"You're going like that?" I ask when I see Lisa getting up from the vanity table, looking like she's just ready to sit down at it. My pretty femme, all pared down, no glossy lips like wet cherries, none of those messy, artfully tousled curls that make me think of her during sex, riding me and raking her hands through them over and over. No brilliance to her green eyes the way mascara and eyeliner and shimmering black shadow can make, no cheekbones like cliffs lit with pink sunsets.
Her powdered, scented, lightly heaving decolletage: covered by a T-shirt. There are no diamonds collecting like dewdrops in the hollows of her collarbone, no rhinestones dripping off her earlobes. Her nails are still long, shiny red daggers, but only because she had them done a week ago. No peekaboo lingerie; just a flash of plain, white, functional bra strap.
My sex kitten is a bedraggled cat.
I lay the back of my hand flush to her forehead. "Are you ill?" I say, only in half-tease.
In the mirror, we both look a mess. I'm staying home tonight; I have reason to be grungy. I pull her hair out of the ponytail she has it in because it looks so wrong, so unfamiliar. She rifles a hand through it, five red ovals surfacing in the golden sea.
"Maybe I should just cut it all off." She sighs.
"You're not just sick, you're feverish." I love Lisa's hair. Lisa loves Lisa's hair. Pantene would pay money for Lisa to flip her hair and say 'Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.'.
"I could have a pompadour just like you." She says, her eyes catching Elvis' where his photo is tucked into the mirror's frame, my guide for classic handsomeness in a world populated by skinheads and buzzcuts. She shakes her head just slightly, breaking eye contact with the rock 'n' roll legend. "Nobody would mistake me for a straight girl with a duck tail."
"Who mistakes you for a straight girl?" I coo.
The fierceness of her reaction makes me jump. "Everyone. All they see is some regular pretty girl. Even at these socials-" like the one she is going to tonight, these silly bimonthly Sapphic Society get-togethers that I so casually talk my way out of- "the women look at me like I got lost somewhere, like I don't belong."
"They aren't all butch, are they?" I ask, taken aback. Somehow, in my mind I imagine the cocktail parties to be swimming with femmes, while every butch relaxes at home, like me, or else gets nagged and dragged there.
"No." She says with a bitter bite. "There are femmes even higher glam than me. But they still don't treat me like a dyke."
I crouch down on my heels beside her so I don't have to keep talking to her reflection. "Why do you give a shit?" I say, seeking a smile. But I don't get one. I try switching tacks. "Do what I do." I gesture to my jacket, hanging on the coatrack, specifically at the big glossy button with the words I EAT PUSSY emblazoned on a rainbow background.
"If you wear that, nobody will wonder, I guarantee." I say and wink, but all I get in return is a sad smile for all my efforts.
