Sister Wolf Read Online Free PDF

than the windows at home. Tallie was hot with fever, and coughing into a French silk scarf. She was so weak that Lola had to hold a cup of mint tea up to her mouth while she lapped it with her pointed pink kitten’s tongue. Lola stayed to warm her bare feet between her hands and pet her like a kitten; and stayed on to make her melt and sigh, and to tell her that her whole person looked like a crushed rose, and one part of her in particular. Tallie had covered her face with her baby hands, and when Lola paused at the door and looked back, her dark red hair was falling over her face and hands, which she still would not take down.
    Tallie fell as lovesick as a clown, and just as mute. Lola might have been keeping a pet in her room, one of those tiny silky dogs that are easy to step on. She found Tallie curled up day and night in her armchair, or nesting on the quilt at the foot of her bed, raising her head and arching her body for petting when she heard Lola turning the doorknob. In Lola’s arms, Tallie felt so limp and fine-boned that she could be snuffed out on the spot, or snapped in two. She would not press back, she would only yield and yield; she felt viscous, or fluid, to Lola. During one strong embrace, Lola pulled up her eyelids and found that her eyes had rolled back in her head, showing the whites, as if she were in a faint. After that, Lola took to marking her, anything to rouse her, raising bloodblisters by pinching her, setting bruises on her neck and thighs with her knuckles or teeth. She pulled ten long auburn hairs out of her head, from a patch that grew over her ear, working very carefully, setting her sharp nails right at the scalp. Tallie only opened her mouth, fluttered her fingers, and fell back into Lola’s lap. Lola picked her up and slung her over one shoulder, like a rug. She carried her into her suite and dumped her on the bed. It took Lola no time to pack a bag and sign out. At home she told her parents that she had the grippe. She stayed away two weeks. When she got back, she heard that Taylor Blackwell had been taken out of school for good.
    “Oof, that’s revolting,” said Marit, the first time Lola had told her the story. “The worst thing is the part about the crushed rose. Wlagh. I can hardly bear to look at you.”
    They were sitting in the back of a bus, coming home from the Regional Cat Show in Pittsfield, making a real teenage scene. They laughed so hard that the driver chewed them out over the loudspeaker: “… if those two young ladies would act like young ladies.” Best friends laugh like that, as if they owned the world, a kind of laughter that is better than sex or back-rubs, and puts heartbreaks and rude awakenings in a long perspective.
    That same evening they made sandwiches in Marit’s kitchen, and drank the good bourbon. They discussed a certain champion Rex kitten, and joked about turning Marit’s acres into a cattery instead of a wildlife preserve. Marit got up to carve more slices of ham. She decided to ask the question that had been on her mind all evening. She kept her tone offhanded, as if she were inquiring whether Lola would like the bread spread with mustard or mayonnaise.
    “I have to know. What is interesting about what two girls do without their clothes on? All that nursing and snuffling. How can you like it? A lot of flaps and folds and creases and empty spaces. Ladies are sewers.”
    Lola got a look on her face like Magellan rounding Patagonia. She stood at the prow of her argument, the wind in her hair, eyes narrowed to pierce the landmass. Marit stopped carving, arrested by so much intellectual rapture enlisted in the cause of lesbian sex. Was Lola implying that lesbian sex was a perfect circle? Her hand was tracing circles in the air. No beginning and no end, she was saying; it goes on and on; I am ready as soon as I am finished; she is ready as soon as she is finished. Every pore is an appetite. Men don’t touch; they grab and they probe. There are