We’re back at her place, it’s dark as she fumbles her keys in the lock and swats at the light switch, flooding the entryway and us with light. The door closes, and we’re in unfamiliar territory; me never having entered this house, and the two of us never having negotiated sex before. I’m led inwards by the hand and as we ensconce ourselves further and further in, I find myself in a room that’s soft and yellow-bathed.
Despite the wine—weighing down my limbs and staining my lips—this is always the sobering moment, confronted by someone who has their own set of expectations, ideas, and desires. We’re lying beside each other, her arm out, hand on the off-ramp curve from my hip to my waist, leaning closer, and just as her eyes flicker down to my lips then back up, instead I open my mouth to talk.
Out in the world, outside this room, words hold currency and weight. They are proclaimed and legislated, and we expect their necessity. Here, when language can easily be replaced by the sparks that catch between our limbs, words are spoken of like wet blankets, but it’s in these dark moments that I treasure them the most. It’s through words that I learned to navigate my body through this space, and I cling to their power even now, far more cool and collected than I’ve ever been. A hand briefly cups my chin, and I return gestures in kind, all sighs and a feast of smiles.
Most days I manage to forget that I am trans—my body exists, but I’ve stopped seeing it through the lens of a gritty origins story, and my name and accompanying markers have long since stopped being foreign to me—but this, this relearning of breath and of feeling, always brings me back to the history I wear. The way someone reaches to touch me, or is acquainted with touch at all, carries its own memory. Our touch holds that momentary hesitation, the quiet fear of rebuff, of weariness. As queer femme women, as transgender women, there are no explicit lessons we are taught about each other or the ways that we may and may not touch, but they’re implicitly everywhere—an inverse of the expectations placed upon people who can and do fuck the way we’re shown how. I cannot experience need, and must never commit the cardinal sin of asking for what I want.
When I first see a woman like me, online and late at night, she has a man’s cock in her mouth, as well as the woman’s cock between her own legs, silently participating in an activity I can’t imagine engaging in without loudly apologising and clarifying. Eventually I realise it’s a performance, but only after I, too, have unthinkingly learned to perform. Within years I master my encore, coming back again and again to fake what I assume is rewarding to the other person. Even when I am asked, I find a script has been burned in me by rote, and I struggle to go off book. Any bodily sense of need is subsumed in something seemingly bigger and more powerful; language has no place in these spaces except as a series of loudly proclaimed syllables of agreement.
She glances fingers down my legs and our breath syncs, until she catches on something and is caught out; I pause to explain that scar, and the others, and we play a slow game of I’ll show you mine if, laughing and tugging off clothing to bare pockmarks and spots of unintentional meaning. Giggling, I tell her that I want to kiss her. I also want to do other things, things that require even more words beforehand, but after the kissing, and she feeds my words back into my mouth with a tease of her tongue, savouring the syllables. I relax into her, feeling heard, but without stopping for the history lesson. Our words grant us the space to just be, and we do.
It has taken years to know how to guide new eyes and hands across me. I am a recipe of every person that has touched me, including myself—the ingredient I most often forget. Knots form just behind my navel as she places her palm there, fingers still and outstretched, but they’re now knots I know the name for, and can tie and untie as wanted. I guide her through the steps unique to me, and her hands make quick work of them; of me. We are fast learners together, spoken words giving way to touch, and nods, and then gasps as we become more comfortable reading the silences.
It is here that I find my strength, my sweetness. My resistance is questions, my resistance is words. I fight back by stumbling over sentences, phrases; stuttering through adverbs and qualifiers until the meaning is painstakingly clear, but in that moment I know that I am not only heard, but seen. I am spread out, exposed, and she is above me, our eyes meeting. We know that if the other says stop, we can stop, as we know if the other says please more, more will follow, joyfully, wanted.
She laughs, and she says this is not what she was expecting. She says this is better.