by Bob Arter
 |
Taking her hand, he stroked her palm with his thumb; it dizzied her. Pulse strong at the base of her throat, she pressed her other hand against his chest and, unthinking, squeezed a nipple. They could talk forever; they could scarcely utter a comprehensible word. Ah, Sarah said. Their kiss was in its twelfth minute, wide-open mouths and eyes, they nostril-breathed, each into the other, when they breathed at all.
On the drive to the country, they’d chattered and laughed and both tried not to think about Elizabeth, but she was along for the ride nonetheless. Another thing they had in common, neither said: She was my lover. Tony had worked for her at a dot com that lasted eleven months and perished before the IPO; Elizabeth had dropped him in her haste to leave the building. Sarah stumbled onto her, finally sharing an apartment, before the bitch quit grad school for the dot com. Both sailed like milkweed seeds on a fair breeze to Elizabeth, until she fled.
Inevitably, in all the breathless business of whispered histories, her name had surfaced. Really? I had a fling with an Elizabeth, too—what was your Elizabeth like?
Oh?
Oh.
Well, it was only—
And we’ve both had other—
Sarah hoisted her hips to scoot out of jeans and panties. Tony had her nipple now; soon he’d kiss his way down to her blossoming wetness, a bee bent on nectar. As he had with Elizabeth, she thought. I wonder if she and Elizabeth, he was thinking.
Both hearts beat wildly, wilder than they ever had when coupling with another.
All content in SmokeLong Quarterly copyright 2003-2008 by its authors.
Read the interview.
