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.

~~~

My apartment is a walkup, and as she follows me up the three flights, I try not to laugh at us both taking off our rings and attempting to discreetly slide them into our pockets. As I fumble with the keys, she places her hand again on my lower back.

It’s barely a half room, smaller than a studio, but the moment I open the door, I see her eyes flicking around the room and taking me in in a way that feels a little like baring my soul.

She clicks the lock for me and returns her lips to mine.

(When I’ve taken people home before, I’ve had to come up with time-fillers until they’ve been ready to hook up with me, movies to watch, little distractions.)

“Fuck, Lillian, you’re so hot.”

(Last time I hooked up with a girl in my apartment, I could tell that she was trying to figure out what to call me in bed the whole time, something not gendered.)

“You’re unbearable,” she says.

(And she doesn’t even need to call me anything which is somehow better. She just paints me, unbearable, so much vibrance, so many degrees.)

I go for her shirt before she can start on mine again, a simple motion now that it’s a little untucked from our tryst in the alleyway. Her bra is just as simple as everything else about her outfit, plain black without any lace or softness about it, something that gets the job done. This is what turns me on, how close she is to herself.

“I can’t believe we haven’t fucking gotten around to this yet,” she says.

I press my lips to the base of her neck, and her tits are before me like some kind of great artistic expanse. I go for her bra with my right hand, not moving my lips away from her.

“Good,” she exhales and sends chills through me. I nip the skin near her collarbone, and she moves to slide off her own bra in response, her movements becoming more rapid, more desperate.

I bend down, dropping almost to my knees to take her left nipple in my mouth and roll the other in between the pads of my fingers. Her gasp is quiet, but she betrays herself quickly with her fingers in my hair again, beginning from the base of my neck and climbing, gently pushing me somehow closer to her. Her breasts, full in my face, press against her chest.

For the sake of flexibility, I step out of my skirt.

(I remember being afraid to make any first moves with cis lesbians, afraid I was always inherently doing it a little wrong. Yet, now, I do not feel the need to perform my femininity to her. I do not perform a lesbianism that is familiar to her at the expense of my trans-ness.)

The zipper is on the left side and comes down quickly. I know she watches me, the bare skin on my hips, on my thighs. 

(It is a gloriously liberating feeling, watching her eyes and knowing I am seen not as woman but as divine world-less lover.)

When I stand again, I press her gently towards my bed and then return to her nipples with a renewed vigor and intensity, twisting one and just barely ghosting the other with kisses.

“Fuck you,” she says between breaths, and it makes me smile. I go for the button of her shorts, but she beats me to it. Her eyes, wide with need, gesture through me and to my desk drawer. God knows how she guessed. I think she probably has a sixth sense for finding toys in the apartments of unsuspecting queers.

I take the vibrator from the drawer, bright pink and cylindrical. When I turn back to her, there she is, entirely bare, on my bed, her feet pressed together so that her legs fall open the shape of a diamond, her elbows propped up against a pillow.

I have to pause.

(I always have to pause, a moment to take in this queer feeling.)

She smiles an air-sign smile again. I hope it’s at the thought of my taking her in as slowly as I do.

I click the vibrator on. Even its lowest setting has always been on the stronger side. She proves this point as well when its head ghosts across her clit. 

I take up a position that gives my mouth access to hers, and as I do, she captures my lips, drawing my body closer to her and pressing my hips against the other end of the vibrator. I curve my hips up and down, dragging the vibrator along with me, running it across her slit, end to end.

“Fuck, I-” Her back arches and her hand tangles in my hair as she attempts to speak, but before she can get the words out, I turn up the setting. She drops her hand to throw back her head, mouth open, chest pressed out. I lean on my elbow, return my lips to her collarbone.

“Hi, beautiful,” I mutter into her skin as my hips continue to move, the vibrator moving more easily now with how wet she is.

“Hi,” she meets my gaze. I have to smile. I hold the eye contact as I press harder, watch the intensity grow in her eyes.

I turn it up, notch by notch, level by level, until she comes, writhing beneath me.

(The moment of quiet after a pretty girl comes could probably bring world peace.)

She undoes my shirt again, this time very quickly without any semblance of rhythm. I like it just as much. Her fingers notch underneath the lower seam of my binder, the fabric pressing them tight against my ribcage.

She doesn’t even ask, just stills, waits for my move.

(When I actually have to think about the sex, I keep the binder on. When I can be truly present with someone, without any sense of dysphoria or internalized anything, I don’t need the binder on to remind myself that I am trans, that I am real.)

My heartbeat is loud in my own ears, my arousal building just from the wildness in her expression, the way she is sitting up on her thighs, completely naked, without a sense of shame.

I replace her hands with mine and pull the fabric off over my head, the tightness of the band making it difficult. I imagine how I must be contorting my arms and shoulders to do this. I hope it doesn’t ruin my illusion. I fold the fabric into quarters and place it on the floor next to the bed.

(“You’ve served me well,” I tell it.)

Her hand, flat against the center of my chest pushes me back against my pillows, position completely reversed as she slides my panties down my legs, drops them into the same pile that has gathered on the floor, and lowers her face between my legs.

Her tongue circling around my clit sends warmth through my whole body. 

“You’re so fucking wet just from getting me off,” she whispers, not even centimeters from my pussy, and the way her exhales land across the tender skin makes me shudder. Her tongue again, warmth and sparks and something reminiscent of accumulating and expanding wildfire. I let out a moan and feel my thighs tense at the pleasure of the sensation.

She stops.

Before I can look down to her and ask why, perhaps plead my life away, she presses her chest against mine and then presses her hand back down to my pussy.

“Hmm…” she hums gently with her lips torturously just too far from mine. She drags her fingers along the edges of my labia, slowly, so slowly.

(I haven’t been with another butch in so long. I’ve never had these moves performed right back on me.)

When she finally enters me, she doesn’t start with one finger but with three, and my breath catches, stars striking across my field of vision.

(I feel divine, having her fingers inside of me, having her eyes on my eyes.)

“Tell me this is good, Lillian,” she whispers, and I hadn’t realized how close she was to me but her lips are so near my ear that I shudder. “Tell me this is so good.”

I exhale. She curves her fingers upwards sharply inside me, and a cry escapes my lips unwillingly. “Oh my-” Before I can even finish the phrase, she does it again, relaxing her fingers and then sharpening them again. “Oh my fucking god.”

The pleasure is so obscene it’s almost painful, something that tears through me. 

Her accomplishment is clear on her face, “There they are.”

My own hand goes to my left nipple, and as I pinch it, she nips gently at my right, her fingers still shocking me with pleasure over and over and over and-

(I’m so fucking alive.)

Her other hand presses two fingers hard against my clit, and within moments, I’m coming. She continues to pulse her fingers into me as I contract, and if the orgasm weren’t as good as it is, I’d watch the still-focused, calculating expression in her eyes.

“You’re fucking perfect,” she whispers into my neck, removing her fingers and lowering herself on top of me. I don’t say anything, just let the remaining shocks of the orgasm pulse through me.

She doesn’t stay the night which I silently deem to be a queer thought, the maddening closeness and then the vanity, the way nomadism leads us back to those selves that we prize so passionately.

(I sleep until noon, and when I find my phone in the pocket of my discarded skirt, her name is onscreen.

I like a pretentious lover, the message says.

Well thank the tr*nny gods, I reply.)

Photo by Plato Terentev