Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year Volume 2 Read online

  But it was certainly no ghost who gently peeled Terry’s hands away from covering herself. Lulu’s teeth pressed against her full underlip as her eyes roamed over Terry’s naked body.

  Terry felt herself blush to the roots of her hair and she closed her eyes, surrendering to the girl’s scrutiny. Lulu chose the moment of darkness to kiss her. Terry’s eyes flew open and then closed again as she relaxed into the kiss. The auditorium smelled of fresh popcorn and Lulu was as warm and soft as butter. She could hardly believe this wasn’t all a dream.

  She put her hands on Terry’s shoulders and gently began backing her toward the front row of seats. She pushed her down and Terry eased herself gratefully into the soft red velvet. Lulu stood before her for a moment before sinking to her knees. Her smile was intoxicating, impish and full of mischief.

  Her hands gently cupped Terry’s breasts and Terry gasped at the contact. It had been a long time since anyone had touched her like that. She clutched the arms of the seat as Lulu toyed with her stiffening nipples, pinching and finally kissing them. She licked them as if they were candy.

  When she pulled back, Terry gave a little whimper of protest. But Lulu wasn’t finished. Her hands trailed over Terry’s body, down to her thighs. Then her face disappeared as she lowered her head, parting Terry’s knees.

  The short-cropped hair tickled as Lulu kissed her way up Terry’s inner thigh. Terry shuddered with pleasure and held her legs as far apart as the seat would allow. After a moment she felt the warm wetness of Lulu’s tongue against her sex and couldn’t restrain a little cry. Above them, the film continued, but the images were like clouds, wispy manifestations of their passion. Terry was drowning in ecstasy. If this was a dream, she didn’t ever want to wake up.

  Lulu moved her tongue in little circling motions around Terry’s clit, then sucked the hard little bud into her mouth. The effect was devastating. It was almost too much to take. Terry gasped and clutched at Lulu’s hair, urging her on. Her whole body tingled and she writhed against the plush velvet, lost in the sensations.

  When the climax came she finally broke the silence, loosing a wild cry into the empty auditorium. Their only audience was the characters on the screen, people from the distant past, frozen in another time and place. They might as well be ghosts.

  Terry clung to Lulu as the orgasm sent shock waves through her body, finally fading to pleasant little pulses. A hot blush burned her cheeks and she closed her eyes, burying her face in the silky hair of her mysterious companion.

  When Terry finally raised her head, Lulu was smiling at her. Terry opened her mouth to speak, but Lulu placed a finger on her lips. She glanced up at the screen.

  YOU MUST BECOME CALIGARI!

  The man who had sought to emulate the evil Dr. Caligari was roaming the wild streets, lost in delusions of grand madness, his mind spiraling out of control as the words chased him, floating in the air above him. Terry smiled, relating to the moment. Lulu was a sweet insanity she could surrender to forever. Together they watched the rest of the film, sitting naked in the front row, neither saying a word.

  The framing story concluded with Francis in the asylum, all the dreamy weirdness revealed as hallucination. Dr. Caligari was the director of the asylum. Cesare was mute and harmless. And the beautiful Jane sat on a throne in the center of the room, wearing a crown and believing herself to be a queen. Francis professed his love for her, but she turned her head away, gazing sadly into the distance.

  WE QUEENS ARE NOT FREE TO ANSWER THE CALL OF OUR HEART.

  As always, the moment gave Terry a little pang of sorrow. Would she wake from this moment to find it had all been a dream, Lulu nothing more than a fantasy, something conjured by her lonely, horny mind to give her pleasure for a moment?

  But there was movement beside her. Lulu reached out and held Terry’s chin in her hand, turning her face toward her.

  “But we are free,” Lulu said, her voice like music, teasing and soft. “And my heart calls to yours.”

  Terry jumped, startled by the broken silence. For a moment she couldn’t speak, could only stare into Lulu’s beautiful eyes, drinking in the sight of her playful grin. She blushed and lowered her head, her arms drifting to cover her nakedness.

  Onscreen, the movie was coming to an end.

  “Um,” Terry said.

  Lulu grinned and slowly undulated her fingers in front of Terry’s face, imitating Caligari. “Awaken from your dark night . . . ”

  Terry laughed softly. “Oh, I’m awake,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more awake. But . . . um, have to . . . ” She pointed at the screen.

  Lulu nodded, still smiling. “I’ve always wanted to see the projectionist booth. It’s where the magic happens, after all.”

  Terry smiled, thrilled beyond measure at the thought of taking Lulu into her own little cabinet upstairs. “I’d love to show you,” she said. Then, feeling a little bolder, she added, “You’re wrong about one thing, though.” She reached over, running her fingers over Lulu’s breasts. “That’s not where the magic happens.”

  BICYCLING PUTS THE FUN

  BETWEEN YOUR LEGS

  Janelle Reston

  “All the nerve endings in my crotch are officially dead,” Morgan said when we rolled into the pit stop in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Our cleats sank into the sandy soil as we dismounted our bicycles and propped them against the closest empty tree trunk. We were about halfway through our eighty-mile route from Philadelphia to the Atlantic shore, and the stop was already teeming with other cyclists taking a break.

  In contrast to Morgan’s, my crotch wasn’t numb at all. It flushed practically every time I looked at her. My nerves down there felt as alive as ever, thank you very much.

  I rubbed my palm over her bike saddle, still warm from her body. I felt slightly jealous that it got to spend so much time between her legs. “This seat isn’t helping? You loved it at the shop.” I’d gone with her the previous week to help her pick it out. Morgan was fairly new to long-distance cycling and had complained about her previous saddle incessantly rubbing against her labia, and not in the good bicycling puts the fun between your legs way. This new one was like mine, with a cutout to spare the delicate lady parts.

  “It’s not my labia that hurt. It’s everything else.” She pulled her empty water bottle from its cage and walked over to the drink tent a few paces away to cram it full of ice.

  Then, in full view of anyone who cared to look, she shoved the bottle down the front of her bike shorts, wriggled her hips to settle it between her thighs, and gave a little shiver of pleasure. “That’s much better.”

  “Ice on your snatch? That’s hard-core.” I laughed even as a quiver traveled through my own hips. What I wouldn’t have given to be that bottle.

  “I told you it hurt. I feel like someone put a sledgehammer to my pussy, and not in a good way.”

  I was too hot from the pedaling to blush, but I ducked my head anyway as I filled my own bottles with Gatorade. “We should check the height and angle of your saddle then. A well-adjusted bike seat shouldn’t make you feel like that.”

  She eyed me. “So your crotch is doing fine?”

  “Never been better,” I answered, still not looking at her. I was afraid the double meaning would be evident in my eyes, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for her to know how I felt about her—not until I could suss out her feelings. She was brash and a flirt, but she was like that with everyone, even dogs and the odd chickadee. I couldn’t read too much into it.

  We found a patch of bare dirt and sat down. “Mmmph, that’s more like it,” she muttered as she spread her legs open for a side stretch. “Nestles the ice right where I need it.”

  “Morgan, that can’t be good for you. You’re going to give yourself frostbite.”

  “You care about my cooch? That’s so sweet of you.” She tipped her head and winked at me. I felt my own cooch flush. Was she flirting? Or just being her usual brash self?

  “I care about all of y
ou. Seriously, I’m looking at your seat height before you get back on that thing.”

  She reached toward her other leg but kept her eye on me. “So you’re telling me your crotch isn’t bothering you at all after fifty miles?”

  “A little tingly, maybe, but not in pain.”

  “Good tingly, or bad tingly?”

  The fact of her asking made me all the tinglier. “For me to know and you to find out.”

  “Ooh, I bet it’s the good tingly then.”

  “You know what they say: ‘Bicycling puts the fun between your legs.’”

  She snickered. “God, I wish.”

  I went to ask one of the pit-stop volunteers for some string. The guy found a spool of twine and gave me several feet. I brought it back to Morgan, who now lay flat on her back with her legs propped up against a tree trunk. Her water bottle had slipped forward so that it now bulged against the front of her shorts like a monster strap-on.

  “Here, take that armadillo out of your pants. I need to take your measurements.”

  She looked up at me from her spot on the ground. “What for?”

  “So I can adjust your seat.”

  “Don’t I need to be on my bike for you to do that?”

  “I wanted to spare you the pain for as long as possible.”

  She smiled with relief and sat up, whipping the water bottle out of her shorts and nestling against a tree root. “Have I told you lately how much I love you?”

  She hadn’t. I had never heard her utter the word love in reference to anyone, unless you counted the times we’d talked about her realization that she hadn’t really been in love with her ex. “No,” I said. “But there’s a first time for everything.”

  She looked right into my eyes. “Indeed, there is.”

  I held the string out to her. “Grab one end and hold it against your inseam. Then stretch out your leg.”

  She did as instructed, the tip of her index finger pressing down against her chamois, right where the opening between her labia would have been if she’d been naked. I tried not to think too much about that as I pulled the string taut and stretched it to the base of her foot. I crimped my end to mark off the right length. “Back in a flash.”

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “I’m coming with you. I want to watch you in action.”

  “Think you’ll learn a thing or two?”

  “Oh, I know I will.”

  It took us a minute in the maze of trees to remember which one housed our bicycles, but we found them eventually. I took the emergency tool kit out of my saddlebag and used the string to check Morgan’s seat height. “Holy crap, no wonder you felt like there was a sledgehammer on your snatch. This thing is at least an inch too high.”

  Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “An inch makes that much of a difference?”

  “You’ll find out in just a second.” I used my pocket Allen wrench to lower her seat. The nose was also tilted too far up, so I flattened it out to redistribute the pressure to her sit bones. “Here, get on and see how that feels.”

  She smirked. “That’s what all the ladies say to me.”

  I held the bike steady as she mounted and pedaled backward to test the feel of the seat without actually moving. “Oh my god. That’s so much better. Here I thought my choice was between finishing the ride and obliterating my twat. But this is like . . . butter. Damn, I think my cunt might actually be usable by tonight.”

  There was no way I could avoid blushing this time. “Are you planning to use it?”

  “I don’t know. But I like to know it’s an option. I guess we’ll see what happens when we get to the shore, won’t we?” She winked again.

  We’d met earlier that summer on one of the training rides. It was my seventh year of long-distance cycling and her first, though she was a few years older than me. Despite the difference in our experience, our cadences were almost identical, so we kept ending up in the same pod of riders. Sometimes the pod dwindled to just the two of us. It was easy to find a rhythm with her and stay in it.

  The training rides grew longer as the season progressed, and so did the time I spent with her. She was a great riding buddy, with a million stories to tell and the perfect amount of tough love when I wanted to toss my bike by the side of the road and sleep for the rest of the day—like the grueling ninety-six-degree afternoon in August when she hopped off her bike only long enough to grab the sprinkler off someone’s lawn and douse me with it. Her background was in marathon running, and those assholes never give up. A gaggle of nearby kids saw what she was doing and thought it was a hoot. They came running over and accosted us with water Uzis until both of our shirts were soaked through.

  God, it felt good when we got back on our bikes. The wind against the wet fabric worked like an air conditioner, and the way Morgan looked in her clinging jersey energized me even more. Normally white, it became almost transparent under these conditions. I could see her skin beneath it and the subtle movements of her back and arm muscles as she steered the bike. When she sat up to ride hands-free on the straight stretches, the outline of her pebbled nipples was unmistakable.

  But just because two people have perfect cycling chemistry doesn’t mean they’ll fit together off the bike. Besides, Morgan had been on a dating sabbatical when I’d first met her, and I wasn’t sure if it was over yet.

  “How long do you think a person should go without sex after a bad breakup?” she’d asked on our third ride together.

  I liked to think she was wondering because of my irresistible wiles, but those kinds of non sequiturs bubble up all the time when two people ride together. There’s only so much commentary you can make on the rolling countryside before conversation turns to more personal things.

  “I guess it depends,” I’d said. “On a person’s relationship with sex and how bad the breakup was.”

  She’d laughed. “I was looking for a pat answer.”

  “You’ll never get a pat answer from me about anything. I’m like Socrates. I turn every answer into a question.”

  Two weeks before the big ride, she’d dropped this one: “You know what’s weird? For the first time in my life, I don’t feel the need to be in a couple. At all.”

  My heart sank. I made a show of carefully inspecting the paper wrapper of my Italian ice for leaks so she wouldn’t see the disappointment written all over my face. “Good for you. So no dating for you ever again?”

  She tapped her feet against the sidewalk. The metal cleats on her shoes made a crisp click-click against the concrete. “That’s the funny part. I don’t know. I think I could be happy that way. But sometimes when you realize you don’t need something—that’s the moment when you’re ready to have it.”

  I wanted that kind of confidence, and when I was on the bike, I had it. Getting to the top of a hill or flying down a crest made me feel like I was king of the world.

  But whenever my feet left the pedals for solid ground, I returned to my shy and somewhat awkward self, making weird historical references no one understood and liking bad puns more than anyone should. I never knew what to say or do to show my interest in another woman. I’d always been that way, waiting for someone else to make the first move and giving up when they didn’t.

  The rest of that September day was perfect: high sixties, a light breeze, and scattered cumulus clouds that made the sun feel refreshing rather than relentless. We got to the shore around four p.m., checked our bikes, and went straight to the beach house we’d rented with a few other riders. We were sharing a room with two double beds.

  “How’s your pain doing?” I said, beginning to unpack my clothes.

  “Much better, thank you. Your seat adjustment worked wonders. My pelvic bone still feels a little bruised, but the fleshy parts are—well, maybe a little tender, but mostly fine.” She threw her duffel bag on the bed farthest from the door, pulled out a bathing suit, and started stripping her clothes off. “God, it feels good to get out of these disgusting shorts. It’ll feel even better to get into that ocean. I
t’s so invigorating this time of year.”

  I looked away, but not until after catching a glimpse of her ass. It was my first time seeing it, and it was breathtaking.

  “You don’t have to avoid looking at me.” Her voice came over my shoulder. “I don’t think I have anything that will shock you. And if I do, it’s better you learn now.”

  “How’s that?” I pulled my bra off through the armholes of my cycling jersey.

  “You know, in case I want to sleep naked tonight. Or in case we both do.”

  I looked over my shoulder toward her, but didn’t turn all the way. I didn’t have to. There was a mirror on the wall, and I could see all of her in it. Her jersey and bra were off now, leaving only stripes in her skin where the elastic had been. She was still gorgeous. Her breasts drooped slightly under their own weight, their coppery nipples as large as silver dollars.

  She met my eyes in the reflection. Was it a challenge? If so, I wasn’t prepared for it.

  My throat went dry. “I brought pajamas.”

  She shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  We threw sundresses over our bathing suits and bought the largest custard cones known to humankind before finding a spot on the beach. We were starving, and since we would be riding back to Philadelphia the next day, we figured we might as well carbo-load now. My stomach grew full and tiredness started to hit me; when I was done with my cone I lay back and closed my eyes. It felt good, the sun lighting up my eyelids and the sound of the waves in my ears.

  When I opened my eyes, the sun was in a different place in the sky and Morgan was leaning over me, whispering, “Wake up, sleepyhead. The last thing you want is a sunburn.”

  She was so close I could smell the remnants of frozen coffee custard on her tongue. I could smell her sunblock too, and the sheen of sweat she hadn’t yet washed off. It reminded me of sex. I wanted to bury myself in it.