ve wondered more than a few times what it would be like to make love with another woman, thought about how exciting it might be, imagined how different it would be from with a man, and again I think there are lots of us who do that; wonder, I mean. I read not so long ago that over sixty percent of women have thought about it at one time or another. But most of us just leave it at that, a thought, we never actually do anything about it, just leave it as a vague itch that we never scratched or write it off as an opportunity that never presented itself, or maybe an opportunity that did present itself but for some reason we didn’t take it - uncertainty, cowardice, the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong woman, whatever…
That’s how I always thought it would be for me, too. I had one or two schoolgirl crushes, but even at the time there was a part of me that knew that that was all they were, and I’ve never been what you’d call very assertive or forward in that way, so the idea of making the first move with anybody, of either sex, wasn’t really one that came naturally to me. And then I discovered boys, and they discovered me, and enough of them were quite happy to be the one to make the first move, and they liked it that way, and I liked it that way, and they liked me, or at least some of them did, and I liked some of them, and so by the time I got to 24 it seemed as if that was going to be it. And then I met Kara.
But maybe I should tell you a little bit about myself first. My name’s Gina and I’m a natural blonde; my hair’s a kind of pale honey colour and thick and straight and reaches to just below my shoulder-blades. I’m told I’ve got a pretty face and I’ve been complimented on my figure by people who were sober or uninterested enough that I could trust them. I’m on the slim side but I like it that way. I tan easily and I like to think I dress well. Perhaps the most genuinely interesting thing about me physically is that my eyes are different colours; the left one’s grey, the right one’s green. It means I get a lot of stares once people see me in close-up.
There’s a kind of café-bar not too far from the office where I work, where I go now and then, maybe for lunch or for a drink after work. I like it because it’s always pretty quiet, the food’s OK, and it’s not the sort of place where you’re likely to get anybody hassling you. One day I dropped in in the middle of the afternoon. It was a really hot day and I’d stopped work early, and as I was going past the thought just struck me how much I’d love a long cool drink. So in I went.
The waitress was somebody new. As I waited for my drink I watched her moving round; it was hard not to. To start with, she had the most amazing suntan, the sort you only get from either lying in the sun for weeks on end or a very heavy programme of visits to the solarium. Like I said, I tan easily, but I couldn’t remember ever having had a tan like this woman had. Like a lot of very tanned people, she had that kind of sheen to her skin that made it look almost as if it was glowing from within.
Her hair was drawn back close to her head and into a ponytail. I got the impression it was about the same length as mine. It was perfectly black, the kind of lustrous blue-black that ink has, and I would have sworn it was dyed if it weren’t for the fact that her eyebrows, which were thick and dramatically arched, a bit like the ones Elizabeth Taylor’s version of Cleopatra had, were the same colour. She was wearing a figure-hugging lycra minidress in a kind of off-white colour; it covered the essentials, but not that much more. Mind you, she had the figure for it, so why not? I found myself thinking, as my eyes followed her around the room and saw the effect she was having on the male customers, that it must be bringing her a small fortune in tips. Like they say, if you’ve got it, why not flaunt it?
When she brought me my drink, she smiled. She had nice even white teeth and I noticed that she had a little silver stud right in the middle of her tongue. I’ve got this really ambivalent attitude to piercings; I like them a lot on other people and think they can be beautiful things if done right, but I’ve never quite had the courage to get one for myself. Not even my ears are pierced. Obviously this waitress didn’t suffer from the same uncertainty I did; besides the stud in her tongue she had another, a tiny one with a diamond in it, in her left nostril, and a series of hoops, of varying sizes but none of them very big and all arranged in a neat mathematical progression, in each ear. I’d already spotted an ankle chain and several silver necklaces and bracelets. Now I noticed that on all of her fingers, thumbs included, she had silver rings. And she had tattoos as well. There were at least three that I could see, a flower picked out on one of her ankles, a dainty-looking butterfly on her left shoulder-blade, and one of those ones that look like rose stems or barbed wire around her upper right arm. Lots of women have those these days, but this one went round her arms not once but several times, in a spiral that went right from her elbow up to her armpit.
I thanked her as she bent down to put the glass on the table and she glanced up at me. I noticed the way her eyes, which were large and clear, with dark brown irises, lingered on mine for a second more than you might have expected and that the expression in them changed as she registered the different colours; it was something I was used to, but I was glad she’d noticed me. Now, I thought, she’d remember me next time.
Next time was only the next day. And she did remember me, which pleased me. We didn’t talk much then, just a few words, but I got the feeling she was happy to see me. Every time I was in there after that we always seemed to manage to find time for a few friendly words, but nothing more. Somewhere along the line we found out each other’s names.
And then, one day, I was in there about three in the afternoon. She was busy behind the bar but shot me a little smile and then, when she recognised me, a bigger one and a wave. After a moment she came out with a tray of drinks for a group of customers on the other side of the room. As usual, she wasn’t exactly dressed for anonymity. Today she had on a tight-fitting white sleeveless top that had the sort of neckline a romantic novelist might describe as plunging, together with high heels and a short black skirt slit high at the side that showed off the shape of her legs to advantage. I thought she looked great.
I ordered a gin and tonic and sat there with it for a while, enjoying its cool crispness. I had a magazine with me but it didn’t really hold my attention much; I spent more time just looking round the room. I was half-reading an article about the need for honesty in relationships when I heard the sound of a female voice quietly swearing and looked up.
It was Kara, who had obviously just lost a battle with the beer pump. The barrel must have been empty, or new, or something, because, instead of pouring a nice steady stream of beer into the glass she was holding under it, it had spat it over her instead, leaving a damp patch on her top and golden droplets of beer all over the exposed brown skin of her chest. She was muttering and trying to shake the liquid off her hands.
Our eyes met and she grimaced.
“Can I get you a towel or something?” I asked.
“No, it’s OK. I’ll manage,” she smiled. “But thanks for offering.”
She disappeared into the back room and emerged again a few minutes later with a new top on. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as the previous one but I guess that at least it was dry.
That night, the strangest thing happened. I had this incredibly vivid dream in which I was back in the bar and the beer pump was spraying beer all over Kara, but this time I didn’t offer to help. I just got up, went over to the bar, and bent my head to her tanned chest and started to lick her skin clean. And she didn’t say anything, didn’t try to stop me, but held my head in her hands and pressed it to her. And I licked and I licked, and before I knew it her breast was bare and I was licking that too, and her nipple, which was a dark chocolate colour, was erect and rubbery under my lips, and, and, and…that was when I woke up, the image still incredibly alive in my mind. I was sweating and I could feel that between my legs I was hot and wet and aroused, and I felt so good that I just fixed that image of me licking the beer foam off her in my mind and let my hand slip between my legs and played with myself until I felt that sweet familiar sensation creep over me and my limbs spasmed and my back arched and I sobbed out my satisfaction into the dark bedroom night.
The next day, passing the café on the way to work, I looked through the window. It wasn’t open yet but I blushed as I remembered my dream. It’s funny, isn’t it, how when we dream something we carry it with us into the waking world and think the people in it must know what happened in our heads in the night. What would she say if she knew? Embarrassed, I hurried on by. I didn’t go back to the place for the next ten days, not particularly because of my dream, but I guess that helped. And then, when I did finally go, she wasn’t there anyway. And nor was she the next time, and I began to think she’d left. But I still sometimes thought about her at night, and when I did it always started with her spilling beer on herself and led into the two of us together, and I always ended up touching myself and fantasising furiously about the idea.
And then, one hot day, I went back there and there she was, looking better than ever. Her hair was shorter now and she was wearing it loose in a stylish bob with a straight fringe at the front. It was shot through with scarlet streaks. She had on a white blouse and tight black trousers and looked a lot like Uma Thurman in that scene from ‘Pulp Fiction’ where she goes dancing with John Travolta.
Although my fantasy about her came flooding into my head as soon as I saw her and I felt a pang or two of guilt about that, most of all I felt pleased to see her. Which was stupid, really, because we hardly knew each other at all to talk to, we hadn’t even been in the same room more than a handful of times, and her main two roles in my life were as occasional supplier of drinks and equally occasional provider of raw material for my nocturnal fantasies. Watching the way she was flirting with two guys at the bar, I got the distinct impression that she would be less than wildly enthusiastic to hear about the second of these two roles. Which just goes to show how wrong you can be.
My own companion, which is to rather stretch the word, was a guy from work. He hadn’t been with us for long and had started by giving the impression of being a bit lost. Quite how it happened I’m not sure, but the group of us which was supposed to be taking him out and gently initiating him into the gang had somehow dwindled to just me, and the guy, whose name, not that it really matters, was Steve, had rather got the wrong end of the stick. After listening to what he liked to think was his conversation for half an hour, I was painfully aware that he was convinced that all he needed to do was to bang me over the head with his club and I would be ready, even eager, to be dragged back to his cave for a night of something he plainly thought I should be very grateful for. The prospect had all the appeal of a bowl of cold vomit and as he started to get even more obvious I told him so. Perhaps I should have used more subtle language to explain this, but I really wasn’t in the mood, and Steve reacted by going into a king-sized snit.
At this stage I exercised a woman’s prerogative and retreated to the toilet for a few minutes to regroup. When I got back Kara was standing by our table and talking to Steve. She was laughing and shaking her head.
