We Get Free With Our Slick Thighs
Originally published in the print edition of The Chariot
Editor’s note: Happy Pride! 🏳️🌈 This creative nonfiction memoir by was originally published in the print edition of The Chariot, our second anthology. It’s a beautiful example of the kind of writing we feature in our publication—an embodiment of the tarot archetype (in this case, The Chariot) but without direct discussion of the card. Content warnings include: sexual violence, purity culture, fisting, religious trauma, descriptions of consensual sex. True names have been changed or omitted.
On the way to our threesome, I want to call the whole thing off. Me and my alleged bisexuality have been building this moment’s scaffolding for a long time, but now my animal body smells change, wants to run. I pinch my thighs in the backseat, will myself to be brave, remind myself it was me who set these dominos in motion.
At the bar, the boy is waiting for me. I slide onto the stool next to him and order a lemon vodka drink in a martini glass.
“Do you think she’ll come?” I ask, wiping some of the sugar off the rim.
“No.” The boy shrugs, sips his beer.
We’ve only met Jane once, and it was awkward. I’d been surprised to hear from her afterwards. She’d had threesomes before with a married couple, and wanted to teach us what she’d learned.
Jane arrives, breezing through the doorway in jeans and a scarf the color of a midsummer plum. She has long dark hair and perfect hips. I let myself drink her in like a man. She hugs us, tells us about her day, asks how we are. We make small talk until she asks if we want to go somewhere else. I remember the Tower is the whole point. I pull the card.
“His place is right down the street,” I suggest. The boy finishes my drink for me and we close our tab — no of course, drinks on us — and wander down Poplar past one of my ghosts in the window of my first Philly house.
It was a shitty house. The landlord blessedly never asked for a credit check but accused us of manipulating her when we begged her to fix the heat in the middle of January. That house is where I read my first tarot cards. Wanted what my lesbian roommate had. Felt full of possibility in a new city where maybe I could be anyone. I see my 22-year-old ghost through the window, innocently roasting sweet potatoes, Fleetwood Mac on the record player.
At the boy’s place, we open a bottle of red. I didn’t think I’d be tipsy for my first experience with queer sex (is the sex queer if it’s kind of hetero?). When the boy goes to the bathroom Jane asks, “Are we doing this?”
I meet her eyes and nod, suddenly shy. She takes what I give and leans in. Her lips are so soft — nothing like the boy’s, nothing like his beard scratching across my cheek, nothing like performing masculinity through chapped lips. Something inside me is dissolving, washing away. When the boy returns I am softer. Jane grabs my hand, pulls me off the couch. She’s not afraid of my inexperience, of what might happen, of who I might become. I let her lead me into the boy’s room. Push me down on the bed. Straddle me. Put her tongue in my mouth.
I’m touching her body, drinking in her soft skin and the curve of her hips and her warm breasts pressed into mine. I can’t believe I’m allowed to touch her. We all three have something pulsing between us — need, desire, a larger cosmic force pulling us towards each other for what tonight will set in motion. And so it does; we descend.
I am used to moving like honey but this is something else, almost frenetic. The movements of creatures who understand the temporary magic of a summer thunderstorm. The urgency of a meal when you’ve been close to starvation. Fifteen years building to this moment since I first knew I shouldn’t tell anyone how looking at girls made me feel, and we can’t stop or else we might have to. I cram the bread in my mouth, bite into the apple of her.
Jane asks me to touch the boy together and it feels like a performance, but I have been nothing for all these years if not an actor. I bury my face between Jane’s legs, and I’m not performing anymore. She tastes perfectly tangy. I touch every forbidden part of her — the soft skin of her décolletage, her breasts, her muscular thighs, the curve of her ass, her delicate arms.
When I come, I’m so overstimulated that it doesn’t feel good. Just a sharp release. I tell them to keep going while I go to the bathroom, and when I get back I’m dizzy and the room smells like sex. I don’t know how to make her come, and I’m embarrassed.
When everyone is spent, we collapse in the puddle of the bed. I’m in the middle, cuddling them both. Tired but wired; little pricks of electricity run through my body. Jane asks if we want to do it again sometime, nibbling on my ear. I kiss her and walk through the door.
My mom and I are in the laundry room after church, arguing about porn. I’m 17 and I’ve just started having sex. It’s not everything I thought it’d be, but more than the semantics I like my new identity: an adult. Someone who is desired. I’m drunk on the power of it while I still feel like I have it.
Every Sunday since birth I’ve attended church, my grandparent’s Baptist church where I went to preschool. A nondenominational church with a praise band that wanted to be cool. Our last church in Maryland when I was 14, where my sister and I played dodgeball in the sanctuary slash gym while they talked to us about god and not having sex and reported us to our parents for holding hands with boys.
Next was a series of Delaware churches as we looked for our new “church home”: the one in a log cabin where girls weren’t allowed to preach or pray. It’s a used car dealership now. The one where the youth pastor excitedly told us to get crunk for Jesus. The one where it felt like every week in Sunday School we were being told we would be bashed cars or unsticky, useless tape if we let a man tarnish us before marriage.
In the laundry room, my mom is fired up. “I had a friend,” she tells me, checking the dryer to see if the clothes are done. “Whose husband was so addicted to porn, he didn’t even want to have sex with her.” She shuts the dryer door, turning the knobs to run our t-shirts through a de-wrinkle cycle. “And she was an atypical woman,” my mom confides, voice dropping low, meeting my eyes. “She actually liked sex.”
The next time I have queer sex, nothing could be more different. I’m not bi now, I’m a lesbian. Well, I’m queer. I’m a dyke. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t like cis men. What I mean is, my sexuality doesn’t fit in a box but I know queer is true.
As I ride the bisexual to lesbian pipeline, I also ride the threesome to open relationship to polyamory pipeline, and back to monogamy again when I fall in love, break up with the boy, and become partners with my love. They have bright brown eyes and the cutest smile with a little gap between their teeth. They’re sincere, soft, generous, silly. By our third date, I understand that annoying thing people say: I just knew.
I want them for months before we have sex. I learn: grinding with your clothes on can be sex. Hair pulling can be sex. Making out can be sex. A thigh between your legs even with jeans on can be sex. Frying garlic can be sex. Fingernails pinching your back can be sex. Every date I melt a little more, either stumbling out of their bed at 2 am or staying over, too horny and in love to be tired.
But I hold back. As much as I want them, I’m not ready. I know what it will mean for me to sleep together before I feel deeply known: my body hyper attuned to what I think they might like, desperately whirring and spinning into the mold of who I think they want me to be.
My sexuality doesn’t fit in a box but I know queer is true.
When we finally have sex on Easter a few months later, we carve a whole world of our own. Crawl inside the cavern and there are glittering stars, soft moss, deep emerald ferns. There are stories in these walls, of queer resilience, pleasure, intimacy. Babbling brooks run over the hard stones of me, a gentle erosion. I slough off years of being touched with rough hands. I’m shy and inexperienced, so my love takes my hand and tells me how they want to be touched. Puts their hand in mine and asks how I want to be touched. Shows me this tenderness is sex.
I come undone with their pussy grinding on my leg, with my hand inside them while they rock their hips against me and moan, with their chest glistening in coconut oil sliding over mine. They reveal a moon out of the stone in me. They’re an artist, after all. I peel back their ribcage, find the ocean inside them. We swim together.
IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou I thrum. IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou their heart beats back.
Something has happened here that ripples into the stars, back and forward across timelines. This story was written on our bones. I become Lilith under my love’s soft hands. I drink the wine of their body, tumble into wonderland and meet the heaven I actually want to go to. These bodies, breaking open and reforming shape. These bodies, these holy landscapes. We traverse together.
Sex with cis men was all jagged lines and sharp edges.
Queer sex blurs the lines, all swirls and circles.
Dreamy.
Creative.
We make it new, we make it our own.
Our bodies don’t follow scripts and boxes.
We get free with our slick thighs.
Trace constellations on each other’s skin that say yes, that say free, that say beautiful, that say love.
We’re sitting on our knees, grinding on each other’s thighs while my love sucks and bites my nipples. Last year, I went to the doctor because I was lactating in their mouth and the internet said it could be cancer. The official diagnosis: overstimulation.
I don’t know whether anything is coming out of my nipples right now but I know that I am panting, wantyouwantyouloveyouloveyou. My love is shuddering and breaking and I press their chest to mine. Inhale their sweet smell into the deep recesses of my lungs, the parts that never get enough air. Sometimes I don’t want sex, I just want to smell their head, their armpits, their neck, for two hours while they tell me lovely forever things. That is to say, I haven’t yet figured out how to say I want care instead of I want sex. But today we are all crescendo and need and I am desperate for the fortissimo.
They make their way down my body. I love this song. They dance their tongue in my favorite places until I say yes, please, need you — one finger, two, three, four, a whole gloved hand stopped at the knuckles. It’s pleasure until it’s not. A prick of pain and suddenly I am not here, suddenly I am swirling in a mash of verydifferentrooms verydifferentpeople verydifferentcircumstances but all I can manage is “I’m scared” before tears pour out. This is new growth but the land remembers what ravaged it.
They wrap their body around me while the blacklight of this moment shines on every violation I’ve had on my body. After I stop being scared, I’m embarrassed. But my love buries their face in my neck and whispers songs of love, tenderness, shared understanding. They welcome me home into their cocoon. It’s okay to remember, they breathe. You are loved, comes the reverb.
I bring my body history and they bring theirs. Sometimes we make a mess. Dishes everywhere, ice cream in bed. Neither of us can shed the hundreds of selves we’ve been, hundreds of versions of these bodies. We have our ghosts. Sometimes we make a bouquet. Orange tiger lilies, sunrise-colored dahlias. We eat and get full, it’s beautiful. And sometimes, we pull open a pomegranate together. Peel chunks of fruit away from the center, wrapped in each other, swallow the arils, suck juice off each other’s fingers.
It was always going to be this; this love, this reweaving together. We are not just having sex, we are making a life. Their heart beats against my cheek. Things are not like they were.
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thanks for re-sharing my piece! i'm so glad the rebis exists <3