The first time I fell in love with a girl, I was nineteen.
There have been other loves, tight friendships that revolve around heart necklace chains, each holding the half of the other – sweet baby friendship bracelets woven with intricate care and affection, lodged together on wrists throughout the summers, leaving tan lines. We sometimes swapped them to our ankles and hid them under our white socks to avoid the detection of the teachers. Even simple silver chain were banned, earrings that were not solid studs, definitely not the hair wraps we had woven to the tender new hair on the napes of our necks, tucked into ponytails and whisperings of who was best friend with who, so much more important that a crush, then a boy. The girls were everything.
But we are older now and this girl is different. Together we are a hurricane. We had been teenagers and full of spite and longing and carefree fuck-yous. I am older by just 2 weeks but she is taller, the yin to my yang. Dark hair, tall, blue blue eyes and even her railway track braces which she has until she is sixteen seem joyous and flash mischief.
We are joined at the hip. She is dating my boyfriend’s best friend. It is perfection. We can size each other up and compare notes without picking up the phone. We share boxes of condoms and sex tips, clumsily figuring out what is allowed and frowned upon as we emerge from our girlish bodies into womanhood. Do you fuck on your period? What happens to the tampon? What if he won’t wear a condom, can you get pregnant on your period or not? If you do it in a pool does that make it less likely to get an STI? In the pool? All that chlorine? Do you wax or shave? How many boys makes you a slut?
She is wild the way I am wild. Our early friendship marked by stealing her father’s cigarettes and drinking her mother’s whiskey, we climbed over walls in the middle of the night and hitchhiked to the club and back laughing like hyenas. We replace the lyrics to songs with filthy alternatives and relay them at volume in the coffee shops in the malls that we stalk like panthers. We steal money and clothes and drugs with abandon. We are obnoxious and insufferable and generally shitty to everyone who is not us.
Now we are older, we get better at not getting caught. We are twin flames, she is Mallory to my Mickey, Thelma to my Louise, Nancy to my Sid. We swap clothes, and make up and boys with abandon. I am obsessed. We write each other long achingly tender letters and fill our diaries up with secret languages and code names for everyone. We have our own world.
The first time we kiss it’s a dare from the boys at the over 21 club we are sneaking into, underage, but ushered in because the owner has a taste for watching younger girls get high and fall around in midriff tops and low slung jeans. We stay away from him but give enough skin to ensure he doesn’t ask us for ID. We know the bouncers by name. They don’t search our pockets and they give us discount on entry.
When we kiss we are surrounded by our peers, a spotlight lit from the dancefloor, a glitterball of sequins and the woozy rushes of chemicals hitting our blood streams.
That kiss opens up something in me, an unfurling. So soft compared to the boys with their stubble and rough tongues that are incessant, impatient in their need. She is not. She takes her time, her lips seeking out a sweetness in mine that I hadn’t known was there. The whooping of the boys fading out to the background. I find I want to touch her in ways that hadn’t occurred to me before. And before I can bring my hands to follow my mind's instruction, it's over. I turn my head and start kissing another girl, blonde and tall and athletic, she’s too tentative, unsure – and not mine. Not the way my best girl is mine.
Dizzy from the kiss, and the strobe light and the drugs, I am passed to my boyfriend, who takes me straight to his car, already unzipping, already hard, cock straining against his jeans. He fucks me with the passenger car door open, pushed down on the back seat. My sequin mini dress bunched up, underwear around my ankles. He pistons into me, breath ragged, the way that young men fuck. Quick and hard and needy.
Did you like kissing those girls babe? Look what you did to me. Fuck you looked so hot
I groan thinking about her. Her eyes wide and surprised. Her hands on my lower back. The way she smelled, tasted, rum and coke and bubblegum. He grunts his cum into me, the leather seats slick with our sweat and everything else.
Later, me and my best girl will be lying in my bed, still wired and bright eyed. This ritual of debriefing after the party, we share the most intimate secrets and fears and wants. We are in our underwear, this is nothing new, having swapped bras and tops and birth control for years. And yet.
We are inches away from each other, a low tone buzz of the amphetamines keeping us just alert enough to feel our heart beats. We are still just about high, tantalizingly close to not yet landing back in our bodies
Tonight was wild right?
We laugh, and turn to look at each other. I wonder sometimes if I had said something rather than nothing, if this would ever have happened.
I kiss her then, just with my lips, a question more than a statement and she responds like electricity. I move closer to her, opening wide, wide, wider. Her tongue found the corners of my mouth, her back arching up to push her breasts against mine. It is a revelation. My fingers tracing the edges of her nipples, her fingers in my hair. We are underwater and not coming up for air. The first tug of the current.
We laugh – Imagine – she whispers – if the boys knew what we were doing right now?
It’s like the best secret we have ever had.
I let my fingers trace their way down to her underwear and slowly pull them down. My girl, my best friend, breathless, tilts her hips to meet my hand and I let myself touch her the way I have touched myself, in the dark, biting into a pillow so that I don’t betray my shuddering want. He thighs are already sticky, warm, all of her so wet and ready. She moans pulling me closer, her hips grinding, reaching, needing more. The ache in me spreads, my tongue pushing deeper into her mouth, as my fingers spread her wider. The softness undoes something in me. The flicker of her tongue dancing in my mouth, the feather lightness of her fingers on my nipples, my neck. Her pussy, wet and open and mine.
When she comes she buries her face in my hair, her open mouth against my ear, her breath hot and damp and I ache in every place I have ever had a boy. But not a girl. Not like this.
Something shifts after that night. We don’t talk about it, except to joke. We have crossed a boundary that had been unspoken. We aren’t sure if it counts as cheating or not. We don’t tell our boyfriends. Unlike the kiss on the dancefloor that earned us our fearless reputations, this threatens to ruin us. Or so we think. Or so I think. Hitting something too close to the bone, something buried so deep within my core I am not yet able to name it. Something that will take me a few more years to own, and nurture and love
She was the first, but thankfully, not the last.