Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg

if it were a rope that could bear her weight. Sometimes as she sucked Anne’s breast, till her tongue was all but numb and Anne’s nipple somehow changed flavor—Flannery could not have described the change, but she could taste it—she felt she was climbing up that pleasure-call of Anne’s, even as she slid back up her body, planting aftermath kisses along her breastbone and soft neck; by her ear; on her cheek; and, hushed conclusion, on her lips, now that they’d stopped groaning and had settled back from gasping into something calmer, like the hum of a dreamer.
    Flannery loved Anne’s breasts; and Anne, for her part, loved Flannery’s love.
    “What did you do to me?” she’d ask Flannery, when her lover had returned to face her, after such a passionate mission. “What did you do? I’ve—I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
    Anne’s face was bashful, her skin the rose of post-climax, and Flannery was unable to keep from her own a sly smirk. It was her most prideful achievement. It brought on the narrow-eyed arrogance of conquest, followed by a simple, affectionate delight.
    “I don’t know what I do,” she whispered into her lover’s mouth. “But whatever it is, I’d like to do more of it.”

D id Flannery believe in souls? She wasn’t sure. Or spirits, or other ineffables? She was scared to ask Anne her views on the matter, as it might be something Anne would laugh at. Flannery did not want to risk that laughter.
    If she did believe in souls (maybe, who knew, it was something she’d have to grow up a little to form an opinion on), she would say that Anne’s spoke to her through her eyes. Whatever pleasures their bodies shared, it was Anne’s eyes that moved Flannery most deeply. Deeper, certainly, than anyplace words could reach. It made her suspect that eyes must communicate something of the spirit.
    She tried, though. She tried to find language to express what she felt.
    “Your eyes—”
    “They glitter like a cat’s—”
    “They are filled with some incredible light—”
    “Your eyes are so—they’re beautiful. ”
    Anne watched her struggle, but how could she help her? Flannery searched for words to convey the color: she rummaged around the minerals, coming up with the obvious jade and emerald and, finally, malachite; she said often how feline they were, in color and in that slow, assessing stare. She found the greens outside sometimes, a new bud, a vivid blade of young grass. “There! Look! Your eyes—that color—” But Anne would shake her head, head-tussle her lover, and say, “Stop trying so hard, babe. I know. I get it. You like my eyes.”
    God, no. It was much more than that, but Flannery would never find a way of saying it. It remained stuck in her throat, what she wanted to speak of how Anne’s eyes held the concentrated, bright essence of the person Flannery loved.
    Many years later, in London with friends, Flannery would find a color that came close. Absinthe. She had never heard of it. Her friends laughed about its mythic strength when they saw a bottle of it in a liquor store window. Flannery, stalled, looked away. She lost herself on that damp street, lost London entirely, as she absorbed that vibrant color, and with it a memory of the unmatched fire of her passion for Anne.

A nd Flannery, too, was discovered. She learned for the first time that she was beautiful, a notion that had never occurred to her before. In Anne’s resonant voice she heard herself described as graceful, lean, curved, lovely—and came to believe the words, a little.
    She was learning what it felt like from the inside, this great life secret. She was finding herself capable of sounds and furies she would never have dreamed of—not in Flannery, the self she’d known.
    Was it like this for everybody? The transformation, and the contrast? Flannery was a still, quiet person: that’s how she seemed even to herself, though in her adolescent journal she had recorded rollicking