Page 36 of Best Woman

A bell rings. We move toward the private event space and find our seats in the cavernous dining room of the snooty Italian restaurant housed in the hotel most of the out-of-town guests are staying at.

All around me are cousins and sleepaway camp friends and my mother’s clique of female friends, who are essentially postmenopausal Rachels, each double fisting a cocktail in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other.

Kim is across the room, walking toward the bridal table with the actual Rachels, sipping from a newly procured scotch like some Mad Men lesbian AU fantasy.

I need this thing to move quickly so I can ask to see her hotel room.

The meal passes in a haze of polite conversation, overcooked pasta, and undercooked chicken. There are speeches from minor players—my own won’t take place until tomorrow night. A photographer floats around capturing the revelry, and I pose with the twins, who flank me on either side.

Later, when I’m sipping espresso and avoiding the cheesecake so my dress fits tomorrow, I suddenly feel hot breath against my ear.

“I’m in room 902,” Kim says. “Be there in twenty.” It’s not phrased even remotely like a question, so I nod my assent like a good girl. Across the table, Aiden rolls his eyes.

…

The carpeted hallways aren’t easy to navigate in my shoes, but every step leads me closer to, I’m pretty sure, a sexual encounter I’ve been fantasizing about for half my life.

I’m not sure if that’s fair, if Kim will be able to live up to the ideal of her I’ve been nurturing since I was a hormonal teenager failing algebra, but the woman I’ve spent the past few weeks getting to know is so much different and so much more vivid than the one I’d caught glimpses of when we were both growing up and outgrowing this place day by day.

I reach her door. I knock. Everything is very quiet in the hallway, and I’m breathing so loudly she must hear me from inside.

The door opens and Kim is standing there, framed by light from the heavy autumn moon shining through the windows behind her.

She’s taken off her suit jacket and wears only those crisp trousers and a plain white tank top so sheer I can see her nipples through it.

Her braids are unbound, her neck is long, her eyes are wide.

“Hi,” I say.

“Get in here,” she grunts, reaching forward to wrap an arm around my waist and yank me forward, closing the door behind me and pushing me back against it.

“Take it off,” she grinds out.

“Huh?”

“That dress looks expensive so please take it off ”—she pulls a hanger from the closet to her left—“and hang it up before I tear it off of you.”

“You can’t tear it off, ” I manage, head spinning. “This dress belongs to Hannah G.”

She laughs, disbelieving, with wild eyes. “I love ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’?” It’s a single from Hannah G’s debut album that still gets played almost hourly on the radio.

“I’m more partial to ‘Diet Dr. Pepper,’?” I respond in a daze. It’s kind of a deep cut. “The bridge really goes off.”

And then she’s on me.

I’m grateful the evening’s festivities are over, because there’s no way my makeup will survive Kim’s brutal kisses.

Together we manage to unzip my dress and peel it off.

She steps back, slides couture worth more than my mother’s car onto a hanger, and shoves it into the closet, pushing me back against the door. My purse hits the ground.

Her hands are in my loose hair, gripping tightly, but don’t stay there long.

She touches my neck, shoulders, my naked breasts—no bra, sorry Mom—and thumbs my nipples into aching stiffness.

Those hands skim my sides and reach down to cup my ass and press me firmer against her.

I want to raise my legs up to wrap around her but my shoes are too heavy.

“My shoes,” I pant out against her lips. “I need to take off my shoes.”

She flicks her eyes down, then back up to mine.

“No.” Kim pulls me toward the bed and tosses me down onto it.

It’s unmade, as though she spent the afternoon tossing and turning enough to disrupt the pristine military precision housekeepingleft behind, and I feel unbearably tender at the thought of lying somewhere Kim has slept.

She stands at the foot of the bed, looking down at me, and her mouth pulls up into a wolfish grin.

Her teeth look very sharp and I want her to tear me apart with them.

“What are you waiting for?” I lift my arms above my head, stretching every inch of me in the golden light of the reading lamp on the nightstand. I’m just a girl, lying in a hotel bed in front of another girl, asking her to fuck me.

“Just enjoying the view,” she says, and yanks off her tank top.

Her breasts are fuller than mine, curving against her ribs so softly, with wide mauve nipples.

I need her to lie on top of me so bad I can’t breathe, which must show on my face, because she shucks off her trousers—no briefs, sorry Mom—and pounces.

I have so much skin and all of it is pressed against hers.

We kiss hard and fast, devouring each other as our hands roam.

The weight of her on top of me feels so good I want to cry, but that might kill the mood.

I’ve cried during sex before and unless you’re into some very specific kink, it’s not really fun for everyone.

She nudges my legs open to fit between them, and again I want to wrap my legs around her but these damn shoes are still too heavy.

“You know,” I gasp out between kisses, “fucking with high heels on might look hot in porn, but I’m definitely going to lodge a stiletto up your ass if I don’t get these off. ”

“Who says I’d mind?” she asks against my throat, and I have to bite back a whimper.

But she nods and pulls away, sliding down my front, trailing kisses as she goes, and lifts first one leg, then another, to her chest. The shoes pinch, and the relief of having them off must show on my face, because she turns and presses a tender kiss against the arch of each foot.

Embarrassingly, that urge to cry returns.

With anyone else it could be silly, or worryingly close to a foot thing I’m not quite sure I’m into, but with Kim it just feels…

caring. Intimate. Something that’s been burning hot in my belly rises up to my chest and goes tight at the way she’s taking care of me.

Then her eyes snap back to mine, burning so hot I feel ready to melt, and anything careful or tender is forgotten and that molten heat is back in my belly, spreading outward and burning through every inch of my veins.

She kisses her way back up my leg, nipping at the skin every few inches, and finally reaches my stupidly expensive underwear.

I’m afraid for a second she’s going to do something dramatic like pull them off with her teeth, which might really send me over the edge in the wrong direction, but she just hooks a finger into the strap against my hip and tugs off my thong.

Then we’re in bed together, naked. No matter how horny I am or whose parts have already been where, this moment is the one that always feels the scariest with someone new.

My body is bare for her to see, and tucked inside me is the lingering fear that, no matter what’s happened between us so far, she might look at me, at all the flesh I have to offer, and decide it’s too much or not enough.

I’ve had partners leave after getting me naked, or caught them in that moment of resignation, of Well, I’m already here, might as well.

But Kim’s eyes are, if anything, hungrier.

“I want,” she says, “to eat you alive.”

Gulp. “Bon appétit.”

The next few minutes are a haze of wet sucking kisses, hot skin twisting and chafing, teeth grazing sensitive flesh.

Kim’s head is buried between my legs, then we switch so she’s straddling my face.

I bite each of her nipples and she worms a finger down into my body.

I nuzzle my face into her armpit and sniff deeply, committing the musk of her to memory.

She smacks a hand against my ass and rubs soothingly at the mark her hand leaves behind.

I lick and suck and burrow into the very center of her, trying my best to crawl inside.

She wraps me tightly in her arms, only ever bringing me closer, harder, faster, more .

It’s so hot, some of the hottest sex I’ve ever had.

But it’s also fun . At one point I accidentally blow a raspberry against her stomach and we both giggle madly, and she gets me back with an even louder blow moments later.

If we had time, I’d lay her out and catalog every inch of her, learn every crease and mole and divot.

She comes, not loudly because Kim Cameron is cool as a cucumber even when you’ve got three fingers and a tongue in her, and soon after I come, louder.

Despite my usual aversion to cuddling, I let Kim tuck me close against her as our sweat cools and dries in the overly air-conditioned room. The moonlight is streaming in through the blinds, and the quiet dark of the room is so still and peaceful I could fall asleep.

Kim props herself up on an elbow and looks down at me.

“Hi,” I say, which is dumb.

“I hope you brought something for your hair, otherwise everyone in the lobby is going to know what we’ve been up here doing.”

I did. There’s oil and bobby pins in my bag.

“I wouldn’t mind,” I say. “If they could tell.”

She smiles, soft and secret. It’s not a smile I’ve seen before, and I think—hope—it might be just for me. “I wouldn’t either,” she says and kisses me again.