Glitter. Real Stories About Sexual Desire From Real Women by Mona Darling, Lauren Fleming, Lynn Lacroix, Tizz Wall, Penny Barber, Hopper James, Elis Bradshaw, Delilah Night, Kate Anon, Nina Potts Page A
Authors: Mona Darling, Lauren Fleming, Lynn Lacroix, Tizz Wall, Penny Barber, Hopper James, Elis Bradshaw, Delilah Night, Kate Anon, Nina Potts
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out. Then, just like a boy losing his virginity, I fell asleep.
When I woke up, it was later than I expected. I was tucked into a ball on the far side of her bed and Miranda was gone.
Scheherazade
Kate Conway
During the day, I edit freelance work and provide customer support for a start-up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm also the Queer Studies Editor at xoJane.com. In my spare time, I frequently write fiction and poetry, take improv and voice-acting classes, fail at running half-marathons, and explore all the nooks and crannies of the great city of San Francisco.
I'm twenty-two, so I guess you could say I came of age basically yesterday. This story takes place when I was in high school in the mid-2000s.
You can find me on Twitter at @KatChatters.
Maybe all high school romances are like this, all searing heat and bitten nails, and me and Audrey were no exception. Audrey never knew how to love a little bit, only in intense, sharp bursts. We spent most of late August in parking lots, sitting in her 1989 Camry, slipping around on the cracked leather seats as sweat slicked the backs of our thighs.
“Tell me a story,” she’d say, seat leaned back as far as it would go and feet kicked up on the dash. I’d watch as her uniform skirt puddled around her thighs, tan and strong from lacrosse. She’d follow my gaze down to her lap and smile, stretch, rub her ankles together where her feet pressed up against the windshield. I’d swallow.
Audrey and I liked to play a game where we refused each other everything, and I’d play it then, leaning back against the passenger-side door and sliding my sunglasses down my nose. “You tell me one.”
She’d wrap a hank of my then-long hair around one callused palm and tug, not hard, just enough to sting. “I’m bored, Kate,” she’d remind me as I melted toward her, open-mouthed. “You’re the only one who isn’t boring.”
I’d smile against her then, swiping my tongue over the salty skin behind her ear, daring, wanting, afraid. “So give me something to talk about.”
The whole time, she’d keep my hair wound around her wrist like a talisman.
While cleaning out my room in my parents’ house, I find a stack of letters, creased and soft. I read them quickly, barely taking any of them in, save a passage here and there.
I loved you so much, I think, but things got intense so fast. I keep having nightmares where the stories I write are real, that I wake up and I’m forty and married and unhappy and dull. I think you’d be happy like that, which is worse. Please don’t be mad at me, but I think you’d be happy like that.
Audrey wrote like a Dorothy Parker character without any of the self-awareness. But at the time these had gutted me, left me staring and trembling in the senior bathroom, and they gut me now.
They weren’t all breakup letters. We each used to leave notes in the other’s locker, tucked among binders and empty coffee cups. I’d grab for my science binder and watch a crumpled ball of notebook paper tumble out. It’d open into a doodle of Audrey asleep on a desk, captioned “I HATE EVERYONE EXCEPT YOU AND HOLDEN CAULFIELD.” They make a pile in my lap, some funny, some cranky, all of them only ours.
“I’ll take you home today,” says one of the notes in thick, rounded magenta Sharpie. I remember this one.
She’d hand-delivered it to me in fifth period, bold as you please, hair spilling out from her ponytail over the shoulders of her stiff uniform shirt. “Message from the office for Kate?” she chirped, sliding it across my desk before our English teacher could get it away from her.
Not that Ms. Falway would have even thought to: I was a compulsively good student, a people-pleaser, biting my lip with nerves before every test and leaving sweaty palm-prints on every page o f Catcher in the Ry e . I tried to keep my expression neutral even so, though, dragging my eyes
When I woke up, it was later than I expected. I was tucked into a ball on the far side of her bed and Miranda was gone.
Scheherazade
Kate Conway
During the day, I edit freelance work and provide customer support for a start-up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm also the Queer Studies Editor at xoJane.com. In my spare time, I frequently write fiction and poetry, take improv and voice-acting classes, fail at running half-marathons, and explore all the nooks and crannies of the great city of San Francisco.
I'm twenty-two, so I guess you could say I came of age basically yesterday. This story takes place when I was in high school in the mid-2000s.
You can find me on Twitter at @KatChatters.
Maybe all high school romances are like this, all searing heat and bitten nails, and me and Audrey were no exception. Audrey never knew how to love a little bit, only in intense, sharp bursts. We spent most of late August in parking lots, sitting in her 1989 Camry, slipping around on the cracked leather seats as sweat slicked the backs of our thighs.
“Tell me a story,” she’d say, seat leaned back as far as it would go and feet kicked up on the dash. I’d watch as her uniform skirt puddled around her thighs, tan and strong from lacrosse. She’d follow my gaze down to her lap and smile, stretch, rub her ankles together where her feet pressed up against the windshield. I’d swallow.
Audrey and I liked to play a game where we refused each other everything, and I’d play it then, leaning back against the passenger-side door and sliding my sunglasses down my nose. “You tell me one.”
She’d wrap a hank of my then-long hair around one callused palm and tug, not hard, just enough to sting. “I’m bored, Kate,” she’d remind me as I melted toward her, open-mouthed. “You’re the only one who isn’t boring.”
I’d smile against her then, swiping my tongue over the salty skin behind her ear, daring, wanting, afraid. “So give me something to talk about.”
The whole time, she’d keep my hair wound around her wrist like a talisman.
While cleaning out my room in my parents’ house, I find a stack of letters, creased and soft. I read them quickly, barely taking any of them in, save a passage here and there.
I loved you so much, I think, but things got intense so fast. I keep having nightmares where the stories I write are real, that I wake up and I’m forty and married and unhappy and dull. I think you’d be happy like that, which is worse. Please don’t be mad at me, but I think you’d be happy like that.
Audrey wrote like a Dorothy Parker character without any of the self-awareness. But at the time these had gutted me, left me staring and trembling in the senior bathroom, and they gut me now.
They weren’t all breakup letters. We each used to leave notes in the other’s locker, tucked among binders and empty coffee cups. I’d grab for my science binder and watch a crumpled ball of notebook paper tumble out. It’d open into a doodle of Audrey asleep on a desk, captioned “I HATE EVERYONE EXCEPT YOU AND HOLDEN CAULFIELD.” They make a pile in my lap, some funny, some cranky, all of them only ours.
“I’ll take you home today,” says one of the notes in thick, rounded magenta Sharpie. I remember this one.
She’d hand-delivered it to me in fifth period, bold as you please, hair spilling out from her ponytail over the shoulders of her stiff uniform shirt. “Message from the office for Kate?” she chirped, sliding it across my desk before our English teacher could get it away from her.
Not that Ms. Falway would have even thought to: I was a compulsively good student, a people-pleaser, biting my lip with nerves before every test and leaving sweaty palm-prints on every page o f Catcher in the Ry e . I tried to keep my expression neutral even so, though, dragging my eyes
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