The pressure on Lucina’s forehead, right between the eyes, was a deep coolness working at the knot of pain there. She would suck in that healing dampness like a drink of cold water. Bird songs, like people whistling through straws, opened her eyes. It was dawn! The firm touch must have come from Ruth’s fingers; but Ruth lay fast asleep beside her.
The headache was caused by an evening of drinking and dancing at the River View Bar, all in celebration of the US PAL Conference, Unveiling Sexual Practices Among Lesbians. Music by the Sextets, six very talented women who played a mix of reggae and jazz, was exhilarating. Though the historical Back Room had been a laughable disappointment — an afterthought of a space, set off by flimsy screens at the end of the enormous dance hall — the organizers had placed small lanterns and baskets of safe-sex paraphernalia near sofas in the area to tantalize and invite sexual play.
Lucina blinked her eyes to clear them of sleep and looked at Ruth. The line of her body — hip rising then falling to shape breasts — seemed a horizon dividing land from sky. Ruth was land, homeland. Her black hair, like an ebony mesa, caught light coming through gauze curtains. Lucina saw an innocent animal resting and so kind. Even in sleep, Ruth had reached out to her, to give comfort.
Now she could give back. She knew that Ruth loved to be awakened with caresses. And when warm feelings filled Ruth, she surrendered to Lucina’s hands.
This morning, Lucina felt her hands had never fully grasped the strength in Ruth’s calf muscles before. The firmness in these legs fed her and urged her upwards to Ruth’s buttocks, mounds of sensitive flesh that were Ruth’s most responsive areas since their first love makings. She grasped again the ample haunches hungering for her hands’ embrace. So delicate and sensitive, so alive was all this skin, she imagined her caresses releasing tiny cries. As Lucina pressed her fingers into the soft, answering flesh, Ruth’s whole body relaxed, purring gratefully.
Ruth turned toward her partner. This turning-toward opened a flood of feelings in Lucina. She kissed the half-sleeping woman fully on the mouth, lips pressing into lips. Her aroused tongue entered the beloved’s mouth. Lucina tasted sleep along with a trace of garlic from the evening’s meal and felt a deep tenderness.
She explored the soft moist flesh of Ruth’s mouth with the tip of her tongue, remembering the other cave, the effusion of flesh there, where thick petals of skin changed shape with each caress, inspired by the promise of release into liquid pleasure.
Yes, their bodies loved each other without fear.
As she spread Ruth’s legs, moved into that thickly scented, cornucopia of hair and flesh, her tongue found the bud center of Ruth’s sexuality. She coaxed Ruth’s clitoris out of its protective folds, feeling it swell between her lips.
Ruth groaned with pleasure and Lucina could hear the words, “Oh, Darling,” float toward her. When she put three fingers of her left hand into Ruth’s opening, a flood of aloe-like balm welcomed her.
Driven by her body’s desire and Ruth’s rhythms, she rooted her fingers within the flesh earth and lapped and cocooned her lover’s jewel. At once, Lucina was in a luminous garden, swooning into velvet, rainbow petals.
Ruth’s undulations quickened. Her body, a taut string, a hundred sucking mouths, lunged with abandon for its pleasure. Within the joyful explosions, she seized Lucina to her and wept.
“Oh, Beauty, you’ve come and it’s gone,” Lucina whispered.
“What’s gone?”
“My headache.”
While straw whistles dissolved into a bath of light, they slept again, closer and deeper than before.
Jeri Hilderley 