Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [40]
Once I’d gotten so angry I’d grabbed her thermos and threatened to kick her out of “my” lab.
“Oh sweetheart, you don’t want me to go,” she’d told me, and tried to coax me up on one of the big empty lab tables beside her.
“Have a sip. Have a little smoke. Tell me how you always wanted to find somebody like me to tease you, and love you, and suck on your nipples till you’re howling at the moon.”
“Oh yeah. Uh huh. I just always knew some black-eyed woman was gonna come along dying to fuck me silly in front of a bunch of toothless monkeys.”
“Prescient. That’s what you were.”
“Desperate, maybe. That’s what I was when I let you talk me into bringing you over here.”
“Oh, girl.” She held a joint in her left hand and using her right hand only, she pulled out a match, struck it against the pack, lit the joint, took a puff, and then held it out to me.
“Have a smoke and lighten up. I’m the one on your side, you know.”
Her mouth was wide and soft, the right side turned up a little in that way made my hips feel loose. Above that mouth her black eyes were shining and bright. Sometimes when I wanted to make her feel good, I would make my own eyes widen, intensify my gaze, and give her the look of love she was giving me at that moment. For me it was lust; only in her eyes did it become love. But she was on my side, I knew that. Toni was old-school. For all that she was my age and just another scholarship student in a blue-jean jacket, she was and knew herself to be a bar dyke with a bar dyke’s studied moves, the low and sauntering strut of a great fighter and a better lover. She had, too, a bar dyke’s rough and ready talent for getting me angry and then charming me out of it. Every time she played that game and made those moves, all the anger went out of me.
“Yeah,” I told her, looking into her soft eyes. “You’re on my side.”
She drew the smoke deep into her lungs and smiled drunkenly. “Girl, girl. You act like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Keeping your eyes down and your voice so soft. Wearing those silly-assed sandals and damn fool embroidered denim blouses. Always telling those drawling lies about all your cousins, and grand-daddies, and uncles . . .”
“They an’t lies.”
“Then they should be.”
“And you.” She was making me angry again. “Who do you think you are?”
She pulled her legs up, ran one hand down her heavily muscled thigh, arched her back to stretch, and gave me another of her slow wandering looks, her eyes sliding up from my crotch to my face, heating my skin as she went.
“Me?” she drawled. “Me? Why, I’m just the daughter of the man with the smallest used car lot in Pinellas County and a mama who an’t been sober since the day I was conceived. They wanted me to go to college and make something of myself, so here I am. Trouble is they an’t got the first notion that all I really want is to be the sun and the moon and the stars to some butter-tongued girl in silly-assed sandals and an embroidered denim blouse.”
“You say.”
“I do indeed.”
I’d laughed, not believing her, but enjoying her anyway—maybe because I didn’t believe her. It was so much easier if she was not too serious, if I didn’t have to think about what might happen if what was going on between us was love—love the way people talked about it, real love, dangerous and scary and not to be trusted at all.