Free Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture by Susie Bright, Rachel Kramer Bussel Page A

my knees scraped like a “cheap whore.” It might have messed with my money. Moreover, I refused to reveal the real me at work. My work persona didn’t have scraped knees (or welts or hickeys, etc.).
    The simplest, sexiest diversion would have been to spit on your cock and lift my skirt. Instead, I stood there frozen in that inciting moment when I realized that keeping my real life and work neatly separated was impossible; it was failing at every opportunity. Sex work was not simply coating the surface of my body like a topcoat of glitter nail polish. It had sunk in.
    We could playfully liken my appearance to a drag queen’s. My money financed more than a few good times together. But we met an impasse when the impact of sex work entered our bedroom. Setting boundaries around scraped knees was only a preview to long and recurring phases when I couldn’t be touched at all. Contrary to your fantasies and my own, I wasn’t an inexhaustible source of amorous coos and sighs. My pussy was not an eternal femme spring, always wet and ready. The image of the coquette was critical to our relationship. It was critical to who I was as a femme. I hadn’t chosen the saccharine country classic “Touch Your Woman” by Dolly Parton (my working-class femme role model) as a mantra for nothing! Who was I, as a femme, if I couldn’t offer my body to you, my butch lovers, as a touchstone, a safe haven of hotness, a soft-skinned, sweet-mouthed reminder that who we were was right and good?
    A bigger question: what the heck did sex between us look like if I wasn’t going to spread my legs anymore? Most of you had your own set of complex raw spots—as our generation of butches with hard-knock pasts often do. I’d spent my younger femme years devotedly learning about and responding to the nuanced body language and boundaries of butches. Suddenly, it was all I could do to keep up with my own changing limits and body issues.
    For a while I tried on “stone femme” as an identity. In many ways, this label protected me and made me feel powerful. It also became a regular topic for dissection in our small community. “A stone femme, meaning a femme who loves stone butches?” I was asked repeatedly.
    “No, I mean I myself am stone.” I’d say. “I don’t let lovers touch me.”
    “Hmm.” I got a lot of doubtful “hmms” in response, as if I were speaking in riddles.
    Ultimately, changes to the way I fucked meant we both had to reinvent the codes and traditions of the butch-femme bedroom as we knew them, which under different circumstances might have been a fun task, but the possibilities weren’t as discernible as the losses. We didn’t ask “Could we…?” as often as we asked “Why can’t we…?”
    Let’s just skip the berating part, where I say, “I admit I wasn’t always an easy woman to stand beside.” Let’s move right to the part where I simply thank you for doing so. If you’ve hung on and heard me this far, then please let me finish this letter by explaining exactly what it is I am thanking you for.
    You were adaptable. You tried really darn hard to be adaptable. Most of the time this only made you about as flexible as a flagpole, but I noticed you bend and knew that you did it for me. I remember the time you let me strap it on and be the first femme to fuck you. It ranks quite high up in my list of all-time favorite memories. Later, you gloated to your butch buddies, “She’s more ‘butch’ than me between the sheets.” To my surprise, comradely arm punching and shared stupid grins followed this admission. It made me wonder if you needed that fuck (and those that followed) as desperately as I did. Maybe you needed a damaged-goods, stone femme like me to ask you to become something besides the ever-infallible butch top you were accustomed to being.
    Likewise, maybe you needed to cry with me during those rare times when you resisted the urge to take up the emotional reins and say “Baby, don’t cry” or