Lake After Midnight

The next two days were torture in a way Maria hadn't been ready for. The bruises she'd expected, the tender, aching nipples, the stiffness in her thighs every time she crouched to tie a girl's shoelace, all that she could handle. What she hadn't been prepared for was Debra. The blonde was everywhere she looked. At the breakfast table Debra would bend over to refill her juice cup and Maria would catch herself staring at the soft curve where the blonde's tank top stopped and her sun-warmed lower back began, and her stomach would knot as if she had just been caught in another shower. At swim period she watched Debra's silky calves move through the water of the lake and remembered exactly how those calves had hooked behind hers. By the second night Maria realized with a sick, slow horror that she wasn't watching Debra to find a new way to beat her. She was watching her because she couldn't stop. Debra, for her part, was acting like nothing had happened, which was almost worse. She tossed her platinum hair the same haughty way, snapped at Maria over scheduling the same way, sneered at her over the heads of the girls the same way. But twice Maria caught the blonde looking at her mouth instead of her eyes, and once, helping load the canoes, Debra brushed past her at the dock and the front of her thigh slid along Maria's, and the blonde didn't apologize, didn't smirk, didn't say anything at all, she just kept walking, and the back of her neck went pink in a way that had nothing to do with the sun. That second night Maria couldn't sleep. The girls in the cabin were finally settled, Debra was back in her own bunk across the room, and Maria lay with her T-shirt sticking to her breasts and listened to the blonde breathe. She knew Debra wasn't sleeping either. The breathing was wrong, too shallow, too careful. She knew that breathing now. She'd had it inches from her own face for hours. She slipped out of her sleeping bag in only the shirt and her bikini briefs, padded barefoot across the cabin floor and stood next to Debra's bunk. The blonde's eyes were already open in the dimness, watching her. Maria didn't say anything. She just jerked her head toward the door and walked out. Debra came after her. Maria heard the soft scuff of bare feet on the cabin steps, and then on the dirt path that ran toward the lake. She didn't look back. She knew Debra was following the way she knew her own pulse. The girls walked single file through the warm dark, past the showers where they had ended the first fight on their knees in lukewarm water, past the empty mess hall, all the way to the little pebbled half-moon of beach the counselors used after lights-out. The lake was a flat black mirror with the moon broken across it. Maria stopped at the waterline and turned around. Debra came up the beach toward her with that prima donna stride of hers and stopped about a foot away, hands on her hips. She was wearing a long T-shirt and nothing else that Maria could see. Her hair was loose and her mouth was set in the same stubborn line it had been set in two nights ago in the bunk. They stared at each other for a long time, and the only sound was the water touching the pebbles. "What," Debra said finally, low. "You want to go again? Out here?" "I want to know if you can stop pretending for two minutes," Maria said. Her voice came out rougher than she meant. "I can't stop looking at you. Don't tell me you can." Debra's chin lifted. The reflex was there, the sneer, the cool dismissal, but it didn't come. Her mouth opened and closed. The blonde looked at the lake, then back at her, and Maria saw something almost frightened pass through the big blue eyes. "You little bitch," Debra whispered, but the word had no heat in it. "What do you want me to say." "Say it." "Say what." "That you can't stop either." Debra was breathing hard now, the same wrong breathing from the cabin. "I can't stop either," she said. For one long second neither girl moved. Then Maria reached out with one hand, very slowly, the way you reach for an animal that might bite, and laid her palm flat against the side of Debra's neck. The blonde flinched. Her pulse hammered against Maria's fingers. Debra closed her eyes. "I hate you," the blonde whispered. "I hate you too," Maria said, and pulled the T-shirt up off Debra's body in one smooth motion. The blonde was naked underneath. Of course she was. Her breasts in the moonlight were the same heavy, creamy globes Maria had ground her own boobs against for half an hour two nights before, but they didn't look like an enemy now. The big pink nipples were already standing. Maria stripped her own shirt off and let Debra look at her, the same way they had looked at each other in the shower the first night, except this time Debra's eyes weren't measuring her against anything. They were just on her, hot and wet and lost. "Get in the water," Maria said. They waded out together until the lake was at their hips. The water was warmer than the air. Maria turned to Debra, and Debra moved into her, and they came together breast to breast for the third time in three nights, but this time there was no shoulder, no jab, no nipple drilling for purchase. Their boobs flattened against one another and just stayed there, and Maria felt the blonde shudder against her as if some terrible weight had finally broken. Debra's arms came up around her back, and Maria's came up around Debra's, and they held each other in the dark water with the moon spilled across them. "I'm not gonna fight you tonight," Debra whispered against her ear. "I can't." "I'm not either." "I don't know what this is." "I don't either," Maria said. "I just know it's mine." Debra made a small wounded sound and turned her face into Maria's neck, and Maria felt the blonde's mouth move against her throat, not a sex bite, not a snarl, just the soft press of meaty lips, the same lips that had spat whore at her thirty hours ago. Maria slid one hand up the wet, sleek length of Debra's back and into the platinum hair at the nape, and tilted the blonde's head back, and kissed her. It was nothing like any of the kisses in the bunk. There was no tongue stabbing for dominance, no biting for purchase, no wrestling. Just Debra's full lower lip caught between hers, and then the blonde's mouth opening and her own opening to meet it, and then a long slow trade of breath in the warm dark. When they finally broke apart Debra's eyes were unguarded in a way Maria had never seen them. "I've been jealous of you since we were fifteen," she said. "Jealous of what." "Everything. The way the boys look at you. The way you walk. The way you don't give a fuck what people think of you. I dyed my hair this stupid color when I was sixteen because I thought I had to be a different kind of pretty than you were, because I couldn't be that one." She laughed, ugly and short. "I hated that I was just a copy of you. I hated that I wanted to be." "You're not a copy of me," Maria said. She put both her hands on Debra's face and held it. "I thought you were. I was wrong. I've been touching you for two nights now and there's not one part of you that's mine. You're, " She stopped, because she didn't have a word that wasn't soft, and softness still felt like surrender, even now. She made herself say it anyway. "You're beautiful. You're fucking beautiful, Debra. I've known it for four years and I've been calling it something else." Debra closed her eyes and pressed her forehead hard against Maria's, swearing under her breath. After a minute she said, "If you tell anyone I went soft on you in a lake I will end you." "There's the bitch I know," Maria said, and Debra laughed low against her mouth, and they were kissing again. They made love in the lake first, slow, neither of them in any hurry. Debra's hand under the water found Maria between the legs the way it had the first night, except this time the fingers didn't twist or pinch or punish. They stroked. Maria stroked back, learning a different version of the same blonde body, the version that softened under her palm instead of clenching against it. They kissed through it. When Debra finally came it was with a small quiet gasp into Maria's mouth, and Maria came almost at once after, holding the blonde's lower lip between her teeth without biting down. They stumbled back up the pebbled beach hand in hand, shaking, and lay down on the dry sand above the waterline with their wet T-shirts under their heads. Maria pulled Debra down on top of her on purpose this time, the way the blonde had pinned her in the bunk, except now Debra's body fit against her like something Maria had been carrying the wrong way her whole life. They rocked against each other in the sand, slow, breast to breast, and Debra's clit slid over Maria's the way it had on the bunk and the shower floor, and this time Maria didn't promise to whip it or bruise it or beat it black and blue. She just let her own clit answer it, soft little kisses of nerve against nerve, until the blonde was shaking on top of her and gasping for a different reason. "I love you," Debra said into her mouth, surprised at herself, like the words had escaped without her permission. "Oh god. I love you, you little bitch." "I love you too," Maria said. The words were easier than she would have ever guessed, easier than calling Debra a whore had ever been. "I love you too, you stuck-up cow." Debra started laughing again, breathless, and Maria held her tighter and let her shake. Above them the trees moved in the warm wind. They lay tangled in the sand for almost an hour before either of them could bear to get up. When they finally walked back up the path to the cabin, Debra's hand was hooked in two of Maria's fingers, and neither of them let go until they had to, at the cabin door, to slip back into separate bunks before sunrise.