Honeycrisp

In the apple orchard I pluck a honeycrisp from a tall branch, my ivory sweater revealing my wrist as I reach. Autumn runs straight up my sleeve and when I turn around she is staring. One look and the smoke of her irises spear me with their silver tips. I want her to undress me with sharp things. She crosses the distance between us, takes the apple from my hands, and bites into it, hard. Somehow I know neither of us is alone—no one goes to an apple orchard uncoupled. I tear the title page from a Patricia Highsmith novel and hand her a pen and “Jay?” a voice calls. From the way her shoulders turn inward, I know it’s her name.  

 “Jay! Where'd you go?” the woman’s voice curdles the billowing heat between my exposed neck and her dagger of a jawline. She writes numbers quickly, folds the paper in half, places it in my palm, her strong, thick fingers almost touching my own. Her dark hair slicked back, a single curl falling into her eyes, she looks at me with an earnest tilt of confidence, and I nod silently, holding the paper to my lips. I tuck the promise of her inside my bra as she walks away, answering to the encroaching voice, and look down at the golden apple, streaked with red like nails down the back, like drawing blood. I take a bite that overlaps with her teeth marks in the tender yellow. A first kiss.

My yearslong lover approaches, finds me with bite mark evidence of what will be our inevitable end. Lex puts her arm around me as we walk through the trees, but it’s like a once-warm coat gone ratty with age and overuse. I’m still cold.  

A gala apple, grown too heavy for its branch, falls and rots. Worms. Maggots. Lex picks a piece of lint from my sweater and talks about nothing. We are surviving off memories, the past an ethanol to keep us chugging along, but there hasn’t been a filling station for some time now. I hope the worms make a home out of the gala core’s decay. I hope I can find time alone to call the secret already burning like a moan against my chest. 

When I meet Jay at a redlit bar in a back booth a few days later, I tell her about our first kiss. She smiles and says the pressure’s off now, and asks to kiss me again. I answer with my mouth and we talk like that for a long while, her hands in my curls. Outside the leaves turn ochre and orange, a dance of decay down the branches. Inside, I unwrap my scarf from my bare shoulders, Jay’s arms around me like a heater, kissing away the cold.

Over hot cider and bourbon, she tells me about the trees where she’s from, how they’re older than any ancestor, how she’s feeling older every day she stays with the girl who said her name like a nuisance. How she’s in the carpenter’s union, how she thanks the trees before she turns them into tables for people to gather around, chairs for families to rest in, how she crafts a place where memories can grow. Then she offers me a dirty thing I’ve been salivating for—the why of us. She says the undoing of them has long been ravaging her, the obligation to stay seeming both inevitable and impossible. She says she is tired of being tired, drained by keeping up the pretense of forever.

Fulfilling my end of the confessional barter, I lurch with the secret I’ve told no one: I’ve been lying to myself for months. How I couldn’t love the past enough to keep loving even the idea of us. How Lex couldn’t draw a future bigger than the outline of her own.  

We curl into our coats against the bitter bite of October, and she opens the door of her ‘57 rust red Chevy for me. I climb in, and she turns the heat on high, kissing the cold from my fingers. I cross the distance between us and lay my head on her shoulder as she drives, one of her hands on the steering wheel, the other on my thigh.  

We check into a motel, both of our own beds occupied with platitudes and other bodies. My heart is in my ears, my cheeks red with nerves and cold, but the hunger of discovery snarls like we’ve both been long cornered and chained, just now realizing that instead of straining against the shackles, we could simply snap our fingers, stand, and walk.  

Jay starts to take off her combat boots and I kneel down in front of her, softly moving her hands away. I unlace her boots slowly, removing them, then rising to unbuckle her belt. Her Levi’s slide right off her, and she takes off her shirt; says “Turn around,” and I obey. I feel her hands on the back of my neck, my breath caught as she slowly pulls my zipper towards the floor, and I realize I’ve been still as a statue, like a single sound could shatter the room and all we are within it. I exhale, step out from my dress and into her arms.  The sheets smell like lye and baby powder and she smells like tobacco and cheap cologne and I want to bathe in her, like closing your eyes during the crescendo of a live orchestra. Her strap grinds against my thighs and I want her to tie me up and make me beg for her just so she can make it last longer. For the minutes to feel like millenia. For this primal growl to burn through me like a rapture deep and new, profane and sacred, searing me into something truer, something new.

We don’t have rope so I guide her hands to my throat and let her fingers squeeze the pleasure from my mouth. “Don’t you know you’re already mine?” she asks. And I answer her in a gush that feels like the anvil in my chest has finally been lifted away. “Claim me again,” I say, and she does.

Now we meet nearly every day. Biting hard in the bench seat of her truck at the drive-in while Dracula drips blood on screen; her hand up my plaid skirt after eating caramel apples, dripping for her in the corn maze; on my knees, with her down my throat, behind the ticketing booth at the fall festival; kissing over hot toddies at the pumpkin patch, not daring to take any home. We’ve told our partners for weeks now that we have to work late again, that we’re going out with new friends, out of town for work, anything. I feel the ache of guilt inside me, but my hunger for Jay has claws, and it rakes down my back with undeniable need. My world is dead cold without her, and she is every sweet hellflame I’d long denied myself. She tells me she can’t ever get enough of me, that she wants to know me in ways no one has, that her world burns brighter with thoughts of us together. It’s irrevocable, irreversible. We can’t stop.  

She fucks me with her boots on, fully clothed in her dark denim and flannel, while my naked body crests with sweat, back arched, her mouth licking up the salt pooling in the space made by my collarbone. She makes the lonely moon of my body burn electric, alive, pulsing with a need to give over my farthest reaches of myself, the darkest depths I’d never let anyone see. She pulls me to her, our eyes meeting as she pushes inside to the base of her cock, and I match her hunger with my teeth in her neck as she groans and pushes into me hard and fast in front of the mirror, watching her ravage me from behind. Watching the moans roar from my mouth. Watching myself feel beautiful.

We fuck anywhere so I’ll know she owns me everywhere—standing up in the shower, or with the windows wide open, or slick-skinned with water sloshing onto the floor as I moan loud against the edge of the bath. Tonight she yanks my silk blouse down and shoves my bra away with hungry calloused hands, presses my breasts against the cold bathroom stall, lowers her boxers just enough to pull her cock out to shove inside me. She clamps her hand around my mouth and rails me until I squirt all over her jeans, and I’m embarrassed by my flood. “Damn, Doe Eyes, you been keeping that from me?”

She kisses each of my lips and sucks on the part of her shirt that’s wet with me. I watch her in awe, still dazed from the rush, and she pulls my chin down to look at her. “That’s mine, you got it? I want it every time. And I won’t stop until I get it.”

“Yes, sir.” I answer. My smile’s bigger than the mess we made. I suck my own taste from her cock and pull the strap down to bury my tongue in her. She holds my head like she’ll die if she doesn’t touch me, and I circle her with my tongue, teasing the promise of release. She grunts, and I giggle without stopping. “Fuck you,” she smirks, and I look up at her on my knees, a grin in my eyes, and she presses herself hard against me. When she comes she throws her head back like she’s summoning a god, the sweet taste of her on my tongue, kneeling before her like an initiate in prayer. I’m enraptured. Want to build a church, a home, some place of warm worship in this bathroom so we’ll never be found, left to our own liquid vices, alone in the sacred give and take of pleasure. 

But building a foundation at each other’s feet will have to wait. Dawn’s inevitable cruelty finds us, and we go back to our old lovers until I think I might not be able to get out of bed anymore, not without knowing I belong to Jay in every full and hellish way. Before winter ends I’m packing the present into cardboard while Lex is out of town. I know she’s bedding someone else, too, and we just can’t seem to say the words out loud to each other. This way is easier. Cleaner. 

Jay puts down the deposit on a new house, a cabin nestled in the trees like we dreamt of together, and asks me to move in. No furniture, only a wooden bowl of honeycrisp apples on the counter, I watch her chop wood to build a fire for us, her wide back and strong hands swinging the axe down firm and sure. I’m going to burst just from watching. I call her inside for hot cocoa and place her cold hand between my legs, let her feel the wet warmth pooling there, dripping with the anticipation of her every inch buried in me. I soak the carpet in front of the roar of the flames, glistening with sweat and relief. We are finally free to be alone endlessly, without the sneak of secrets. We moan loud, liberated, making love on the kitchen floor, then counter, her mouth between my legs, again, up on the bathroom sink. My big, strong butch on her knees just for me. “That means yes,” I say, cumming for the sixth time. “Yes, I’ll move in.”

She puts her flannel around my shoulders and kisses each of my collarbones. “Oh, I didn’t know if you were sure or not,” she laughed. “Are you sure I don’t need to keep convincing you?”

We’re only playing; boxes of my clothes already lay half open around the cabin. Outside, the first snow softly dances into the pines, settling our new world in crisp, pure white. I lead her to the living room floor again, in front of the fire, to straddle her and slide her cock back inside me, staring into her with a smirk, flames dancing over our bare skin. “On second thought, you might have to convince me some more.  You’ll probably do something terrible, like never fold the laundry, or—” 

She pushes herself deeper up into me and I gasp, sinking into her, and she leans in close to whisper, “I won’t leave the toilet seat up, though,” and we burst into laughter. “I promise.”

I wrap my pinky in hers like the beginning of knitting a blanket, like the beginning of making something big and warm and safe. “It’ll be beautiful,” I tell her, kissing her palms. “I’ll bake you pies and wake you up with my mouth and we’ll live in a love poem. Worship at each other's altars forever.”

She plays with my fingers, kissing the red tips of my nails.

“I love loving you,” she says, and I don’t know if she means fucking or real love or if there’s even a difference, and we build our home on the bedrock of the honeymoon stage like we’ll never be faced with what’s real. We curl into each other, bare and wrapped in blankets in front of the fire, glowing in the warmth. She takes a deep bite of a honeycrisp and opens her mouth to me, and I lick it into my own, swallow the sweet down easy. The seeds will grow an apple tree in me maybe, or perhaps, for once, the lust will turn out a little like love. 

Photo by Jill Burrow