Beth looked down at her, with her soft brown hair scattered on the pillow. Her eyes were very green in the rosy light and her skin was very fair. Beth caught her hands, pulling them gently away from her breasts and kissing the palms. And then Nina took them back to slip out of her own pajamas. Beth watched her in silence, letting things happen as if she had no will to stop them; she didn’t even try.
Nina wriggled out of the bottoms and threw them on the floor, at the same time pushing the covers off her body with a couple of long quick thrusts of her legs. Suddenly, almost unexpectedly, for Beth was not well prepared for anything that happened that night, Nina was lying beautifully naked beneath her, her fine legs crossed at the ankles, her sharp restless eyes searching Beth’s.
Beth looked away and said in a low voice, “Do you want a yokel like me to make love to you? I don’t know what I’m doing, Nina. I’ll disappoint you.”
“You couldn’t, honey. Try it.”
“You mean, in the mood you’re in, nobody could disappoint you.” Beth gave a sad little laugh. “It just happens I’m the one who’s with you.”
“In the mood I’m in, nobody could touch me but you.” Beth felt the smooth tingling drift of a hand over her back underneath the loosened pajamas. She bore it for a moment in silence and then, with a little groan, she struggled out of the tops, nearly tearing them in her hurry. She turned on Nina, leaning over her and bending nearer until her weight rested partly on her, and then she kissed her and a flash of pleasure, as sharp and dreadful as a sword, impaled her. She had wanted to tell Nina, “Don’t laugh at me. Don’t make me feel clumsier than I am. I think I could kill you for that.” But there had been no time and now there was no need.
Nina, for once, was not laughing. She was spread beneath Beth like a carpet of warm silk. She moved with her, she murmured to her, she was as absorbed as Beth was in the fantastic luxury of sexual pleasure. When she tried to pull away a little Beth caught her from behind and kissed her bare neck and shoulders, her fingers pressed around Nina’s lovely breasts and their legs entangled. Nina was surprised at the strength she felt in Beth’s arms, and let herself be pushed back down on the bed with a sigh of ecstasy.
Nina showed Beth things that night that Beth never dreamed existed. “I’m going to do things to you you never even heard of,” she whispered, and she did. With her mouth, her fingers, the warm tickle of her breath, she called up feelings in Beth that had never been there before. She made Beth aware of parts of her body, her own familiar comfortable body that she thought she knew so well, that Beth had never discovered for herself. A thousand sensual subtleties were revealed to Beth in Nina’s arms: all the tricks and caprices of a lovely body, all the scented shapes, the astonishing joy of uncontrollable physical reactions, the enormous force of a woman’s ecstasy flowing unfocused through her whole body, claiming her absolutely and reverberating in her for hours after the act of love.
Beth kissed Nina with a hungry mouth, amazed at her own appetite, at how much it took to satisfy her. She would settle against Nina, holding her in her arms and thinking now sleep would come. And she would half doze off for a while and then shift her weight a little and the mere feel of Nina’s hair brushing her face, or a length of perfumed leg, would jolt her desire to the surface.
“Nina,” she murmured wildly once in the night, “am I exhausting you?”
“No,” Nina whispered. “You surprise me but you don’t exhaust me.”
And once Beth tried to recall if it had been this way with Laura, if it had been this good, or if it could be. There wasn’t any reason for anything to be so beautiful. After what she had done, after what she had been through, Beth could hardly believe this was happening to her at all. It seemed as if all her days were fated to be gray and worried, all her nights empty and tragic. And now suddenly she was incredibly happy. There was no time to wonder whether the happiness was purely physical. She didn’t stop to think about her ambivalent feelings for Nina, about how Nina might look in the daylight, with irony in her air again and sarcasm on her lips. There was no daylight, no night, no time, nothing but that moment on the bed with Nina in her arms. Beth was unable to think ahead or to care what happened.
Nina’s voice came softly out of the dawn to her. “You’re gay, Beth,” she said positively.
“I know.” It came as a wild wonderful relief, just to know for sure after years of tormented wondering.
Nina stroked her cheek with one finger. “What was her name?” she asked.
After a long pause Beth answered her. “Laura.”
Nina smiled. “Good,” she said. “I don’t know any Lauras.”
Beth felt a small stab of dismay. And then she wondered if Nina could conceivably be jealous now, unwilling to share Beth, unwilling to reveal anything she might happen to know. Beth considered Nina’s curious incapacity for friendship. Nina might be able to come close to her as a lover but never as a friend. She might even learn to love Beth for a little while, but she could never like her and it would never last.
“You know what you’d be if you let yourself go?” Nina said playfully into her ear. “You’d be a butch. You’d cut your hair
