Free After Midnight by Chelsea James Page B

juices.
    Thinking of a mouth over my crotch made my cunt grow warm and my nipples harden. I breathed deeply and looked over at Dalia, hunched over her black Fender Telecaster with the punk rock stickers and white pick guard, her feet moving rhythmically in their untied striped sneakers. I’d missed her over the summer. Sometime in June she sent me a postcard from her favorite diner in her Los Angeles neighborhood, talking about the gig she’d had the night before. I carried that postcard in my bag with me for weeks until it nearly fell apart and my partner laughed at what a crush I had. “That’s not true,” I’d said, even if I could taste her skin in my every dream. “But even if it were true, we’re only friends.”
    Dalia and I were friends, even though most of her friends, lovers, and girlfriends were much tougher than I, who had little interest in drugs and guns. We were college friends who valued each other’s voices, art, ideas, and kindness, but I doubted we would value, say, each other’s scent in the middle of the night. And though my primary partner was certainly not a man, I’d never slept with what I considered a woman before, a woman in the traditional sense, the double- X -labeled-at-birth sense, the bleeding-uterus-like-a-sacred-heart sense. Where Dalia’d had a hundred women since she started fucking at fourteen, I hadn’t put more than kisses on one since I’d come out a year earlier. I didn’t want to tell her, and I didn’t want her to think she’d have to teach me anything.
    Dalia turned on the four-track and we started putting lyrics
and music together. Her band had just signed a two-record deal, but she still liked playing casually with me. We’d gotten together at least weekly during our first year, listening to the end results at the end of every session, our heads pressed together as we shared one set of studio headphones. I loved the resonance of Dalia’s enormous voice and could hardly ever believe that she wasn’t a foot taller—rather than a foot shorter—than I was. This night was no different. The lovers on the futon hardly stirred as we experimented and harmonized and laughed.
    As always, Dalia and I ran out of tape, which signaled the end of the session. We soon got into a loud, heated conversation about the likelihood of Andrea Dworkin becoming a porn star before we realized it was past midnight and Dalia’s roommates probably had their own midterms to take in the morning.
    â€œCome to my room for a beer,” I said. Unlike Dalia, I had a room of my own, of which Virginia Woolf would have approved.
    â€œSure, sounds good.”
    I pulled a hardpack of menthols out of my bag while I was putting my writing away. I tapped it hard against the palm of my hand and watched Dalia unplug her guitar and place it on its stand. By the time she was done, a red mark had formed just above my wrist, and Dalia came over to look. She touched the mark with one finger. Her eyes met mine, and she smiled slowly up at me. I swallowed hard and gestured with my head toward the door. The fluorescent hallway lights whined at us as we turned the corner.
    My key turned over the tumblers very slowly as I unlocked the heavy wooden door to my room. At this time of night, the slightest noise was amplified in echoes that hit every door of every sleeping student on the hall. Somehow, tonight, it felt like a dozen eyes were watching me, but it could have been just
Dalia’s two, looking at me calmly, which made me move self-consciously into the dark room.
    I pulled the chain on the light and was able to see the detail on her white wifebeater. As usual, her tits bounced against her slim rib cage as she talked and laughed, her pierced nipples temporarily restrained by the fabric covering them. I handed Dalia a beer from the small fridge and turned on the stereo. I offered her a cigarette before lighting one for myself. I had