Once that thought hits, it stays like a burr lodged in Claire’s hair. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Sexual relations are a foreign language to her—with Pete it was always easiest to think about something else until it was over. With Jackie, the last thing she wants to do is disengage. Claire wants to be aware of every single second.
“I’ve never—” Claire gasps. Jackie’s hands are smoothing over her stomach, tracing each bump of her ribs, slipping just under the high waist of her underwear. “I want—I want this, but I don’t know how.”
“I’ll show you,” Jackie whispers. She’s sinking to her knees for reasons Claire can’t fathom, trailing a hot line of kisses as she goes. “Please, let me show you.”
As if Claire could refuse her anything.
At Claire’s vehement nod, Jackie unbuckles Claire’s belt and pulls it from her waist with asnapthat makes her shiver. She slides the button from Claire’s corduroys, then the zipper, easing it all down her legs underwear and all.
Claire assumes that maybe Jackie will stand up again once the task is done, but she doesn’t. She just guides Claire to step one leg out of the garments, and then presses her lips just below Claire’s bellybutton, looking up at her with dark eyes.
“Spread your legs for me?”
Claire feels a thousand things at once. There are nerves, but also excitement—she feels exposed, raw as a new cut as she eases her legs apart to reveal herself to Jackie’s gaze. She feels a chest-tightening, breath-stealing affection for the woman currently nuzzling the coarse hair between her thighs. And, above all, Claire feels anticipation—something is about to happen, something new, something transformative. She’s too distracted by sensation to understand what it is until Jackie finally moves lower, spreads something with her fingers, and takes Claire into her mouth.
The feeling that arises from a single swipe of Jackie’s tongue is euphoric.
It’s gentle at first, softness against softness, but at the tail end of it Jackie’s tongue brushes a spot that makes something deep inside Claire jolt awake. It’s like that day with the laundryhamper, put under a magnifying glass by Jackie’s touch, by her tongue, by her eyes never leaving Claire’s.
Claire spreads her legs wider, gasping as her head hits the back of the door. Jackie eases herself under one until Claire’s knee is over her shoulder, opening her up, and Claire steadies herself with a hand on the top of her head.
“Goodness,” Claire manages to choke, knowing that her words can’t fully explain exactly what she’s feeling. Nothing could. It’s beyond her comprehension. “Jackie, I—gosh. That’s—you—can you do that again, please?”
And Jackie does. She does it again and again until Claire is quaking with the contained force of it. There’s something magical happening at the intersection of pressure and friction, and Claire wants to chase it down.
Somewhere beyond the closet door, a chorus of voices begins the countdown to midnight.
“Twelve! Eleven! Ten!”
The knowledge that it’s Jackie’s tongue that’s doing this to her, hermouth, that she’s drinking Claire in like wine and moaning at the taste, her fingernails leaving little crescents in Claire’s hips from the attempt to keep her close—it’s almost too much. Claire squirms in her grip, eagerly following the rhythm of Jackie’s mouth like a woman possessed—
“Seven! Six!”
She’s on a train hurtling towards the edge of a cliff, and there’s no jumping off now. She can’t, shewon’t. Jackie’s deep brown eyes are seeing Claire across the wide plain of her body, truly seeing her, as it all mounts to an inconceivable height—
“Four! Three! Two!”
Claire grasps for Jackie’s hand, lacing their fingers together over her own thigh. The unknown is opening up under her feet; it’s not a yawning chasm but a bright stretch of warm, blissful ocean, shimmering and waiting for her to land—
“Happy New Year!”
Jackie’s hand squeezes, her tongue doubles in its lashing over that blissful spot, and Claire’s body seizes as everything comes to its obvious conclusion.
1970 dawns with raucous cheers. There, in Jackie Callas’s coat closet with the muffled notes of the Rolling Stones playing over a rowdy party behind the closed door, Claire has hereureka.
It’s like nothing she’s ever known, those seconds of suspended feeling. It’s a pot boiling over—it rises and rises until it spills over the sides of her, uncontainable, intense and yet brief. Claire couldn’t stop herself from crying out even if she wanted to. It’s involuntary, unstoppable—she’s so full to the brim with base, primalpleasurethat her voice can’t fit anymore. She bursts past the boundaries of herself, and it rolls in waves, lapping against brand-new shores.
Jackie groans. She buries her face deeper between Claire’s legs, her tongue still making sloppy circles as Claire’s world is reshaped entirely.
“Jackie,” Claire finally gasps, as the feeling tapers off into something less consuming. Her legs are shaking. She’s sure she’s only kept standing by the grace of Jackie’s shoulders holding her up. “Holy hell.”
“That’s the second time I’ve heard you swear,” Jackie mumbles into Claire’s pelvis, trailing wet kisses over her inner thighs and then upward.
“This situation called for stronger language,” Claire says breathlessly as her leg slips back down to earth. “I mean…Jackie, mygoodness.”
Jackie rocks back on her heels, looking up at Claire with an expression more vulnerable than Claire has ever seen on her face. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”
Jackie stands up slowly, pressing herself against Claire again, which helps immensely with the shaking legs. Jackie’s mouthis wet and shiny with that between-the-legs slickness Claire has been waking up to for months, and it makes her throb as if the last five minutes never even happened.
