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When the table’s been cleared, the plates and utensils are in the dishwasher, and the pasta pot and saucepan are drying on the rack, Harrow wipes her hands on a dish towel and turns to the part of the counter where Gideon is sitting. Gideon leans back a little and Harrow stands between her legs, a hand on each of her knees, eyes upturned to drink in her face. Which is, come to think of it, awfully far away.
“This seems…counterintuitive,” Harrow says.
Gideon’s habitual smile spreads into a full-blown grin. “Counterintuitive. Nice one.”
“That wasn’t a pun.”
“It was in my heart, and that’s all that matters. But I see what you mean.” Gideon slides off the counter and helps Harrow up onto it. Now their faces are almost level with each other, and Gideon positions herself between Harrow’s knees, palms pressed to the counter on either side of her. “Wait,” Gideon says with their lips just inches apart. “What about the garlic bread?”
Harrow blinks. “What about it?”
“I ate like six pieces of it. Shouldn’t I brush my teeth?”
“Hmm.” That sounds like a good idea, but it also sounds like Gideon withdrawing from her, taking her soft mouth and warm body with her. Just for a minute or two, and yet. “Let me see how bad it is.”
It’s not that bad. Gideon’s mouth only tastes like garlic for the first thirty seconds. After that, Harrow’s used to it, and she’s too caught up in the sensation of kissing her to care what she tastes like, anyway. It’s a slow kiss, as befits an evening when there’s nothing else they need to do and no one around to interrupt them. Glam took off yesterday to hit the casinos with her friends, leaving her staff in charge of Eden and Harrow the run of her apartment. She’ll have the place all to herself all weekend. Even better, she has Gideon all to herself, and she intends to enjoy her.
Before she knew Gideon, Harrow thought kissing had been overhyped by the sex-obsessed secular media. She wasn’t allowed to kiss during the dates her parents arranged for her, but when she looked at a suitor across their table at some neighborhood restaurant, a relative sitting nearby to keep an eye on them, she found it hard to imagine why she would want to kiss him. Men’s mouths were just another body part, the same as their ears or elbows. Harrow wasn’t interested in putting her own mouth on any of the above.
Gideon’s mouth is not just another body part. Gideon’s mouth is a marvel, a delicacy, an addiction. There are times Harrow can’t even look at her without feeling like she’ll die if she can’t kiss her. Of course, kissing Gideon is about more than just her mouth—it’s also about her hands on the small of Harrow’s back, and her arms under Harrow’s hands, and the little sounds she makes in her throat when Harrow’s tongue does something she likes—but her mouth is the main attraction. Harrow could easily spend the whole night attached to it, although maybe not on Glam’s kitchen counter.
She manages to slide her mouth off Gideon’s, but then Gideon starts kissing her neck, making it hard to remember what she wanted to say. Counter, she reminds herself. Uncomfortable. Relocate. “Couch,” she bites out.
They could go to the spare bedroom that’s Harrow’s for the time being, but the living room couch is closer, if only slightly. Seconds matter at a time like this. Gideon picks Harrow up, supporting her with hands on her behind. It makes Gideon laugh when Harrow says that word aloud, but she can’t say ass without bracing for one of her parents to appear and shove a bar of soap into her mouth, and saying butt would make her feel like a second grader.
Happily, she doesn’t need to name it for Gideon to get a grip on it. She wraps her arms around Gideon’s neck and her legs around her waist and they move from the kitchen into the living room, where Gideon sits on the couch with Harrow in her lap.
Within a minute, Gideon is stretched out on her back, Harrow on top of her, devouring her and being devoured in turn. Gideon keeps licking over the tiny scar on Harrow’s bottom lip, where she bit herself the night they kissed for the first time. Gideon has paid special attention to that scar when they kiss ever since Harrow admitted how she got it. Harrow isn’t sure what that means, but it feels good. Everything they do together feels good.
It feels good when Gideon strokes Harrow’s newly cropped hair, rubbing her fingers through the short strands. It feels good when she hikes Harrow’s shirt up to mid-back and smooths her hands over Harrow’s bare skin. And it feels good when one of Gideon’s thighs finds its way between Harrow’s, or maybe Harrow finds her own way there, and Harrow rocks her hips into the slight pressure.
Actually, that feels really good. So she keeps doing it, not thinking about it, just wanting more of that good feeling. It’s rare that she does anything without thinking about it—overthinking it, in fact—but that’s the effect Gideon has on her. She quiets the thinking part of Harrow’s brain and makes the feeling part sing.
Gideon’s hands come up to cradle Harrow’s face, holding it in place so Gideon can disengage from the kiss. Harrow stops moving against her and opens her eyes. “Hey, um.” Gideon’s voice is husky, her eyes mostly pupil, her mouth shining wet. “Do you want more?”
It takes a second for Harrow to process that. “What do you mean?”
Gideon bends the leg Harrow is straddling, lifting Harrow’s back end off the couch. “I mean you’ve been grinding on me for a good five minutes, so…”
Harrow’s face heats up in an instant like she’s been put in a microwave. Her instinct is to recoil, but that’s hard to do when you’re wrapped around someone’s leg. “Oh,” she says stupidly, “I’m sorry, I—"
“Don’t be sorry, you dope, I didn’t say I wasn’t into it.” Gideon smiles, and Harrow stops trying to squirm away. “I am into it, that’s why I’m asking if you want to do more than make out.”
Harrow rests her chin on Gideon’s chest and stares at her collarbones. She figured they would have sex at some point—sooner rather than later, since they’ve been together for three months already and Gideon is probably sick of waiting—but she didn’t think they’d have to talk about it. She thought Gideon would sense, somehow, when she was ready, and then it would just…happen. “I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, I do want to, but I don’t…know what to do.”
“Well, you could keep doing what you were doing. Seemed to be working for you. Or you could show me what you do when you’re alone, and I’ll follow your lead.”
At first Harrow doesn’t understand. “When I’m alone?”
“Yeah, you know. When you’re rubbing one out. Flicking the bean. Diddling the Skittle.” Harrow still doesn’t understand. “Masturbating, Harrow.”
Harrow feels her face getting hot again. “I don’t do that.”
Gideon laughs a little. “It’s okay, you don’t have to be embarrassed about it.”
“No, really. I’ve never done it.”
The mellow expression on Gideon’s face seizes into something stricken, almost horrified. She props herself up on her elbows and says with the utmost gravity, “Never? Not once?”
“Never, not once.”
“Oh my God, no wonder you’re wound so tight!” Gideon cries. “You’ve been doing No Nut November your entire life!" She springs upright so quickly Harrow’s head ends up in her lap for a second before she sorts herself out. “So when you’re horny, you just, what, ignore it?”
“Yes, I ignore it. It’s not that hard.” She thinks back to a handful of tortured nights in her early teens, before she got good at ignoring it, and amends her statement. “When it was hard, I used to cope by reading the Bible. The passages about the sin of lust, in particular.”
“I hate that stupid book,” Gideon says passionately. “I hate all the bullshit it put in your head. Why did God invent vibrators if you’re not supposed to use them to jerk yourself raw on a rainy night when you don’t feel like going out?”
Harrow shifts on her haunches, wishing they could stop having this conversation and go back to making out, or whatever making out was about to turn into. “Well, I don’t need to do…things…to myself now, do I? I have you.”
That makes Gideon choke-laugh. “Uh, if you think being in a relationship means you don’t jerk off, this isn’t going to work out.” Harrow’s body floods with fear, because she can’t always tell when Gideon is joking. She tries not to let it show, but she knows she’s failed when Gideon cups her chin and tilts her face up so she can kiss her, light and reassuring. “I didn’t mean that. But I mean this: if you’re not comfortable touching yourself downstairs, do you really think you’ll be comfortable with me touching you?”
“We can find out,” Harrow says hopefully.
“Or, we can wait for you to do some self-exploration.” Gideon props her chin on her fist and grins her most obnoxious grin. “You can think of me while you do it, if you want.”
Harrow groans. “Gideon, I don’t know if I can.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard, I’ve been told I have a memorable face.”
“Don’t play dumb, you know what I meant.” Harrow strains to put her reluctance into words the way a cat strains to cough up a hairball. It doesn’t come easily to her, after a lifetime of sublimating her feelings into religious devotion, but she tries anyway. She knows Gideon likes her to say how she feels. “I don’t know if I can…let go…when I’m not with you.”
“Okay, but that’s actually a really good reason to try.” The grin is gone now, replaced with a look so clear and earnest it would be unbelievable on anyone else. On Gideon, Harrow believes it, and she’s helpless to resist it. “Harrow, I like you a lot and I want to make you feel good so fucking bad, but I don’t want to be the only thing that makes you feel good. You deserve more than that.”
It’s not true—Harrow doesn’t deserve what she has, let alone more—but she can’t argue back, not when Gideon’s giving her that look. “I’ll think about it,” she says. “That’s all I can promise.”
“You don’t have to promise anything, but thinking about it sounds good.” Gideon reaches toward the coffee table for the remote control and hands it to Harrow before lying back down, one arm folded behind her head. “Here. Since you’re not getting laid tonight, the least I can do is let you pick what we watch.”
Gideon helped Glam set up streaming on her TV so they could watch UFC together, but thankfully, there are other options. Harrow puts on The Great British Bake Off, because it’s relaxing and not at all sexy, unless you’re aroused by food, which she sometimes suspects Gideon is. If so, she’ll just have to contain herself.
They get through an episode and a half before Harrow starts to have trouble keeping her eyes open. She can feel that Gideon is already asleep or close to it, her chest lifting and lowering Harrow’s head in a slow rhythm, so she pauses the show and turns off the TV, pulling a blanket of darkness over the room. In the dark, she hears Gideon’s breathing and heartbeat and the more distant white noise of their surroundings, Eden’s patrons laughing downstairs and cars passing on the street. She listens for a while, suspended in half-consciousness. Then she’s gone.
—
She returns at the chime of the alarm on her phone. Silencing it, she looks around the living room. It’s four-thirty a.m., when she needs to wake up for her five o’clock shift at the bakery, and although the sun is rising earlier now that summer is on its way, it’s not light out yet. The room and its contents are washed in predawn blue, like a monochrome watercolor painting.
Gideon is still asleep, unbothered by the alarm. Her jaw is relaxed, parted lips showing a glimpse of her top teeth. Her closed eyes are perfect crescents fringed by dark eyelashes. The long hair on top of her head is a mess and there are strands scattered across her face, one near her nose fluttering gently as she breathes.
She’s so beautiful that it hurts to look at her, presses on Harrow’s chest like a breath held too long, but it hurts worse to look away. An inevitable pain, since she didn’t set her alarm this early so she could lie here staring at Gideon’s sleeping face. She climbs off her as gingerly as she can, but in vain; Gideon shifts and her eyelids twitch, then open halfway.
“Go back to sleep,” Harrow tells her.
Gideon says something plaintive and sleep muddled, the most intelligible part of which is, “You took my blanket.”
To compensate for the loss of her body heat, Harrow takes the afghan from Glam’s recliner and tosses it over Gideon, who snuggles under it and appears to fall instantly back asleep. She’s made it known that she thinks Harrow’s working hours are obscene, but Harrow doesn’t mind them. She was raised on her parents’ early schedule, so she’s used to it, and she likes how quiet the city is before sunrise. She can walk the three blocks to the bakery without passing another pedestrian, keeping company with dark storefronts and empty crosswalks.
At work, she spends the first half of her shift making muffins and cinnamon rolls for the morning crowd, and while she mixes batter and rolls out dough, she thinks about it. Not the batter or the dough. It, what she promised Gideon she’d think about. She’s so busy thinking about it that she almost forgets to add cinnamon to the cinnamon rolls.
When it’s time for her break, she takes it in the bakery’s café area, at a table in the corner so no one can look over her shoulder. She eats a muffin spread with a little of the bakery’s housemade butter, and between bites, she uses her phone to do research.
Harrow knows where babies come from, but that’s about it. She’s not even supposed to know that much. Her parents didn’t talk to her about sex, believing she should learn from her husband on their wedding night. She picked up the basics of procreation inadvertently online, and she was so guilt stricken she never attempted to educate herself further. She was a good girl, with no use for forbidden knowledge. Now she’s a reprobate, fallen from grace, so she may as well learn what she can.
Not that she wants to learn everything. She just thinks that if she’s going to do it, she should know what the parts down there are called and what they do. And what people do to them. Theirs and other people’s. That’s something she’ll need to know later, once she’s satisfied herself to Gideon’s…well, satisfaction.
During the second half of her shift, she makes sandwich bread and dinner rolls for the afternoon crowd. At noon she’s off, and she walks back to Glam’s apartment. Gideon’s taken the leftover garlic bread from last night and left her smell on the living room couch, which is why Harrow sits there to continue her research. She thinks Gideon would like this, her reading what she’s reading and thinking what she’s thinking with a noseful of Gideon’s scent, but she chickens out of texting her about it.
That night, after Glam gets home and barks a hello at Harrow before going to bed, Harrow runs a bath. She’s chosen to start in the bath for two reasons: first, because she hopes the warm water will help her relax, and second, because her research indicated that this activity, when done right, can be messy. She’s probably not going to get it right on the first try, but better safe than sorry. She takes off her clothes, steps into the tub, and lowers herself into the water, inhaling sharply at the sudden heat.
Reclined in the tub, she looks through the water at her bare body. It’s brown and scrawny, like a twig. She has barely any breasts to speak of—she only wears a bra so her nipples won’t show through her shirt—and her ribs and hipbones press against her skin from the inside. It’s hard to imagine anyone being excited by her body, let alone someone like Gideon. Gideon looks like the handiwork of a loving God, and Harrow looks like she came from his scraps bin. I want to make you feel good so fucking bad, Gideon said last night, but maybe she didn’t mean it in a physical sense. Maybe she just wants to take Harrow to an amusement park.
“Stop it,” Harrow mutters to herself. As usual, she’s thinking instead of feeling. The part of her that likes to be right puffs up in triumph, but the part of her that wants to succeed squashes it down. She hasn’t even given it an honest try yet. She has to at least try.
She closes her eyes and reaches between her legs, passing her fingers through the wiry hair there. Beneath it, she finds the crease in her flesh that conceals the delicate parts of her anatomy. The skin is soft, but it’s just skin. She doesn’t feel anything special when she strokes it with her fingers.
Then she presses down a little harder, and oh, okay, that feels like something. It’s the same sensation she got rubbing herself against Gideon last night, a muted pleasure like music playing in another room. It feels safe, so she lingers in it, touching herself through her skin.
The more she does it, the more she likes it, and the harder she presses, her hips lifting into her hand. Emboldened, she slides her forefinger between her outer lips. This part of her, inside but not inside inside, is warm and smooth, smoother than her other skin. She feels around carefully, seeking out her clit, which her research said is the primary conductor of pleasure for a body like hers. If she understood what she read, she’s been stimulating it indirectly up to now, but direct contact should produce a stronger effect.
It’s strong, all right. She rubs the pad of her finger over her clit and it sends a jolt of…something through her entire body, not pleasure exactly, nor pain, but pure sensation, wringing a clench-jawed grunt from her throat. It scares her, or startles her, more like, and in that moment of uncertainty, her thinking brain sneaks up on her and pounces. You’re doing it wrong, it says. This isn’t going to work, it says. You should be ashamed of yourself, it says. Finally, fatally, it says, Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.
She might have bounced back from the rest, but when her internal monologue starts quoting Scripture, she’s done. She takes her hand away and opens her eyes, wincing in the bright light from the exposed bulbs over the bathroom sink. With a groan, she slips below the surface of the water. There she groans again, louder, bubbles streaming from her open mouth.
It wasn’t her idea to try, so it shouldn’t bother her to fail. If anything, she should be relieved; now she can quit. That’s what she tells herself before she sits up and grabs the soap to wash. She’ll just quit, and if she’s never able to gratify her own flesh, so what? There are other ways to spend a rainy night. Watching The Great British Bake Off, for one.
Later, in bed, she thinks of texting Gideon to report her failure. I tried what we talked about and it didn’t work. I told you it wouldn’t. You don’t have to wait for anything, so just remember that next time we’re making out, okay? She types it all up, but she doesn’t hit send. It’s not because she’s chicken—well, maybe she is a little, about the last part. But it’s something else that stops her from backspacing the hint and sending the rest. To her own surprise, she’s not quite ready to admit defeat.
—
The next day, Harrow checks her phone after work to find a text from Gideon. You coming to rehearsal today?
She’s suspicious from the jump. She always comes to the Serpents’ rehearsals, even though she’s not part of the troupe. Gideon knows that; she teases Harrow about it, how she’ll take any opportunity to see Gideon onstage. I was going to, why? Harrow texts back. The reply comes a few minutes later, and things only get more suspect from there.
You might wanna skip it this time
Glam’s on the warpath, she lost a bunch of money on her trip
Really? She seemed fine last night when she got in
Yeah well yknow, she’s not gonna whine to you
She’ll let loose on us at rehearsal though
You shouldn’t have to sit through that
She told you she lost money?
Yup
In a text
She texted you
Yeah how else would I know
I didn’t realize you and Glam were texting buddies
We’re not, it was one convo
Listen just trust me on this, I’m doing you a favor
Dinner after? I have coupons for steak n shake
Are you sure you want to go with me
You could take your texting buddy Glam
Oh my god we’re not BUDDIES
And she won’t give me her fries 😢
Gideon is a better liar via text than in person, which is saying almost nothing because she’s a terrible liar in person. Harrow is ninety-nine percent sure that Glam, whose phone is dead so much of the time that it practically takes a séance to use it, didn’t text anyone anything, nor did she lose enough money at the casinos to make her surlier than usual. What Harrow isn’t sure of is why Gideon’s lying. It can’t be that she doesn’t want to see Harrow, or she wouldn’t have asked her to dinner. She just doesn’t want her at rehearsal, for some reason.
It’s an uneasy feeling, being on the outside of a secret, but there isn’t much Harrow can do about it. If she tries to spy on the rehearsal, she’ll get caught. If she tries to drag the truth out of Gideon, it’ll be uncomfortable. Harrow doesn’t want things between them to be uncomfortable. She wants to sit across from Gideon in a booth at Steak ‘n Shake, eating a kids’ grilled cheese and watching Gideon wave a fry around while she tells a story from one of her jobs. She wants Gideon to walk her back to Glam’s and spend too long kissing her goodnight in the stairwell. If the price of that is pretending she bought the story about Glam’s gambling losses, she’ll pay it. She’s at least better at pretending than Gideon is.
The week passes in what’s become the usual way. Harrow goes to work in the mornings, and when she can, when they’re both off, she spends time with Gideon. Gideon doesn’t bring it up, and neither does Harrow. She’s going to try again, she’s decided, but later, when the fiasco of her first attempt isn’t so fresh in her memory.
The Serpents’ performances are always on a Friday, with a dress rehearsal the preceding Thursday. Wednesday evening, Gideon has Harrow over for dinner and makes butter chicken. Harrow sits on the bed, which in Gideon’s studio apartment is just outside the kitchen, and watches her juggle pots and pans on the tiny coil stove, keeping the plain chicken she’s making for Harrow from burning while she starts the curry sauce for her portion.
Casually, Harrow says, “So, how’s Glam doing?”
“Glam?” Gideon echoes, distracted by her cooking. “Fine, I guess.”
“That’s good. I thought she might still be upset about what happened on her trip.”
“What—oh yeah.” Gideon’s a bad liar, but she’s not stupid. She keeps her face downturned toward the stove, so Harrow can’t see how her expression is almost certainly betraying her. “Actually, I think she is still in a funk. Dress rehearsal’s going to be a bitch. I’d give it a pass if I were you.”
“Hmm,” Harrow says. “Maybe I should pass on the show this week too.”
“No!” Gideon blurts out. She looks over at Harrow, dismay plain on her face. “I mean”—she looks back at the stove—“Glam’s a professional, she’ll behave at the show. Besides,” she adds in a teasing tone of voice, “if you’re not there, whose drool will they use to mop the floor at closing time?”
Harrow shudders. “That’s disgusting. I’ve never drooled over you.”
Gideon tastes the curry sauce, then points her spoon at Harrow. “I’ll take that as a challenge.”
So, Gideon still doesn’t want Harrow at rehearsal, but she very much wants her at the show. Harrow’s anxious brain suggests that this is because the other Serpents don’t like her and Gideon is trying to minimize their face time without losing her biggest fan. Her logical brain, however, contends that it’s more likely Gideon is trying to surprise her, which also makes her anxious.
Harrow doesn’t like surprises. She likes things that are predictable, things she can prepare for. When she’s prepared for what’s going to happen, she can control her reaction to it. Being unprepared means reacting on instinct, and what if her instinct is bad?
Two more days go by all too quickly. With an hour until showtime, Harrow agonizes over what to wear. Her nerves make her indecisive, although she doesn’t have much to decide among. She walked away from her old life with only her phone and the clothes on her back, and since then she’s worn mainly Gideon’s and Glam’s hand-me-downs, ill fitting but functional. When she wants to look nice, like she does tonight, she turns to the small wardrobe she’s built with her paychecks from the bakery. Three shirts, two pairs of pants, all black or dark blue.
She tries on every outfit she can make before settling on one. It’s a pair of jeans and a black shirt, long sleeved like all her shirts, but with an off-the-shoulder neckline that’s daring by her standards. Wide straps hold the shirt up and make it a little more modest. Harrow was taught to always dress modestly, and even now that she doesn’t have to, she likes to. Modest clothes make a person invisible, while skimpy clothes shout, Look at me! This shirt says, Notice me, but only for a moment. That’s acceptable one night a week.
Downstairs, the usual crowd has assembled in Eden’s bar area, some fifty or sixty people drinking and chatting while they wait for the show to start. Harrow stops by the bar for a glass of water and takes it to her table, the wobbly table no one else ever uses. Gideon moved it from the front of the room to the back near the platform so Harrow always has a good view of the Serpents’ shows. Once seated, she gets out her phone, her trusted strategy for discouraging people from talking to her.
Of course, some people can’t be discouraged. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” Harrow looks up to see Gideon standing over her. She tries with limited success to prop her hip against the table, which really is very wobbly. “This is a respectable place, not some sleazy joint where you can sit around with your shoulders out.”
The quip, or come-on, or whatever it is barely registers with Harrow, who’s focused on Gideon’s outfit. She’s wearing a white T-shirt tucked into cutoff jean shorts that stop at her upper thighs. There are navy Converse on her feet, and suspenders, striped pink, white and red, stretch from her shoulders to her waistband. None of it gives Harrow the least clue as to what to expect. “Nice clothes,” she says, stymied.
“They’ll look nicer on the floor.” Gideon bends down and presses her grinning mouth to Harrow’s, kissing her with more enthusiasm, and more tongue, than she normally does in a room full of people. Harrow makes a flustered noise into the kiss, and Gideon backs off, still grinning. “Just wanted to make sure your drool glands were working,” she says. “They’re good.”
She scoots away, through the curtains over the doorway to the dressing room, before Harrow can tell her what a menace she is. Her timing is perfect. Almost as soon as she’s gone, the music in the bar area quiets, the light above the platform comes on, and the show starts.
It’s a good show. The Serpents always put on a good show. If Harrow didn’t think so, she would wait upstairs for the finale, when Gideon goes on. She’s here instead because she likes watching the other acts, even the ones she’s seen a dozen times already.
She admires the performers’ confidence, and she…appreciates their bodies, supple and shining in the stage lighting, revealing themselves a little at a time. She appreciates them quite a bit; she can admit that to herself now. But no one else has ever made, will ever make her feel the way she feels when Gideon’s onstage.
It begins even before Gideon comes out, when Glam stumps onto the platform to introduce her. Harrow’s stomach tightens and her heart beats louder and faster. It’s worse this time, the anticipation of seeing Gideon perform intensified by the anticipation of finding out what’s so special about this performance that it had to be kept a secret. Glam takes the microphone off its stand and addresses the audience.
“Some of you,” she says, “know our last performer as Big Red. Those of you who’ve been to Tuesday night karaoke know her as Rubber Chicken in a Dryer.” The audience laughs, and Harrow huffs through her nose. She doesn’t think Gideon is such a bad singer, although admittedly, she herself has never had much of an ear for music. “But she has her strengths too. She’s easygoing, good with kids and animals. And she’s highly self-reliant.” Glam smirks as she slots the microphone back into its holder, leaning in to add three final words. “As you’ll see.”
Harrow could strangle Glam with the microphone cord. What on earth is that supposed to mean?
There’s Gideon’s music, a youthful female voice singing over a light, bubbly beat. Harrow doesn’t recognize it, but she didn’t expect to. Gideon flips open the dressing room curtains and lopes up to the platform, and it’s the strangest thing—Harrow’s seen this before, over and over again. She’s seen Gideon perform, she’s seen her rehearse, she’s seen her lick buffalo sauce off her fingers and sprinkle foot powder in her shoes. The mystique of her stage persona should be long dead.
But tell that to Harrow’s guts, twisting themselves into pretzels as Gideon crosses the platform and drapes herself over the chair in the middle. Tell that to Harrow’s eyes, magnetized by Gideon’s tall, sturdy frame, her blaze of red hair, the coppery sheen of her skin. Every time Harrow sees her perform, it’s like she’s seeing her for the first time.
Gideon sits forward, plants a hand between her parted knees, and rolls her body slowly from the hips, drawing the motion up through her chest into her shoulders. Then she does it again, and again. While she’s doing it, she brings her free hand up and rakes it through her hair. It makes Harrow’s fingertips itch, wishing they could feel the silk of those strands slipping over them. It barely helps that they have felt it, that they will again. It doesn’t help at all when Gideon’s hand travels downward, thumbing over her lips, tracing a cord of muscle in her neck, cupping one of her breasts through her shirt.
Just when it seems that she might touch herself between her thighs, that there’s nowhere else for her hand to go, the song launches into its first chorus, and she springs to her feet. She half-dances, half-struts across the platform, tossing her head and shimmying her hips, looking like she’s having the absolute best time. That’s real, not just for the act. Gideon always has fun onstage. She says if she’s not having fun, how can she expect anyone else to?
She runs a thumb under one of her suspenders, then the other, teasing the audience with the prospect of their coming off. When she does take them off, she leaves them clipped to her shorts, so that they hang from her waistband and brush against her thighs as she moves.
Harrow is looking a lot more than she’s listening, but she hears the lyrics of the song. She hears the female singer shouting about loving herself, and her brain glosses over it. Plenty of songs are one big brag about how great the singer is. For the second verse, Gideon goes back to the chair, where she kicks off her shoes and resumes her provocative motions, only more so. Now her legs are spread wide and her hand does venture between them. While the audience whistles and throws money onto the platform, gears turn in Harrow’s head. Then the woman on the track sings that she’s going to love herself so hard ‘til it hurts, and Harrow understands that the song isn’t a brag—it’s an anthem. And she, Harrow, is an ignoramus.
Of course this is what Gideon’s doing. It’s such a filthy, fearless, Gideon thing to do. Shriveling in mortification at the mere idea of it is a Harrow thing to do, which would be why Harrow wasn’t allowed to know about it beforehand. Before she was sitting here with Gideon in front of her, well on her way to half-naked and working up a sweat. Gideon’s a bad liar, but she’s not stupid.
While Harrow tries to figure out how she can bury her face in her hands and still watch the rest of the performance, Gideon undoes her shorts and slinks out of them as she stands up. She parades around the platform in her T-shirt and black boyshorts, at one point rolling the bottom of her shirt up and tying it in place, letting the audience glimpse her toned stomach.
Finally, she pulls the shirt off. Her breasts curve out from within a framework of black straps, shaped like a bra but with none of its coverage. Where the cups should be, there are only a pair of black hearts pasted over her nipples. The audience howls at the sight. Harrow’s mouth may actually water a little, although she’s certainly not drooling.
She assumes—fairly, since Gideon can’t get much more naked without being, well, naked—that the striptease part of the act is over. Fair or not, she assumes wrong. After the bridge of the song, which Gideon spends straddling the chair backward, doing the most indecent things a person can do in fifteen seconds, she stands again and smiles at the audience. Not that she hasn’t been smiling the whole time. It’s just that this smile's different, gleeful, almost smug. She hooks her thumbs in the waistband of her boyshorts and slides them down, revealing a smaller black garment that consists of just enough fabric to qualify as underwear.
There’s a moment in which Harrow reflects on how ridiculous it is that she and Gideon have been involved with each other for three months, and this is the most of her Harrow has seen. The moment ends when Gideon turns around. Her underwear are even scantier in back than in front, baring her entire behind. It’s a very nice behind. It’s also an articulate one: LOVE, it says on one cheek, YOURSELF on the other.
The audience laughs and whoops and showers Gideon with balled-up bills. Harrow laughs too, helplessly. She’s not very good at laughing—she hasn’t had much practice—but she laughs anyway, one hand pressed to her open mouth. She laughs in dopey, high-pitched giggles that sound nothing like any other noise she makes on a regular basis.
By the time she manages to stop laughing, the song is over, and Gideon is giving her graffitied behind one last wiggle for the cheering crowd. She moves to face forward and Harrow sees that she’s laughing herself, her face alight with pleasure and pride.
She collects her T-shirt and boyshorts and puts them back on, and then she wades through the crowd to Harrow. She’s flushed and sweaty, heavy breaths pumping her chest up and down. Harrow can see the black heart pasties through her shirt, now that the suspenders are gone. She makes herself look her in the eyes instead. “I am so stupid,” Harrow says.
“You’re not,” Gideon says, sitting on top of Harrow’s table. To keep it from wobbling and bucking her off, she braces her feet on Harrow’s chair, one foot on either side of Harrow. “Why aren’t you stupid?”
“I knew you were cooking something up. I should’ve guessed it would have to do with…you know.”
Gideon beams, eager as a puppy. “Did you like it?”
“I…” Harrow searches her vocabulary for a word that encapsulates the past four minutes from her point of view. She doesn’t find the word, if it even exists, so she settles for, “It was very entertaining.”
That’s enough to satisfy Gideon. “Good. I haven’t been flossing my buttcrack for three hours for you not to be entertained.”
“I want it acknowledged that I did not ask you to floss your buttcrack,” Harrow says firmly. In a softer tone, she adds, “You didn’t have to do anything for me.”
“Listen, you preached the gospel to me once. Remember?” Harrow couldn’t forget it if she tried, and she did try. Sitting at this same table, lightheaded at the smell of Gideon’s sweat and Mountain Peak deodorant. Watching in fevered distress as Gideon took one of her proselytizing flyers and put it in her sports bra. She wonders what Gideon did with the flyer, whether she still has it. “I was just returning the favor.”
—
After most shows, Gideon stays at Eden until closing, drinking and reveling with the other Serpents and their fans. Harrow isn’t much of a reveler, and she’s still a little too young to drink without, as Glam puts it, putting my ass on the line, but she stays too, to be with Gideon. This week, Gideon is scheduled to work a moving job on Saturday morning, so she leaves early. Harrow walks her out and gets an extended goodnight kiss at the foot of the stairs to Glam’s apartment. Then she goes up to bed.
Harrow sleeps in one of Gideon’s T-shirts, a Red Cross one she got for donating blood. She gave it to Harrow before they were together, when Harrow was just a charity case raw from a breakup with God and Gideon was just a gorgeous burlesque performer too charitable by half. Harrow inhaled this shirt so many times she thinks she probably sucked out Gideon’s smell before it would have faded naturally. Now her shirt has no smell Harrow can detect, but she hasn’t gone out and bought real pajamas.
She lies in bed, the worn-in cotton of Gideon's shirt soft against her skin, and listens to the muffled sounds of people having fun downstairs. She feels good: relaxed but not sleepy, still riding the charge of the show and the kiss in the stairwell. She feels like she could try again.
Under the blanket, she pushes Gideon’s shirt up to her stomach and starts to rub herself through her underwear. Without her even telling it to, her mind takes her back to earlier in the night, to Eden’s bar area and Gideon onstage. She pictures Gideon in the chair with her legs flung apart, her head tipped slightly back and to the side, caressing herself with long-fingered hands. She remembers the way Gideon looked at the audience while she pretended to pleasure herself, her steady gaze and silken smile. That can’t be the way she looks when she’s experiencing real pleasure. Harrow throbs with desire, the desire to see Gideon undone, to commit every twitch of her face to memory.
Harrow presses the fabric of her underwear between her outer lips and feels the shape of her clit, already swollen with excitement. The layer of fabric blunts the sensation, so it’s not too much. She keeps rubbing, using just her forefinger, as she draws again from the well of memory. This time it’s the memory of Gideon kissing her at the foot of the stairs. Gideon’s mouth like warm velvet, her hands holding Harrow by the hips.
Gideon’s hands alone could drive Harrow out of her mind. When they’re on top of her clothes, she wants them on her skin. When they’re on her skin, she wants them on her bones, on her soul, if there are such things as souls. She wants Gideon to touch and hold her in every way possible, and some impossible ways too.
She wants so much, but right now all she has is her own hand, her finger moving faster over her clit. It’s good, but it’s not enough. She peels the crotch of her underwear away from her skin, surprised at how damp the fabric feels, and positions her middle and forefinger on either side of her clit. The sides are less sensitive than the top, and at the same time, sensitive enough to make her breath catch and her hips jerk.
She slides her fingers up and down, the motion smoothed by the slickness leaking out of her. Pleasure tightens like a screw below her stomach. Her wrist starts to hurt, but she ignores it. It only takes a few more seconds for her whole body to tighten, to burn with an unbearable tension, then release in a hot rush. Her legs shake and she heaves out a huge breath.
So this is it, she thinks, her hand working slower, easing toward a stop. This is what it’s like to be a person who’s had an orgasm. This is what it’s like to be a person who’s given herself an orgasm. It feels like being the same person as before, but with wet fingers and an ache between her thighs, a more pleasant ache than the kind she used to bury under Bible passages.
She thinks briefly about whether this qualifies as a success. Gideon said she could think about her while she did it, but Gideon also said she doesn’t want to be the only thing that makes her feel good. Does it count if it was the mental image of Gideon that made her feel good? She decides it doesn’t matter. Taking her phone from the nightstand, she types a short text: I did it
Gideon responds within ten seconds. Nice, she says. What did you do?
Please be joking
I did the thing you put on an entire burlesque act to convince me to do
SORRY I was almost asleep
NICE!!!
Wait
Pics or it didn’t happen
What am I supposed to take a picture of?
It’s kind of over
Round two? 😉
Harrow knows she’ll regret it in a minute, but she’s reckless with endorphins, so she uses the flash on her phone to take a photo of her hand, palm up. Her middle and forefingers are still wet, gleaming in the burst of light. She sends the photo to Gideon.
You’re a goddess, Gideon replies.
Shut up
I’m serious
That’s getting a place of honor in my hidden photos album
You mean in your memory, because you’re going to delete it
No can do
Should’ve used snapchat
This is the thanks I get for throwing you a bone
Baby I’ll thank your brains out
I’ll thank you til you’re numb
Name a time and place
I’d come over right now if I didn’t need to get some sleep before work
As if I’m gonna sleep now anyway
I think I’m going to fall asleep soon, Harrow types. She wasn’t sleepy when she first lay down, but she is now. The bed feels more comfortable than it ever has, and her eyelids are getting heavier by the moment.
Of course you are
Hey Harrow, if I did an act about nip piercings, would you get them?
Bc that’d be super hot
Harrow
HARROW
Fine, I get it
Sleep tight you little skittle diddler you
—
The next morning, Harrow and Gideon make plans to go out for dinner when Gideon’s done with work. Harrow is off today, so she has hours to fill in the meantime. She puts on tights and a baggy collared shirt, one of Glam’s, and putters around the city for the better part of the day. She goes into a used bookstore and reads excerpts from a dozen books; stops in an occult shop to look wonderingly at articles of witchcraft and devil worship; buys a cup of tart frozen yogurt topped with granola at a froyo bar.
Just when Harrow thinks she’ll combust from frustration if she has to kill any more time, Gideon texts to say she’s on her way home. She wants Harrow to meet her there. Harrow takes the bus to her street and walks up six flights of stairs to the top floor of her building, which Gideon facetiously calls the penthouse. She answers the door in her work jeans and a sports bra.
“Hey, I’m really gross,” she says, backing up to let Harrow through the doorway. “Give me five minutes to shower and change and we’ll go.”
“Wait,” Harrow says. Gideon waits.
Stepping closer to her, Harrow wonders if there’s ever been a graver misapplication of the word gross. Gideon’s been working hard all day, moving boxes and furniture out of and into people’s houses, and she looks and smells like it. The earthy tang of her sweat raises Harrow’s body temperature by a degree with every inhale. Her bare arms and stomach are carved perfection, begging to be pressed against Harrow.
She winds her fingers around a strap of Gideon’s bra and pulls her down for a kiss, the fingers of her other hand scraping through the fuzz on the side of Gideon’s head. Gideon makes a noise into her mouth, something between a grunt and a whine.
Harrow stops to look her in the eyes. They’re molten in the early evening light, focused on Harrow with scalding intensity. “You’re not that hungry, are you?”
“Starving,” Gideon breathes, barely getting the word out before she crushes her mouth against Harrow’s.
They stagger across the room without parting for more than a second, eventually finding their way to Gideon’s bed. It’s a twin bed, chosen to fit the small space, and the only way they both fit on it is if they’re crammed so close together there’s no part of either of them that’s not touching part of the other. Which happens to be exactly what Harrow wants.
While they’re kissing, mouths making soft wet sounds as they slide against each other, Gideon shifts so her knee is nudging Harrow’s crotch. Harrow can’t tell if it’s just what’s comfortable for her or if she’s doing it on purpose because Harrow liked it before. That would be embarrassing, but she likes it now too, so she can’t complain.
She opens her legs a little to push herself forward onto Gideon’s thigh, and the grip Gideon has on her waist tightens. She moves her hands to the neck of Harrow’s shirt, gingerly undoing the top button. “Is this okay?” Gideon asks, her breath hot on Harrow’s face.
Harrow nods and feels her undo another button. When her shirt is all the way open, Gideon strokes the slight inward dip of her stomach and lightly traces her ribs, making her almost squeak from ticklishness. To smother the sound, she grabs Gideon’s face and dives back into the kiss. It lasts less than a minute, though, before Gideon breaks away again to ask, again, “Is this okay?”
Her hands are on the clasp of Harrow’s bra now, unhooking it. Harrow nods without opening her eyes. Gideon nibbles her bottom lip, and at the same time, she slips her hand up under the loosened left cup of Harrow’s bra. Feeling rough fingers brush her nipple, she makes a high, bitten-off sound. Her nipple hardens instantly at Gideon’s touch, and Gideon rubs circles over it with her thumb, sending crackles of pleasure racing from Harrow’s chest down between her thighs.
“Is this okay?” comes the by-now familiar question. “Does it feel good?”
“Mm,” Harrow says, thrusting against Gideon’s thigh to make her meaning clear. That sensation, the friction on her clit through layers of skin and fabric, coupled with the sensation of Gideon’s thumb circling her nipple, is a sugar cube on the tongue, shockingly sweet.
She keeps moving, rocking back and forth on Gideon’s thigh, while Gideon rolls her other nipple gently between two fingers. Pathetic noises well up in her throat and slosh from her mouth. She can’t seal it to Gideon’s mouth anymore because Gideon’s mouth is on her neck, stamping kisses in a line from her chin down to the notch between her collarbones.
That puts Gideon’s head in a convenient place for Harrow to run her hands through her hair, so she does it, several times, slowly. When Gideon wets the fingers of her left hand in her mouth and brings them back to Harrow’s nipple, to pull almost harshly with saliva cooling her warm skin, Harrow’s body jerks and she gives a pull of her own on Gideon’s hair. They both moan a little bit.
Harrow isn’t sure how much more of this she can take. Gideon hasn’t technically touched her below the waist and already she can feel the pressure building, a pressure she recognizes from last night. Her body wants to release, and if Gideon keeps doing what she’s doing with her hands and mouth, if Harrow keeps grinding against the firm muscle of her thigh, it will.
“Don’t stop,” Harrow says, trying not to sound like she’s begging. She doesn’t know if Gideon can tell how close she is, and she doesn’t want her getting any ideas about changing her technique.
Thankfully, Gideon takes direction well. She doesn’t stop kissing Harrow’s neck or working her nipples, deftly squeezing and plucking, delivering just enough pain to contrast the pleasure. She lets Harrow ride her thigh until she’s tense and panting, and when Harrow comes with a whimper, she draws it out for as long as she comfortably can. Afterward, she switches to light touches and murmured praise.
“You’re so good,” she’s saying, “so hot, fuck, it’s unbelievable.” Harrow can’t quite believe it either—that Gideon, that anyone could so enjoy feeling her squirm against them, touching her all-but-nonexistent breasts—but she’s willing to accept it for now.
Gideon certainly seems to be enjoying herself, so it’s not just talk. Her cheeks are ripe with color and there’s fresh sweat beading on her face. She looks at Harrow with desire hazing her eyes, and Harrow thinks she might ask to be taken care of herself, until she says, “Can I eat you out?”
Harrow feels something down inside her pulse with interest, even though she just came and it should be Gideon’s turn. “Is that what you want?”
“So much,” Gideon says, sounding like she really means it. “Since the first time I saw you.”
Harrow props herself up on her elbows and stares, baffled. The first time Gideon saw her, she was sitting in the audience after one of the Serpents’ shows. She was wearing a black beanie and winter coat and feeling deep consternation over the content of the show and her response to it. She must have looked like an angsty charcoal briquette. “The first time you saw me?” she says. “Why?”
“I dunno.” Gideon closes her eyes. “I just remember I came up to you, and you looked at me like I was an asteroid, or a meteor, or whatever, I’m not an astronomer, headed straight at you. Like I was something amazing that was going to destroy you.” She opens her eyes and laughs. “And I thought, holy shit, I have to eat this girl out.”
Harrow can’t think of anything to say to that but, “Tell me how you want me, then.”
Gideon wants her sitting at the head of the bed, reclined against the pillows. She pulls Harrow’s tights down and off and tries to lie on her front with her head between Harrow’s legs, but it doesn’t work. Gideon barely fits on the bed when the full length of it is in play, and she absolutely doesn’t fit leaving room for Harrow at the head. She admits that she’s never tried this on a twin bed before. Then she says, “Wait, brainstorm. C’mere.”
Gideon stands and scoops Harrow off the bed, like it’s easy, like she’s weightless instead of just scrawny. She’s resettled a moment later in the armchair on the far side of the dresser, in the area that would be the living room if the apartment had more than one room. It’s an odd piece of furniture, the armchair. It has a wood frame cushioned by a thin pad and a tilted back tall enough that Harrow’s head doesn’t reach the top. It also has some bounce to it, which is maybe not ideal for their purposes. Or maybe it is. Harrow wouldn’t know; this is all new to her.
She watches Gideon kneel in front of her and feels a nervous clench in her stomach. Gideon thinks she wants this, but what if it’s not what she thought it would be? What if Harrow is ugly down there, or offensive in some other way? What if Gideon gets one look at her and says, Yikes, not what I signed up for?
“Okay?” Gideon asks, her eyes shining up at Harrow, and Harrow swallows and nods. Gideon keeps looking at her face while she takes off her underwear. Then she looks down, and pushes Harrow’s legs apart, and gives a sigh that doesn’t sound at all like it’s preceding a yikes. She kisses the inside of Harrow’s thigh, which is enough by itself to make her draw a sharp breath.
“Go easy,” Harrow says. “I get overstimulated.” Something she wouldn’t know if Gideon hadn’t asked her to do it—masturbate, that’s what she did, she’s not going to sit here with her crotch in Gideon’s face and refuse to so much as think the word masturbate—before they did this.
“I’ve got you,” Gideon says, her hands on Harrow’s thighs, parting her with her thumbs.
Gideon licks up the middle of her. It’s a soft lick, and it doesn’t even touch her clit, but it sets every nerve ending that it does touch alight. She curls her fingers around the arms of the chair and feels profoundly glad she told Gideon to go easy. There are more soft licks, a lot more, spreading her, separating her inner lips. Gideon doesn’t put her tongue inside her, but she licks over and around her entrance, and it’s good, very good.
Harrow didn’t realize how good it would feel to have attention paid to parts of her that aren’t her clit. And all the kissing they’ve done didn’t remotely prepare her to experience Gideon’s tongue between her other lips. The way it strokes, the way it flicks, the way it’s soft one second and hard the next—it’s magic, a spell that vanishes Harrow’s composure and turns her into a breathless, shuddering wreck.
In keeping with her promise to be gentle, Gideon is careful with her clit, at first only licking around it. When she finally glides her tongue over it, pleasure explodes through Harrow’s lower body. She clutches the arms of the chair so tight that her knuckles stand out under her skin, afraid to hurt Gideon by pulling too hard on her hair.
She could come again so easily, her body is screaming for it, but she forces herself not to. If she comes, Gideon might stop, and right now that seems like the worst thing anyone could do, ever. She doesn’t want to come and be done; she just wants more of this, Gideon’s tongue on her, lapping her up, drinking her down. She wants to hear the dirty wet noise of it and feel Gideon’s fingers pressing into the flesh of her thighs. For the rest of the hour, the rest of the night, forever.
She hears Gideon breathe out in a determined huff, feels the warmth of it on her slick skin. Gideon’s tongue darts once more across her clit, and her lips close around it, and she sucks, and Harrow’s whole world shrinks to that pinpoint of powerful sensation. For an instant she thinks she might burst into tears, but instead she comes. She comes hard for what feels like a long time, and she’s so lost in it that she doesn’t hear whatever sounds are coming out of her.
Gideon’s mouth stays on her until it’s over, licking her slow in a lingering kiss. Harrow feels her heart beating against Gideon’s tongue. Gideon moves back and nuzzles her inner thigh, and Harrow misses her, ridiculously, as if she’s not right here with her head between Harrow’s legs.
“Hey,” Gideon says. Harrow looks at her, and her face is so lovely, smeared with the evidence of how good she is to Harrow. Harrow wants to kiss her, but her bones and muscles have all softened into jelly and she can’t move to reach for her. “How come you were holding back?”
“I. Hm.” Harrow’s voice feels thick and sticky in her throat. She pauses to cough, then tries again: “I didn’t want you to stop.”
Gideon kisses the crease between her thigh and pelvis. “Do you want me to stop now?”
Harrow finds the strength in her legs to hook them over Gideon’s shoulders. “No,” she says, her voice breaking as Gideon’s tongue laves over her again.
It’s just as good the second time as the first. In fact, it’s better, because it lasts longer. Tempered by two orgasms, Harrow can feel everything Gideon is doing without worrying that it’s going to finish her too soon. She lets herself come unraveled little by little, lick by lick. At one point she combs her fingers through Gideon’s hair, and when Gideon hums encouragingly against her, she roots her hand there. Then her other hand, and it’s much nicer than holding onto the arms of the chair.
Most of the time she’s just breathing, fast and deep with the odd vocalization peppered in. But the closer she gets to coming a third time, the more vocal she is. She says one word, one name, three syllables, over and over again. She says it because it’s the only word her mouth will make, even though she has so much more to say. Gideon, she says, meaning, I need you; Gideon, she says, meaning, You’re everything; Gideon, she says, meaning, Thank you. She knows Gideon likes hearing it from the way her thumbs stroke up her hipbones where she’s holding her. And she comes again with Gideon’s name on her lips, her back arching off the chair, her body trembling and trembling as her orgasm sweeps through her.
Coming down, she lets go of Gideon’s hair and caresses the slope of her cheekbone. Gideon pulls one hand out from under Harrow’s hip and catches her by the wrist, holding it still so she can kiss her palm. “You good to go again?”
Harrow goggles at her in disbelief. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Are you kidding? I could do this all night and all day tomorrow. And holding onto you instead of bracing myself on the floor makes for a good core workout.”
“Working out isn’t sexy,” Harrow scoffs.
Gideon grins up at her. “Spoken like someone who’s never watched me do crunches.”
Harrow could go again, happily, if she didn’t have something else in mind. She takes her legs off Gideon’s shoulders and sits up in the chair. “Let me do something for you now. I want to.”
Gideon pouts, but the way she shifts on her knees tells Harrow she’s not going to say no. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I don’t know how well I’ll do, but if you don’t like it—”
“There’s nothing you would do to me I wouldn’t like,” Gideon says with foolhardy confidence. “But I’ll help you cheat if you’re worried.”
She gets up, rubs the back of her neck, and walks behind Harrow. Harrow hears a drawer opening and things being shuffled and fiddled with. When Gideon comes back into view, she’s holding something that she gives to Harrow. It’s a device—a sex toy, Harrow is pretty sure—the length and thickness of Harrow’s arm, with a power cord trailing from its narrower end. On the wider end, there’s a knob a bit smaller than her fist, mounted on a flexible stem so it can bend in different directions. It makes an intimidating impression, so big and heavy with its long electric tail.
Harrow finds a switch on the device and depresses one side. The device comes to life in her hands, humming loudly. She can feel it in the body of the device, but it’s concentrated in the knob, the head. Touching it, she’s met with vibrations that travel through her hand down her arm and into her chest. This thing is strong, so strong it hurts just to imagine it on any sensitive part of her. But she hasn’t been given it to use on herself. She switches the vibrations off and asks, “This is what you like?”
“Sometimes,” Gideon says. She’s standing by the armchair, still in her jeans and sports bra. “I like other things too, but this should make it easy for you. All you have to do is hold it and change up the pressure now and then, so I don’t go numb.” It feels like days have passed since Harrow arrived at the apartment, but it’s really only been long enough for the sun to set. The light from outside is purplish gray where it was gold, and there’s far less of it. Harrow can just make out Gideon’s expression, hopeful and delicate. “If you’re not sure—”
“I’m sure,” Harrow says. “Take off your clothes and switch places with me.”
Gideon lets out a small shaky breath, like she’s either nervous or thrilled. She pulls her bra off over her head, freeing her breasts, firm and brown with nipples a shade darker than the rest of her skin. Then she slides down her jeans and underwear and steps out of them. Harrow gets up from the armchair, moving so Gideon can sit.
When Harrow turns to look at her, she’s caught by surprise. She didn’t think it would affect her much to see Gideon naked. She’s seen her almost naked plenty of times, like anyone who’s a regular attendee at the Serpents’ shows, and there’s nothing extraordinary about nipples and a patch of hair. But seeing her like this…Harrow is affected, and not because of Gideon’s nipples, or the chestnut curls at the fork of her thighs. It hits her, as she stands there staring at Gideon’s long body sprawled in the armchair, that this is just for her. There’s no audience throwing money and crying out for more. Harrow doesn’t have to share. She gets to have all of Gideon all to herself, and she gets to see this look on her face, anticipation as naked as she is. That’s extraordinary.
Suddenly it seems absurd that Harrow is still partially dressed. She shrugs off her shirt and bra, both hanging loose on her since Gideon undid them, and climbs into the armchair with Gideon. She holds the vibrator in one hand and curls the other around the back of Gideon’s neck while she kisses her. With her mouth, with her whole body, bare skin held against bare skin. It’s so good she doesn’t mind that she’s tasting herself on Gideon’s tongue, spreading her own fluids from Gideon’s face to hers. She doesn’t even mind when Gideon puts her hands on her behind, cupping what little there is to cup, and squeezes gently.
But Harrow didn’t get in the chair to be groped. She’s kneeling between Gideon’s legs, pinning her thighs apart. Without interrupting the kiss, she brushes her hand over the hair covering Gideon’s outer lips, then slips a finger between them. It’s easy, astonishingly so. Gideon is soaking wet and so hot there should be steam rising from between her thighs. She makes a desperate noise, bringing her hands to Harrow’s waist, and Harrow stops kissing her to peer at her face. “How are you so wet already?”
Gideon tries to smirk, but her expression is soft with want. “Might have something to do with having a smoking hot babe attached to my face and moaning my name,” she says. “Or hey, maybe it’s just monsoon season.”
Harrow feels her cheeks flush and hopes it doesn’t show in the gathering darkness. It’s almost full night now, but she can still see Gideon’s face in the ambient light from the street outside her window. That’s important. Seeing Gideon’s face is one of the points of this activity; the other is giving her at least one orgasm.
“Are you ready for me to use this?” Harrow asks, touching Gideon’s thigh with the head of the vibrator.
Gideon shivers. “Literally couldn’t be readier.”
Harrow feels her with a finger once more, making sure she knows where her clit is. She positions the head of the vibrator against it and flips the switch. The loud humming starts again, and Gideon gasps, her body going stiff, her lips and brow contorting in a grimace. Harrow panics for a second, thinking she’s messed up somehow, but when she feels Gideon rock her hips, she realizes it’s a grimace of pleasure, not pain. She can do this. She can be good to Gideon like Gideon is to her.
She follows Gideon’s instructions, pressing the vibrator hard against her for ten or fifteen seconds, then easing up for twice as long. All the time, she’s watching her face. The grimace slackens after the initial shock of sensation, leaving her with a more peaceful look. Her jaw is relaxed, her lips slightly parted, her closed eyes perfect crescents fringed by dark lashes.
Recognition nags at Harrow until she remembers: she looks the same way in sleep, down to the messy hair hanging in her face. This is what her face does when she’s completely off guard, vulnerable. It strikes straight through Harrow’s chest to her heart and melts it like butter on a hot skillet. She’s keenly aware that Gideon’s vulnerability is a gift, and she wants so much to be worthy of it. She wants to love her the way she deserves to be loved.
There’s a ripple in Gideon’s expression, and she gives a whimper so tiny Harrow can barely hear it over the vibrations. “Fuck, Harrow, like that, don’t move,” she says, grabbing the body of the vibrator, covering Harrow’s hand with her own so she won’t lighten the pressure. Her eyes open and fix on Harrow for a moment before she fastens them shut again. It doesn’t take much longer for a shudder to break the tension in her body, for her mouth to open on a deep sigh of completion.
Possessed by something braver than herself, something woken by that sigh and how Gideon’s face blooms in relief, Harrow brings her lips to Gideon’s ear. “That’s it, let go,” she whispers, “come for me, you’re so beautiful.”
Gideon whimpers again, louder. She wraps the arm that’s not wedged between them around Harrow and holds her tight, so tight it would hurt if Harrow were capable of feeling pain right now. But all she can feel is Gideon’s embrace and Gideon’s need. She thrusts with renewed urgency against the vibrator, two, three, four times and then she’s shaking hard, breathing raggedly over Harrow’s neck. Coming again, not a minute after the first time. She’s a wonder.
“Enough?” Harrow asks, and she nods jerkily, chin bumping Harrow’s shoulder. Harrow turns the vibrator off. It goes quiet and the room with it, the only sound Gideon’s pulls and puffs of breath. Harrow kneels, petting Gideon’s hair, until the ache in her knees is intolerable, at which point she shifts to curl on Gideon’s lap. She rests her head on her shoulder and counts the droplets of sweat constellated on her skin.
She thought earlier that she wanted Gideon’s mouth on her forever, but this, she reflects, would be just as fine a way to spend eternity. Both of them satisfied and still, Gideon’s arms around her, Gideon’s nose pressed to the crown of her head. If this were all she could experience for the rest of her life, it would be a fuller life than any she might have led before they knew each other.
It’s through the mist of such romantic thoughts that she hears a gurgle not far from her head, and she looks at Gideon in dismay. Her stomach is growling. “You are hungry,” Harrow accuses her.
She looks innocently back at Harrow. “Yeah, that’s what I said before.”
“I thought you were being euphemistic!”
“I was, but I also didn’t get to eat lunch.”
Harrow groans. “You should’ve told me.”
“And miss what just happened here?” Gideon smiles and shakes her head. “Even I don’t like food that much.”
Harrow sits up and stretches to reach her discarded shirt without getting up. Pinching a sleeve between her middle and forefinger, she reels the shirt in and takes her phone from the breast pocket. “What do you want? I’ll order something.”
“Get me something edible, beyond that I don’t give a single shit.”
Harrow looks up an Italian place on the next block that has pizza Gideon likes and ravioli Harrow doesn’t hate. She places an order, puts down her phone and snuggles against Gideon’s chest. The food should be delivered in twenty-five minutes, which gives Harrow twenty-five minutes to pretend she never has to move from this spot. It’s not enough, but it’ll have to be.
“Harrow,” Gideon says, tracing her spine with a fingertip, “would you do something for me?”
“Mhm,” Harrow agrees.
“Would you help me wash the Sharpie off my ass?”
Harrow snorts, but when she turns her face toward Gideon’s, she sees that she’s serious. So much for not moving until the food’s here. “It’s still there?”
“Well, I only took a quick shower last night, and I think it’s going to take some scrubbing.”
“So you’re asking me to scrub your behind.”
“I’m inviting you to scrub my—” Gideon snorts too, cutting herself off. “I’m sorry, I can’t say it with a straight face.” She arranges said face in a wheedling expression. “Will you say ass one time, for me? It would make my night.”
Harrow glares and Gideon grins, making it hard to be annoyed with her even for saying something so willfully stupid. “How’s this?” Harrow says. She unfolds herself from Gideon’s lap and walks to the bathroom door. “Get your ass in the shower before the food comes, unless you want to be tattooed with a masturbatory injunction for the indefinite future.”
Gideon grins wider as she rises from the chair. “Yes ma’am.”