Satan's Sisters, Vol 2, Lesbian b**m

Chapter 2

I like to break and enter. Call it a vice.

I take only one item from each place I visit, a souvenir, nothing of great monetary value, nothing dear. I prefer something the owner has touched or worn; a drinking cup, a used lipstick, panties, a personal vibrator. It’s a sort of benign stalking, I suppose, a way of counting coup, more delicious when I know the victim first. Nibble, nibble, little mouse. I know locks; I know alarm systems; and nobody’s home when I go in- usually.

Okay—it’s the adrenaline rush, the childhood hide and seek thrill. I have to get in and make my selection and get out fast before I get caught.

Like now.

Nibble, nibble, little mouse . . .

The woman in the wheelchair has a phone in her hand, and I’m trying to console myself with the thought that getting busted beats the marble slab and the toe tag.

Who’s that nibbling at my house?

Her eyes never leave me, even to dial. The gun doesn’t waver either.

“Sam,” she says into the phone, “are you on your way home, Dear?”

Her dialect is pure New England, Boston, I’m thinking. Her final “R” is as soft as a sigh. Her vowels come out of her nose. Grandpa made a fortune on whalebone corsets before moving west, that’s my guess.

“Were you able to find the sherbet I like? Excellent! Do hurry home, dear. I have a surprise for you.”

Why does it frighten me to see her so calm?

I know who Sam is. I have read the names on the mailbox where their driveway meets the road—Tabitha and Samantha Tanner. Tabitha must be the one in the wheelchair.

I have seen Sam as well, watching her as she worked the hydraulic tailgate on the van to load Tabitha, wheelchair and all, aboard. She was younger than Tabitha, but too mature to be a daughter—a sister perhaps. Through my binoculars, I could see that she was large, not fat, big boned and wide shouldered. Under her slacks were racehorse thighs and a butt as hard and tight as a bowling ball. Thinking about bowling made me think about fingers in holes. That made me think about Sophie.

It wasn’t love at first sight. Sophie and I have both been there-done that. We know that sudden crushes are dangerous. They put crazy ideas into a girl’s head, and blind her to the warning signs. They say lesbians bring a U- Haul to the second date. It’s true. Many of us fall quick and hard. We are too swift to trust a sister soul, and pathologically reluctant to let go, even after our friends can all see that the game has gone into sudden death overtime.

I still remember the first time I saw her. I was at a party that Sheena’s band was throwing to celebrate the end of a successful Midwestern tour. Everyone was pretty plowed, so even the designated bouncer was slow to react when some clown threw down the gauntlet over an imagined slight. He had smashed a bottle on the edge of the bar, intending to use the jagged neck as a weapon. It never works the way it does in the movies. He had pretty much destroyed the whole bottle, and gashed himself besides. The cut was small, but gushing blood the way glass cuts do. The sight of his own blood just made him crazier, and he was winding up to put a serious hurt on somebody.

Just then, Sophie walked in off the street and stepped behind him. She placed two fingers on each side of his neck, just below his ears, and pressed hard. He started to turn, wondering what kind of crap was going down here. He never made it. Sophie just turned with him, holding on, and in a couple of seconds he slumped to the floor like a sleepy kid. Sophie leaned over and checked his pulse. By that time, the bouncer was there, and she asked him to find a quiet place for the brave warrior to rest. I was there too, crowding in to get a better look at her.

She was tall and fair, moving with the languid grace of a cat. Her intelligent eyes looked out at the world with perpetual amusement. I would later learn that she was a sort of divine trickster, fond of practical jokes with Zen punch lines.

“Nice tan,” I said, because commenting on her quick action right away would have been uncool.

“Thanks,” she said. She looked me up and down and grinned. “Nice leather.”

Fact is, she was wearing more leather than I was. I was dressed for biking though, and her leathers were more of a fetish thing. It takes a really secure top to parade in public with a full kit, but that was just what she was doing. I looked back, our eyes met, and we didn’t have to negotiate much after that. We both knew the same hunger, and we both liked what we saw.

“What was that?” I stabbed a thumb in the direction of sleeping beauty, who was snoring peacefully on a couch, “Vulcan nerve pinch?”

She laughed. “Nothing that fancy. I just shut off the blood supply to his brain for a few seconds. He might have a headache later.”

She looked into my eyes and riffled the pages of my mind. I swear I felt her mental fingers on my skull, as though she were doing psychic phrenology. I have since learned that she does it to everyone. Gypsy felt it too, the first time they met. She must have liked what she read, because her smile brightened and she said; “Thank you, I will have a beer.”

I hadn’t asked yet, but she knew I was about to. I got her a beer. We talked. Later we screwed. Eventually we shared an apartment. I fell in love.

It was an incredibly stupid thing to do. The more I learned about Sophie, the more I knew that no one would ever lay claim to her. The night we met she had just stepped off a boat from Australia, where she went to surf and stayed to go “walkabout”. For her, that was just one more thing to be tasted, a resume enhancer. She had already done everything from cattle roping to teaching dowagers to Tango. I couldn’t place her dialect. Her background was more diverse than mine, and she had sampled cultures all over the world.

Her favorite hobby, I soon learned, was s*x. She liked it rough. She preferred women, and she liked to be on top. She could wrap a bullwhip around a balloon without breaking it and reduce a bottom to blubbering hysteria without touching her. It was more than technical skill. She was Mistress of those intangibles—presence, imagination, and empathy. Greedy little bottoms were lined up to beg for her attention. She taught me a lot of what she knew, and I had all the action I could handle just assisting.

It would be corny to say that we were soul mates, every lover believes that, but we were simpatico. Many women, especially those living on the s****l frontier, see themselves as victims of oppression. Sophie and I never bought that notion. We always did as we pleased, without guilt or inhibition. Life for us was one big hedonistic celebration.

The whole dyke package, the left wing politics, new age religion, and herbal tea thing, never seemed to work for us. We liked our coffee strong, our scotch neat, and our girls ass up and begging. As Sophie put it, we were Libertarians and libertines.

And we were hot together. It didn’t matter that we both wanted to be on top, we worked that out the first night.

We wrestled for it, naked and oiled, on a rubber mat. We only wore jockstrap style dildo harnesses. The rules were simple. Loser gets f****d. We went at it snarling, like mating leopards. Sophie took two out of three, but I let her win the last one.

Back to Sam. I watched her secure the chair in the van and drive away. Her walk was a disappointment; she strode like a marine. I like my ladies soft and yielding. That is—except for Sophie.

The squirrel came down the tree with cautious little hops, ready to fly if I moved. I felt the little paws tickling my hair as the prize was seized. Then I heard her scuttle back to her squeaking brood. I put another peanut on my head and waited for darkness to fall.

Seeing them leave together earlier in the day, I assumed that they always went out together. When the garage door rolled up in the evening, and the van emerged, I thought it contained two women. I didn’t think that a crippled woman would stay home alone in dangerous times like these. I didn’t think that she would be cold blooded enough to let me prowl her house unchallenged while she loaded up the family shotgun.

Shit—I didn’t think.

The cattle fence was no problem. It was down in many places. When the van’s headlights could no longer be seen, I kicked my cycle awake and rolled up to the back door.

It was unlocked—a disappointment. I had my tool kit in my jeans, and there is no thrill to compare with teasing a deadbolt open. (Well, maybe one.) I wasn’t really surprised though. Lots of country folks leave their doors open.

I found a museum inside. The place hadn’t been re-decorated since Victoria was on the throne. Everywhere I looked were tiffany lampshades, tassels, antimacassars, doilies. The fireplace in the library was big enough to be a crematorium. The portrait of some musty ancestor glowered down from the mantel. From the cut of his clothes, I guessed that he was Grandpa, the corset king.

The elevator should have tipped me off. The car was up by the stairway landing, instead of downstairs, where it would be if the cripple had gone out. I was too busy admiring the spiral stairway to notice.

The bathrooms were bizarre. There were grab bars everywhere, so I could assume that Tabitha’s condition was permanent. The shower was huge, and there was a plastic chair inside it. There was porcelain and stainless steel everywhere: toilets, sinks, bidets, douche nozzles. These ladies had a thing for hygiene.

I was upstairs, going through the nightstand drawers, when the wheelchair rolled silently into the room behind me.

***

Sam is back. She has taken her time, putting groceries away and puttering around the kitchen before coming upstairs. Now she stands in the doorway with a bowl of sherbet in each hand, looking from the shotgun to me.

“What’s happened here?” she asks, more surprised than alarmed.

“It would appear that I have captured a burglar,” says Tabitha dryly.

Sam sets the bowls down carefully. “Have you called the police?” She has a precise way of biting off words that is intimidating and rather sexy. If we met in a bar, I would be plying her with double Manhattans by now, and discreetly checking out her marital status and s****l orientation.

The shotgun is steady. Isn’t her arm tired? “I was waiting for you to get home first,” says Tabitha. “I thought we might discuss what we should do with her.”

I don’t like being left out. “You could let me go,” I offer hopefully. “You will never see me again.”

“It seems a shame to turn her over to the police,” Sam says. “She will just end up with some three hundred pound axe murderess for a roommate.” I have a strange feeling that they are performing for my benefit, speaking rehearsed lines for the sake of form. I keep waiting for them to dissolve into laughter, slap me on the back, and share the joke.

Sam is studying me. The pink tip of her tongue wets her lips, not furtively, the way it would if she were nervous. It’s more of a sensual thing. She is looking at me the way she should be looking at her bowl of sherbet. There should have been a warning posted on the door­: “Trespassers will be violated.”

Sam asks: “Does she have any weapons?”

“I haven’t asked,” says Tabitha. They are still talking about me as though I’m not there.

Sam nods in my direction. “Take off your jacket.”

It’s a small thing she’s asking for, but I don’t like taking orders. I peel off my jacket and throw it at Sam’s face. The barrel of the shotgun rises a little, and I fear for a second that Tabitha thinks I’m using the jacket to distract them while I charge for the door. Sam is calmer. She snags my jacket out of the air one handed and smiles gently. My temper has amused her.