READER ADVISORY: The following story includes material of a graphic, sexual nature, making it inappropriate for certain readers. In the interests of allowing free avenues for creative expression, it is not the policy of The Crimson's Arts or FM boards to curb the subject matter of fiction pieces, or to alter them in ways that may diminish their literary force. With this in mind, readers of the following piece may proceed at their own discretion.

The last guy I dated always wanted to put his balls atop my face. I’d lie down and he’d lean over me so that his taint, balls and hairy ass crack were all that I could see. He’d sort of plié down toward me, and I’d have to snap my teeth at his balls, try to catch them in my jaws before he pulled away. That was my job.

He only fucked me every other week or so. All the rest of the time, it was testicle ballet, or sometimes he’d slobber on my genitals and I’d pretend to have an orgasm. I was getting pretty sick of it, so I told him that the ball game was boring. He said, “Sweetheart, if you won’t try new things, then how can we finagle a relationship?” And then he left.

That was my last boyfriend.

I’ve never been that into fantasies or roleplay. My uncle once got me a subscription to World of Warcraft, and when he came over to set it up and introduce me to his online guild, I kept laughing nervously. This probably offended him, because a few months later I signed on out of boredom and realized he hadn’t renewed my subscription.

One time I guess I sort of got into it. Funny sex, I mean. I had this boyfriend who couldn’t get it up. I was nineteen and loved his guts out.

My friends all told me, “he’s gay, all right? He’s gay.” I told them they were ignorant. Gays could get it up for women. He was too smart, I explained. He just couldn’t turn his mind off.

So we tried some things. Rape scenarios didn’t work for him, and I didn’t like them because he always forgot to hold my hands down. We tried a little girl-older man thing, and we both sort of liked that but felt bad for liking it. The only thing that really worked was this doctor-nurse behavior. I called him Dr. Cock, up it went, and we’d have a few minutes to work. I always had to lie perfectly still (changing positions turned him flaccid all over again) and whisper, Dr. Cock, Dr. Cock, ooooh, your cock, until he came.

We ended up breaking up a few months later because he found out he was gay. He’s very happy now. We have lunch and talk about it sometimes.

I just want to have regular sex, the kind where the guy fucks me and I have an orgasm that sends my head knocking against something from the flailing thrill. But I keep finding all these boys who need it in a special way. And now I figure I’ve tried the weirdest most exciting stuff and found it boring, and that’s never going to change.

I’m wrong, of course, but I don’t know that till I meet Miss Lee-Lee.

She’s sitting next to me at a crowded bar in Wicker Park, drawing caricatures on a napkin of everybody in there. Which would usually piss me off a little: oh look how alternative I am, I’m Zach Braff’s next movie girlfriend, I’m that girl at the laundromat who dances alone with headphones on to music nobody can hear. But for whatever reason it doesn’t bother me, her drawing. It gets me going, like I’ve found a friend or something.

I have on this white onesie underneath my jeans and mesh tank top. A cotton leotard that eliminates need for underwear or bra. It’s itching like crazy. I feel about seven years old, and I try to search for something good to say, compliment her on her cool nail polish or the Marc Jacobs sailor top that she has on (except not say Marc Jacobs because that’d make me a snob and point out that she is one).

I tell her she is pretty.

I expect her to blush or scoot away or at least say something cool, like, I don’t swing that way, baby, but instead she looks straight back at me and tells me, “You are too.”

That’s when I start to realize something I haven’t considered. That this woman might be interested in me, might even want to take a tumble with me, and I’ve never done any of that stuff before. The closest I have ever come to being with a girl was the time my friend Erin and I did shrooms and made our teeth touch just to hear the click.

That is the closest I have come.

Sure, I think some girls are pretty. Sometimes I even think about what it would be like to freeze time and undress one or kiss one and not have to deal with the “Are you gay?” stuff. But usually those are with ex-girlfriends of my boyfriends, and I always figure that I’m jealous and just want to compare our bodies, and besides, the fantasies always end at kissing, looking, touching. When it comes down to O-time with my vibrator and me, I always have to think of being fucked.

“I’m Miss Lee-Lee,” this woman says. “But you can call me Lee-Lee.”

She draws my picture, which is good, I think. It gives me a big nose, which I sort of think I have, but she keeps on mumbling, “No the nose is all wrong, all wrong,” and wringing out her hands. I buy her a drink, and she writes me a message on an index card. “I write backwards,” she explains, and tells me to go read it in the bathroom mirror. I do, and it’s nothing naughty or exciting, just saying I have really white teeth.

I go back upstairs, and she swivels toward me on her stool. The tiny straw—those bar ones with the double holes—is pressed between her lips, and I think I hear a tiny swoosh of bubbly air, which means there is a hole somewhere. I put my hand against her knee to steady myself, then leave it there. “You’re really so pretty,” I shout, and everyone around us turns around.



Back at her apartment, Lee-Lee makes me a gin and tonic with lots of lime. I pretend to drink it. What I really need is a glass of water, but I don’t want to ask for one because I think it might come off as, “I’m wasted party’s over.” So I go into the bathroom and scoop mouthfuls from the sink until I feel a little better.

There are framed photos of ballerinas all around the mirror. Most of them are just of the girls’ bodies, the frame holding only downward pointed toes to skyward pointed chin, jumping and bending in their tutus. Some of them show faces, but I like the non-face ones better. I don’t know much about ballet but figure with the chorus girls it’s probably more about fitting in and looking same, so probably these no-face photos mean something.

I don’t know, though. I’m pretty drunk.

When I come out, Lee-Lee’s in the hallway holding my drink. She’s barefoot and has changed into pale pink tights under a leotard. Her hair’s in braided pigtails.

“You really like ballerinas, huh?” I say. “They’re your favorite, it looks like.”

I don’t know what I’m talking about, and neither does she. I point toward the bathroom. “All those photos.”

“Oh, those.” She laughs.

“Those are me.”

It’s true, and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t see the resemblance right away, because in this hallway light I can see she’s older than I thought. Thirtysomething, maybe. It doesn’t matter to me, except I know that the thirties are when girls get ashamed of age, and so maybe she’s self-conscious about it, and maybe by not recognizing her I’ve made it worse.

She holds my drink out away from her body for balance and rises up on her bare toes, then trembles a bit and falls.

“I’m retired.”

“Geeze louise,” I say, and take my drink. “So you were in the ballet, or?”

“The circus,” Lee-Lee says. “My parents were crazy.”

I nod. “Your name.” I put my drink down on the floor, between the carpet and the wall. I’m starting to feel a little weird. I thought she was more experienced than she’s acting, and I can’t see things going very well if I have to initiate.

I lean back against the wallpaper and raise my hands above my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I start to say, but then Lee-Lee barges toward me and pulls at my mesh top, gathering it up into her fist. She wraps her hands around my ribcage, tugs her nails in, and my forehead starts to buzz like I know she’s going to kiss me.



“I got your license out of your purse while you were peeing,” she says. “I’m ten years older than you. Can you tell?”

My eyes dart back and forth across her face. I try to think of something good to say. “Not with your hair like that.”

Lee-Lee laughs and leans into me. She traces her tongue between my lips. “This’ll be fun,” she says. She leans back and gathers up the hem of the mesh tank in her other hand. “Just as long as you play along. Promise?”

I smile, nod, and then she rips my tanktop straight in half.



The most difficult thing about having experimental sex is regaling it, I think. For instance, after Lee-Lee ripped my shirt off and pulled the straps of my onesie down around my waist, she started kissing at my tatters, which is strange, because it’s not something I would think to do to a woman. It seems like something boys do because they’ve seen it on pornos and it’s usually just dumb. But with Lee-Lee, I was getting into it, because she wasn’t just suckling, like a boy, she was nuzzling, squeezing, licking all down my stomach. Then she started biting. First around the edges of my areola, then my actual nipple. Tugging a little bit at it with her teeth.

Now I regale that and whoever’s got nipples says, “Ow.” And even thinking back on it, I think that too, because I’m sore from it. But at the time I was soaring. My head all tingly and in this kind of headache. My eyes aching with involuntary roll.

She bit my tits and I wanted her inside of me right then. That’s how good it was. Except she didn’t have a dick, but I didn’t think about that much till later.

After a little while in the hallway, Lee-Lee stood up abruptly and spun me around by my pelvis so that I was facing away from her. Then she pushed me, hands low on my hips, all the way into her bedroom, where she kind of tossed me on the bed. She was very small, but I was so woozy from the biting that I pretty much just tipped.

I lay on my back and looked around the room while she looked at me. I felt shy all of a sudden because I didn’t know how much we could actually get done without a penis.

I looked around, noticed some leather straps hanging from the ceiling. They were tucked into a hook against wall.

I chewed the inside of my cheeks. “Um.”

“Listen,” Lee-Lee said. “I know this is your first time, but you can’t be totally passive.”

I lifted my head and started to tell her it wasn’t.

“I know,” she said. “But it’s your first time with Miss Lee-Lee.”

My onesie was still down around my waist, and while I pushed her back against the bed she traced her fingers up and down my chest, pulling my bellybutton and tucking her fingertips into the top part of my jeans. I couldn’t do anything but breathe hard with her touching me like that.

“You have to really try,” she said, and so I tried to touch her while she distracted me with all her touching. We grappled like that until finally I pinned her down by her wrists. She pressed her head back into the mattress and smiled at me, then spat at my face. I laughed, asked if she was serious, and then she called me a bitch and so I slapped her.

“Okay,” she sighed. “Now you can begin.”

I thought for a second I might have my period—that’s how wet I was. But I didn’t even check because she was so still, and it was just like I’d imagined it. Time frozen and a girl lying down and waiting for me. I pulled the tight straps of her leotard down by her elbows, then peeled the whole thing away from her skin and left it dangling at her knees. Her breasts were medium, I’d say, bigger than mine, but so high and round they barely had any shape. There weren’t any folds where they fell, they just sat, and her nipples were light pink and darted out with stretch marks like miniature suns.

I’ve heard sex is like a massage—you give like you want to get—so I rubbed my cheeks and temples up against her tits before I took each nipple sideways in my mouth for a second and rolled it like a pencil between my teeth.

“Keep going,” Lee-Lee said.

Her legs were bent over the edge of the bed, and so I scooted down between them, and lifted her butt up to pull her tights down.

“Could you take them all the way off, please,” she said. “My feet are sweating.”

I pulled gently, then, remembering the hallway, harder, causing runs, then rips in Lee-Lee’s stockings, which I threw into the corner. She was completely naked then, and she actually had pubic hair, lots of it, so I figured she was definitely a lesbian.

Lee-Lee watched me watch her, and then brought her hands up behind her head. “Go ahead,” she said.

I inhaled hard. Then buried my face between her legs.

I always thought I’d hold my breath down there but when it came down to it I breathed, and then I opened up my mouth and tried to give it like I’d want it. Big broad tongue strokes from her anus to her pubis, then some pinprick, pointy-tongue stuff near the opening, the actual vagina, and then I licked in circles around that. I waited until she was sweating to rub her clit back and forth with my tongue, and then, not knowing what else to do because I’d never come from cunnilingus, I stood up and pulled the rest of my clothes off, let her take in my grown-out pubes for a second and then scrambled up atop her, pressed against her, and reached down to curl my fingers up inside her.

She used the back of her hand to press my tongue deeper into her mouth, and then she grabbed my wrist to stop my fingers. I figured I’d messed up—that she was going to tell me to stop finger-fucking her like some stupid boy.

“Turn over,” she said.

I did and she grabbed me by the hips again, pushed my butt up toward my head so I was stretching like a cat. Then she dove in and started eating my ass, really going to town, while I writhed—both because I liked it and because I thought it was only polite to act like I didn’t want to put her through it. No one had ever done that before. It was hard enough to get a boy to eat my pussy.

“You don’t have to,” I said finally, but I said it like a question, and I made sure that she knew I was out of breath and loving it.

“Oh, but I do,” she said. “Now we know each other. Now we can do anything.” She climbed up and flattened me against the mattress. Her tits were pressed into my shoulder blades.

All of a sudden she leapt off and went over to the nightstand. “Ever seen one of these?” She asked. She was opening a drawer.

I wasn’t scared of her. She was a ballerina.

“No,” I said.

She turned around and held something out to me. More black straps and a dildo with some plastic on the back. I took it, thinking she just wanted me to hold it.

She went over and unhooked the leather hammock stuff. “You do it like this,” she said. She sat down into one of the leather loops and tucked her feet into two more, holding out her legs like stirrups. She pointed at the strap-on. “Hey, get that on.”

My clit was pulsing. I didn’t know quite what to do, and she could tell. She leaned forward and pointed to rubber dick and leather straps. “It’s like underwear,” she said. She tapped one leather loop that hung against the dildo. “Right leg.” She tapped the other. “Left leg. You tighten the waistband like a belt.”

I climbed in and Lee-Lee pulled me toward her. She flipped something at the end of the rubber cock and I fell forward, my legs jerking. It was buzzing on my clit.

She leaned back against the leather web and smiled.

I looked down at the contraption. I had a hard on. I had a vibrator. I could fuck Miss Lee-Lee and get off at the same time. It was perfect. But as I looked at her reclined body—her elbows and knees and ankles laced through leather strings—I knew that I still had some questions.

“But what’s next?” I said. “I mean, how do we finagle this?”

Miss Lee-Lee laughed and said, “Well, honey, we take turns.”

Kathleen E. Hale ’09 is a senior in Winthrop House. She was most recently awarded the Louis Begley Prize for Fiction from the Harvard Advocate and was the winner of that publication's Contest Issue.