"I'm sorry," you guys. We have to go home and crash. Diane and I are really wiped out. Our daytime job of waitressing all last weekend and all the excitement of getting our group together has caught up with us," Erin said in an obviously tired tone of voice with evident regret. She was flagging herself and she felt Diane leaning against her shoulder. She didn't need to turn her head to know that her lover's eyelids were drooping.
"Sure. You've gotta do what you have to do," Annabelle answered with generous understanding. Erin's warm smile silently blessed their friends as Simone was obviously of like mind.
"Come on honey," the dark haired woman said with surprising gentleness as she gently hauled her lover to her feet."We're going home for some shuteye." Diane mumbled something with a soft smile on her face although she had just enough presence of mind to deal with their farewells before stumbling up the path to their car.
By the time Erin drove their car homewards, the road felt like rubber and there were moments when her eyelids drooped down and she dreamed she was driving. A sudden shock that she was driving this way gave her a temporary energy boost. However, the soporific feel of the constant hum of the engine, the dark sky, the steady feel of the road they were driving on and the flashing lights tended to drag her back down to the dangerously soft warm comfort zone. She looked sideways at Diane whose body was angled sideways in gentle sleep and fondly thought she was the lucky one. Finally, Erin rounded the last weary turn past the lights of the all night garage, turned off into the familiar side street with the drugstore on the corner next to the takeaway pizza joint. She parked outside their ground floor apartment with the garage cum band rehearsal place at the back of it.
Erin opened the door with a turn of the key and a smart rap on the door frame. The bedsitter that opened up before them was a comfortably untidy physical manifestation of who they were. The internal washing line strung from one side of the room to the other was crowded out with a couple of pairs of jeans, a selection knickers,bras and T-shirts and a couple of Diane's floaty dresses. A settee along the side was cheek by jowl with a rather battered looking cooker and, just visible through the jeans hanging from the line was their double bed with Erin's bass guitar propped in the corner. The DVD player and CD rack held equal pride of place. Everything was purposefully arranged in the apartment to make the most of the space, however haphazard it looked. The two women loved it.
"Shall we take down the washing?"Diane sleepily mumbled, a residual instinct from her houseproud mother rising to the surface.
"Leave it, sweetheart. It won't come to any harm or attack us," Erin nonchalantly reasoned, neatly salving Diane's conscience.
The two women threw off their clothes and tumbled into bed together. They loved the feeling of moments like these. Tonight, waves of tiredness ran through their systems and they passed up on the stray impulse to make love and they drifted off into peaceful, fulfilled sleep.
Waking up in the morning ought to have been for Erin the slow, delicious feeling inside Erin that her beloved was only a finger width away from her, that she could reach out and touch her lover's naked skin anytime she wanted. In her sleepy haze, she attempted to do just that and transform her desires into reality – only to make contact with empty sheets. That woke up Erin properly and her blinking eyes looked wildly around for her lover. With a measure of relief, she saw her silhouetted by the early morning sun streaming in, her back turned away from her as she sat at the cheap dining table, apparently writing away. This puzzled Erin as this wasn't Diane's normal habits but she put one step forward after the other to discover what this all signified. The blond haired woman turned round to give Erin a reassuring smile as she got close. The glimpse of her shape looked good to Erin as her lover turned back to the scribbled pages, including crossings out.
"I had these words going round in my head while I was asleep. I had to write them down and they started something," Diane explained, kissing Erin on her lips.
"Makes sense to me, honey,"Erin said reassuringly as she kissed her lover's bent shoulder. The sigh that escaped the blond-haired woman's shapely lips mingled relief with pleasure.
"Stay with me while I finish off. I like you around me."
Erin dragged the other lightweight plastic chair, looking on at the creation of this poem, a sweet and loving creation. It had a sense of rhythm as she silently spoke the words and the repeated payoff line felt good. Suddenly an alternative explanation for Diane's creativity crossed her mind. Finally, she put her pen down and eased herself onto Erin's lap, her long slim arms slipping round her. She gave the smaller woman a long deep lingering kiss.
"There's something I want us to do before we make love. Just bear with me. You still got that acoustic guitar of yours?"
"I think I can dig it out even though I'm a shit guitar player," smiled Erin.
"Then that's OK as you sing better than me," laughed Diane, throwing her head back, her hair being swept back. She looked particularly gorgeous to Erin right then, both of them comfortable in their nakedness round each other.
Ten minutes after sorting through the rubbish in the cubby hole, Erin was sitting on the sofa dressed with the guitar which she fumbled out retuning it. Finally, her face brightened and she looked expectantly at her lover who swallowed a mouthful of water from the glass and sat facing her on the plastic chair, looking especially ravishing. However, Erin cocked her ears for the way she started singing the song, lightly slapping the table to feel the rhythm of the song within her. Her voice sounded hesitant, unsure but
Erin instantly picked out the root chords in her head and this sounded good to her.
"Play, goddamn it," laughed Diane, breaking off after finishing the first chorus, having expected her lover to intuit the song she was shaping with her voice.
"You take it from the top honey and I'll back you,"Erin enthusiastically answered her.
Feeling more confident, Erin strummed out the opening chords, the thin metal strings feeling uncomfortable and Diane felt came in sketching out the song more comfortably this time. Both of them started to feel Simone and Annabelle's kindly support for their effort as they worked their way through the song. Finally, as they finished the chorus, Erin put down the guitar and started shaking her left hand. The thin metal strings has made her finger ends hurt like hell.
"Oh your poor hand," Diane exclaimed sympathetically." Have you been disabled for life? It's all because I got obsessed about our song."
Erin grinned wickedly as she ran her hand under the kitchen tap. She knew what her lover was getting at. She knew that Diane wouldn't be disappointed at what she had in mind
"The song's lovely. We'll show it to Simone and Annabelle and they'll love it too."
"And now gorgeous, I want to take you to bed."
A delicious jolt coursed through Erin's nervous system as the edge in Diane's soft voice connected with something vital in her. It wasn't often that Diane made the first move but this was just the way that events unfolded. This morning after crashing out for nine hours solid, they felt especially attuned towards each other as they woke up to a bright new day. Diane placed the smaller woman's short, square hand in the slim fingers of her own right hand, softly and lovingly kissed her and led her in the direction of their dishevelled bed. She gently laid the smaller woman down, her long blond hair falling loosely on Erin's face and their bodies instinctively moved into each other. The deep friendship between the two women whose personalities fitted together so seamlessly became overlain by their blossoming desires for each other where nothing lay between each other in their glorious nakedness. The two women kissed each others' lips, their faces, their necks while the slim fingers of Diane's right hand gradually sought out her lover's intimate places. Erin was in seventh heaven at the feeling of being pleasured as her legs were bent double and wide open to the skies and her arms were wrapped around her lover's back. Finally, the blond-haired woman's fingertips reluctantly abandoned the feel of her lover's rounded breasts and sought the centre of her desires. She loved the way that Erin set herself up to be made love to in a perfectly unselfconscious manner. Finally, Erin gave out a gasp as those prized fingers slid inside her and started coaxing her towards orgasm and took her time to extract every ounce of pleasure within her. This was the life she had always dreamed of in being with a woman who was so compatible with her. It hadn't always been that way as her natural appearance had given immature women entirely the wrong idea about her...
"You're really patient and understanding. You could have wondered what in hell I was doing but you had respect for my early morning burst of weird inspiration," Diane murmured in her lover's ear an hour or so later as Erin lay across her.
"As soon as I read what you were doing, I got really interested. It put my libido temporarily on hold. Only temporarily," laughed Erin, lazily stroking a long lock of hair off her lover's face as she lay on her side, leaning on her elbow.
"That's all right. Everything's all right,"murmured Diane contentedly, turning her head on her side. The patterns of sunlight that shone in through the front widow cast interesting shadows and contrasting lightness and darkness and varying colours. Only an occasional car passed down their side street and everything was peaceful.
"Do you really think Simone and Annabelle will like our song?" Diane asked anxiously at last out of the long silence.
"Honey, do you have a special reason they won't?" counter-questioned Erin as gently as she could put it."It's not forbidden for drummers to write songs. They're not time machines. They have feelings like anyone else."
Erin could feel her lover's momentary tension immediately dissipate."You've read my thoughts, right."
"That's what I'm here for. Don't worry as Annabelle's great. She has definite ideas but she won't shut anyone out who wants to help. I know you're a bit overawed by Simone, college educated and a teacher but she's a lovely woman. She's definitely not one of those women who are up her own ass. She's very calm and takes everything in her stride."
"She must be in her early thirties but she doesn't act that way, I mean in the nicest possible way," mused Diane."I mean she and Annabelle are so suited and they're mature women."
"Do you regret splitting from that last group we were in? I felt like I was expected to be a rhythm machine, the same shit every night. The other women were way too uptight for my liking. I might as well have been on some car production line. That's no life for us, kid," Erin said with the kind of infinite tenderness that Diane knew so well that lay behind her lover's exterior.
"You've got it. I just want us to add anything we've got to help and be ready for what our friends come up with. The dream group, finally,"sighed Diane with a feeling of infinite peace as she lay on her back, watching the strange lines and perspectives their washing made as they looked up at it.
"We make good music on stage as well as in bed," laughed Erin softly into her ear and a soft wide smile spread across Diane's face in agreement. She was thinking of the way they made music together. Both knew that her slim frame contained surprising strength so that, when she sat on her drum stool, her legs and arms moved in coordinated rhythm to lay down that interlocking layer of percussion, from the deepest sounds of her bass drum to the whooshing sounds from her cymbals. Erin always stood to the side of her, hunched up over her own bass guitar but her senses were attuned to the propulsive rhythm her lover kicked out and this provided the backbone to whatever they were playing. Once they started playing with Simone and Annabelle, they were entranced to realise that they were freed up to contribute to their friend's songs. They were conscious of the one and only rule in 'Creation' that never needed to be spelt out as it was so obvious and right. From their perspective, they were politely asked if their underpinning to the song sounded right and did they want to chip in something different. There was a sense of collective leadership so that no one was left out. Now they were going one step better and contributing a song to their growing repertoire and they knew that this would be fine by Annabelle and Simone as only four women who played music together could know each other this way.