Who We Love: A Steamy Lesbian Romance Collection

Chapter 7

Chapter 7Sex. It’s a simple three letter word but for centuries, thanks to the influence of religion it has been a four letter word. And yet without s*x the human race would not have existed. Never has anything been so universally practised and so strictly controlled. My mother’s only advice about s*x when we were old enough was to ‘read the bible.’ I’ve read the bible half a dozen times and found no instruction and so I experimented with boys, eventually. I might have been the oldest child but it was Cathy who lost her virginity first at the age of eighteen.

I was nineteen before I got with a guy, Tommy. He was not very experienced. He initially had a thing for Cathy but she was going out with his mate and so I became next in line. I suppose that should have told me something because the afternoon we got naked in his bedroom was a quick and dirty affair after a chicken and champagne breakfast out at Ringwood Lake.

Foreplay was two cans of beer and a bit of a feel, the afterglow was the cigarette and a feeling that I’d missed something. Wasn’t I supposed to feel better? Our next few attempts became a little better but I always got the feeling that he was distracted. After s*x he just wanted to nod off and I’d lie there stroking myself, wondering what the hell I was doing with him.

He actually caught me touching myself and pushed my hand away.

“Quit doing that. Sheilas don’t masturbate.”

The fling ended after that. I can’t call it a relationship because we only had s*x twice over a three week period. I stopped answering his calls and he found someone else.

Over the years s*x got marginally better but I guess I was affected by that miserable first attempt and my mother’s constant sermons on immorality. There was one man, Gerry, the only married man I ever slept with, who really opened my eyes to s*x. He was separated from his wife at the time and we got together for six weeks before he went back to her. I knew it would probably end like that. For all his faults though, Gerry never lied to me and I loved him for it. But he did take time to give me a glimpse into normal love making and at last I understood what Cathy had been talking about. I was twenty two years old at the time.

She was the only source of information about s*x for me. More so than I, she rebelled against our mother in a very open fashion, moving in with one guy when she was nineteen before embarking on a series of affairs over the next few years whilst living either with me or different girlfriends. Two women she rented a room off were lesbians living in a house out in Kilsyth and by then I’d signed a mortgage agreement for my house in Croydon.

Suffice it to say, I had the basics well in hand by the time I started my weekly sessions with Agnetha, but like many women I still had questions and she became my s*x therapist. To sit there asking questions that had seemed so silly or just plain crude was amazing. I felt as if I’d entered into a new world, one that had different rules. Up was down and left was right. She loaned me books on erotic massage, tantric s*x and her favourite book. The Joy of s*x. The copy she gave me was a spare one and I still have it today. I devoured these books at home and slowly but surely I began to awaken as hidden desires started stirring.

It was slow at first. m**********n had been forbidden and while I’d long ago accepted it was okay, it still felt weird until Agnetha took me through the routine, not physically of course! But one night she gave me a present, a dildo and a bottle of oil.

“When you feel ready, use it.”

I used it that Sunday night and had just about achieved s****l climax when the phone rang and I instinctively picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Louise? Are you okay? You sound out of breath?”

My hand froze on the dildo.

“Sigrid, I um, I had to run for the phone.”

“No you didn’t, you answered on the second ring.”

I closed my eyes and gathered my strength.

“Okay, okay, Agnetha gave me a dildo.”

“Oh, okay,” she chuckled, “you want me to call you back?”

“No, it’s okay, what’s up?”

“I was wondering if you wanted to go on a mystery flight? A friend of mine I haven’t seen in nearly a year just dropped in. She’s just broken up with her girlfriend for the last time and had two tickets for a mystery flight. She just gave them to me. It’s for next Saturday.”

“Oh,” I sat up slowly and looked down at myself, “and you don’t want to go with her?”

“Not happening, babe,” she chuckled, “it’s complicated. She and I were involved and I’m not going down that road with her again.”

“Okay, sure, I’d love to.”

“No worries,” she replied, “well I’d love to chat longer but you go back to your new friend, I have to jump into the shower and iron my uniform for work tomorrow.”

I sat staring at the dildo for a few minutes after she hung up with a stupid grin on my face.

Fuck that felt good!

The mystery flight was one of those brilliant concepts in the days before cheaper air fares. You got your tickets and just turned up at the airport and checked in. If you got there early, you wound up in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane or Perth but if you were late the choices were poorer and who wants to go to a shithole like Canberra? Fortunately Sigrid had done this before and we got a flight to Sydney, which basically meant a fifty minute flight and the whole day in Sydney.

It was one of those casual dressed down days. She wore a white shirt, jeans, and a jacket. I wore a blue and white striped shirt and jeans and due to Melbourne’s ‘four seasons in one day’ climate, we both wore jackets on the way to the airport. By the time we’d been in Sydney for an hour we took off our jackets and headed to where all tourists go.

Kings Cross. Where else?

Sydney Harbour Bridge is just a bloody bridge, and nowhere near as long as Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge and the Opera House up close is soot stained. The Cross on the other hand had cafés, shops, the fountain and of course the strip clubs, with bouncers out the front trying to shepherd people inside. Of course once you get your foot over the threshold you have to pay. Thankfully, Sigrid knew the tactic and artfully guided me away from a big Maori bouncer outside the Pink Pussycat and into a café down the road and it was there she finally told me about the woman who gave her the tickets.

“Her name is Wendy and we lived together for two weeks after she broke up with her partner, Toni, but then she got back with Toni and it ended,” her eyes shifted as I sat bolt upright.

I knew those names, as I mentioned earlier, Cathy had lived with a lesbian couple but it was only when Sigrid mentioned Wendy and Toni in the same sentence that I made the connection.

“What?” Sigrid peered at me over the rim of her cappuccino, “you look like you just saw a ghost.”

“Maybe I just heard of a ghost, Cathy lived with a lesbian couple, Wendy and Toni, they rented a house out in Kilsyth, just off Durham Road.”

“Jesus,” Sigrid looked away for a moment, “it’s a small world. When did she live there?”

“Five years ago, no, five and a half years ago.”

“That’s about the time Wendy and I hooked up,” she replied, “I never met Cathy but I did go around there once for a smoke. We must have missed each other like ships in the night,” Sigrid looked at her cappuccino.

“Did Cathy ever talk about being with a woman?”

“No,” I shook my head, “Cathy was straight although she certainly had gay friends.”

“Wendy came around to where I was living in Box Hill with two other women and it all came out that night. Her girlfriend had f****d their housemate and so we put her up on the couch for two nights, but then she and I had a few drinks and a smoke and fell into my bed. It was doomed from the start, it was a classic rebound thing. We were only together for about two weeks and it ended when she got back together with Toni.”

“I should check her diaries. She left a heap of diaries and she wrote about everything. If I had the inclination and thought it might help someone I’d get some writer to put it into a book.”

We headed over to The Rocks after that and then down to Circular Quay before jumping on a train to Manly because I had it in my head to get on the Manly ferry. Only an Aussie understands that strange urge, it comes from the line of a song by Australian Crawl titled Reckless. I remember the song was going over in my head as the ferry cut through the water. Cathy was certainly reckless and if my suspicions were right, she’d indeed crossed over years before and never mentioned a thing about it to me. It bothered me though. Not the fact that she might have had s*x with a woman but because she hadn’t told me. There was no way in the world I’d have rejected her for something as trivial as that.

On the way back from the airport that night we grabbed a takeaway pizza from the pizza parlour in Croydon and settled down at my house with pizza, garlic bread, glasses of Coke and Cathy’s diaries and we found it soon enough. Toni’s mystery lover had, as we suspected been my sister. Wendy and Toni might have been officially separated for two weeks but the affair had gone on for a good six weeks before their secret was uncovered. It was rich in detail, Cathy was always a good writer but with this account she’d outdone herself. She’d not just written about her feelings but also the things they’d done together. After I’d read the final page I actually said that it could easily be turned into an erotic novel.

“You’d have to change the names of course,” Sigrid cracked a grin.

We were sitting on the couch with the diaries on the coffee table and I was still mulling over the last paragraph Cathy had written about the affair now that it was over.

Toni is back with Wendy and I feel torn in two, I need to tell someone about this but I dare not tell anyone and so my secret stays hidden. Maybe one day I’ll tell Louise, just not yet. I wish Toni all the best. Perhaps one day we will meet again and laugh over shared memories.

“So what brought them back together again? She doesn’t even say what happened.”

“Wendy and I had a big fight and she stormed out. She ran into Toni in Croydon Main street and they worked out their differences. She moved out the next day and I assume Cathy must have been given her marching orders. I never knew the name of their housemate because Wendy refused to even say her name. Wendy was the original green-eyed monster. It was another reason she and I could never ever get together even now, she’s very insecure when it comes to relationships. Toni couldn’t even have straight male friends because she’d first identified as bisexual.”

“I remember she turned up here with her worldly possessions in the back of her car and she stayed here for two months, then she went to Egypt and Palestine on a whim and didn’t come back for six months,” I slipped a hand beneath the collar of my shirt and sat forward.

“But why would she be worried about telling you?” Sigrid rubbed my back gently, “you don’t strike me as being homophobic.”

“I’m not, but we used to sleep in the same bed,” I arched my back as she kept rubbing it.

“It was something she always did from as far back as I could remember. Our beds were in the same room right up until I was, oh about eleven but she’d go to bed in her bed and wake up in my bed. Mum tried to put a stop to it early on but then gave up. It kind of stopped when we were teenagers and had separate bedrooms, but even then if it was a stormy night she’d clamber into bed with me or if mum was out for the night. Whenever she stayed here it was pretty much the way it was, Cathy had the bed in the spare bedroom but most of the time she got into my bed.”

“Interesting,” Sigrid’s hand fell away and she sat forward.

“You think my sister was gay? She had a string of boyfriends.”

“That’s not unusual,” she looked at me, “I’ve known quite a few women and men like that. Very often the ones most likely to turn are those who are having s*x with multiple partners, it’s like they’re trying to escape something or sometimes they just want to try something new. Either way, she might have been either gay or at least bisexual.”

“And coming out to me might have affected our relationship?”

“Possibly,” she put her hands between her legs, “especially if she was always sleeping with you, as in just sleeping,” she smiled and knocked her knee against mine.

“It’s weird,” I fell back against the couch, “she used to lie behind me with her hand on my breast and just fall asleep,” I looked at Sigrid, “you don’t think she was?”

“Coming onto you?” Sigrid leaned her elbow on the back of the couch, “possibly, incest has been a part of human society ever since Noah or something like that,” she reached over and brushed a lock of hair from my forehead.

“But from what you’ve told me about her, she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who would have wanted you to respond. Maybe she just felt secure. There’s a difference,” she flicked at my hair, which had grown to past my shoulders.

“Between this kind of thing, playing with each other’s hair, adjusting a collar,” she tugged at my collar, “and this,” she let her hand drop to my breast and squeezed it, I put my hand on her hand and held it there.

“That’s when it starts and sometimes it just stays there but if the two women are feeling vulnerable, lonely or just want a little intimacy then it goes further.”