Vee (Volume 1) Read online

  Vee: Volume 1

  by

  Alyssa Linn Palmer

  ISBN: 978-1-928098-05-8

  Copyright 2013 Alyssa Linn Palmer

  Smashwords Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The stories "Vee" and "Vee's Notebook" originally appeared in the anthologies "Felt Tips: Office-Supply Erotica", and "Anything She Wants", respectively.

  "Sylvia, my brightest star, my desire. My lust, my soul.

  "She was Lia to her co-workers at the bookstore, Sylvia to her mother, who clicked her tongue disapprovingly at her bright blue and hair and her Monroe stud. But to me, she was simply Vee."

  In Alex's notebooks, the story of Vee unfolds, from their first kiss, their first date, and the moments in between. It’s a May-December romance between a former punk girl gone conservative, and a gamine young woman in combat boots and fishnets, finding each other on the streets of New York City.

  This is a short collection of stories, two of which have appeared in the FELT TIPS and ANYTHING SHE WANTS erotic anthologies.

  Table of Contents

  Vee

  Heart of Glass

  Birdland (I)

  Birdland (II)

  Vee's Notebook

  Other Books by the Author

  Vee

  (originally released in FELT TIPS: Office-Supply Erotica, 2012, 8th Circle Press)

  Sylvia, my brightest star, my desire. My lust, my soul.

  She was Lia to her co-workers at the bookstore, Sylvia to her mother, who clicked her tongue disapprovingly at her bright blue and hair and her Monroe stud. But to me, she was simply Vee.

  Before you start to think I’m some sort of pervert, let me assure you. Vee is no nymphet, for all that I wish I had the talent of Nabokov.

  She stood five-six in buckled combat boots that looked far too big for her gamine figure. Her driver’s license when she flashed it at me said twenty-one. I’d commented on what she must look like with her hair tamed and everyday. She’d showed me.

  I didn’t mind her rebellious looks. In truth, I preferred her with the blue spikes in her short hair, the dark violet lipstick, the piercings. My first had been a girl at CBGB’s, and I’d kissed her sloppily in the bathroom, my fingers catching in her lacquered hair, and on the safety pin stuck through her ear. She’d taken me home and fucked me thoroughly. From then on, I was hooked.

  Except it hadn’t lasted. Two weeks later I found her dead of an overdose, her lips blue and cold. Heroin.

  I still see her in my mind’s eye, ripped jeans hugging the curve of her ass, heavy combat boots, their laces dangling. She made the fire escape rattle, clambering up the steps to sit high and watch the sun rise. Her worn leather jacket, smelling slightly smoky, lay under us as we looked up at the sky.

  But here I am in my middle age, sneaking glances over the cash register from my spot by the notebooks, waiting for the moment when she’ll be free. The line at her till seems to stretch for a mile. Christmas.

  I wait, my hands clutching a pair of Moleskine notebooks, their shrink-wrapped covers slick against my palms. I love these notebooks. I love the feel of their smooth pages, the easy glide of my pen. I’m quite sure that Vee keeps them stocked especially for me. I buy little else while I’m here. Without fail, every week, two notebooks.

  “I’d love to read your work sometime, Alex,” she tells me as she hands over my parcel and the receipt. She asks me regularly, but I’ve always demurred.

  “One of these days,” I tell her, smoothing my dark hair in a nervous gesture left over from an anxious childhood. To lengthen my time, we talk of other things, until she has to help someone else.

  Finally, finally -- the line in front of her till has disappeared and I can make my way over. It’s my favourite time of the entire week.

  “Alex!” Vee grins at me as I lay the notebooks on the counter. “I almost thought you wouldn’t be here. And I love your dress.”

  I can’t help the pleased flush that heats my cheeks. I’d worn this dress for her, its dark crimson a far cry from my usual muted suits. It seemed appropriate, given what I had to say.

  “I’ve brought some of my work for you.” I pat my purse and and am rewarded with an even larger grin. I want to kiss that mouth, with the gap between her front teeth and the plump lower lip.

  “I’ll read it tonight.” Vee puts my two notebooks in a bag. I hand her a twenty.

  “I can’t let you keep it.” Now for my chance. “But there’s a coffee shop on the corner. Let me buy you a drink and you can read it.”

  “Promise?”

  Her fingers brush mine and she hands me my change. Did she feel that frisson of electricity as I just did?

  “What time are you off?” I struggle to keep my voice even, though the question itself must betray my eagerness.

  “Soon. You’re my last customer.” She closes the till drawer with practiced ease. My eyes focus on her lips, soft under their violet paint. Will she taste of sweetness?

  I put my change in my wallet and replace it in my purse, the regular movement calming my nerves.

  “Meet me there?”

  “Give me half an hour,” Vee says.

  Her manager is coming near and it’s time to make my exit. I’m sure he knows; his beady eyes follow me out. I think everyone must know, aside from Vee herself. I don’t even know if Vee is a lesbian.

  I can only hope. If she isn’t, I think my heart will shatter.

  I’d trudge onwards and find myself another store. I wouldn’t be able to face her again, knowing that body under its fishnets and paint wouldn’t be mine. The humiliation of having tried and lost would be too much.

  Before you start to judge, or tell me to get over it, just wait. It’s not like I didn’t get over Lucie. I did. I went to the therapist the counsellor at NYU recommended; I said all the right things and tried to believe the platitudes. I even tried to date others, but I had no taste for the femmes with their made-up faces, their high heels and their hair blown in a poor rendition of Farrah Fawcett. I had even less liking for the occasional butch lesbians I’d meet out bar-hopping.

  When I went back to CBGB’s, I kept looking for Lucie and none of the women there could measure up. They lacked her confidence, her joie de vivre, the surprising delicacy under the punk face she showed to the world. I wanted her.

  The bell over the door jangles and I look up from my coffee and my memories to see Vee walk in. She’s changed from her plain work uniform to a spectacularly short mini-dress. On anyone else the combination of blue hair, mini-dress and combat boots would be comical, but she wears it with a brash confidence I find utterly alluring.

  She slides into the chair across from me, her bare knee with its ripped fishnets brushing mine, the toe of her boot crushing my toes in their thin high-heeled leather boot. The slight pain is like a tiny orgasm and I struggle not to let it show.

  “You made it,” I say to cover my relief. If she hadn’t come, I really would have been lost. I take my wallet from my purse along with a worn notebook, kin to the new ones in their shiny plastic.

  Vee takes the money with a smile that just quirks the corner of her mouth. “Of course I came.” She goes to buy a drink and I watch her saunter up to the counter. She flirts with the young woman who makes her coffee, and I look away, down to the notebook.

  I find what I’m looking for, flipping through the weathered pages to a sho
rt story I wrote. It’s about the punk scene of the 70s, a nostalgic piece I’d meant to submit to any number of erotic anthologies. I had to write about Lucie, but I just couldn’t part with it in the end. It felt too intimate to let go, but it would be perfect for Vee’s first taste of me. Despite my age, she’d see a kindred spirit.

  I doubted she’d fall into bed with me after one story. After several, perhaps. I could show her the pieces of my soul I’d put down on paper.

  I place the notebook face down before the other spot, my fingers lingering on the worn cover. The matte black is creased, worn in some spots almost to white. I can see some finger marks, a larger crease where I’d held open the cover.

  Vee returns with her coffee and settles in across from me. She sucks up some of the foam, licking her top lip. Her eyes light on the notebook.

  “Is this it?” She reaches for it, flips it over, her gaze skimming my words, deciphering my handwriting. I hate writing straight to my computer screen. My mind gets slow, distracted. Better to sit with a pen and paper as I always have.

  I watch Vee as she begins to read. She’s the only other person to touch that notebook, the only one to read those words. I’d like to think there’s an intimacy in that, one as great as a relationship.

  Her thumb absently strokes the cover as she reads. What would her hands feel like on me? I’d rather her thumb stroked the curve of my breast or the hollow of my inner thigh, or the bud between my legs. I shift noiselessly in my chair.

  Vee licks her lips again. She has forgotten her coffee. She leans forward, resting her elbows on the table. Her foot in its combat boot brushes mine and stays. I wonder if she even notices.

  I let myself relax. My knee touches hers and I can feel the heat of her skin on mine. The threads of the rent in her fishnets tickle as I shift against her. She glances up at me.

  “This is good,” she says in a low voice before taking a sip of her cooling coffee. I wait for her to say something more, but she doesn’t. She continues to read.

  I trace the grain of the tabletop and circle a knot in the wood. She should be getting to the first encounter now, where Lucie and I had made love in her tiny studio apartment, on a bed that creaked and shook with age.

  She’d kissed me hard, her tongue in my mouth, her lips demanding. We’d stripped off each other’s clothes in our haste, just enough to feel skin on skin. I’d rolled her tight jeans down over pale hipbones, cupped my hands over the globes of her buttocks, dipped my hand teasingly between her legs, her dark curls tickling my fingers.

  When she’d had enough of my teasing, Lucie had pushed up my skirt, pulled down my panties and buried her head between my thighs, her mouth closing around my bud. What I wouldn’t give to do the same to Vee.

  I shift in my chair and Vee glances up at me, her lips parted. I can see the tip of her tongue, pink and enticing. She adjusts her position and I feel her hand slide across my knee. She goes back to her reading, but her fingers stroke my skin in slow circles. I try to casually sip my coffee, but I can hardly manage to swallow a mouthful.

  The minutes stretch out, broken only by the sound of Vee turning the pages of the notebook. Finally, finally she finished the last page.

  “Do you have more?” she asks. She lays a hand on the black cover.

  I manage to answer, though my throat is dry and the words come out as more of a croak.

  “Not here.”

  “Could I read more tonight?” Vee’s hand on my knee stills and I can feel the increase in pressure.

  “I live nearby.” My language faculty has shrunk to the basics at the thought of taking her back to my apartment.

  “I know.” She grins. “Your address is on file at work. I walk by there sometimes on my way to the subway, but I’ve never seen you.”

  “I stay in, usually. You should have buzzed. I’d have let you in.”

  “You will tonight.” She meets my gaze directly, confirming what I had hoped.

  I push back from the table and stand. I can’t bear waiting; the anticipation until now has been agonizing. Vee rises with me, scooping up the notebook. Our fingers brush as she hands it to me, and I want to take her hand.

  We leave the cafe and she does take my hand as we stroll down the sidewalk, skirting around the bags of garbage left out by the restaurant next door. I inadvertently squeeze her hand as I spot a rat huddled among the bags. Vee laughs.

  “Should I save you from the scary rat?” she teases me.

  “Distract me instead,” I suggest. She tugs me into a darkened doorway so abruptly that I nearly lose my balance. Her slender body is surprisingly strong. I feel her warm breath caress my face. We are of a height and her lips hover inches from mine.

  “Better?” she whispers. Her mouth comes down on mine and her hand slides under my jacket to cup my breast and I forget everything but her. She pins me against the wall and the hard corner of the new notebooks in my purse dig into my ribs. I know what story I will tell on its pages. The story of Vee.

  Heart of Glass

  “Sherry?”

  Vee looks at me askance, a brow raised. “Are you sure you’re the same woman from your notebook?”

  I flush. That me, the one she’d read about in the coffee shop half an hour ago, was many years past.

  “I didn’t think punk chicks liked sherry,” she continues, resting her hand on the back of the leather chair that faces the small fireplace in my apartment. The blue and black polish on her fingernails is chipped, her hands reddened from the chill walk home. Her legs in their raggedy fishnet stockings have pinkened from their usual pale hue.

  “Jack Daniels, then?” I try to keep a straight face, but Vee’s laughter is infectious.

  “I’ll try the sherry,” she says, and I move into my postage-stamp kitchen. She follows and the snug space seems smaller still. My hand shakes as I take the bottle from the cupboard over the fridge and fetch two crystal glasses from another. That kiss in the shop doorway has unsettled me. I want more from her, but I don’t want to press. Tonight seems like a dream.

  “My grandmother gave me sherry when I was a girl,” I say, trying to keep my mind from picturing Vee in my arms again, but naked. I carefully fill the delicate glasses. “She was a lady, never worked a day in her life.”

  Vee takes the glass I offer and sniffs it. “Not bad,” she says. “I could pretend to be a lady.” She lifts her glass, clinks it against mine. “To notebooks, and stories.”

  The sherry is sweet on my tongue, but what I really want is her sweetness again.

  Vee looks at me from under her lashes as she sips her sherry, a smile quirking at the corners of her lips. “What else should I know about you?” she asks. “Do you have a collection of opera records? Wear white gloves?”

  “To my grandmother’s dismay, neither.”

  “She probably wouldn’t like me,” Vee confides.

  “That doesn’t matter. She’s long gone.” I take Vee’s hand and her fingers twine with my own. “I think you’ll like my record collection.”

  Vee practically skips into the living room, pulling me along. She tosses back the last drops of her sherry and sets the glass on a bookshelf before dropping to her knees to peer at the lowest shelf. My record collection is much reduced from my younger years, but I kept all my favorites.

  She pulls out a 7” single with a tattered cover and I recognize it immediately. I’d been ashamed to own it, Blondie’s hit single, ‘Heart of Glass’, thinking that my friends would doubt my punk cred, but I loved that song.

  Vee holds it out to me and my fingers close over the heavy paper, feeling the familiar creases.

  “Are you sure?” I ask. I’d expected her to pull out my Iggy and the Stooges records, or my old Clash imports that I’d saved for and taken so much pride in.

  “Of course,” she says. “Debbie Harry is the bomb.”

  “You’re losing your punk cred now,” I tease. “You’d have been shunned to admit a love for Debbie Harry after this song hit number one.”
/>
  Vee scoffs. “Then they wouldn’t know what they’re missing. Play it, Alex. Please?”

  I pull the dust cloth off my old record player. I found it at a thrift shop, delighted at the cheap price and the stacking spindle. It’s been awhile since I’ve played an entire stack of singles.

  The record drops into place and the arm swings over. The crackle and pop of the first grooves come through the speakers. I listened to this record so often that its quality has declined, but the sound is familiar, like an old friend.

  At the first tikka-tikka of the percussion, Vee takes my hand again, tugging me to her. “Did you see Blondie in concert?” she asks as we sway to the music.

  I lean over and put my sherry glass next to the record player so that I can put my arms around her. The heavy toes of her combat boots bump against my thin leather boots, and our knees touch.

  “Once or twice,” I say, taking the lead and sending Vee into a twirl, away and then back. She giggles and staggers against me. Her body is warm, soft yet angular where her hip bones show against the light fabric of her miniskirt. She’s perfect. I want to kiss her again, but fear I’ll come on too strong.

  Vee moves to the music, draping her arms around my neck. She leans in until our foreheads touch and I’m looking into her grey eyes, the lashes dark and long, dusting over her cheeks as she blinks. Her pale skin is flushed and her Monroe stud glints in the light of the lamp. Her lips are pink where the violet lipstick has worn off. I could look at her forever. But looking won’t be enough.

  Her mouth is soft under mine and she parts for my tongue. We come to a halt, though the music still plays. She tastes of the sweet stickiness of sherry, and a hint of the coffee we had earlier. I don’t want to let her go.