Nicotine by Nell Zink

You should stay here with this freak and learn . You’re crushing hard on the Robster and thinking you want his dick, but it’s not his dick you want. It’s his mind . Get back in there and show the boy some respect, and you’ll see—”
    â€œDon’t you think it’s pretty fucking sexist, telling me to let him set the agenda?” She moves forward, toward the door.
    Jazz raises the glass of wine and cigarette in her hand to eye level. She sidesteps to block Penny’s escape. “Look at me,” she says through the smoke. “Do I have a dick?”
    â€œHonestly? I don’t know .”
    Jazz flicks open her quilted dressing gown to reveal a deltaic butterfly-like arrangement of Wedgwood-blue silk and ivory lace. It looks pricey. “Check it out,” she says, resting her left hand onPenny’s shoulder as she dandles her cigarette and wine in her right. “No dick. But I want you anyway, because I’m a sexual person . Not asexual like a certain vagina tease who leads women on because he likes the attention.”
    Confusion sets in. Penny sees a possible hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned angle, but Jazz does not seem to be looking for sympathy.
    â€œYou’re hot,” Jazz continues. “Like a woodland creature in heat to get fucked, and so smooth and brown no normal person can stand it, and this sexless bastard over here does not care, because he wants to be your friend. But I care. I want to get all up inside you and make you come until your teeth chatter. Go ahead. Grope my crotch.”
    Feminine beauty is not something Penny is used to seeing up close. Especially not beauty so reassuringly obscene. She had felt like a sailor on a life raft pelted by hail, and now Jazz is the mermaids, singing of life in caves under the sea. The obscenity is the neon sign flashing over the fairy-tale cave, telling her she’s in the right place.
    The standoff is brief. Her pride—as a curious person not entirely conservative—bids her extend her hand and tap the underwear. The slight touch turns the silk a darker blue. Jazz is very wet. When Penny’s finger grazes her, she struggles to get her next breath.
    â€œSee?” she says. “We’ll never be friends.”
    Penny touches the underwear again a little harder, in the interest of science. She puts her hand on Jazz’s birdlike hip bone and looks into her eyes. She feels more or less as though a trapdoor had opened and dropped her into the Matrix. She sneaks a glance at Rob. He has picked up a back issue of Popular Mechanics from the floor and seems to be reading.
    Later he enters Jazz’s room to turn off the light (for privacy, because her rooftop greenhouse has no curtains). He sits in her armchair, watching the two women by the pinkish glow of mercury vapor streetlamps on atmospheric haze. He palpates his crotch once briefly and frowns.
    THE NEXT DAY AROUND LUNCHTIME, over dry toast and tea, Sorry invites Penny to come along to the Friday potluck at Stayfree.
    Penny says, “What, did you hear I’m a lesbian or something?”
    â€œThe whole neighborhood heard you’re a lesbian!”
    She imagines herself making loud sounds and can’t be sure she didn’t. “I was so fucking drunk,” she says, apologetically.
    â€œI was just busting your balls. We didn’t hear a thing. When Rob came down this morning, he said you were with Jazz, and I put two and two together. He didn’t look real ecstatic.”
    Penny frowns. “Well, it’s not like he wanted—”
    â€œWhat? Love, romance? He wants all those things. He’s just not ready to pay the price.”
    â€œWell, if he doesn’t want sex, he doesn’t want sex. It would be really shitty to, like, rape him by humping his leg. And I was truly pretty drunk. And Jazz was so into it.”
    She frowns at the memory. The symmetry of sex with Jazz is still vivid. Breasts