Sapphic Voices General Fiction

My Girl

My girl rides a bicycle with a painted alien on the bar, because well, she is an alien, having come from England several years ago - no longer considered an immigrant, but an almost legal alien. She is, proudly, a thirty-eight-year-old teenager, with a faux Mohawk, bicycle and penchant for relationships with a lot of sex and no future. She is ISOP – In Search of Pussy. She likes geeky girls because of the innocence.

My girl is at home on okcupid.com tonight looking for someone new, the way I am. Her okcupid profile, new as of seven days ago, says she just got out of an LTR in April and is a bad bet to be “your forever girl.” She didn’t tell me that when we met. The LTR she’s talking about refers to the eleven-and-half years she spent with a school teacher who put her through college so that she could stay in the country. The school teacher made my girl into a domestic slave, the way she tells it.

My girl comes clean about that on okcupid now (and maybe craigslist, too), and about how she likes to cook, and lives in a teeny room, how she is always on a creative spree painting walls and cars, and gets the paint all over her cargo shorts. She laced the cargo shorts with a man’s leather belt, and I was attracted to her in the belt and the cargo shorts, and both her masculine and feminine qualities -- the short short hair as well as the soft pale skin and long eyelashes.

My girl is lonely tonight, and it is Saturday.

If I had not loved her so much, we would be curled reading together on the couch, her arms around me, humming into my ear, but I could not have loved her any less, even if it had meant keeping her around.

Unus mundi – Latin for one mind, or one elegant world. We lived in the same elegant world, but she was not ready for the kind of sustained commitment I offered and craved. My devotion, my passion, runs hot as lava, and maybe she saw that and compared it to her own cool lake, the waters of which couldn’t keep us afloat. But how I loved to swim in those waters, and it didn’t feel as though I was drowning.

But my girl hadn’t planned on finding herself in the deep end. She ran back into her shady forest of trees and solitary animals, away from my eyes, and skin and arms, and all the possibilities two people create.


She was the one who had to nuzzle me every day, check for my presence. I arrived at the yoga studio, and there was my girl, waiting to kiss me. I went to a client’s house, where I was allowed to spread out my work, and she was on the porch. Her calls and emails came daily, and I realized that we had set the pattern of her being the boy, pursuing me, and me the girl, receiving her interest.

My own longing could hide behind her own so that she wouldn’t see it and be frightened by my plan of being hers forever. We were joyful together, our hearts glowing in the other’s presence, and it made no sense to turn away from that kind of happiness.

The being away from her is like the cold bench of a prison, but I have a window to look out of, and the hope of being released by a new love. When or where that new love will come I don’t know, but it was worth it – loving her, her abandonment, the tearing apart, the prison – all worth.


The first photo my girl sent me was the top of her head, with her hair carved in the shape of a dead fish. I could not see her face. Her arms were extended, and she was dancing. She said to email back if I wanted to see the face that went with the top of her head, and although I was scared by the dead fish, I told her I wanted to see her face. She sent her face in the second photo; it was bright and gentle, with no funny shapes cut into her hair this time. I thought it was a face I could love.

I called the number she provided, and was linked to a soft, British voice, someone who had walked around and travelled, like me. We made plans to meet at Starbuck’s, the way everyone does. I had never been to bed with a woman before, had not even kissed one, but had loved women as well as men since I was eleven, and swooned when my sixth grade teacher stood close.

My girl was wearing maroon pants and an okra top on our first date, an outfit I would never wear and did not like. She more than made up for the outfit with her soft cheek, which I kissed, and her snow white skin glowing with her smile, and the way her eyes looked all over my face for me. She was slender and toned from ab crunches, weights and cardio training, and from loss of appetite after breaking up with her ex. This didn’t scare me off. Life had happened to her, the way it had happened to me.

I had brought a Scrabble game, to distract us both from the tension of making conversation; we talked as we played. She had just exited the aforementioned LTR, in which she had not been well-loved. She alternately cooked nutritious meals of rice, vegetables and chicken for herself and assorted housemates, or ate icecream three meals a day. My girl ran in extremes, the way I did.

She wanted me to come by her house. I arrived, and found the place populated by the homeowner, a woman who taught kayaking, the timid female law student who rented a room behind a curtain in the back and the middle aged man from the second floor who appeared to be lonely and ten years old. They often ate at a picnic table, the same kind of thrown together family I lived with.

My girl’s room was off the kitchen, and contained not a whole lot -- a cozy bed, computer, desk and walls adorned with photos of happy times and loved ones. She pulled a helicopter off the top shelf, and allowed me to play with it. She had found it in the trash. I spun the propeller beside her on the bed, and to her credit she didn’t try to kiss me or touch me, however horny she was.

“Do you want to have a fling?” she asked.

“I’m not wired for flings,” I told her. “I know only how to love another person.”

“I could love you,” she said the night of the first massage, when I saw the fading tattoo of a witch she had gotten as a youth. I don’t like witches, I thought. I don’t like witches. Then I told myself to ignore the tattoo and touch her the way she wanted me to.

I had never put my hands on another woman. She wanted me far inside that soft labyrinth of folds that went deeper than I had known. My girl moaned and breathed furiously, gripped the bedpost as I penetrated her, thrusting until my hand got sore. It was easy to pleasure her, I thought.

I was too distracted by the novelty of the experience to be turned on myself. Her vagina had been such an alive thing, as major as a penis. I had imagined that a woman would be more subtle, but her sexual longing was just as urgent. It was like touching a pulsing heart.

I was amazed by how small her teeth felt when I kissed her, how soft she was, how her breasts felt in my hands. My mind took her in before my body finally responded to her.


When I spent overnight visits in my girl’s teeny little room that she rented from the kayak queen, she put me in the trundle bed that pulled out of hers. She read me bedtime stories with me curled against her. We woke up smiling, happy to be together. We made love for eight hours, and made love each time we were together. I wanted her constantly.

She stopped by my writers studio one Saturday. We started out with me seated on a table, my legs wound around her hips, my arms around her neck, a child being carried.

Our kisses ignited something within, and touched me in every year I had lived.

I sought her as a woman when I kissed her. When I lay my head on her chest, I sought her as a child, and she stroked my hair and understood all of this, and the woman and child integrated as we kissed and touched, and my soul burst out of my skin and joined with hers.

We moved onto the couch, as I was otherwise alone in the studio that day. I climbed on top of her, warmth and passion heightening, and I quivered as a startled bird who has just pecked into a new world.

This was the present tense I had sought.

She held me tight wherever we went, and how I loved her. This filled me up somewhere deep down where I had ached for a woman’s affection since I could ever remember, and I knew that even if I lost her, I would remain filled by her.

The tenderness we knew flowed effortlessly between us, similar to what I had felt with the men I had loved, but multiplied, and softer.

What could I give her? I wanted to buy her things – tickets to big shows like “Jersey Boys” that she wouldn’t have been able to afford on her artist’s salary, dinners out, but she told me that all she wanted was for me to be there, so I endeavored to make her feel my love.

By our fourth week together, my girl was skateboarding alongside me on the freshly paved asphalt. We relished the speed, and the ability to play. I gave her a candle, blue tipped matches and some other things I can’t remember now for her birthday. Around that time, her attitude toward me completely changed, and stopped looking me in the eye.

Although she had loved me, and still did, she said it was a small kind of love, and that she really had not been ready for any more than a fling.

“We find something beautiful and I want to cherish it, while you want to ruin it,” I told her.

She was sorry for hurting me, but she just couldn’t love in a big way. There was only love, I told her, and this was always a big thing. I stayed at my friend, Daddy’s house and cried for three days. My girl was lost to me, but I was still full of her love and affection, and she was still full of mine. I reminded myself that there was a high cost for loving sometimes, but that it was almost always worth it.

My girl was a witch and a vampire, who sucked my love out of me, and then left when she was no longer hungry, who put me under her spell, then rushed off in the wind. She was an angel who gave me everything I had always needed. Oh, how she had loved me.

My eighteen-year-old friend, Guy, calls her Elderly Mohawk. He wants to shove an arcade game up her vagina so that it will light up, and all of us can play. He wants us to super glue dildoes to her jungle themed station wagon. Maybe we will do these things, but I don’t want to hurt her. In the meantime, the sun rises, the sun sets, the way Wallace Stevens said, and I look for my girl everywhere, ready to run the moment she catches up with me.

If you have enjoyed Denise Roma's "My Girl", then please be certain to e-mail her at  deniseroma[at]yahoo.com  and thank her for posting this Story.

Click here for a list of all of Denise Roma's  Stories and Poetry at  Sapphic Voices Authoresses.