drifting in empty space

When me and my girlfriend first started hooking up I had no idea what I was doing. I was new to lesbianism and to relationships in general.

 I remember the first time I ever interacted with a self-described lesbian, in my first year of college. We had a statistics class together. In my opinion, math is quite possibly the least sexy thing in the world, but during one of our group project meetings the topic arose. The third member of our group, a frat boy named Devin, had missed our meeting for the fourth time in a row. 

“He’s probably out getting laid,” she’d remarked.

 It was a Friday night. Somehow neither of us had plans of our own. I was still a world-class shut in at the time, but my partner seemed normal enough. I jokingly said that that sounded a lot better than formatting bar graphs.

She snorted. “Sure does. And I totally would be if my girlfriend weren’t out of town. No offense.” She grinned. “I mean I’m having a great time here and all but…”

She trailed off. Meanwhile my mind was reeling. A real, live lesbian. Right in front of me! I came from a fairly small town where most people still consider homosexuality to be some kind of new trendy thing all the kids are doing to mess with their parents.

My partner must have noticed my expression when she glanced up from her laptop. “Something wrong?”

“I…no. Sorry, I-I just,” I fumbled over my words, trying to explain quickly lest my reaction seem homophobic. “I’ve just never met another lesbian before.”

There was a beat of silence wherein I wondered if that was indeed the awkwardest thing I could’ve said. I was also silently wrestling with the fact that it was the first time I’d referred to myself that way out loud. Despite being only three syllables, the word felt large in my mouth, like I couldn’t fit my lips all the way around it. It felt weird to describe myself with a word I barely knew.

“Oh.” She blinked.

We moved into a little discussion about small-minded hometowns and homophobia and how nice it was to be away at school in a larger city. She told me that she met her girlfriend during orientation, and asked me whether I had met anyone cute on campus.

“Um, well,” I laughed, embarrassed. “There’s this one girl.”

She tried to tease details out of me, but I shyly refused. Said I didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it.

“Well, if you ever need lesbian relationship advice you can call me anytime.” She winked at me. “I know what it’s like to go through all that for the first time. I wish I’d had someone to talk to about it.”

I started to open my mouth, though better of it, then smiled and nodded. 

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

A few minutes later, we were in the middle of spreadsheet-ing when my curiosity overcame me.

“Hey…can I ask you something?”

“Fire away.” She grinned again. She was so friendly.

“Something…pretty personal.”

“Go ahead. I’m an open book.”

I shifted uneasily in my seat. 

“So…have you ever…done it?”

Another beat of silence as she stared at me, probably wondering whether I’m serious. I can tell that she wants to laugh and I feel pathetic but she composes herself.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes I have done it.”   

“So, um,” I squirm a little more. I hate myself for asking but when am I gonna get this chance again? I don’t know any other lesbians. “How do you…uh…”

“How do I have sex with a woman?”

I flinch. It sounds so…base just spelled out like that, but I’m grateful that she said it before I had to. I nod anxiously. 

She exhales slowly. “Well,” she starts in a tone that is usually followed by ‘when two people love each other very much…’ in TV and movies.

It isn’t often you meet someone willing to explain sex to you, who doesn’t want to have sex with you. And willing she was. I left that group meeting a changed woman. We texted for a while after that semester, but gradually lost touch. We never got very close, but I miss her sometimes.

And, I hate to say it, but I thought of her the first time we had sex.

She turns to face me, her face luminescent in the moonlight. Her eyes glitter in the dark, sapphires burning with their own light like each was a world unto itself, the perfect black pupil a tiny earth circled by some unseen moon, absorbing and reflecting its beams into the expanse of pure blue that surrounds it.

“Uh…”

She snuggles closer to me. “Promise I won’t tell a soul,” she says. The hushed, playful tone of her voice somehow conveys a wink without her performing the action. And I would know, since I can’t look away.

“I…” I swallow, force myself to look up at the actual moon in the sky. “I don’t usually have dreams.”

She scoffs lightly. Nudges my shoulder with hers.

“That’s not what I asked.”

I feel her breath on my cheek: gentle, tinged with mint. I run my tongue over my chapped lips.

“Um…I don’t know.” I can feel her start to object so I amend my statement. “Nothing interesting, anyway.”

She sighs, but the conspiratorial grin remains. 

“What kind of dreams do you have?” I blurt before she can question me further.

Now she turns her face to the moon, hums almost inaudibly. A warm, strangely intimate rumble that registers in my chest, rolls like dark honey down my own throat. I shiver.

“The good kind. Mostly. Sometimes you’re there.”

My heart skips a beat. I try desperately to keep my breathing even.

“Am I…um…are the ones that I’m in…good ones? The dreams?”

She chuckles softly. I silently curse myself for being so motherfucking goddamn awkward, until she turns to face me and my mind goes blank. 

“Those are the best ones.”

I have to look at her now, but when I do her face is…oddly sad. She’s smiling but there’s a wistfulness to her expression that banishes the uneasy warmth I’d felt a moment before. My face creases in concern. I have the strongest urge to cup her face in my palm, to stroke her cheek in a soothing manner, tell her that whatever’s bothering her it will all be okay. The way she’s done for me countless times, both seriously and in jest. For all her whimsy and irresponsibility, she’s really quite maternal in that way; always ready to comfort, calm, talk me down. She’s always there.

I start to raise my hand towards her but my arm halts in mid-air, hovering in the little space left between us. I look at her perfect face, her perfect skin, and I can’t bring myself to touch her. My arm falls to my side.

“Um, I-”

“Hey, can I ask you something?” She interrupts, not unkindly.

“Sure,” I reply, grateful that I don’t have to conjure an ending for that sentence.

She glances off into the distance before returning to me with a look I can’t quite decipher.

“Who’s Brianna?”

Groggily, I sit up in bed. Judging by the dim light filtering through my curtains it’s about six o’ clock. Casting a glance over to my laptop, I wipe the drool from my mouth and stretch my arms over my head. I have my computer set up to notify me audibly when I get a new email so that I don’t miss messages from classmates or professors about assignments. I’ve already got a ton of make-up work to contend with and I don’t need that pile getting any bigger. It’s not that I’m lazy, I just have a shit attention span, and a worse memory.

I shuffle over to my desk and plop down in the old swivel chair, which creaks as I settle in. Clicking open my email reveals that only one of my new messages is school-related: one of my professors has had a death in the family and will be missing class. The other two are from an address I don’t recognize. The first subject line reads “Find Me and F#ck Me” and was sent around 3 PM, the second simply says “hello”, received about half an hour afterwards. Both appear to be spam emails so I have no idea why they ended up in my main inbox, until I look a little closer at the email address. It’s the same as the web address of that weird porn website.

Suddenly my body is covered with sweat. After I threw up earlier I’d stumbled into bed and passed out (as I tend to do after a stressful situation), and I’d completely forgotten about what I’d done this afternoon. Busty Brianna. Now it all comes rushing back. My roommate must be back from class by now, and I’m willing to bet she’s been back on that site. I wonder if she’s been contacted. If I’ve been snitched on. The muscles in my hand seize up, desperate to click on the first email, but I hesitate. I’m always so worried about getting a virus from opening spam mail and that website was so freaking weird, who’s to say clicking this won’t explode my computer? Maybe the whole site is just a phishing scam (is that what it’s called?), where they bait you into clicking weird links and unleashing malware into your system with big boobies and pretty girls? But I know that if there’s a chance I can contact whoever runs the site and stop them from letting my roommate know I snooped through her shit, I had better take it. Hell hath no fury like a doomsday prepper scorned; she could literally hold out on me for the rest of our lives. 

The first email reads like any standard porn spam so I go ahead and delete it, but the second one reads like a letter. 

“dear Friend, 

so sorry to see you go before we truly could become acquainted. please consider further interaction. i humbly leave my contacting information below. click if you will

your roommate’s girlfriend”

A bright blue hyperlink underneath the body of the email appears to be the aforementioned “contacting information”. It looks like one of those shortened URL links you see sometimes with spam advertisements. 

My brow furrows and my mind reels with this new input. This is obviously a different person than before, judging by the typing style. But they must have had access to my roommate’s webcam during my chat with “Brianna”, seeing as they are trying to bait me by pretending to be dating my roommate. I must have visibly reacted when “Brianna” told me my roommate thought I was cute. I would have had to react pretty damn hard for it to be visible via her shitty webcam, but I never have been good at hiding emotion. Or this is just a stab in the dark, whoever this is “revealing” some personal connection to pique my interest had it faded by now. To instigate “further interaction”.

I turn my head towards the door, listening. If my roommate’s back, she isn’t making it known. I’m not sure I’d want to face her so soon after trespassing anyway. I still feel too guilty, my face would give it away. 

‘Well,’ I think to myself. ‘I’ve come this far.’

I click the link.

I blink several times rapidly. 

“CLICK HERE TO SEE WHOSE HORNY IN YOUR AREA”

Poorly edited pictures of large-breasted, heavily made-up women in different stages of undress fill the screen. Pop-ups advertising “HOT N HORNY LADIES”, etc., in neon fonts flash at me from the perimeter.  

“SEXXXY ASIAN SINGLES NEAR YOU”

I stare at the computer in disbelief. A porn website? Not that she doesn’t watch porn; she definitely does (it isn’t a topic of discussion with us, but I’m a healthy red-blooded American woman who knows what jacking off sounds like and we do share an apartment), but it just feels…strange for this to be her most visited website. Like, above Instagram. And the address is so bizarrely nonsexual, corporate really, sounding more like a site you’d go to to get investment banking tips than something you’d click on when your dick’s hard. Almost like they didn’t want anyone to know it had porn on it, but wouldn’t that be counterproductive? Maybe this is some tech-savvy, high-powered businessman’s weird fetish project, a secret titty trove he can dip into while at work without resulting in any suspicious browser history. But if this was a personal site, then why have the ads? Maybe that’s part of the fantasy.

“FUCK DESPERATE OLDER WOMEN NOW”

I open the drop-down “MENU” at the top of the screen and scroll through a list of what sounds like titles of different new age self-help books (”Live Your Fullest, Brightest Life”, “Discover Your Destiny Spirit”…I nearly click on “Unleash the Goddess That Slumbers Within” but stop myself”), until I reach a link titled “In Memoriam”. 

Intrigued, I click on it.

Rather than taking me to a new page, the website appears to refresh itself and load the homepage again, but with different ads. I am about to click the link again to make sure this wasn’t a glitch, when a new, larger pop-up fills the top-left portion of the screen, blocking the menu. 

“BUSTY BRIANNA WANTS TO CHAT!” 

This pop-up appears to be some kind of instant messaging interface. Displayed at the top of the window is a photo of a blonde, conventionally attractive young woman whose low-cut top and large breasts are featured prominently by the framing of the image. Under the picture a green dot next to the word “Online!” in bold letters flashes on and off. At the bottom of the pop-up there is a text box for me to type in, encouraging me to “Say hi!”.

Before I can type anything, a ping goes off and a message appears in the chat.

“Hey, cutie! ;) Where’s ur roommate?”

Several months after the “barn incident”, as we’re calling it (well actually I just call it that in my head, we haven’t talked about it), we’re rooming together in a moderately-priced apartment in a decent neighborhood near our college campus. Originally she was going to stay with her boyfriend, but they broke up at the end of that summer. She’d called me in the middle of the night, in tears, and despite having an early shift the next morning I’d spent two hours consoling her, reestablishing her self-esteem, and reluctantly but emphatically convincing her not to break into his car and smear dog shit all over the dashboard or commit any similar crimes of passion. I was a little nervous because we’d never shared a room before, but she’s tidier than I’d imagined and always replaces the toilet paper, which is really all I ask. Neither of us cook – between school and working part time we don’t really get the chance– so we order out just about every night. 

“Fine with me.”

I’m working on getting rid of the dirty dishes in the sink before we add more to the pile. I fucking hate doing dishes so I insist upon wearing these elbow-length purple rubber gloves with elephant faces on them that I found in the “lifestyle” section in Wassermann’s, which I am mercilessly mocked for, but they keep my skin dry. The water is so hot I almost can’t feel it. The television blares “The Big Bang Theory” which I cannot stand but she finds compelling. Every time she watches she tries to convince me there’s some kind of coded message hidden in the laugh track but I think it’s wishful thinking.

I’m discovering that the sounds of canned laughter and rushing water combined give me a weird tingly sensation in the back of my brain when I’m startled by a sharp intake of breath and the clatter of a phone hitting the floor.

“Oh my god,”

“What, what, did something happen?”

Alarmed, I waddle over into the living room with the gloves still on my hands, holding them out to avoid dripping on myself.

“I-I fucking-”

She takes a shaky breath to steady herself before turning to me with panic in her eyes.

“I swear to god I am not fucking with you.”

“What?”

“Ughhh, you’re not gonna believe me.”

Her fear seems to dissipate as she deflates in defeat, burying her face in her hands with a sigh that ends in a sob.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Ugh! …Okay, so I was on Snapchat just now, and there was this fucking guy, and-”

“What? When were you on Snapchat, I thought you were ordering the food?”

“Okay, I was about to, alright, but I saw that Jason posted a story and-”

I straighten, looking down at her through narrowed eyes.

“Wait, are you fucking serious? Jason? Why are you still looking at his Snaps?”

“Ughhhh oh my god, can we please not-”

“I told you this isn’t healthy! You can’t cyber-stalk your exes and remain a normal person! It does shit to you. And you know I know from experience.”

“Okay, but it isn’t the same, we didn’t have a messy breakup, he said we could be friends-”

“Are you kidding me?! He broke up with you over text.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t messy, it was like, detached and stuff. Emotionless.”

“Uh, it wasn’t emotionless for you. You called me sobbing-”

“Okay, I was a mess but it wasn’t a mess and I’m pretty much over him anyway and I just check in to see if he’s doing okay I’m not stalking him like, fuck, why am I not allowed to watch someone’s Snap stories?! Who am I hurting?!”

“You’re hurting yourself-”

“Well I feel fine!”

This she yells, finally standing up for herself after being on the defensive. Glaring at me, she swipes her phone up from the floor and aggressively punches in her lock code. 

“Fuck it, I don’t need this.”

She stands and stomps off to her room leaving the TV on, which she knows I hate. I’m left standing in the middle of the living room, dripping into the carpet. My arms now stiff from holding them in front of me. I feel ridiculous and I let them fall to my sides, water immediately seeping through my jeans to my skin. I can’t turn the TV off because of the gloves, so I shuffle back to the sink to the sound of a live studio audience losing their minds.

I feel a lurch and the truck takes a sharp turn. Looking up from my lap I see us pulling up to a dilapidated-looking barn – really a glorified shack – in the middle of a long-abandoned cornfield. Most of the plants here are crunchy and brown, more husks than plants; only a few stubborn weeds hanging on around the barn’s edges, clinging to the only shade in the area, look remotely alive. The faded, rust-red wood of the building burns like a pale flame against a cold grey sky. It’s gotten cloudier since we left. A crow caws in the distance.

We sit in silence for a moment after we’ve parked on the gravel walkway.

Finally she turns to face me from the driver’s seat, a look of apprehension on her face.

“So…”

She hesitates. I can tell she’s trying to test the waters, see if I’ll react the way she thinks I’ll react.

I surprise even myself by turning to her and smiling.

“Well. What are we waiting for?”

My body finally reacts at these words. My head starts to swim. My heart is pounding. I feel lightheaded and I’m sure my vision is blurring. Nope — yeah, definitely blurring. I feel myself starting to slide down the seat, but force myself to remain rigid. Hold my smile. I can barely make out her response.

“!!”

She says this while rolling her huge blue eyes into the back of her head, honestly so damn far that I’m afraid for a moment that she’ll swerve and run us off the road.

(It’s hard to miss the gorgeous way her eyelashes flutter as she does this, framing those eyes like twin sets of plush black butterflies flitting around a lurid crystal pool…surely she must know about that?)

It takes me a moment to formulate a response. Of course she wouldn’t understand. How could she? It had nothing to do with her and never would. I’m sincerely frustrated - nearly angry - for a second, before I recognize the desire to make her understand is a fruitless one. I sigh and drop my shoulders, resignation now replacing the dead objection on my lips.

“Fine. You know what? Let’s just go where you wanna go then. It’s fine-”

I cut her off as she starts to open her mouth, eyebrows raised at my sudden compliance. 

“Really.”

She shakes her head at this, scoffing incredulously but unable to hide a grin. 

(Feigning surprise but smirking like a spoiled child who’s conned her way into extra dessert.)

“As you wish.”