J'ai Envie de Toi

"Like you said, nothing important." She folded back the paper and slid it discreetly on the bar in my direction. I couldn't look at her, so I fixed my feet and hoped that she would stand up and walk away, leaving me with the remaining tatters of my dignity.

A few seconds of silence fell between us, uncomfortable and heavy. My glass was now empty, but I subconsciously raised it three times to my lips before realizing there was nothing inside and dropping it back down. On the third try, her hand grabbed mine. "Let me buy you another." I tried to object but she was already calling the bartender over.

As the glass was being poured in front of us, I felt her palm on my back, slowly caressing it. She leaned close and whispered in my right ear, "I'm sorry," then grabbed her glass and raised it, waiting for me. I reluctantly answered her request and gulped half the scotch, no time for swirling or savoring.

"So what's your favorite part about the vineyards?" She was trying to break the giant mountain of ice that I had erected around me, and luckily, had found the only topic that could succeed at it.

"The caves."

"The caves?"

"What you call the cellars. Don't get me wrong, I like the fields with their sun and smell and the freshness of the air. But the cellars - les caves - are a bit magical." I could talk for days about our little piece of heaven. "Being there feels a bit like entering Ali Baba's cave, so many treasures inside, yet you are one of the few people with the secret passcode." I smiled, and could feel the joy in her eyes for seeing me comfortable again. "Plus I grew up believing, like my parents, that every bottle of wine has its own story. So even though it's a bit chilly down there, I always feel a lot of warmth. Sometimes I go sit in them for hours, surrounded by the soul of every bottle, and by the thousand stories hidden inside... It's easy to clear your mind there, and not feel judged or confused."

I smiled again, gradually feeling that it was getting easier to talk about myself. She had a serene and respectful expression on her face, one that conveyed real interest and not fake effort. The mere fact that she tried to fix our little snafu without overdoing it was a sign that she cared about the human in me more than the direction in which our flirting had previously been headed.

I finally reached for the paper and slipped it into my clutch. "I told him this wouldn't work, but he lives in the perfect world of Hollywood movies and tv series." I laughed. Michael was the only person I had come out to, a few months earlier. When I finally decided to visit New York and meet him in person, after several years of online chats, he insisted on bringing me to a lesbian bar, came up with the paper idea, and kept it with him because he knew I'd pretend to have lost it. He swore that he wouldn't let me board my plane back to France without having crossed that first step.

"What was your plan with it anyway? Were you going to hand it to a woman after chatting her up?" I shook my head involuntarily. "Wait..." she pressed on. "No... Please don't say that... You were going to hold it open and stand waiting?!"

She burst into her wonderful laugh again and I couldn't refrain from joining her while unconvincingly attempting a lie, "No."

"Yes you were. Oh my God, you were so going to do that," she managed to say between chuckles. "In the middle of a lesbian bar! In New York!"

"It was Michael's plan," I snorted.

"You're so brave, Red. And I just saved you, I saved you that epic humiliation." She winked.

"Oh I'm not sure I would have done it," I took a sip of scotch and, as I was swirling it in my mouth, I thought about her last words. "Oh," I saw the teasing grin on her face. She had been waiting for me to grasp it. "Does that mean...?"

She leaned slightly forward, placed her right hand lightly on my cheek, and declared, "Make no mistake about it, Red, I am going to kiss you tonight."

Her palm cupped the side of my face, her thumb parted ways with the rest of her fingers and brushed its path to my lips. It slowly drew their contour, caressing every nerve ending, starting a cascade of tingles that traveled at the speed of light between my upper and lower body. My lips parted of their own volition; a sigh escaped between them, betraying my thrill. Her thumb, now with more room to play, slipped further in, stopping a few millimeters shy of my teeth, but still stroking the newly exposed velvet areas.

Her left hand reached for my side, grabbed me and brought me closer to her. I... I stopped feeling, thinking, desiring, anticipating. This was too much for me, too intense for my poor brain and body to cope with.

"So what's your lesbian fantasy?" she grinned while slowly retrieving her thumb and then her right palm. I frowned. "Come on, I know you have one." I rolled my eyes innocently. "What's the scene that gets you red, Red?" I chuckled. She nudged me.

"It's weird."

"I can handle weird. Give it to me, woman!" I raised my eyebrow naughtily at the suggestive meaning of that last sentence, but she didn't want our conversation derailed. "Just say it. What's the fantasy that gets you hot and bothered, the image that makes you wet, the act that takes you..."

"Nip-clit," I interrupted her one-liners.

"Nip-whatnow?"

"Oh, you haven't heard of it?" I smiled, immensely proud that I would be the one introducing her to that delicacy. She shook her head. I took out my phone and looked for the video of Magdalene St Michaels and April O'Neil that I had played thousands of times, in my most intimate personal times. She waited, amused and excited. I jumped to minute 28 and put the screen on the bar at an angle that we could both see.

She scooted closer to me, I pressed Play and my heart rate doubled. Was I really watching this with a woman? My brain told me that I, terrifyingly, was.

The video played with Magdalene suckling hungrily on April's nipple, an hors d'oeuvre before the main course. They then shifted positions, April straddling Magdalene and sliding down, putting her nipple on the clit below it.

I looked at her from the corner of my eye, waiting to see her first reaction when she understood what they were doing. I caught the merest of a smile, then her face froze and I felt a small shake in her shoulder, which was now touching mine.

For a while, Magdalene kept reaching down and grabbing April's tit, trying to get the alignment just right. When she succeeded, April just started grinding energetically, her head reaching out and planting clumsy kisses on Magdalene's chest and mouth. You could tell that she was an amateur at handling and maintaining this position, figuring out her way as she goes, trying everything to please the woman beneath her.

My thighs contracted and rubbed on each other, in a subconscious move to create friction a bit higher and ease my rising urges. For a second, I wished I was alone so I could finish what my body had already started. Then I felt her shoulder dig almost imperceptibly deeper into mine and remembered that this was another level of eroticism in my life. It was a privilege to have a woman sit next to me and share my intimate secret, to feel her breathing quicken as her shoulder rose and fell faster against mine, and to sense all the telltale signs that she was responding to that scene the exact same way I have, many times before.

Unlike my denied orgasm, the build-up was fast and unrelenting on-screen. Magdalene's face turned red, her breathing fast and shallow, her eyes glazing, no longer aware of or caring about the cameras and the "acting". As she went over the edge, head thrown back, body convulsing, April had a pure, ecstatic grin on her face, glowing with the unbridled pride that she had just caused that powerful orgasm.

I paused the video, turned off my phone and slipped it back in my pocket. She looked flustered, with a few sweat droplets glowing on her forehead. She raised her hand to fan herself, then laughed, a bit awkwardly.

"How hot was that on a scale of flaming to blazing?"

"Scorching," she answered and I chuckled. She paused to drink some scotch then asked, "So... nip or clit, which do you want to be?"

I had never thought of that. As a viewer of lesbian scenes, I had never entertained the thought that in reality, I could be in only one of the two actresses' positions at any given moment. "Nip, wait, no, clit. Why not both?" She raised her eyebrow. "At different times, of course." She smiled. "What about you?"

"This is your fantasy, Red," she winked, suddenly mysterious. "Let's dance!" She extended her arm to me and jumped excitedly off the stool.

"I'm a terrible dancer," I admitted, crashing back into reality.

But there was no refusing her. "Tell you what: you get one kiss; I get one dance. And don't misunderstand me, that's not a pity deal; I'm just incentivizing you." I stood up and pretended to be annoyed at having to do as she said. "I'll try not to be this grumpy when it's time to kiss you," she chuckled, grabbed me tighter, and we started swaying together with the music.

Part of me was too excited to be dancing with a woman for the first time. It was sweet, soft, sensual, and every other adjective I had imagined it to be. But it was also exhilarating, passionate, and a bit possessive. The androgynous side of her had kicked into high gear. The way she grabbed me, the way she guided me, the way her eyes created a virtual shield around me, I was hers, and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

The other part of me was terrified, like it was caught stealing or sinning. I knew I wasn't doing anything wrong but I couldn't shake the guilt away.

It wasn't until she pushed us closer, her body merging with me in a delicious tangle of flesh and perfumes, her feet entwining with mine in a perfect grind, her chest pressing against my palpitating heart, her hands digging their desire in my side and back, her mouth aligning perfectly with my ear, ragged breathing punctuating every beat of music, that I felt serene and dismissed my fears. I knew I was home.

"I was going to kiss you anyway," she confessed.

"I know that," her red hair vibrated next to my lips. "But I wanted to dance with you anyway."

My chuckle caught in my chest, suddenly irrelevant compared to the kiss she had planted on my cheek. She drew a line of tiny kisses from my temple to the side of my mouth, taking the time to inhale my scent after each one, the air she withdrew disappearing inside her and coming back in a short burst with every kiss, hot against my skin. I shivered; everything around me felt twenty degrees colder than my body.

She stopped her trail of kisses right at the juncture of my lips, breathed out a long sigh that did nothing to appease my own nerves, and spoke against my skin, "you are worthy of your name, Red," then unglued her body from mine. My skin cried for hers, but she said, "The song is over," and guided me back to our bar stools.

My knees wobbled and I barely hoisted myself up. My shaking hand went to the glass then came back, knowing it wouldn't be able to hold it up. I dropped it onto my lap, tried to grab my thigh with all my strength to keep it from trembling, and then felt her eyes on me. I couldn't read her expression, for something dark and intense was clouding her face. "What?"

"What?" she replied with as much confusion as I was feeling.

We both fell back laughing, the reverberations of her vocal cords hurtling me back to reality, the beautiful reality of this night, this woman, and this chemistry. "Lin, would you like to go back to my hotel room?" I blurted, ridding my mind of every confused, insecure, or terrified thought.

The question sobered her like a bucket of cold water, erasing the smile from her eyes. "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Then yes, I would."

She asked for the bill, her palm anchored to my thigh, drawing circles of caresses. She paid, and we quickly found ourselves outside, hand in hand, the chill of the night air playing with our hair.

"This way," I pointed and we started walking, hands entangled. The hotel was three blocks away, and somewhere around the second block I became aware of where I was and what I was about to do. My apprehension got the best of me. I stopped walking and looked into the distance, terrified and sad.

"Are we here?" I shook my head. "Are you lost?" I repeated the gesture. She reached her other hand and turned my face toward hers. "Don't you dare panic on me now!"

"Too late, I'm already panicking." I tried to get my hand out of her grasp but she held on.

"Do you still want to do this?" I evaded her eyes, looking sideways and pretending I couldn't answer that question. "Look at me, Red. Do you still want to do this?"

The way she pronounced my name, like the many times she had done it throughout the night, had a sobering effect on my nerves. I guided my eyes back to hers and answered, hesitantly, shyly, "Yes."

"I want it too." We smiled, and then she dropped her bomb. "J'ai envie de toi, moi aussi."

For a second, I didn't understand what was happening. She had spoken French, in a very American accent, sure, but French nonetheless. The same sentence I had appealed to her with, in my brief moment of superiority, was now back, floating in the tiny space between us, a testament to the fact that she had known, almost all along, how much I wanted her.

Her face was serious, with no hint of victory for fooling me. "I want you too," she switched back to English. "I want to see your muscles tense then relax, your eyes glow then glaze, your breathing quicken then slow down. I want to show you what it's like to love a woman, to please a woman, to let yourself go in the arms of a woman, to discover the sky and the clouds from another angle, your head twisted, your eyes uniting with the stars, your soul dissolving from your body, your feelings transported to another world and another dimension. I want you to know what a woman smells like, what she tastes like, how she moves, and how she pants. I want you to enjoy the blend of sublime softness and vigorous passion that is a woman, and that wonderful but ephemeral pleasure of possessing the world when a woman vibrates under your touch, when you feel powerful yet incredibly fragile, when she belongs to you and owns you at the same time."

I stood in awe of her rhapsodic lyricism, millions of pieces in me tingling that I didn't know existed in the first place. She must be a poet, I thought, and that broke me down further. I trembled and she held strong, my hand still a prisoner of hers.

"We'll stop anytime you want. We won't do anything you aren't comfortable with. You just say," she looked around, searching for a word and landed on the supermarket ad a few feet away, "watermelon when you want to stop. No problem, no judgments, OK?"

"That's a stupid safe word."

"I've heard worse," she shrugged. "Now, may I kiss you?" She smiled, cautiously but mischievously.

"Here?" I looked around us at the busy street, only shrouded by the nighttime darkness.

"Any...where." Her deliberate pause was punctuated with a sweeping look at my entire body. "But yeah, here."

I smiled. How lucky was I to have fallen for her, that witty, gentle, cute woman with a vicious and arousing temptress on a long loose leash inside?

"Did I just get a smile out of you?" She went back to an innocent grin.

"I believe you did."

"Well aren't I the luckiest woman on earth tonight!"

"I'm luckier," I quickly replied.

She turned the seduction dial back up, "Oh, are we flirting now, Ms. Red?"

"We may be."

She threw her head back, her laugh resonating in the streets of New York, thousands of lights reflecting in her red hair, my heart jumping with every vibration of her throat, my chest swooning toward hers, my mouth finding the object of its desire, attracted by every part of her, and immensely blessed to know that she was mine, at least for the night.