Read 69 Barrow Street for Free Online

paths would never cross in any manner more intense than an occasional meeting in the hallway. While she wanted the woman, sexual involvement of any sort was one thing she desired desperately to avoid for the time being.
    Susan had been a lesbian for almost two years, a relatively short time. In the course of those two years she had made love with six women. The six affairs ranged in duration from five months with Gloria to one night with a girl named Alicia whom she had met in a Village bar. She remembered the first time—it seemed so long ago, and yet it all happened less than two years ago, just a month before her twenty-second birthday. Perhaps she had been a lesbian before that without knowing it; the fact that she had avoided any sexual relationship with men on a deep level suggested that to her. But the first real affair began in September, several months after her graduation from art school.
    She had spent the summer as arts and crafts counselor at a summer camp in the Catskills, and when she hit the city she had nothing to do and no place to go. She wanted to get some sort of job that would let her continue with her work in ceramics, but jobs of that type didn’t grow on trees. So she lived with her parents in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, read the Help Wanted ads every morning in the Times , and spent her evenings strolling around Greenwich Village, drinking cafe espresso in the little coffee houses, listening to modern jazz in a dimly lit bar and watching people feeding pigeons in Washington Square.
    It was on one of those evenings that she met Sharon. She and Sharon had been in art school together. Sharon was a year or so older and the two of them had never been very friendly, knowing each other well enough to exchange nods in the hallway but not much more than that. But when she met the older girl in the Village, Sharon gave her a heavy welcome and Susan was lonely enough to be grateful.
    They went out drinking in a quiet bar; she couldn’t remember anymore which bar it had been. It was a warm evening and they drank dry martinis on the rocks. The drinks were very refreshing and very cool and very effective, and Susan had never been much of a drinker to begin with.
    She got quite high in a short amount of time.
    Thinking back, she couldn’t remember whether Sharon had told her she was a lesbian before or after they went to the older girl’s apartment. Probably after, because she probably would have refused to go if she had known.
    At Sharon’s apartment, a little one-room-with-kitchenette place on Bank Street, everything happened with phenomenal speed. The first part was not fresh anymore in her mind, but she remembered that almost as soon as they were inside the door Sharon was kissing her, covering her mouth with lips that were soft and tender and sweet. And what followed, followed swiftly, with Sharon pressing her down on the bed without even bothering to remove the spread, pressing her down and lying on top of her and grinding her body into hers. It had ended almost before it began.
    Then they were lying together on the bed, with Sharon’s long red hair hanging to her waist and contrasting beautifully with her pale, milky skin. Susan was in a state of shock at the time, numb with the liquor and even more numb with the realization of what she had done. And Sharon had explained to her exactly what she was and what they had done, and the sort of life she could expect to lead in the future.
    And then the second time. “I want to make it good for you,” Sharon said. “Lie down and be perfectly still and don’t move at all. Don’t even think about anything, darling. Or if you must, tell yourself that you love me.”
    She did as she was told. She lay down on her back with her head resting gently on a soft foam-rubber pillow. She closed her eyes and let her mind go completely blank, concentrating entirely on the physical sensations that came to her and letting her whole body respond to them.
    Sharon