“You should talk about Lilly,” David said softly to his wife, who was curled up on his lap in the lazy swirl of hot tub bubbles. “I love that one.”

We spent long stretches of our first two nights together – times when we weren’t actively in bed – in warm spring-fed water on the deck of our cabin. We told stories idly, asked questions, and fondled one another’s mineral-slickened skin beneath the water’s surface.

“Lillypalooza,” she said with bright loving eyes as she caressed the stubble of his chin. “OK.”

“Come in close,” she told me as she pulled at my bicep. In fairness, David and I were already in direct contact from shoulder to ankle on the tub bench where we all sat, and Hanna was nearly as much in my lap as in David’s. Closer would be hard to do, but I loved the sentiment.

Hanna began:

When I was seventeen, I spent a week with my cousin Holly in Phoenix. She was a year older and had just graduated. Holly was my favorite and we had always been close; our moms were inseparable growing up, and we got to see each other every summer. She was funny, sweet, and whip-smart. Long black hair and enormous brown eyes.

I was shy as a kid, and I was a little nervous to hang out with Holly’s friends. When I met them, we spent the first night walking around Mill Avenue and chasing each other across the ASU campus. Holly was fast, with athletic long legs; she and her friend Cate left me behind, but her other friend Lilly dropped back and walked along beside me.  

“Enjoying the cool temperatures?” Lilly asked. At ten-thirty at night it had “cooled” to ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit (that’s thirty-seven to the rest of the world). “You’re from the mountains, right?”

“Um – yeah,” I stammered. “It’s higher there.” Immediately I winced at such a mindless thing to say, but Lilly made me deeply uncomfortable in a way that I sure didn’t understand at the time. It’s not like she was mean – but she was intense. She was that person that you know you should stay away from but can’t stop yourself and so you have the most breathless affair of your life in exchange for three months of therapy twenty years later.

“I bet it’s nice,” Lilly moved the conversation along with bright green eyes that made a lot of contact. Her auburn hair was pulled up into a disheveled bun. Her toned shoulders and arms glistened with the constant perspiration that the Arizona heat drew from us. She had a flat chest covered by a tight lavender tank and a firm round ass hidden behind shapeless torn denim shorts. Her toes, peeking out from a worn pair of Teva sandals, were painted in black and they matched her fingers except that the polish on her toes wasn’t worn down from chewing.

Lilly and I stayed in one another’s orbit through the rest of the walk. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate on her part or not. I was trying desperately to not look like I was following her while still trying to stay close: like that invisible boundary when two magnets can be connected, but not so close that one of them slides across the table and slams awkwardly and girl-crushingly into the other. When we piled into a booth in the Mellow Mushroom Lilly made no effort to correct the fact that our thighs were touching from hip to knee. She could have used the excuse of the heat, or that there was ample room on the bench. Instead, she stayed put while she and Holly argued over pineapple. I felt her body relax against mine. I thrilled.

At this point in my life, I had barely begun to play around with boys. I’d been going out with Spence for something like three months back then, and we’d done some heavy petting: he’d finger me on the floor of my bedroom where the door had to stay open but my mom never came upstairs. I’d help him cum into his shorts with my hand after making out to our mixtapes for hours. Needless to say, I had plenty to discover about relationships in general, and I had zero information about same-sex relationships. I had no language to describe what I was feeling when I would sit close to Lilly in Holly’s basement and feel my belly flutter.  Lying next to her, I would soak my underwear by the time a movie finished. But you’re ready for what you’re ready for – and I wasn’t anywhere near ready to understand that I wanted Lilly to fuck me. I certainly wasn’t ready to see the signs that she was putting out: signs that said she felt the same way.

On the day of the show, we arrived wearing more sunscreen than fabric. To stave off the heat we wore sports bras, braids, and Daisy Dukes. I eyed Lilly’s black leather logger boots and thought she must be hot in them. I also thought fuck, she was hot in them.  The four of us pushed up to the front during Pearl Jam’s set and it was bananas in there. There were multiple mosh pits springing up like solar systems out of the firmament and we were thrown around with the surges of the crowd moving to accommodate them. When I lost my footing, Lilly caught me and kept me upright. Her arms went around me – all sweaty and slippery – and my arms got caught between us against her chest. She really didn’t have boobs, but her nipples were the sort that commanded respect and I found my hands resting on them. Her arms held me a few beats longer than necessary for me to find my footing and if we hadn’t been so jostled around, I think she would have kissed me right there.

“I would love to have known you then, Sweetheart,” David said, as he topped up our Sambuca glasses. “You’re beautiful right goddamn now. But it would be a privilege to know you in all different phases of beautiful. You in braces and braids? God help us.”

Hanna kissed him sweetly. “I’d like to have met dorky young David, too. Would you have held me upright against the mosh madness and the stage diving?”

“I’d have been absolutely terrified of you and wouldn’t have dared look in your direction,” he laughed. “But I would have loved you.”

Hanna kissed him affectionately and then gave my hand a squeeze of connection and affirmation.

She continued:

By the time of the Ministry set, it was dark. We’d been dancing for hours but when they started up with New World Order, the crowd went nuts again. We were further back from the stage, milling around and smoking, where things were a little more open. We saw people gathering trash from the lawn wherever they could and making little piles with it. The little piles became big piles. Then they started the piles of garbage on fire and began moshing around them – the light from the bonfires and the smoke was hypnotizing and by the time Just One Fix was playing it reached a crescendo: relentless, aggressive, and repetitive. It was half religious mass, half Lord of the Flies.

Visually, it was really captivating. Golden light and the slender silhouettes of feral children.  Holly and Cate dove in with them, blending into the masses of skin and sweat and enthusiasm. I moved in that direction, but Lilly caught my arm. I looked back and she took a step closer, pulling me to her. I leaned in and she kissed me. She kissed me with a drive and energy that matched the crowd dancing all around us. Our hands were on one another – feeling arms and shoulders and throats. I put my palms over her nipples, and I got chills feeling them thicken and rise beneath her top. Her hands dug at my back and ass, grinding me into her. I tasted her gum and spit and sweat as we kissed. Her tongue swept through my mouth, and I swooned.

We stepped further into the shadows behind the concessions with the music still pounding all around us, and I felt her hand - salty from snacks, sun, and sweat - plunge down my abdomen, past the waistband of my shorts, and into the thin cotton of my underwear. My head buzzed and I gasped. She dug deep into me - into my slickened hormonal teenage pussy. Her fingers were swimming within my pelvis and I pulled her close and held her shoulders tight to support my weight against the dizziness of the pleasure she made me feel. Behind my closed eyes, it all intensified: the manic growl of the band, the smell of her sweat and lip gloss, the frisson that I got from her grasping my labia in between her fingers and rolling them like the thin papers of a cigarette.

I had wanted to be cool. I spent the afternoon wanting her to like me – and I didn’t even really know what I thought that meant. I just wanted to do it right and I wanted her to be close to me.

Hanna paused a moment. She kissed me and then kissed David. She was getting a little wound up from the memory and from the telling of it. Her turquoise eyes caught the moonlight that reflected in endlessly shifting networks off of the warm sulphuric water. That image would become one of the two dozen or so perfect moments of my life: moments when it all held still, and I could take in – for the briefest second – just how shockingly beautiful and satisfying the company of the right people could be.

She continued:

I had wanted her to be near me, and now she wasn’t just near me – she was a part of my fucking architecture. She was inside of my body: plunging her two middle fingers into me and then rolling the moisture over my clit. I just prayed that she wouldn’t stop. I opened my eyes and saw a trio of boys watching us from like twenty feet away. They were about my age, and they looked as shocked as I felt. They also looked like they were digging it and I’ll be damned if that didn’t pump up my arousal that much more. I don’t know if I liked the feeling of exposure or if I liked showing off the scalding hot chick that was doing this to me, but I felt my pelvis burn with energy. I ground against Lily’s hand and kissed her deeply. I sucked at her as savagely as I wanted her to finger bang me and she responded magnificently to the message.

I don’t know if my eyes rolled back in my head – but let’s assume they did because it was fucking a-mazing. David, you know the Bernini statue we saw in Rome? The nun having an orgasm? It was like that. I saw Lilly’s eyes staring me down as I came. And as it kept going, I shuddered and caught the gaze of one of the spectating boys; in the darkness, his wide eyes looked both horny and afraid. Awestruck. This was decades before smartphones. I’m sure he’d never watched a girl climax before.

Lilly backed off of the pressure and let me just grind softly on her palm and fingers. It was heavenly. I had my forehead buried in her chest as I floated on the afterglow. Finally, I looked up and kissed her again and felt her fingertips gently drag their way home from my swollen and sensitive lips. I was so sad to feel them leave but I was also becoming aware that we were in a really public place, and I’d never done anything remotely like this before. Our faces were still close from our kiss, and she brought her fingers up to our noses. She looked directly into my eyes and inhaled my scent. Fuck. It was hotter than anything my brain could have imagined up to that point and if she hadn’t burned herself into my psyche forever already, that gesture would have done it.

“Respect,” said David with a smile. "That girl knew her shit."

“She was good, Sweetie,” Hanna curled tighter into David’s lap. He shifted to accommodate her alongside the erection that rekindled from Lilly’s masterstroke. “But she’s no you, Baby.” She ran loving fingers through David’s hair.

“Mmmm,” he cooed. “And what happened to Lilly?”

 We found the others again for the Chili Peppers set. It was fun and bouncy and all the more wonderful for having Lilly beside me. We would look at each other in the midst of our dancing and smile. She seemed as elated as I was: the kind of elation that can only come in those teenage years when the highs are so high and the lows so low. Sometimes we would dance facing each other and beaming with our eyes at our shared secret. Sometimes we watched the stage, side by side, skin to skin, in a silent acknowledgment of what we felt.

I never did see her after that night. Holly lost touch with her too. They went off to separate colleges and it’s like Lilly just vanished. I worry about her. She was different and special and susceptible to the kind of shit that finds us in our twenties. But for that night she was electric and kind and unbelievably loving. It’s like she showed me something that no one else would get to see because I was young and completely green and would never be a threat. I was safe. And for that, I was given the most beautiful kind of gift.