A/N: This chapter started off as one and turned into three...it's a lot of backstory and a bit experimental but hopefully you guys like the glimpse deeper into Piper's head...tw: it does include teenagers doing the things undersupervised teenagers tend to do (sexual exploration, underage drinking, inappropriate crushes)
I was doing everything I could to resist the urge to pace and scream in an empty apartment as I wondered why I let her go out with Nicky.
One last legendary night out. I knew she needed it. Diane knew. Both my friends and ours knew. Hers demanded she come out just one last time before she joined the still relatively new legion of party gays fleeing Manhattan for suburbs and matrimony. But where were they at 12:30 in the morning?
Not standing here with the words, "I'll be home by midnight" ringing through their ears and a red-lipped kiss stinging on their lips from six hours before.
"You can come," she had stated in her cool yet affectionate way with her eyes locked in mine and burning with passion as she turned the word come into a sonata all its own.
"No, this is about you," I had replied as I swore all I wanted to do was hang out in a pair of her worn-out sweatpants and an oversized hoodie, the last thing I wanted to do was squeeze my pregnant self into a dress worthy of a Manhattan club and the heels such an outfit necessitated. I was exhausted and wanted to enjoy my wedding the next afternoon. I knew I could have a night of fun or do the grown-up thing and get some rest before I married my daughters' mother to protect the bond that the three of them already shared.
Alex had clung to her singlehood for nearly four decades. She had never imagined getting married and here we were, supposed to be getting married in ten hours.
Celeste had invited Diane and Geo to join her in her hotel suite near Central Park, "to give the girls one last night alone before marriage," my grandmother had told my soon to be mother-in-law and the woman who was quickly becoming my best friend. I wasn't always sure that was a good thing either but she understood me in a way nobody else, not even her daughter, did.
Here I was wondering where Alex was. Was some girl underneath her? Did she have some girl shoved against a wall in an alley outside a noisy bar? Did she have some girl propped on a sink or toilet and her head between her legs? Or had she pushed a head between her own legs because her pregnant lover was incapable of performing her role as lover to her complete satisfaction? Had she found some girl who prettier and fucking was less complicated? Where was she but more importantly where were those perfect lips if they weren't on mine?
Our lives had become so intertwined. How could they not? I gave up everything I had once been to chase her. I had put all my trust in her. I knew I was playing a high-stakes game but that didn't stop me from continuously raising the stakes just a little more. As I felt the heaviness low and deep in my abdomen, I knew the stakes couldn't get any higher than they were at this moment. Caring for one baby I could handle but I only had two hands and was about to have three children. I was horribly outnumbered but I loved my children beyond words, even if two of the three were completely unplanned.
I had never been more scared as I sat on the bed that I shared with the woman I loved. I had never felt more alone as the blackness of our dark apartment settled around me while dark memories from a past that she hadn't been a part of flooding into my head.
I was at about this point in my pregnancy with Geo when I told Larry, "I'm pregnant." He, of course, had the gall to ask, "Is it mine," like it could have been anyone else's baby. I was a lot of things but I wasn't a cheater. If I was in a relationship then I was with that person until the wheels came off but when I wasn't then I kissed whoever, whenever. I found people and their bodies and the responses my lips could elicit from them invigorating. I didn't need alcohol or ecstasy the high was so good. Not that I didn't use both, in addition to dabbling in other drugs throughout my adolescence and young adulthood.
I loved girls, the softness and the innate knowledge of one another and our psyches. I loved being the object of desire for a woman who had the strength and confidence I wished I had. I also hated them for the same reason. I liked that girls realized a woman's erogenous zones were not limited to that expanse between our legs. That penetration was nice but it wasn't a requirement for orgasm. Plus, girls didn't need to wait for their arousal to rebuild post-orgasm and didn't get flaccid before I got mine when there was penetration with a phallic object involved in our sexual activities.
I chose the boys who were like human puppies without realizing puppies grew into dogs and there were no guarantees as to the dog you would get. But I enjoyed the attention from boys and their muscular bodies. They fucked because it was what they were hardwired to do. I had been told I was hardwired to carry babies as if enjoyable sex wasn't supposed to be a part of that. And I enjoyed it or at least I learned to. I liked it when he'd get hard from hearing the moans of pleasure he would elicit from rubbing my clit while we were spooning and I would end up with him inside me while his rough hands roamed my body and made it clear I was all the pleasure that he needed. That my pleasure mattered to him. But those moments had also resulted in multiple pregnancy scares and possibly an actual pregnancy that I liked to call Geo. Add one more advantage to my earlier list of reasons why girl cocks are superior to boy dicks.
During my last two years at Smith, I had become increasingly interested in girls and less interested in going up to Amherst for parties with boys. I was fine with staying in Northampton where the girls were and go to cool underground queer parties far from anywhere my friends would venture. I would drink, dance and get to second and sometimes even third base but never let them fuck me, even when both our bodies were ripe with hunger for each other. I resisted. I had not allowed myself to fall. I was just allowing myself a moment of freedom before finding a man who could both please me and offer me social acceptance. I knew I could live as a straight woman and be happy, I just had to get some things out of my system first. I wanted to enjoy everything the world had to offer. I knew that I could still live a normal life where I talked about shopping, makeup and boyfriends. I could still know how it felt to fall in love, get married and bear a child that was a mix of both his parents. I was safe.
Even when I didn't correct someone who called me a lesbian and I said yes to dates where the other girl paid as our hands met over the check before she kissed me in the relative safety of a Northampton restaurant frequented by Smith students with their queer haircuts, flannel, and combat boots. I brought girls home and let me take me home where we would rub our clothed bodies together on couches or one of our beds. I didn't do anything with boys from age twenty to twenty-two and the longer I went without feeling a guy's hard body against my softer, leaner one the less I craved it. I didn't miss it. I told my parents I was concentrating on school in hopes of going to graduate school instead of going up to Amherst to meet boys. This made my father happy and my mother concerned that I was doing yet another thing that would reduce my marriageability and opportunity for motherhood, as if I didn't still have twenty years of fertility left, and moved to New York City fully intending to work for a year and then apply for graduate school. It's hilarious now but I actually had my eye on NYU.
But of course, that story got derailed when I met Larry and there was something about his lost puppy dog look and geeky hipster demeanor that was so simple at a time in my life when everything had been so complex, so complicated. When I was searching for something familiar in a new world, one I was truly alone in for the first time.
Larry's fingers under my dress, pulling down my underwear as he pushed me against his bedroom wall without asking a million questions first. He did what he wanted to my body when he wanted to and I allowed him to take the lead, I wanted it.
And that night, it was a welcome change. He pushed me down on the bed and pushed my skirt up as high as he could, completely uninterested in my breasts, which were longing to be touched, which girls always went for first. It was as if he was in a rush to defuse a bomb before it exploded and there was no time for little things like getting undressed. This was merely about aroused body parts crashing together. I knew I should be more careful, that I had so many other things to do and we hadn't properly discussed going from merely seeing each other in public to the bedroom. Did I like him sexually or was I merely aroused and he happened to be nearby with a hard cock that I found particularly alluring? As he undid his belt and pushed his jeans down to his knees then he knelt before me on the bed, I reminded myself this was what I wanted, simple and uncomplicated boy-girl sex with a guy who had just told me he was in love with me. But was I in love with him? Feeling like I was in love with someone had always followed a sexual act of some sort for me, so maybe I would know after we did the deed. I told myself that was it, I needed to sleep with him and then I'd know if I loved him.
He pushed my legs open and without looking between them, mounted me and grabbed my lip in his teeth as he rubbed his hard body against mine and started pushing his way inside me. It quickly became apparent that something felt different and it wasn't just that it had been a few years since I had sex with a guy as the head of his dick suddenly made its way inside me. I pushed him off as he kept trying to push forward, deepening his kisses and soft touches. I finally gained control and demanded, "condom. Stop. Larry, no. Please don't, we barely know each other." He replied, "You really must be new to the City. All the girls are on the pill. I don't even think I have any. It's not like you're a virgin anyway. There's no way you used a condom every time. Besides isn't there like one day a month you can get pregnant? And even if it did happen, you don't have to keep it. I would sit beside you at the clinic and even pay for the whole procedure," He declared as if those were the magic words to gain full access to my deepest places, the ones no one else had ever conquered. How romantic, just what every modern New York City twentysomething junior career woman wanted, a man who she out-earns by double willing to pay for her abortion, never imagining she might choose one of the other two options such a woman would have before her. The red flags were there and I saw them but kept going anyway because I wanted the love of a man so desperately and I confused him for one.
Instead of leaving and never contacting him again once he showed his assholey true colors like I should have done I swallowed his dick when he really didn't deserve it. I went to Planned Parenthood and started taking the Pill after going over my options. I hated every minute of it and he knew it but I kept taking them so that he could cum inside me freely. And when he asked me to move in six months later, it seemed like the logical next step in our relationship. Sure, it was soon but when his dick was flaccid, he was the sweetest guy I had ever met. He lived in a free-floating world of dreams that reminded me not to cling too hard to my routine or need to run the world. I loved the way he would smile, the way he would grasp my hand and kiss my cheek on the sidewalk. It was everything I had ever wanted. He loved me and I was beginning to love him. He was full of ideas and every day with him was different. He had a vigor for life and a desire for creative expression that I very much shared. Besides, it was what young Brooklynites did when they had a real boyfriend and two decent sources of income. We no longer fucked, we made love, the sex was slower and softer. He became the same thoughtful man I loved when we walked down the street in the bedroom. I had found a man who I loved, who I could introduce to my parents and wanted me to meet his. I could walk down the street with him and go to weekend BBQs together without worrying about who might show up. Still, I couldn't stop noticing women and they couldn't stop noticing me.
We were the cute young couple that adults gushed over and our friends admired. All my friends wanted to find a Larry and all his wanted to find a Piper. Maybe we were a bit too Bohemian for my WASPy family and their friends but even they admitted we were a great match. Except we had nothing in common.
But Larry didn't want to propose, well not marriage anyway. He wanted to throw out the pills and condoms that I had convinced him to use when the chart told me I was ovulating. He had overheard me telling Polly that the doctor told me because of where my BMI was at that unless I quit marathon training and put on a little weight around the middle then I wasn't likely to ever conceive a child. I had told her as an attempt to start a discussion about what a pig he was but of course, Polly's idea of a hard workout was hot yoga and advanced Pilates. She suggested I ditch the running instead of the man so I could have a kid the easy way. Not that we knew anyone who had been through IVF. Or either of us aspired to be mothers.
I wasn't about to let anything get between me and the sound of pine needles and leaves crunching underneath my running shoes and the feeling of the wind against my skin. I listened as he made his argument and I sat there, too worried about not being seen as a proper upper-middle class heterosexual young lady I knew I was. Again, instead of throwing my drink in his face and storming out, I didn't. I agreed as long as we used protection on my fertile days. I stuffed down my anger at being one of those chicks good enough to make out with or fuck or even have a kid for but I wasn't the girl anybody ever wanted a real commitment with behind tequila and white wine. I tried to remind myself that I didn't even want to be married, not then, not ever. The other side of me knew that was the highest level of being wanted by another person and I wanted to call myself somebody's wife. I truly believed that person also had to have a dick that came in the original box and wasn't detachable. I knew I would never meet another man as sweet, creative and sensitive as Larry, even if he wasn't an amazing lover. He was trainable and he wanted to make me happy.
I knew Larry could be a great father, he had such a gentle soul. Except, I had no actual proof and he had never shown any interest in children. In fact, every shred of evidence suggested he loathed their presence in public places. He was one of those guys who thought women should keep their bumps out of sight and not breastfeed in public. We would be sitting on a patio in Williamsburg having Sunday brunch and he would comment about how couples with children should stay at home on a Sunday morning and never bring their kids to a restaurant, especially if they were too young to consume anything other than breast milk. And at the time, everything I had been taught by my mother, aunts and older women agreed with his opinion so I did too. I went along with it, hoping one day he would realize that I was the one for him as I was sure he was for me. That when it was our cooing baby in the stroller or our baby crying for milk while we roamed the grocery store aisles it would be different.
But of course, it wasn't. Our baby was the most detestable of all babies and he didn't even like to watch me breastfeed on our couch or bring him into bed to feed. He'd grumble and stomp out of the room when I recognized our newborn's hunger cry and pulled my breast out of my shirt, if he said anything, he said I had National Geographic titties now and it was gross.
Then when I was left broken and completely certain I would forever be unlovable this unreal woman I wouldn't have dared to dream in my wildest fantasies came along and swooped me up.
For the first time, I didn't feel like a girl but like a woman. I wasn't unfeminine anymore, just feminine in my own way. To one person I wasn't imperfect or unlovable or anything else I wrongly believed in the depths of my soul. She never mentioned my tits or muscles. That probably wasn't out of any chivalry or gentlelady ness but because her tongue was usually too busy making love to one of those two things to talk.
And now she was somewhere in the City with some sexy redhead who was curvier than me, more womanly looking and who had an unspoiled vagina. Some girl who was more her type. Who was I to think I would ever be the girl anyone gave their name to? That I would ever be marriage material. I was the girl you fooled around with and if anything happened then it wasn't your problem, it was mine. I was the one who would have been told that she should have been more careful or kept her legs closed or not gone out dressed like that. Whatever happened to my vagina or inside my womb was solely my fault. And I couldn't say I didn't know exactly what I was doing. I was a naïve little lamb but I wasn't ever that naïve.
From the first time playing spin the bottle in fifth grade to the summer before eighth when the game became seven minutes in heaven courtesy of the beginning onset of male puberty, the boys didn't know how it worked just that kissing girls and thinking about boobs got them aroused. I knew exactly what I was doing, even if I didn't know what it was called, the first time I made the bottle land on a girl who I thought was cute and I had heard thought I was cute too. Her name was Addison. She was a little older with long dark hair always pulled into a neat ponytail. At twelve and a half, her body had already begun to blossom into that of a full-fledged woman while I was still waiting and praying for tits and hips. As if God rather than science were in control of what my body was destined to look like as an adult. She had beautiful hazel-green eyes and full lips. She never wore a drop of makeup and never needed to; teenage acne somehow had, as yet, completely escaped her despite her also being on the soccer team, in addition to field hockey.
"We don't have to do anything," she declared once the dog whistles of mostly eleven to thirteen-year-old boys and gasps from the mostly twelve-year-old girls died down. I just walked over to the coat closet and turned my head with fire in my eyes until I saw her follow. She shut the door and reiterated her line and added, "You know what they call me. Is that what you want? You're not gay. You are the blonde haired-blue eyed ideal who marries a rich man and gets fake tits and spends her days at lunches and salons while her kids are raised by tutors and nannies. While I move out West where it never snows and nobody calls me a lesbo."
"I like the snow," I argued before smiling and running my hand along her jaw, "and I like you. Why can't I like both? Maybe I'm not gay. I admit I'm probably not. I like kissing boys and getting them turned on. I don't know what I am. I'm not sure I give a damn about finding out. I just want to be free to do whatever I want, whenever I want. But I know what I want and I want to kiss you. I don't care if people talk. You know nobody will believe it. I'm supposed to want that life but I can't stop thinking I'm destined for something greater. I want to get an athletic scholarship to a women's college and then move to Manhattan and take a bite out of the Big Apple. I want to be the CEO of a startup that helps raise women up. I want something more exciting than the hollow lives of our mothers. I don't think I'll ever want to be somebody's mother, to have some man's baby and no matter how in love or serious we are, it doesn't mean I don't love him or that I'm an evil, selfish woman."
"You can be whoever you want. You are so beautiful and gifted. I mean I'd prefer to have you on my team but if you aren't, you aren't, you can't force it. You are going to grow into such a strong and powerful woman, I can already tell. So what do they look like anyway," she asked with a certain familiar adolescent curiosity that I wasn't used to seeing on someone who possessed a set of her own. I didn't say a word. Instead, I pulled off my tank top and watched her eyes scanned my bare skin. I could tell she had at least been expecting a trainer bra but found herself face to face with the tiny buds poking out from my chest.
"Maybe you aren't as straight as all the girls think," she whispered as she palmed my breast, her thumb rubbing across my nipple while she rubbed the soft flesh with an expertise I wasn't used to. I soon felt a current surge through me at this new form of contact and I let out a low moan I had never heard before. When boys had touched my breasts, it had always been about them and getting to momentarily peer at the forbidden fruit and get a sense of boobs in the flesh for themselves. It was a thing of curiosity about something they didn't have like when I would look at their boy parts, the hanging flesh between their legs that made them discernibly male. I found it alluring and liked how it felt when I could feel it get excited when it rubbed against me when we danced or kissed. I liked when it came alive from a boy's gaze on my body. I wasn't sure I wanted anything more to do with it but I figured that would come once womanhood settled in a little more, when it went from curiosity about the opposite sex and crushes on baby faced boys to falling in love with a man. Girls were supposed to give in to the normalcy and security only a man could offer. Besides, it wasn't like I felt nothing for boys or didn't find their physiques alluring.
I was lost in my thoughts and how the things she was doing affected me when I heard her whisper, "You wanna go to a real party after we get out of here? Mitzi's parents are out of town and her parents told her she could have a sleepover as long as it was only girls."
"Mitzi is the biggest dyke in our class," I responded through ragged breathing as her hands moved down my rib cage and to my jutting hipbones. I felt myself opening, ready to receive her hand between my legs. As if on instinct, I began rubbing my legs together not knowing why other than messages my nervous system was delivering my brain. Being with this girl and the things she was making me feel and do was so natural to me. I didn't need anyone to tell me what to do, I had an innate knowledge of what my body needed at that moment. Her hands roamed my abs as mine snuck under her shirt and felt her silk bra.
"Wow, even you know that," she gasped as I lost touch with my physical body and its motions.
"Uhm, I spend most of my time in between books and the field. Trust me, the girls I hang with off the field have no clue," I answered as her fingers rubbed along my shorts. Was this how I was going to lose my virginity? If I lost my virginity to a girl would I ever have a normal life? Or would I be forever spoiled and undesirable to boys? Where was the line that made a pretty blonde-haired blue-eyed girl too masculine and sexually undesirable? Would a boy ever want me or would the guys take it as proof to the rumors that the Chapman girl was a hairy-pitted, full bush feminist dyke, the kind of freak who only liked dicks if they were fake? Of course, at twelve I didn't know about some of the more horrific things dudes thought about lesbians and the power of their erections. I didn't know some guys found lesbians more attractive, not less. Yet, I already knew all I needed was the right man to prove to me that girls like Addison and Mitzi, definite full-fledged lesbians even in middle school, were neither like nor for me. I didn't not like dicks, they just weren't anything particularly special, at least not as special as guys thought they were. And I desperately wanted to know what it felt like to have a boy ask you to the dance over every other girl in school, to steal kisses during passing periods and take me down to the make-out spot. I wanted to be wanted. I wanted to know real love. And right now, even if it wasn't the way I had imagined throughout my girlhood, I was wanted by someone I very much desired for the first time.
"So, do you wanna? We could make these seven minutes last a little longer," she asked softly as her eyes checked out my sporty tomboyish frame that had barely begun to blossom into womanhood.
"Would it be like a date," I asked unsure if I wanted my first one-on-one date to be with a girl, even though I had just seriously considered allowing this girl to be the first to explore all of me, to stretch open my most sensitive, as yet unexplored and unseen places.
"Doesn't have to be. I mean I'd like it to be but I'm starting to think you're right, you don't belong here in some basement with a bunch of straight kids who will lead boring lives and settle into either their father's jobs or, more likely, the family's creative eccentric. C'mon, I'll vouch for you. We'll say you're questioning or you could try on a label for the night, whatever you want to do and I will support you. Nobody will say anything, at least not in the group I run with but there are girls who think it's their duty to out other girls," she asserted and I knew she really liked me as much as I liked her. She wasn't just curious to see how boobs looked or to practice for a girl she actually wanted, no she was totally into me.
"I'm an athlete. If I couldn't play at the elite level it would be worse than death. That's one of the few things I've chosen to be, that I like being. Soccer and running are everything to me," I told her as I clung to the only remaining reason to say no.
"I'll keep you safe and keep those girls away and maybe someday there will be a national women's soccer team with more lesbians than straight girls. And they'll kiss when they win like everybody else," she answered as her hand ran along my jaw and she pressed her lips to mine.
"Maybe someday there will even be a team romance for the ages," I added in an attempt to ramp up the fantasy created between two preteen queer female athletes who were limited to a couple of tennis stars from our parents' generation. The greatest player there had ever been in our sport so far was a straight woman and as far we knew so was the rest of her national team. The thought that the one who would take up the reins next being a proud queer woman was incomprehensible in that small closet in suburban Connecticut at the dawn of the Millennium.
"A baby dyke can dream. C'mon, let's blow this lame-ass party. There are better ways to spend a Saturday night then trying to figure out why dicks get hard and how to navigate braces when you want to kiss the opposite sex," she asserted. Figuring her out and what made seemingly normal, feminine, talented blonde girls go after each other seemed way more fun.
"You're right, what's the worst thing that could happen?"
"You hook up with a chick who isn't me? Down the road, you marry a chick and have her babies? You do something with your potential and make your mother unhappy?"
We left and walked to the party, I had never really been to a party, plenty of preteen basement gatherings and someone would swipe a bottle from parents who either didn't notice or didn't care. Nobody really liked the burn of the alcohol but the effect was worth it. At Mitzi's party, the girls were older and the alcohol sweeter. Girls were dancing and skinny dipping in a pool full of floating inflatable animals and colorful rings underneath the moonlight. Everything about this party was sexy and alluring. These girls knew what they wanted and how to get it, they had already found themselves and how sexuality worked, unlike the kids in the basement who didn't quite know how to tell a member of the opposite sex, "I like you" or "I think you're pretty" or felt they needed practice for the real thing. These girls, on the other hand, could go up to another girl and run her fingers down her abdomen and say, "wanna fuck" at thirteen or fourteen years old. I both wanted to be and be with those girls with their confidence that was only matched by their curves. They possessed a maturity and self-assurance that drew me in like the moths to the porch lights that night. But like Cinderella, the ball ended and my carriage turned into a pumpkin, except there was no princess searching for the owner of a lost glass slipper.
