I'd headed for New York fresh from drama school. My goal had been to become an actress, but at the time I had succeeded only in becoming a waitress, and I worked at the kind of place where the men holding martinis felt empowered to give my butt a pat and blow Chesterfield smoke in my face.  But it was a job, and I was in New York and I knew I was going to make it. 

Back then I shared an apartment in the Village with three girls as between the three of us we could just pay the rent.  Marnie was our neighbor. She lived alone in 9G and had been in the chorus line at a couple of places and worked off-Broadway. She was my competition but I liked her and didn't care. She was pretty, well more shapely than pretty but she was an actress and there are very few plain actresses. We talked now and then in the hallway. She'd just gotten cast in a show.  Sometimes I watched her stretching from my bedroom window. At first, I told myself it was to pick up things I might use.  She wore leotards or a man's shirt when she wore anything at all.   And it seemed she wore less the longer I watched.  

I got off one night at about eleven and came home to change out of my clothes into something that didn't smell so much of Marlboros.  I saw Marnie leaning out the window, wearing just a shirt, stretching. I waved at her from my window and she invited me down. It was summer and it was hot, so pulled on a short top and tight shorts before heading down the hall.  If I'd had some wine, I'd have brought it, but well, you couldn't store alcohol with my roommates.  

I knocked at the door and she answered, wearing just that shirt, opened down the middle, and a pair of lacy panties. I put it down to the heat as no one had air conditioning back then.

She shook out her hair at me and smiled.  "Come on in," she said.  "I was asked to a party, but I really don't feel like going out tonight, It's too hot, and all I want right now is cool"   She went to her kitchen and poured me a glass of chilled white wine to match hers and led me to the living room. It was a simple room and she had Rosemary Clooney on her record player, and she sort of began to move.  

Marnie was a dancer. I thought I could dance. Then I arrived in New York. I had danced in all the shows at school, usually as the lead. Quickly I began lessons trying to re-learn everything I'd learned in college. I recognized I was still a raw amateur. Marnie was a professional and it showed. She turned and moved with light feet. No jumps, because that would have set her phonograph needle skipping, her toes on point, her spins just right, limbs aligned so I could see every curve of her body. She was beautiful, maybe not so shapely as some, but the precision of each motion only made her lovelier, her proportions primally female.  

She stuck out her hand, and I stepped into her arms. This was the first time I'd danced with a woman who'd danced on broadway.  She led and I followed,  concentrating, trying to keep time, working to keep my movements in balance with hers. It was hard, but I thought I was doing it.  

All at once, she pressed tight to me, her chest to mine, her thighs to mine,  her lips to my ear.  "Relax," she breathed into my ear.  "Let the feeling penetrate you.  Let the music fill you and carry you away.  That's the secret, you have to feel as you dance."

So I tried, oh how I tried. And she did not criticize. She kept her hands on my hips, and a bit of butt and I liked it, moving with her in 4/4 time letting the music pass through me and her until we found new synchronicity together. 

"I haven't seen any boys coming around you," she said, still in our dance.  "You seeing anyone?" Suddenly I felt my body tense up as her closeness made me guess why she had asked that question.  It was scary, but it felt... warm.   

"Who has time for boys?" I replied, pressing tight to her.  "I have dancing lessons, singing lessons, acting lessons.  And then I spend my night passing out t-bones and manhattans to men who like to squeeze my ass and call me baby."

"I know the type," she said. "I dealt with plenty of them when I first started in this town. And don't talk to me about directors and casting directors. It's a man's world and we just live in it."

"What about you?" I was genuinely curious.  "I haven't seen you out with anyone.'

"Well," she said.  "I'm queer.  Men aren't to my taste. So I don't take my work home." Her right hand went down to squeeze my bottom.  

"You're a... lesbian,"  I said,  saying the word aloud for the first time."

"Yeah," she said.  "And I got the idea you might be a little strange yourself. You're too pretty not to have a boy hanging around if you wanted one."

I clammed up,   I. didn't know what to say. Part of me was thrilled she thought I was pretty. And I'd always felt pretty but I felt like a schoolgirl before Marnie. I used to think I was something. I played Marian the Librarian the Music Man back in college.  In high school, I was always the female lead. I thought I was something. Until I got to casting calls and saw my competition. In New York, there are pretty girls.  And Marnie, well she was really something. Older but so sweetly shaped, so dark and exotic. She found me pretty. She wanted me.  For the first time in a long time, I could feel my pussy tingling. And I realized I had felt this before, back when I watched her practice.  When I saw other girls now and then. Could it be I was lesbian too?  

Marnie let me go, and stepped away, to take a slow sip from her wine glass.  I reached over to get mine and gulped some down.   "You don't have to do a thing," she said, head tilted and an eyebrow arched.   "We don't force girls into joining. It's not like a sorority, I figured you were a sorority girl."

"I was a Tri-Delt in college," I admitted.  An officer.  And I remembered how much I had enjoyed sleeping in the dorm with the other girls. Sometimes listening to one of my sisters touch herself. Then touching myself as I heard my sister's soft coos made me hot. Often I wasn't alone in that, and that was even hotter. And the whole time no one said a thing. We went out with boys, we kissed them, and I had kissed them too. But I'd never met a guy who moved me. 

I sat silently. Thinking, not looking at her, no I did, but looking nervous, Feeling nervous. Was I that way?  It was a scary way to be.  "I don't know," I finally admitted, looking up, placing my eyes on her hers.  "I might be a... lesbian too."  

"Only one sure way to find out," she said, reaching out her hand. Long fingertips gently stroked my left index finger. Her nails were done nicely; shaped but very short and her finger felt grand on my skin.   I didn't move, I just sat there looking at her and breathing.  Sipping nervously from my glass of wine. 

Marnie got up and changed the LP.  Off went Rosemary Clooney.  She put on My Fair Lady and reached out her hand to me again, extended like a man might for his lady in a musical.  And like a lady in a musical, I took it. 

And then I was in her arms, my skin covered with goosebumps. I felt flush, and then I felt her thigh pressed between mine, a slow undulation against my mound, and sighed in sheer pleasure. 

That was when Marnie kissed me.  And oh, what a kiss it was.  Gentle, intense, no scratchy stubble, no rush to jam a tongue down my throat. She tasted of wintergreen, not Viceroys.  Her hands wrapped around me as she ground and her fingers on the small of my back made me open my mouth and suck her tongue into my mouth.  

I don't remember how we made it onto her bed. I just know that when we got there, my shorts were down, my top was up and my right nipple was pinned between her teeth, with her hand pressing on my mound. Her fingers moved like liquid, no hurry to get inside me, no rush for completion, no trophies to be won, just relentless pleasure. I heard my own moaning, as I held her head in place my hips pressing against her, truly wanting for the first for someone to be inside me.  I wanted her, and as I held her to my breast I cooed and moaned, rocking in ecstasy.  

One finger got pushed inside me, two then. I was too small, it hurt and I cried out.  Marnie started to apologize, and pull out of me, but I was too far gone by then. I grabbed her hand and held it in place.  "Hurt me," I said.  "I want it to be you who takes my maidenhead."

She stopped and looked at me, her focus so intense. And then she grinned.  "Well, if that's the case I have just the thing." And she slid down and began to lick my pussy.  

That night I learned how little I had understood my own cunt. With her tongue Marnie showed me, sliding it up and down, showing me what my pearl was really for. My hips pumped and I begged her, I cried out to God, I swore and I rolled from side to side.  

And then I came.  For the first time, I came.  My body was consumed with light and spasm. Juice poured from my cunt and splashed on Marnie's beautiful face as she licked me and licked me until I felt like I couldn't take any more,  

Then she rose. I lay back, staring at the ceiling in wonder, my chest heaving as she rooted around in a drawer for something. I lay back in wonderment, realizing yes, a lesbian was exactly what I was, and that nothing in the world could be sweeter. 

And I felt guilty wondering what I had done for her.  What could I do for her that would not pale in comparison to the pleasure she had given me. Then I saw her by the bed, standing there, adjusting a harness.  From her hips jutted a huge curved thing, shaped like a man's cock, or from its size maybe a horse. 

"It's fuck time, baby," she said and crawled on top of me.  Instinct made me open my legs, preparing myself from mounting in the way of every woman since Eve first seduced Adam.  She kissed me softly and then with growing intensity, her breasts pressed to mine, her belly to mine, her tongue in my mouth thrusting deeply, and then I felt it against my sex, so big, so huge, I had a moment of fear that it could never fit and then she thrust and I screamed. 

Yes, it hurt.  It was agony, but with the sweetness that came from the touch of her skin to mine.  And the pain soon turned to throb, to heat, and then to joy as she mounted me, driving deeply and grunting like an animal as I was ridden until as one we sang a duet of ecstasy that rose above the honking horns of a New York street.  

I moved in two days later.  Back in those days, we hung our clothes out on lines that stretched from building to building.  She hung out the sheets,  the sheets she had taken me on.  In the middle, though she had treated it, was the brown spot of blood that had come from my shattered hymen.  In times past, the women carried a bloody sheet through the streets to show their daughter had gone to her marriage bed a virgin.  Today we hang our sheets from a clothesline. And every time I see that spot and remember, that night, the night she made me her woman.