The Gorgeous Girls by Marie Wilson

Chocolate in my mouth. A man I’ve just met at a friend’s Valentine’s Day dinner asks me to find him the cherry. I do, and he pops it into his mouth as I take another bite from a pair of chocolate handcuffs.
    Frozen. The world outside is covered in snow and ice. The man and I leave the dinner party together, slipping and sliding. At Gerrard near Logan, he stops and kisses me. He tastes like bourbon and chocolate and cherries.
    Melting. Beneath my muskrat coat, I’m on fire.
    Frozen. It takes him a month to call me.
    Fire. We meet at Rosewater for drinks, then move on to Starfish, where, amid candlelight and hyacinths, the black threads of my fishnet gloves (a gift from Wanda) soak up oyster and lemon juice. In darker places other juices flow. I lean over and put my nose in the purple hyacinths and inhale deeply. He picks a few blossoms and places them between my breasts, where the lace of my camisole peeks out.
    Hot. One of my fishnet stockings keeps falling down. In the ladies’ room I perform a kind of Laurel and Hardy routine: off with the boot, off with the stocking, turn it right side in, put everything back on. Back at the table, I tell him about the vaudeville act in the cubicle and he wonders aloud how stay-ups stay up, so I whisk my leather skirt back to reveal not only the rubber-lined top of my stocking but also my thigh.
    Later, he’ll reveal how transported he was by that creamy sight. But on this night at this late hour, I am giddy as hell, having stayed up till the wee hours the night before discussing matters of love and life with a friend. Knowing this, he says he’ll hail a cab and send me home. He helps me into my coat and we leave the restaurant.
    Burning. The following week we meet at Canoe. Smoke from ignited sprigs of rosemary excites the olfactory sense, while creamy cheese inspires finger-sucking. Back at his place, hot tongues of flame lick the embossed fleur-de-lys on the inside of the fireplace. By the flickering light and crackling heat, his hot tongue licks my own flower.
    Steamy. April brings fiddleheads and a Magic Wand. We share a plate of the tender ferns, steamed, soaked in butter and spritzed with lime, and for dessert we drive to Come As You Are, where he buys the above-mentioned crème de la crème of vibrators—along with a few other toys. They do not threaten him because he has the wisdom to know they don’t replace his tongue, his fingers, his cock. These are all different mediums for exciting me, just as Super 8 and 70mm are for a filmmaker.
    Burned. “Trust gets eaten away,” he says.
    I reply, “Trust is always there, but life experience creates a murky film, and it gets murkier with each breach.”
    â€œThen you meet someone—someone like you,” he replies, and the film clears, bit by bit. “Love—I feel as if we are inventing it.”
    I say, “Yes. Love. It’s not a path already taken. It’s a living thing. It breathes.”
    We decide we must invent new words for love, a new language for what we are together. We start with
hyacinthisized
.
    Sweltering. It’s one of those muggy days in late August. I’m feeling jittery as a bug in a jar, all jumpy nerves and wet heat. We stroll along the sidewalks, stop to buy lingerie and duck into Tiger Lily to suck back some noodles.
    Iced. He orders me cool cocktails with umbrellas in them and watches as I drink. His eyes are green as fiddleheads, though the light emanating from them is pure silver. It glows through slits of merriment and wide circles of surprise—laughing silver, knowing silver, brilliant silver. And then there’s the way he cares for me—that’s brilliant, too, more brilliant than the silver light of the moon.
    Dripping. In the ladies’ room I kick off my G-string, as its pink-and-lilac lace butt strand is most assuredly contributing to my high-strung state. I step into my new green boy-cut undies. Tonight