Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  She thought of April and her nipples tightened. She shed her blouse, camisole and bra without hesitation, and before she put the blouse back on, she looked at the costumes on hangers behind the screen. Some of the shining fantasies were no bigger than her hand, and her nipples grew as hard as marbles as she imagined herself in glossy black and white, shining patches of satin. She stole a glimpse of herself in the mirror, unable to look directly at her image, the rising curves with dark rigid tips, and her face that of the woman in Bobby’s photos. She slipped on the sheer blouse and buttoned it to the place Mr Bentley had asked for, aware of every place the linen touched her, its Calendar Girl 481 cling no more than mist, but intense as a warm finger. She stepped from behind the screen, her blood pulsing in her ears, her throat, and her treasure. Almost giddy, she walked toward the men and their cameras. As she approached the chair, she understood at once that everything had changed. She smelled something in the room, a scent, sharp and tangy, exhilarating and new. She heard their breath, as ragged as her own, but with a primal edge. Every one of them watched the bounce of her breasts. She sat and gathered the roses, leaned forward so that the revealed cream of her chest emerged from the linen, her dark nipples harder yet in clinging, translucent pink, her lips parted in a smile, a promise. The clicking almost deafened her. “You are everything Bobby said, my dear.” Mr Bentley took the roses from her this time. He put his hands lightly on her shoulders and his fingertips kneaded lightly through the blouse. He held her gaze, the unspoken question as clear as a shout. She answered it with a nod. He knelt, his gray eyes intense on hers, not looking down to where his fingers worked at the’ last four buttons, not until he had finished and stood up so that she could open the blouse and drop it in a whisper to the floor. Click. She picked up the roses, spread them in a fan over her breasts, not covering herself at all, letting the red flowers brush the most sensitive spots just below the nipples. The men watched her, rapt, their cameras silent. She grew still in the moment, the pulse in her treasure and the blazing heat just under her skin demanding obedience. She saw the intense shapes against the rising light of the morning sun and tried to find Bobby among them. Paint me, she thought to him. Paint me with light. Raising a finger to her lips, she wet it to dripping, then touched her right nipple, slick and shining, catching the sun like the sweat of its luminescent desire.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  In Germany I have since learned the State requires that ten times as much pure air must be supplied as we had and in consequence the serious illnesses which with us amounted to eighty per cent in three months have been reduced to eight. Paternal Government, it appears, has certain good points. One day just as the “decompression” of an hour and a half was ending, an Italian named Manfredi fell down and writhed about, knocking his face on the floor till the blood spurted from his nose and mouth. When we got him into the shed, his legs were twisted like plaited hair. The surgeon had him taken to the hospital. I made up my mind that a month would be enough for me. At the end of the first week I got a note from Jessie saying that her father was going on board that afternoon and she could see me the next evening. I went and was introduced to Jessie’s sister who, to my surprise, was tall and large but without a trace of Jessie’s good looks. “He’s younger than you, Jess”, she burst out laughing. A week earlier I’d have been hurt to the soul, but I had proved myself, so I said simply, “I’m earning five dollars a day, Mrs. Plummer, and money talks.” Her mouth fell open in amazement. “Five dollars”, she repeated, “I’m sorry, I—I—” “There, Maggie”, Jessie broke in, “I told you, you had never seen anyone like him; you’ll be great friends yet. Now come and we’ll have a walk”, she added and out we went. To be with her even in the street was delightful and I had a lot to say, but making love in a New York street on a summer evening is difficult and I was hungry to kiss and caress her freely. Jessie, however, had thought of a way: if her sister and husband had theatre tickets, they’d go out and we’d be alone in the apartment; it would cost two dollars, however, and she thought that a lot. I was delighted: I gave her the bills and arranged to be with her next night before eight o’clock. Did Jessie know what was going to happen? Even now I’m uncertain, though I think she guessed. Next night I waited till the coast was clear and then hurried to the door. As soon as we were alone in the little parlor and I had kissed her, I said, “Jessie, I want you to undress. I’m sure your figure is lovely, but I want to know it.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “But how did you do it!” we wanted to know and he gave us his whole experience. “Girls love kissing,” he said, “and so I kissed and kissed her and put my leg on her, and her hand on my cock and I kept touching her breasts and her cunny (that’s what she calls it) and at last I got on her between her legs and she guided my prick into her cunt (God it was wonderful!) and now I go with her every night and often in the day as well. She likes her cunt touched, but very gently”, he added, “she showed me how to do it with one finger like this” and he suited the action to the word. Strangways in a moment became to us not only a hero but a miracle-man; we pretended not to believe him in order to make him tell us more, but in our hearts we knew he was telling us the truth, and we were almost crazy with breathless desire. I got him to invite me up to the Vicarage and I saw Mary the nurse-girl there, and she seemed to me almost a woman and spoke to him as “Master Will” and he kissed her, though she frowned and said “Leave off” and “Behave yourself”, very angrily; but I felt that her anger was put on to prevent my guessing the truth. I was aflame with desire and when I told Howard, he, too, burned with lust, and took me out for a walk and questioned me all over again and, under a haystack in the country we gave ourselves to a bout of frigging which for the first time thrilled me with pleasure. All the time we were playing with ourselves I kept thinking of Mary’s hot slit, as Strangways had described it, and at length a real orgasm came and shook me; the imagining had intensified my delight. Nothing in my life up to that moment was comparable in joy to that story of sexual pleasure as described, and acted for us, by Strangways. MY FATHER. Father was coming: I was sick with fear: he was so strict and loved to punish. On the ship he had beaten me with a strap because I had gone forward and listened to the sailors talking smut: I feared him and disliked him ever since I saw him once come aboard drunk.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “You look at me strangely!” she said swinging round from the long mirror with a challenge on her parted lips. I made some inane remark: I couldn’t trust myself to speak frankly; but natural sympathy drew us together. I told her I was going to be a student and she wanted to know whether I could dance: I told her I could not, and she promised to teach me: “Lily Robins, a neighbor’s girl, will play for us any afternoon. Do you know the steps?” she went on and when I said “No”: she got up from the sofa, held up her dress and showed me the three polka steps which she said were the waltz steps too, only taken on a glide. “What pretty ankles! you have”, I ventured; but she appeared not to hear me. We sat on and on and I learned that she was very lonely: Mr. Mayhew away every night and nearly all day and nothing to do in that little dead-and-alive place. “Will you let me come in for a talk sometimes?” I asked: “Whenever you wish”, was her answer. As I rose to go and we were standing opposite to each other by the door, I said: “You know, Mrs. Mayhew, in Europe when a man brings a pretty woman home, she rewards him with a kiss—” “Really?” she scoffed, smiling, “That’s not a custom here.” “Are you less generous than they are?” I asked and the next moment I had taken her face in my hands and kissed her on the lips. She put her hands on my shoulders and left her eyes on mine: “We’re going to be friends”, she said, “I felt it when I saw you: don’t stay away too long!” “Will you see me tomorrow afternoon?” I asked: “I want that dance lesson!” “Surely” she replied, “I’ll tell Lily in the morning.” And once more our hands met: I tried to draw her to me for another kiss; but she held back with a smiling—“tomorrow afternoon!” “Tell me your name”, I begged, “so that I may think of it.” “Lorna” she replied, “you funny boy!” and I went my way with pulses hammering, blood aflame and hope in my heart. Next morning I called again upon Smith; but the pretty servant, “Rose”, she said her name was, told me that he was nearly always out at Judge Stevens’ “five or six miles out,” she thought it was; “they always come for him in a buggy”, she added. So I said I’d write and make an appointment and I did write and asked him to let me see him next morning.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Wives were tasked with meeting husbands’ every sexual need, but it was the responsibility of women and girls to avoid leading men who were not their husbands into temptation. What counted as appropriate modesty depended on one’s location in the evangelical subculture. In certain homeschool circles, women wore dresses that fell below the knee and fashioned their hair in long, unadorned styles. Other evangelicals defined modesty more liberally. But wherever evangelicals drew the line, women were judged for their failure to uphold the ideal. Evangelicals had far less to say about male modesty. Instead, they emphasized the rewards that awaited boys who waited. A message of delayed gratification was at the heart of purity teachings for adolescent boys. Since wives served to gratify male desire, men only needed to wait until marriage to be rewarded with “mind-blowing” sex. Such promises were the stock-in-trade of evangelical youth pastors in the 1990s. In the words of purity evangelist Josh McDowell, God was not a “cosmic killjoy.” After all, God created sex.40 McDowell, an evangelical pseudo-intellectual who first made a name for himself writing popular books on Christian apologetics, helped launch the purity movement. In 1987 he published Why Wait? What You Need to Know about the Teen Sexuality Crisis , and he followed this purity primer with a VHS video series. In the early 1990s he joined with Christian rock band Petra to promote his purity message. It was an odd pairing, the middle-aged father figure who appeared onstage at rock concerts mixing in dad jokes with frank talk of sex and venereal disease. But it all made sense within the larger evangelical culture.41 A decade after McDowell’s book appeared, Josh Harris helped transform the purity message into something cool for the younger set. Harris was the son of pioneering Christian homeschoolers—his parents helped establish the Christian homeschooling movement, and his father’s 1988 book, The Christian Home School , was a Christian Booksellers Association bestseller. Harris got his start as a teenager publishing a magazine for fellow homeschoolers, and in 1997, at age twenty-one, he published his magnum opus, I Kissed Dating Goodbye . Influenced by the writings of Elisabeth Elliot, Harris introduced a generation of young Christians to “biblical courtship,” the idea that fathers were charged with ensuring their daughters’ purity until their wedding day, at which point they handed unsullied daughters over to husbands who assumed the burden of protection, provision, and supervision. The book became the bible of the purity movement, selling more than one million copies. The purity movement received strong support from evangelical institutions and organizations. The Christian homeschool community helped fuel its popularity, and the Southern Baptist Convention was home to True Love Waits, one of the most influential purity organizations. (Three years before Promise Keepers rallied at the National Mall, 20,000 evangelical teenagers showed up to pledge their sexual purity as part of the True Love Waits campaign.) Countless local churches promoted purity teachings, and purity culture found expression in an array of consumer products.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] My mother still remembers her confusion the first time she met a woman with HIV. You just never saw that, she says. Then, as now, gay men were the demographic most affected by HIV and AIDS. The women we met through volunteer work were mostly sisters of men who had died, best friends, or ex-girlfriends. I’m sure some were straight and some were not, but I didn’t think about it. My understanding of “gay people” was that they were mostly men. Gay men packed our living room for support group meetings. I wondered how they had sex, tried to picture it. They fascinated me. One summer vacation in California, I went with my aunt Tina, her husband, and their daughters to the San Francisco Pride Parade, where we saw the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence drag troupe, their outlandishly made-up faces above dark, flowing habits. On Castro Street, there were men in gold lamé thongs dancing in cages on flatbed trucks. Gay men were thrilling, heartbreaking, tragic, wild. I wanted to be close to them. I wanted them, even though I knew they were not for me. The idea of being a lesbian seemed boring. Lesbians were less visible than gay men, for one thing. I attributed this to a statistic I’d picked up somewhere, possibly from that conversation with my mother about Michael Freed’s one-in-ten banana painting. One in twenty women, the statistic went, is a lesbian. I thought, That’s why we don’t know any gay women. There apparently weren’t a lot of them. I remember seeing them on motorcycles at the front of the Pride Parade. They weren’t like women I knew. Lesbians were butches. That was how you could tell who was a lesbian. They wore scuffed leather boots, short hair, and lips the color of lips. They weren’t pretty. Why, I thought, wouldn’t a woman want to make herself beautiful? “Like most people around me,” writes A. K. Summers in Pregnant Butch, “I unthinkingly conflated butch with ugly.”14 In French class, we learned that adjectives follow the noun they modify. Un sac bleu. A blue bag. Des gâteaux délicieux. Delicious cakes. The only exceptions to this rule are adjectives for beauty, age, goodness, or size, all of which precede their noun. There’s a mnemonic device for this, the acronym BAGS. Beauty, Age, Goodness, Size. This is how I learned to understand women, too: in terms of beauty, age, goodness, and size. A pretty woman, a young woman, a good woman, a slender woman. Lesbians were woman-minus. Lesbians were function over form, the Ford Taurus of women. They didn’t seem to care about things that motivated the girls and women I knew: about being liked, about approval, about men. They were motivated by something I couldn’t understand.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Interview your character, she said, and I wrote it on the back of the handout. Ask her what she wants. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] To forget about her. That was what I wanted. We learn in elementary school that a star’s gravity keeps its planets in orbit. But planets too have gravity, and as they orbit their star, they tug it back and forth, making the star wobble gently. Our Earth does this to the sun, though weakly; Jupiter, which is bulkier, gives the sun a pretty good yank. The wobbling of stars is, in fact, what allows astronomers to discover and locate planets outside our solar system, planets that orbit other stars. As faraway planets tug their stars to and fro, the light from those stars changes color. As a star moves closer to us, the light waves it emits compress and look bluer; as a star swings away, its light waves stretch, looking redder. A shift in the light of a star points to the presence of an orbiting planet.6 Nora exerted this type of gravity, a disorienting pull. I wobbled. But I didn’t want to; I wanted to stop. I knew where I was supposed to be, my location inside the constellation of my family. I had to quit thinking about her. There’s a trick for this in meditation: when you catch your mind drifting into thoughts rather than resting in the present, you silently say, “Thinking.” Gentle. Easy. No judgment. You recommit to the present. If I quit thinking about her, my internal desires would align with my external reality. If I quit thinking about her, everything would be like it was before. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] My mother moved from Oklahoma City to Seattle that summer, into a house a block from ours. Brandon and I helped her find it, and we couldn’t believe our luck, having her so close by. June started preschool that September. At the class orientation there were two lesbian families. The teacher waved us toward a brown rug at one end of the classroom and asked us to sit. Brandon was home with June, so I was alone, and I took a spot close to one pair of women. I hoped they wouldn’t notice the way I planted myself among them. In the child-size space we lowered ourselves to the floor awkwardly, like foals do, the rug too small and our legs too long. This couple appealed to me. One of the women had floppy light-brown hair that fell across her eyes, tanned skin, glasses, and a gap between her front teeth. She gave a small wave when she said her name, and her fingers were long and slender. Her wife had dark eyes and wavy black hair cut short, tapering along the tendons at the nape of her neck. They wore loose, boxy jeans that frayed at the pockets, what clothing companies like to call “boyfriend jeans.” There was evidently no boyfriend.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  On the drive home, I rode in the back with June. Snow was falling through the bluish dusk. June asked me for a story about Olaf, a friendly giant I’d made up who often got into scrapes requiring the help of his human friend June. As I spoke, she nodded off, and I caught Brandon’s eye in the rearview mirror. I told him about a thing I’d recently heard her say, that she’d pointed at her own belly and said there was a baby there. She wanted to call the baby Juicebox. We laughed, wheezing, not wanting to wake her. How could this kind of contentment coexist with the mess in my head? How could this love coexist with the desire for a whole other love? Shouldn’t they cancel each other out? I had watched my husband and child sleep, choked with feeling. I wanted to press a woman against a wall with the length of my body, a woman who looks like a boy, and fuck her. Does one life preclude another? I wanted both, two lives in this body, running alongside each other in parallel, like ski tracks. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I get email newsletters from the Gottman Institute, famous for its research on relationships and marriage. The subject line of one reads, Move from me to we. “It’s important to move from me to we in your marriage,” the email says. “What do we need? What do we want? What do we like? . . . You get the feeling they are ‘in this together.’” This struck me as a noble way to operate. Very country-above-self, one-nation-under-marriage. I wanted to stand under that flag. But I had mixed feelings when I heard or saw it in practice, the sort-of royal we. Oh god, have you seen that new Wes Anderson movie? We hated it! Was there a time when I thought of Brandon and me that way, as a unit that moved and thought together? If I had, it was with effort, not instinct. This felt like a personal failing. Brandon and I talked about it, attributed it to my being an only child, screwed from the get-go. The bridge between the poles of we and me felt perilous, like a slackline over a pit of snakes. I knew I shouldn’t linger; for my own safety, I should choose one or the other. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Now that we were people who skied, we decided to do it again. This time we’d leave June with my mother, and that would be nice, a day-date. It was February, and Brandon was working every day, doubles on the weekends. But on President’s Day there’d be no construction work at Dino’s, so Brandon could take the day off. We’d drive an hour east, over Snoqualmie Pass, and ski for the day. I knew this had to be it: I should tell him what I was feeling. In the passenger seat, I practiced opening my mouth, forming syllables like smoke rings.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  The last was a quote I’d pulled from the book In the Company of Women. It was from an entrepreneur named Mary Going, intended as advice about work and business. When I stuck it to the mirror, I was mostly thinking of going down on a woman. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Out one day, I ran into a friend of a friend. She was easy to talk to, and I mentioned my separation. Do you have any friends who are divorced? she asked. I’ll be your divorced friend. We made plans to go out for drinks a couple of weeks later. Over a plate of nachos, we traded stories. I recounted the tale of Nora, said I now wanted to date casually, full stop—caaaasually, I enunciated. She asked if I had “a type.” I like androgyny, I said, my first time saying it aloud. I’m attracted to both men and women, but really I like people who aren’t exactly either. What word do you use for yourself, for your orientation? she asked. Do you use queer? I guess, I said. Maybe bisexual works. But I don’t just want it both ways; I want it every way. I fished an ice cube from my margarita and crunched on it. I’ve never been into, like, American-man men. No men-men. I loved that Brandon was a composer. He threw dinner parties in college, you know? Ha, she said. I didn’t know that. I think I like softer men, I said, and harder women. I liked how this sounded in my mouth. I might know someone you’d be into, said my friend. She gave a smile, quick and devious, and grabbed her phone. Scrolling through somewhere, she produced a photo. It was grainy, with the ersatz orange haze of an iPhone filter, but in it was a fine-boned girl with very short dark hair, sitting in what looked like a swiveling desk chair. She was beautiful, but not like a girl. She looked like the lead singer of a boy band. Oh, I snorted. Yeah, I’d totally fuck her. Her name is Ash, my friend said. I used to work with her at my old job. Want me to see if I can set you up? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We went out on a Thursday night. It was raining hard for Seattle, a hood-up kind of rain, and I got to the bar first, glad for a second to rearrange my bangs. I was too antsy to sit down in a booth, so I stood at the bar and made small talk with the bartender. He was the same one who’d bought me and Nora a round on our first date, but at a different bar. I tried not to read into it. At the edge of my vision I saw Ash walk in and felt my heartbeat thud, ca-su-al, down the length of my arms.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  This is clearly a belief, not a fact, perhaps reflecting a profound human desire that it should be true when accidents of birth clearly continue to shape our social status and prospects. It is for many a deeply attractive belief, calling into question social constructions of value, significance and intrinsic merit. For Christians, for example, the belief that all are created equal is a social leveller, demanding that we look beyond how society values individuals and discern something deeper, more significant beneath the surface. Yet the statement that ‘all people are created equal’ is ultimately a belief , not something that can be publicly demonstrated to be true. The American philosopher and statesman Benjamin Franklin would disagree with my judgement. He confidently declared that this was a ‘self-evident’ truth – most famously, in his landmark statement in the American Declaration of Independence. But why is this view ‘self-evident’? After all, Thomas Jefferson’s original version of this statement, which was modified by Franklin, spoke more cautiously of holding certain truths to be ‘sacred and undeniable’. A ‘self-evident’ truth is basically an intuition, in which someone just ‘sees’ or ‘senses’ that something is right, without relying on evidence or argument. 16 Yet these ‘intuitions’ are self-evident only within certain cultural contexts and because of those cultural contexts. Franklin’s assertion that this belief is a ‘self-evident’ truth is little more than an intellectual ploy, designed to fend off criticism or critical evaluation of this decidedly under-evidenced assertion, no matter how culturally desirable or politically convenient it might be. It is a defiant assertion, not an evidenced conclusion, a decision to present a belief in such forceful terms that it will be treated as if it were a fact. Why have I excluded the conviction that ‘it is wrong to torture people’? Surely any right-minded and liberal person would affirm this without reservation? I happen to believe this is true, but that’s not my point. This ethical conviction has the status of a moral judgement , a belief rather than a statement of fact. It is contestable in theory and is contested in practice. For example, Sam Harris argues that ‘some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them’. 17 Killing such people, he tells us, could be regarded as an act of self-defence. As part of his overall argument, Harris offers a defence of torture, based on his assessment of the relative demerits of collateral damage on the one hand, and torture on the other.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  What I had understood of woman stood in contrast to what I understood of man. They gestured at each other across a divide, defined themselves in contrast, made themselves solid. There were two natural and essential sexes: a woman and a man. Binary sexes appear so real, so normal, as to seem inevitable. I remember reading Judith Butler in graduate school and sort of getting it, but also not getting it at all: “Gender appears to the popular imagination as a substantial core . . . the spiritual or psychological correlate of biological sex,” she wrote. “Performing one’s gender wrong”—like SNL’s Pat—“initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.”20 I had scoffed at the scripts of womanhood that my childhood in Oklahoma City had offered me, but I’d believed all the same that there were right ways to do it, right and wrong ways to be a woman. My mother was a right way. I had always wanted to be good. I had stood by my husband, even as he made choices that I didn’t want. I’d raged, but I had recommitted again and again. I’d panted to do it all right. Can I be someone who can live with this? I’d contorted like an acrobat. When I saw Nora in the courtroom, I knew only that she was a woman in a suit. But I think she looked like something more than that, something I didn’t have: the will to stand apart, to crumple up the script. She seemed to define herself against no one, yet she was as real as anyone else. She was both and neither, somewhere in between, someone else entirely. She was her own invention, and I wanted her. There was no mistake or glitch about Nora. The friction between her body and the strictures of the world—that friction didn’t read as failure. Instead, it gave off heat. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We had sex for the first time in her bed, early one afternoon. We’d been dating for three weeks. I drove to her house with Beyoncé’s Lemonade on the stereo, turned up until the dash vibrated. I knew what we were going to do. I was nervous when I walked in the door. I didn’t want to be shy with her, but I couldn’t shake it. She must have felt it, too. We lumbered through a greeting, small-talked. It was daylight, and her sheets were patterned in beige and white. There are no men here, I remember thinking. We could be anything. When she lifted her T-shirt over her head, there were three freckles along the ridge of her collarbone, dark as ink and evenly spaced. Orion’s Belt. We would find our way.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  She was twenty-nine. When I told her I was thirty-eight, it felt like a dare. Her last girlfriend, she smiled, was thirty-nine. We fiddled with the straws in our drinks, stayed for two hours, walked around the corner for Malaysian food. She’d come out a few years ago, she said; like me, she’d felt straight before that. Then a year ago she came out again, this time as non-binary, gender-nonconforming. I liked how easily she said it. When she turned to speak to the server, I gawped at her: the line of her jaw, angular and delicate, and the confident slash of her brow. At each corner of her mouth a soft crease ran perpendicular to her lips, and it gave a tiny fullness to the flesh there. I wanted to suck on it. We closed down the restaurant and walked out to my car. The rain had let up, and she handed me the paper bag of leftovers. The street was busy, cars sluicing us with rainwater as they sped by. Can I walk you to your car? I asked, depositing the leftovers on the seat. She pointed us up a side street and we went, shoulders knocking through our coats. I couldn’t look at her. When we got to her car it was raining again. There was a slope to the sidewalk, and I was below her, which was perfect, because now we were the same height. I asked if I could kiss her. We both started to giggle, shy now, and she put her lips on mine. I opened my mouth to her, searched out her narrow hips under my hands. I could feel her start to smile as I kissed her, and I pulled her closer, flicked my tongue along the inside of her cheek. I liked the taste of her mouth, like fried rice and clean water. The rain was coming down steadily, ice-cold on the back of my neck, and the nylon of our raincoats scritched-scritched. Can I see you again? she asked, and I said, Please. I pressed my pelvis against her. She whispered into my teeth, threw her head back, and laughed, did a giddy soft-shoe. I wanted her to be more aloof, hot and distant—a gun for hire, for sex. I wished she liked me less. When we were soaked, she offered to drive me back to my car. We clambered into hers, and the windshield wipers squeaked to life. Heat blasted from the dash, and I rubbed my hands in front of the vent. When she pulled up behind my car, I found I didn’t want to get out. I looked at her, and she turned in her seat, and like horses we nuzzled, touched our faces cheek to cheek.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I wanted to touch her, move my body over hers. I wanted to play, to be allowed to play, to be pulled along, to be pushed. I wanted to take and be taken. I wanted permission to try. Instead we sat on opposite ends of the bed, not touching. Nora leans back against the headboard. She stares at the dresser. We take turns sending out words to probe the space between us, measuring its depths. I don’t know if we’re a good match, Molly, says Nora. She says my name like a threat. I don’t know what to do about this, I say. I want to say her name back to her, but it feels perilous to say it aloud, as though I’ve forgotten how to pronounce it. There are a lot of ways to have sex, she says. I’ve had sex plenty of times without even taking my clothes off. My head empties like a drain. But I don’t want that, I choke. I threw off all the rules to be here. I don’t want a whole new set of them. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] “Axiom 1: People are different from each other,” writes queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I imagine Sedgwick rolling her eyes at the typewriter, poking tiredly at the keys, lamenting that this should require explanation. “Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people.”29 Being with Nora feels like a homecoming, I wrote that summer. But to a place I’ve never lived, and I can’t figure out which room is mine. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Why are there so many rules? I once asked Nora. I mean, in lots of places it’s against the law for two women to have sex with each other at all. If we’ve already decided to break those rules, why create even more? I had made my way to her bed because something in me had shifted. I did not choose that shift, but it had happened, and what it looked like was desire. I wanted to love and be loved by a woman. Here is the part I did choose: I followed what I wanted. Against social constraints, against my marriage, against my own instinct, against anxiety, against rules, I chose desire. Isn’t that queer sex? I wanted to ask. What is queer sex, if not a throwing-off of everything that isn’t desire? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In casual conversation, one of Nora’s friends referred to me as femme. Not in the French sense, meaning woman or, depending on the context, wife. Nora’s friend called me femme as in the opposite of butch, as in a queer person who presents as conventionally feminine.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  If he lost, he was forced into exile but would return with an army to unseat his rival. If he won, he downed a draught of soma and led a raid into the neighboring territories, and when he returned laden with plunder, the Brahmins acknowledged his kingship: “Thou, O King, art Brahman.” The raja was now “The All,” the hub of the wheel that pulled his kingdom together and enabled it to prosper and expand. A king’s chief duty was to conquer new arable land, a duty sacralized by the horse sacrifice ( ashvameda ), in which a white stallion was consecrated, set free, and allowed to roam unmolested for a year, accompanied by the king’s army who were supposed to protect it. A stabled horse will always make straight for home, however, so the army was in fact driving the horse into territory that the king was intent on conquering. 35 Thus in India, as in any agrarian civilization, violence was woven into the texture of aristocratic life. 36 Nothing was nobler than death in battle. To die in his bed was a sin against the Kshatriya’s dharma, and if he felt that he was losing his strength, he was expected to seek out death in the field. 37 A commoner had no right to fight, however, so if he died on the battlefield, his death was regarded as a monstrous departure from the norm—or even a joke. 38 Yet during the ninth century, some of the Brahmins in the Kuru kingdom began yet another major reinterpretation of ancient Aryan tradition and embarked on a reform that not only systematically extracted all violence from religious ritual but even persuaded the Kshatriyas to change their ways. Their ideas were recorded in the scriptures known as the Brahmanas, which date from the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE. There would be no more crowded potlatches or rowdy, drunken contests. In this entirely new ritual, the patron (who paid for the sacrifice) was now the only layman present and was guided through the elaborate ceremony by four priests. Ritualized raids and mock battles were replaced by anodyne chants and symbolic gestures, although traces of the old violence remained: a gentle hymn bore the incongruous title “The Chariot of the Devas,” and a stately antiphon was compared to Indra’s deadly mace, which the singers were hurling back and forth “with loud voices.” 39 Finally, in the reformed Agnicayana ritual, instead of fighting for new territory, the patron simply picked up the fire pot, took three steps to the east, and put it down again. 40 We know very little about the motivation that lay behind this reform movement.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Brandon and I called them my crushes. He had a crush too, felt a fun little twinge when he saw a particular mom from the classroom across the hall. We joked about it, teased each other. I was euphoric, caffeine-jittery, when I ran into the lesbians at pickup or drop-off. I wanted them to take me in like a stray. My mother once commented that the black-haired one looked a bit like a boy. I nodded my agreement. I thought, That’s what I like about her, though I didn’t say it out loud. Not looking for Nora was not working. I noticed girls with short hair and delicate, angular faces, girls whose bodies could pin me down. I noticed butch women, women with graying buzz cuts, women who looked like mechanics, who might sling me over a shoulder. I saw every lesbian and queer couple everywhere. I envied what I imagined they had, their dynamic, their sex. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Was I a lesbian, then? Was that it? Had I been this way all along, and I didn’t know it? Writer Minnie Bruce Pratt was married to a man and had two small sons when she first fell in love with a woman. “Everyone was shocked at the turn I was taking in my life, including me,” she writes. “Everyone . . . wanted to know: Had I ever had these feelings before? . . . When had I started to ‘change’? . . . I didn’t feel ‘different,’ but was I? (From whom?) Had I changed? (From what?)”7 The way I looked at Nora, I’d also looked at Brandon. I remembered it. Was I bisexual? Was that the word for me? Queer? My birthday came in mid-September, and I turned thirty-seven. Had this always been in me, like the eggs in my ovaries? There’s a scene in Fun Home where Alison Bechdel, then a four- or five-year-old girl, sees a butch dyke walk into a diner wearing dungarees, boots, and a set of keys on her belt loop. It’s a powerful moment, young Bechdel seeing a glimpse of who she is and who she wants to be: “Like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home—someone they’ve never spoken to, but know by sight—I recognized her with a surge of joy.”8 I had to have had a moment like this, surely: a flicker of the person I was now becoming. If the evidence was there, I would find it. 4Early in our dating, Brandon and I sat looking at old photo albums, and a shot of me in college made him laugh out loud. You looked like a lesbian, he said.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The abbot, who slept not, nay, whose thoughts were ardently occupied with his new desires, heard what passed between Alessandro and the host and noted where the former laid himself to sleep, and well pleased with this, began to say in himself, 'God hath sent an occasion unto my desires; an I take it not, it may be long ere the like recur to me.' Accordingly, being altogether resolved to take the opportunity and himseeming all was quiet in the inn, he called to Alessandro in a low voice and bade him come couch with him. Alessandro, after many excuses, put off his clothes and laid himself beside the abbot, who put his hand on his breast and fell to touching him no otherwise than amorous damsels use to do with their lovers; whereat Alessandro marvelled exceedingly and misdoubted him the abbot was moved by unnatural love to handle him on that wise; but the latter promptly divined his suspicions, whether of presumption or through some gesture of his, and smiled; then, suddenly putting off a shirt that he wore, he took Alessandro's hand and laying it on his own breast, said, 'Alessandro, put away thy foolish thought and searching here, know that which I conceal.' Alessandro accordingly put his hand to the abbot's bosom and found there two little breasts, round and firm and delicate, no otherwise than as they were of ivory, whereby perceiving that the supposed prelate was a woman, without awaiting farther bidding, he straightway took her in his arms and would have kissed her; but she said to him, 'Ere thou draw nearer to me, hearken to that which I have to say to thee. As thou mayst see, I am a woman and not a man, and having left home a maid, I was on my way to the Pope, that he might marry me. Be it thy good fortune or my mishap, no sooner did I see thee the other day than love so fired me for thee, that never yet was woman who so loved man. Wherefore, I am resolved to take thee, before any other, to husband; but, an thou wilt not have me to wife, begone hence forthright and return to thy place.' Alessandro, albeit he knew her not, having regard to her company and retinue, judged her to be of necessity noble and rich and saw that she was very fair; wherefore, without overlong thought, he replied that, if this pleased her, it was mighty agreeable to him. Accordingly, sitting up with him in bed, she put a ring into his hand and made him espouse her[90] before a picture wherein our Lord was portrayed, after which they embraced each other and solaced themselves with amorous dalliance, to the exceeding pleasure of both parties, for so much as remained of the night.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘whether you have ever considered what a strict life we have to lead, and how the only men who ever dare set foot in this place are the steward, who is elderly, and this dumb gardener of ours. Yet I have often heard it said, by several of the ladies who have come to visit us, that all other pleasures in the world are mere trifles by comparison with the one experienced by a woman when she goes with a man. I have thus been thinking, since I have nobody else to hand, that I would like to discover with the aid of this dumb fellow whether they are telling the truth. As it happens, there couldn’t be a better man for the purpose, because even if he wanted to let the cat out of the bag, he wouldn’t be able to. He wouldn’t even know how to explain, for you can see for yourself what a mentally retarded, dim-witted hulk of a youth the fellow is. I would be glad to know what you think of the idea.’ ‘Dear me!’ said the other. ‘Don’t you realize that we have promised God to preserve our virginity?’ ‘Pah!’ she said. ‘We are constantly making Him promises that we never keep! What does it matter if we fail to keep this one? He can always find other girls to preserve their virginity for Him.’ ‘But what if we become pregnant?’ said her companion. ‘What’s going to happen then?’ ‘You’re beginning to worry about things before they’ve even happened. We can cross that bridge if and when we come to it. There’ll be scores of different ways to keep it a secret, provided we control our own tongues.’ ‘Very well, then,’ said the other, who was already more eager than the first to discover what sort of stuff a man was made of. ‘How do we set about it?’ ‘As you see,’ she replied, ‘it is getting on for nones, and I expect all our companions are asleep. Let’s make sure there’s nobody else in the garden. And then, if the coast is clear, all we have to do is to take him by the hand and steer him across to that hut over there, where he shelters from the rain. Then one of us can go inside with him while the other keeps watch. He’s such a born idiot that he’ll do whatever we suggest.’

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  I moaned as her fingers slipped inside my coat to unbutton my silk shirt. “I know you need this,” she continued. “I can tell.” She pushed my bra upward on my chest, exposing my small breasts, and coaxed my tiny nipples to life. They hardened beneath her touch, and her mouth left mine to travel down to my left breast. Her teeth scraped at the sensitive skin there, and I whimpered, not knowing whether to beg her for more or to beg her to stop. I’d never been with a woman before, aside from kissing my high school best friend once during a game of spin the bottle. But that had been an attempt to show how sexually liberated we were at the ripe age of fifteen, as well as to seduce a roomful of teenage boys who couldn’t believe their good luck. This—with Sabra—was significantly different. To Sabra, it seemed like men didn’t exist. At least, that was the impression I’d gotten the last time I saw her. My meeting had ended early, and I’d headed back to the limo only to find her sandwiching a coat-check girl between her body and the vehicle, oblivious to the stunned and intrigued looks that the men passing by were shooting them. It was clear that Sabra didn’t want men, she didn’t need them, and she certainly didn’t feel compelled to seduce them. There was something exciting and free about that. Still, that meant her want for me was genuine, and that frightened me. “I don’t know about this,” I admitted. Her hand had drifted down to the top button of my pants. “Why is that?” She smiled, flashing me a row of charming, semicrooked white teeth. She wasn’t taking me seriously—I could tell by the way she undid that top button and went for the second one. “Because.” My cheeks turned pink with shyness. “Look, I’m not—” “You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,” she assured me as she undid the last button and pulled my pants down over my hips and off my legs, revealing my lace thong panties with the butterfly appliqué. “But one thing you are is horny. And no matter what you are or aren’t, you want me. I know that much.” How did she know? Did it even matter? She was right; more than right, in fact. I was feeling more excited than I ever had toward my ex-husband, a lawyer who had a mind for business and not a clue about a woman’s needs. I had a feeling that Sabra didn’t have his same problems. “Have you ever eaten pussy before, Mrs. B?” she whispered, her voice thick with amusement and sensuality as she slid off my lap and knelt on the floor of the limo. She lowered her head to dip her tongue inside my belly button. I swallowed hard. “It’s just Kent now. Rachel Kent.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  “Turn your ass around this way, and I’ll make you hot.” I’d wanted to sound surly, but I was panting too hard to be convincing. “You’ll get your turn. Promise. But if you want more, you’ve gotta give it to me dirty.” “Fuck. You expect me to be articulate when all I can think about is how fucking hot you look, lying between my legs?” “There’s a start.” She raised an eyebrow, waiting… I rolled my eyes and blew out a deep breath. “Okay…I want that plastic penis cramming up inside me and your mouth sucking my clit.” “Cramming? Like this?” She twisted it, gently screwing it into me, but only about three inches. My pussy clenched around the shaft, trying to draw it deeper. Again, I growled, frustration making me grind my teeth. Her lips were set in a straight line as though she were trying to keep from laughing. “I want your hand cupping the fucking base of that plastic prick and you shoving it up until you’re slapping my cunt. I want all of it, bitch.” Her lips pursed. Her hazel eyes narrowed. “Callin’ me names, now? What if I don’t like that?” “You fucking love it. Fucking little whore. Fucking cunt.” Kari giggled and dove down, slurping as she sucked my clit and crammed the dildo deeper. “That’s it, bitch,” I breathed. “Fuck, yeah. Bite it. Scrape it with your teeth.” I closed my eyes as she ratcheted up the heat, her mouth sliding over my clit, sucking, her tongue feathering over it, then, at last, her teeth chewing it, every scrape making my body writhe. “Fucking talented. Oughta sell clit-jobs. Make a fucking fortune.” She snickered. “You know you talk like a dude when you get desperate.” “I know what the fuck I want,” I said, pulling her hair again. “And you talk too much.” Her lips latched harder, and she shoved the whole six inches deep inside me, her hand sliding in the moisture she’d coaxed from inside me when it met my pussy. My hips rose and fell; moans, one after the other, ripped from my throat. “Fuck, yeah. Fuck, fuck.” And then the spiraling coil deep inside my belly loosened. I sucked in a deep breath and rode the high, clutching her head with both hands. When my fingers slipped away, Kari withdrew the cock and turned it off. Then she crawled upward to rest on her side next to me. She caressed a breast, bending to kiss one of the hard little spikes. “You know we have to talk,” she whispered. I sighed. “Yeah, we do.” “I want more,” she said quietly. “More what?” The words came out flat, with a tinge of annoyance. I winced inside, but I don’t take rejection well. “More…company.”

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  “Almost.” Her fingers slid away and she reached for the dildo. She tucked the first four inches in her mouth and twirled it, then pulled it away. A string of spit, stretching from her lips to the tip of the soft lifelike cap, had me thinking for the first time that I might like to watch her going down on a man. She’d be insatiable. Her hungry little mouth would gobble him up and have him cramming deep into her throat. “Yeah, hold that thought,” she said, her expression smug. “Now you can read my mind?” “Your tits are spiking.” Her wide mouth stretched. “You wanna see me do a dude.” “What I wanna see is you doing something with that dildo besides teasing me.” Her laughter tinkled. No other way to describe it or her. Kari was elflike—small, slender, her frame so narrow she looked like a prepubescent teen from the rear. I was anything but petite. And I liked the fact I could subdue her with just my weight. Liked the way her eyes would darken when I rolled on top and began to pump my hips. Sometimes, I wore a strap-on, because I knew she liked it. But I’d left it at home, wanting nothing but our mouths and hands this weekend, nothing but ourselves. I should have known she wouldn’t leave home without one of her own toys. The cock kicked to life, humming loudly. The first glide landed on my clit, and she held the dildo there until the vibrations made the sensitive knot swell. She pulled the toy away, bent and latched on to me with her lips and sucked, drawing hard twice, then releasing with a succulent pop. My heartbeats slowed to a deep, rhythmic thrum. I raised my knees and planted my feet wide apart, opening to her, nestling into the furry rug at my back and resting my head on both my arms so that I could watch. She stretched my folds and tugged them upward, then leaned closer so that I could feel the warm gusts of her shortening breaths against me. Her tongue trailed along the edges of the outer lips, up and down. The tip of the dildo pushed inside me, just past the flanged ridge surrounding the cap, but no deeper. The humming tantalized and a gentle convulsion rippled up my channel. It wasn’t enough, and I growled to tell her so. A smile kicked up one corner of her mouth, and she twisted the cock inside me. My pussy clasped noisily around it, trying to trap it, but she pulled it out again. I slipped one hand from under my head and thrust my fingers into her soft, straight hair, tugging hard to punish her. “What do you want, Margot?” she asked, her voice filled with teasing laughter. “Gotta tell me. Gotta make me hot.”