Chapter Cast:

Ireland (Iry), Female, 29
- Beige skin, 5’6, 130lbs, straight shoulder-length blonde hair
Zoe, Female, 29
- Beige skin, 5’6, 120lbs, straight long silky black hair

I’d never been one to approach anyone for a sexual relationship. I never made the first move. I liked it when someone would try to seduce me. To catch my interest. To let me know they wanted to do more than have a conversation. I was confidant in doing so, happy to be the shy, innocent type who enjoyed being led to the bedroom to make love. Over my first twenty-nine years, I’d had a couple of boyfriends who were generally pretty great, a couple who weren’t, and a handful of casual friends-with-benefits who I liked to have a few drinks with and then blow in their cars, maybe going further if I was into it that night.

I don’t think I was that unusual or abnormal for my age. Many of my female friends enjoyed robust sex lives, and the close circle of four of us had known each other since at least second grade, sharing our hopes, our secrets, and, often, our intimate details.

I enjoyed sex, but I’d never been one to explore beyond the normal vanilla acts. I gave a pretty good blowjob, and I usually swallowed. I knew how to use my hands and my thighs to draw out a man’s cum. I generally demurred when a partner wanted to introduce something new. I enjoyed what I was used to, and I didn’t experiment beyond what I’d already done. I don’t really know why that was my way, it just was.

All my partners had been men. Never had I even really thought about women sexually. Sure, I looked at breasts or hips or legs or whatnot, but it was in the comparative fashion, not in a way which was measuring out a woman’s desirability or for my own sexual interest. I wasn’t drawn to women the way I was to men.

That changed on my friend Melodia’s thirtieth birthday. The four of us were together again, celebrating on a Friday night at a jazz bar downtown. We were all single for the first time in two years. Melodia had been the last with a steady ‘other,’ that relationship ending only four weeks earlier. The woman was short, blonde like me, and rounder than my frame, but I knew she was pretty even without the makeup. She wrote columns for a music magazine and website, and it often had her going out of town regularly. The stories that came back from those times away were often funny or downright filthy.

With us was our wild child, Gretchen. She hated her name. I wondered regularly if she pushed boundaries as a way of keeping herself from becoming the stereotypical cranky, frumpy ‘Gretchen’ that often was the first image to come to mind when hearing that name. She’d once had sex with a cab driver while his meter ran. Another time, she fucked two bartenders after a party in an upscale hotel. You’d never know she was an attorney and, at work, was the consummate professional.

And then there was Zoe. Dr. Stanlove to her patients in the city hospital’s emergency room. She’d been my best friend since kindergarten. We were partners in crime, she and I, and she knew all my secrets. If I had bodies buried somewhere, Zoe probably helped me dig the hole and cover our tracks. She’d been my confident, my accomplice, and the one person in the world who I knew, without question, I could count on in any situation.

I’d always been pleasantly jealous of her silky black hair. It was gorgeous. My own straw-blonde couldn’t compete. At work, Zoe kept it neatly pulled back into a knot which let the strands hang down to her mid-back. That night, as was her usual, she let her hair fall loose from her head, and it danced each time she laughed or turned. She wore a shockingly-bright red dress. Zoe wasn’t ostentatious or gaudy in her looks. She wasn’t showing anyone up or overcompensating. She was just that beautiful. She could pull off most anything sexy. Even at my height, about five-six, she had a large presence. Zoe could be intense and intimidating if you didn’t know her, or if she didn’t trust you. She’d once gotten into a fist fight with a frat boy during college because he’d said something mean about my backside.

Zoe kicked his ass.

The two of us were as tight as two friends could be.

I’d find out that night, however, that we could be even tighter.

The four of us were drinking moderately. I’d caught an Uber ride downtown and wasn’t too worried about getting drunk. Only Gretchen regularly got visibly intoxicated when we got together, but it only made her more fun to be around. She was a happy drunk, and she knew we’d look out for her if she had picked out a guy below our standards to go home with. We all took care of each other like that.

It was one of those nights where I thought I might like to find a one-night stand. I was horny, which wasn’t that unusual, but I was letting go some work stress from my HR job after a big reorganization had finally finished. I felt pretty good, on my third margarita in a little over an hour, and I scanned the room for a guy to talk to.

The night passed on quickly. Before I knew it, we had been sharing several hours of laughter and companionship and the bartender yelled out ‘Last Call!’ I ordered one more after Melodia and Gretchen called it a night and offered their hugs and kisses before departing in the waiting cab.

Zoe and I hung around as the club emptied, just talking. She commented, “I saw those looks tonight, Iry.” My friends called me that, a shortening of my full name, Ireland. Yeah, I was named for a country. My parents were strange. “You’re looking to get laid, eh?”

I shrugged, buzzed, smiling, “Would be nice. It’s been a couple of months for me. Getting that itch.”

Zoe turned her head around to look at the three or four people still sipping their last drinks of the night. “Not much to pick from. How about that guy?” She said, pointing towards a young man who was probably no older than twenty-two who was loudly telling the bartender about his motorcycle.

“Nah,” I told her. The guy was a hottie, for sure, but at that point in the night, I was past trying to work myself into a position where he had a chance to initiate things with me. “Besides, they’re closing down.”

Zoe nodded, then looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Still can’t quite believe it.”

“What?” I asked.

“That you’ve never considered women.”

I shrugged. “Just never found an attraction there.”

Zoe shook her head. “Too bad ... you don’t know what you’re missing.”

I knew Zoe was bisexual. Hell, I’d known that about her since she started puberty. She told me so as soon as she knew the right term for the way she liked both boys and girls at thirteen. Zoe had had steady relationships with both sexes over the years, but she’d never once propositioned me or suggested we be anything more than best friends. When we were eight, we’d practiced kissing on her bed. There was nothing sexual about it. Really, it was just two giggling young girls with wet lips and shared excitement. It went no further that night, and it never was repeated.

I tried to consider her words carefully. I suppose, like everything else in my sexuality, I was silently waiting for her to suggest we do something more than talk. I wasn’t aware of it, as such, and I didn’t think about Zoe that way at all. But, if she was to suggest more, I would have willingly followed her lead. To me, Zoe wasn’t like other women in so many ways. Only looking back at that night do I realize how easily I let her initiate things.

She was only slightly buzzed as we slowly finished our drinks and prepared to leave. “Iry ... want some company tonight?”

It was an innocent question in my ears. Zoe and I had cuddled on many occasions. It was purely platonic, and we both enjoyed falling asleep, usually in our underwear with Zoe spooning me. I never thought of that as sexual, really, just an enjoyable night shared with my best friend. “Sure ... been a while since we’ve cuddled...”

Zoe smiled. Her red lipstick matched her dress. No wonder men and women were falling over each other to sleep with her. Those lips were made to give pleasure. “Cool. I’ll fetch Uber.”

We waited just inside the door of the club until the bartender shooed us out so that he could clean up and get home. The Uber driver pulled up shortly and we rode the ten minutes to my home north of downtown. We said little, and I closed my eyes for the last couple of miles and enjoyed my buzz.

Inside my modest house, Zoe excused herself to use the bathroom, setting her oversized purse on a living room counter. I knew she liked to have a nightcap when visiting me, so I poured us melon sours and took the drinks to the couch in the living room. I turned on the gas logs in the fireplace to fight the chilly air.

Zoe returned a moment later and sat next to me, leaning back as she sipped her drink. “Two positions, eh?” Zoe asked out of the blue.

“What?” I replied.

“Tony,” the last sexual partner I’d had, “only did it in two positions.”

“Yeah,” I confirmed, “doggie and missionary.”

“No you on top? How could a guy not want that?”

I shrugged. “He never suggested it.”

“But you love to ride, Iry, why didn’t you just climb on top?”

“You know me, Zoe,” I said, repeating a thought I’d spoken to my best friend many times, “I’m passive. I like letting the guy lead me in bed.”

“That is so sexy.”

I blushed, as usual. “Tony was good, though ... I even let him go bareback in me a few times...”

“Nice ... Not much better than that.”

I was feeling very aroused as I remembered the sex I’d had with Tony. He had been a good lay. I knew I was flushed.

I felt Zoe’s eyes on me, and I turned to look at her. I’d seen that look in her eyes many times. Usually, it was pointed towards someone else and I’d admired the way Zoe looked so inviting when she stared at a desired partner that way.

This time, it was me Zoe gave that look to.

“You are so beautiful, Iry,” she said in her seductive voice, “I can accept you aren’t interested in woman ... but ... are you interested in me?”

I’d been led to the point where the only honest response was to say, “Yes...”

Zoe’s lips pursed and her eyes narrowed slightly. She’d hooked me, and she knew it.

Her body moved slowly forward and I felt her hand on my knee. I had no time to worry about what was about to happen, no moment to consider that this was my best friend, a woman I’d known since she was five or so, the person I’d spent the most time talking to in my whole life. When she brought her lips to mine, I let her draw out a moan as she took my breath away.

Her fingers began to caress my cheek, then my neck and shoulder. She started to slip the blouse from my shoulders and I let her. I trembled lightly, turned on, scared, nervous. Zoe’s hands slid to my breasts as the blouse fell lower. I moaned into her mouth, growing warm, my nipples tingling each time Zoe’s palms or fingers touched them.

I was becoming wet. I could feel my pussy twitching in anticipation. I was erect, as well, my clit rubbing lightly against my thin panties. Zoe pushed me to my back and yanked the blouse over my head and off my arms, then slid her fingers to the zipper on my skirt, that covering soon gone as well. She wasted no time reaching for the edge of my panties and started to draw them down my thighs.

Zoe had seen me naked many times in our lives. She’d even gone with me a year early when I had a scare with a possible STI. It turned out to just be a nasty rash, but Zoe had been in the room when the gynecologist had me spread wide open to examine my genitals. I hand’t thought anything of it at the time.