The New Gods
She looks like a classic butch and something about that has always done it for me.
(When we meet, I’ve been at the theater for four hours already. It’s a Thursday. She catches my eye immediately: 5’ 3” and a pixie cut that she styles just-so. She wears a crystal around her neck and has five ear piercings on each side.
“Your pronouns?” Her voice is butch too, grounded and low, a little challenging. Magnetic.
“Sorry?”
“What are your pronouns?”
I almost laugh. “They/them.” Pause. “That’s the first time someone has straight-up asked me here. Sorry.”
“I don’t see why,” she says. “You’re very visibly non-binary.”
That comment is too much for me to unpack—what really is it to look non-binary and also what is it for a butch lesbian to say that to me after my lifelong struggle with the concept of “passing,” and all of my exhausted readings of “Stone Butch Blues”? Her comment is probably mostly thanks to my buzzcut anyway. I know what she means. “Thank you,” I say.
“I’m flirting with you.” There’s the challenge again, the magnetism.
“I don’t know if I can be femme enough for you, beautiful,” I reply.
“Who said I liked-” I’ve already returned to work before she can finish. I know how to play this game.)
We work together for three months before we somehow end up being the last two people at the bar after a Friday night outing with our coworkers. We work in the arts, so, of course, I’m wearing a far-too-uncomfortable white pencil skirt with painted peonies stretching across my right hip, my binder, and a dark blue button down with sleeves rolled above my elbows. She’s in her usual: black jean shorts, black V-neck, her rings, the one that is amethyst on her ring finger that I ache to ask about, her figure short but full.
(I’m sitting with her on the third floor of the theater, and we’re trying our best to figure out how to Exacto Knife a sheet of tracing paper without completely destroying it. I’m a writer, not a prop-designer.
“I don’t understand why we can’t just use the fucking cardboard,” she says for the tenth time under her breath to no one, and she knows I agree.
She’s on her knees, leaned over, and resting her weight on her elbows as she traces the shape in pencil again. Every other breath, her hand goes to her hair, brushing it back. I imagine I am her hands. I imagine I am her lips. I imagine I am working my way down.)
I’m nineteen, she’s twenty. We go to the same school, but somehow we’ve never met before this job. She’s a writer too, specializing in horror and the Gothic, all the things I do not know how to articulate. I’m a love poet by trade. Somehow, it seems that’s her articulation weakness, our artistic fantasies like two sides of a coin, a penny, a token for a lesbian arcade.
“So when you say you’re studying social myth, what does that mean?” she asks.
I’m two drinks in, and I didn’t get carded because no one cards you in Midtown if you move quickly enough.
“It’s like…” Her body turns towards me, her knee just brushing mine. I try not to be too obvious about how my eyes wander. “We, as artists, are always in social myth. Like we’re very direct players. As writers, we are participants in the existing social mythology of our given moment. We imagine our work out of it, through it, because of this moment’s pre-existing mythology. But at the same time, we’re also creating it, like, seeing and feeling what it is we are seeing and feeling in the world and then creating new mythologies for new worlds out of that.”
“And by mythology you mean…” It’s a leading question, leading somewhere, her fingertips just barely brushing the skin of my lower thigh under the table. I feel something flutter, I feel my palms ache.
(Once, when my best friend asked me what served as the best kind of foreplay, I said whispering. What I think I really meant was a pretty girl never breaking eye contact with me across the bar.)
“Divinity,” I’m looking right at her. “But also mortality. Life, death, lovers, the new gods.”
She laughs, a laugh that bubbles up from her stomach, makes her tilt her head back just a little, an excuse for her to reach for my hands. I watch her shoulders, her chest. “Well, I’m happy that you’ve found yourself some new gods, Lillian.”
“What can I say,” I reply, “it’s actually my right as a tr*nny to do so.” She shakes her head and smiles, and I know it’s near midnight by the way her hair is falling out, the gel she uses slowly causing it to fall and fray a little at the sides.
“You are so bright,” she says. She has this smile that is very air sign, very playful, always filled with a little bit of a question.
“In a pretentious way,” I reply.
She considers it, nods. The bartender closes the tab.
We kiss before we even make it on the train. I live uptown, and she lives downtown, and we don’t even decide, just walk to a bus stop on the west side as an excuse to go anywhere. She nudges me into an alleyway and pulls down my mask.
My hands are in her hair first.
(I’m thinking of the first time I kissed a girl and how my hands in her hair made her breath catch.)
She pulls her lips away from mine, breathing heavy, starting her kisses again behind my ear. She moves achingly slow, letting the pleasure of it all build as her teeth brush the soft skin below my jaw, the goosebumps at the base of my neck. I can’t keep myself from tossing my head back and exhaling, loud and open.
“You want this?” She whispers low, just below my ear.
“Mhm.”
She unbuttons my top button, then the next, makes eye contact with me, smiles, continues. Fuck, she’s so-
I untuck her shirt with a quick movement and rest my palm against her hip, pressing her closer to me. I’ve never been taller than a girl before.
(I’m thinking of the first time I kissed a girl because every time kind of feels like a new “first time.” And how this is better because I have gotten better, and I have also become more “here” and more able to stay present in the unbearable sweetness of it all.)
She returns her lips to mine, deepening the kiss, her tongue in my mouth. She’s unbuttoned my whole shirt now, our chests pressed together through her shirt and my binder, her hands flat against my lower back, her pinkies just barely ghosting below my waistband. Though the skirt limits my movement a bit, I press my thigh against her crotch, just to test the waters.
She hums into my mouth, slides her hands lower, leans towards me so my shoulders really are pressed up against the brick wall of the alleyway. My fingers climb her lower back, her rib cage, the clasp of her bra.
“Let’s go to yours,” she says, still in a whisper. I nod in response and go to button my shirt, but her hands are already there.
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