Six months.
That's how long I had been enveloped in the world of being a lesbian. How long I'd been in a relationship with Jenna Swallow. How long it had taken me to accept that my life would never be the same again.
I had gone from being engaged to a man I thought I'd loved, to moving into my girlfriend's apartment after an extended trip to Tuscany and Paris. I had flipped from enjoying a cock inside me to preferring the skillful fingers and tongue of a woman. I had gotten a tattoo on my back and had a part of my body pierced where jewelry did not really belong. I had entered the world of kinky.
We weren't really into spanking or discipline or severe bondage. But when two women got together to make love, they had to be a little creative sometimes to keep the mood alive and fresh. And trust me, Jenna was good at both.
I was meeting her for dinner tonight. I hadn't seen her all day, and she'd already left for work by the time I'd gotten out of the shower. She'd left me a note with instructions of what to wear and where to be this evening.
I got a little flutter in my stomach when she took control. While we didn't really define our relationship as one of the BDSM world, we did delve into that territory occasionally. And we'd both agreed that Jenna was the Top and I was the bottom, although she wasn't opposed to me topping her sometimes.
As typical when I had plans after work, the last hour crept by. Either that, or I was so swamped it was hard to get out the door on time after the bank closed. I did not envy the tellers who had to stay later to count the money in their drawers and the vault. When five o'clock struck, I was free to leave.
I watched the last twenty minutes tick off on the standard, circular clock with the white face and black hands. The voices of my coworkers faded away, and I contemplated something I'd heard on a talk show at lunch. I don't usually watch them, but I had been flipping through the channels when the phone rang. After abruptly disconnecting from the telemarketer because my several polite attempts to deny I wanted their service hadn't been successful, I'd just stared at the television.
"Have you always felt this way, or did something happen in your childhood or your adolescence that made you want to pursue a relationship with someone of the same gender?" the host had prompted his four openly gay guests.
The two men and two women beside him had shared their own opinions. At the time, I hadn't paid much attention to their responses. But now that I was on the verge of meeting my girlfriend for dinner to celebrate our six-month anniversary, I couldn't get the question out of my head.
I hadn't been abused as a child. I hadn't been bullied in school for being different. I'd actually had quite a few friends. And I had always liked guys. I went on the assumption that they'd liked me, too, even though I hadn't been what Hollywood considered beautiful.
I tried to pinpoint something else that had happened to make me think of girls as more than just my BFFs. And then I thought of Brady McDaniel.
When I was in high school, I noticed that a lot of the girls in my class tried to flirt with the boys by the way they dressed and talked and acted. It was superficial to me, so I didn't jump on the bandwagon. I wondered if the boys could see right through their acts and didn't care, or if they were truly oblivious.
Somehow, I went through the next four years without being in a relationship. I don't believe I was a late bloomer or an ugly duckling. Guys just seemed to like me as their friend and nothing more.
That is until my freshman year of college when I met Brady in chemistry class. He was of the nerd variety, but he was cute, too, in that Leonard Hofstadter of 'The Big Bang Theory' way. No sweater-vests and pocket protectors for him. Although he did wear a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that would have put him on par with Harry Potter these days.
Our relationship had actually started when I asked him to tutor me. He lived off campus with his parents, and we met at his place three times a week to go through the lesson and any homework I was struggling on. Afterwards, we sat on the couch and watched Jeopardy. It was a strange arrangement, but his parents were rarely home as they were both professors at the college. Eventually, it became a comfortable routine.
Then one night during a commercial break, he leaned over and kissed me. I'm not talking a little peck on the lips. It was a full-blown, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation attempt where he backed me into the corner and held my head still, just like in the movies. He wasn't half bad, but it was awkward—noses hitting as we tried to find the right angle, lips a little slobbery and our breathing a little fast.
Afterwards, he sat back and stared at my face. I felt like an experiment he was trying to analyze. I tried to get over the shock that it had taken a guy almost nineteen years to kiss me. And of all the guys who had crossed my path, it had been a science geek to accomplish it. To this day, I am certain I was the first girl he'd ever kissed, and he had been twenty-one at the time.
We escalated to heavy petting on a November evening when I convinced him to meet at my dorm room for our tutoring session right after class so I didn't have to go back and forth to his house in the snow. I'd taken the lead that night and kissed him. When he didn't pull away in disgust, I slowly placed his hand on my breast over my shirt. He tried his hardest. I really think he did. Yet even though it felt good, I wasn't all that impressed. And I still felt more like a personal lab rat than a girlfriend.
One Saturday, we descended to his basement to search out supplies for our group's midterm project. I opened a box to find it filled with girly magazines. Penthouse. Playboy. Hustler. There were at least fifty of them, if not more, and the most recent dates went back about twenty years.
I teased him...asked if they were his. He said no, they were his dad's. He didn't even flinch when I opened one and showed him the woman inside riding a saddle that was sitting on a hay bale.
Ms. Cowgirl was naked and facing away from the camera for the most part. Arching back towards the right-side of the page, she held onto the horn of the saddle with her left hand. The angle pushed her chest out. I could see the fullness of one large breast plunging below her left arm and the gentle slope above that ended in a rosy nipple. As if the photographer thought the appendage blocking the model's breast made the picture more modest.
There must have been a wind machine just outside the shot as her ebony hair billowed behind her. Her right hand held the cowboy hat on her head as if riding a real, bucking horse. Her red lips were parted in a silent gasp, her green eyes shiny as they stared at the camera.
I licked my lips, my heart pitter-pattering as I stared, transfixed by that expression and the wonderment of what was hidden between her tanned thighs that hugged the worn leather. I thought these magazines always had the women all splayed on beds revealing everything they had to offer. This was a tease. No wonder men loved them. Articles my ass.
