This week’s S L I C K is curated and edited by Malic White.

Content notes: friend sex, masturbation, oral sex, manual sex, penetration

Okay, I lied. When Naomi asked if I was busy, I was giving a less than enthusiastic hand job to an ex.

Fran. Remember Fran with the ass so thick and tight that even Givenchy evening gowns wished that they could be humble cotton boxer briefs just to get to hold it? Fran with the bougie apartment in Wicker Park that they could inexplicably afford? Fran who gifted me the first ten orgasms* of my life when I moved to Chicago and was still painfully repressed? Fran who later told me we should just be friends since they were going to grad school and needed to focus. Fran who claimed to defer their enrollment for five consecutive semesters? Yes, that Fran.

Fran and I knew that neither of us was having that much fun. I was wet, but it wasn’t looking like I was going to come from penetration despite Fran’s persistent effort. They were unbuckling their strap-on harness as I absentmindedly fingered them, when Naomi called.

Mine and Fran’s pact to fool around on any Sunday morning that we were both single, bored, and horny had lost its charm. In the time since we’d met, we’d conquered every inch of their condo, sucked the maple syrup of every brunch spot within delivery radius off of each others’s nipples, and pretended to get caught fucking by the same nosy neighbor enough times that it had all gotten old. When my phone rang right as they began to dig through their top drawer for some lube, they weren’t surprised that I answered.

“Hey. What’s up?” l asked into the phone, attempting to play it cool as I watched Fran relax their muscular back onto their headboard and open their legs wide, while maintaining eye contact with me. Where was this energy half an hour before?

Fran snapped open the cap on the tube and squeezed a little too much for my taste on their middle finger and began to circle their clit slowly. Fran mouthed, “Who is it?”

Illustration by Laura Lee Benjamin.

I place my index finger on the lips of their mouth to signal them to shut the fuck up for once. They proceeded to slide my finger into their mouth with their free hand, as I said into the phone, “Oh fuck, Naomi, I’m sorry to hear that. “

Fran bit me. Fuck. Ow. I pulled my finger away. Fran rolled their eyes.

“Of course it’s fucking Naomi,” they chortled as they began to increase the speed circling their clit.

Naomi was my oldest friend in the city. We met at a party freshman year at SCAD. She had an allergic reaction to a pot brownie (the nuts, not the weed — but still terrifying to a couple of impressionable 18-year-old DARE program graduates). I was the only person sober enough to drive her to the ER. We ended up avoiding many other crises together throughout college. When she moved to Chicago after college for an internship, I figured that this was just as good a city as any to be a broke post-grad. I tended to be the person she called when her dating life blew up in her face.

I twisted Fran’s nipple while I listened to Naomi explain how her night had gone awry. Fran yelped.

“Sorry. That was nothing,” I said, shooting Fran a death glare.

Fran slid onto their back and hissed in mock irritation, “I shouldn’t have to whisper in my own house.”

“Yeah, Naomi, I can pick you up. No, no, it’s not out of the way.”

Fran moaned in pleasure— their pussy now glistening. I bit my lip and said to them, “Hey Fran, I’m sorry, Naomi—”

Fran grinned and responded through heavy sighs “I got it. From here. Go. Just promise me. You’ll fuck her. This time.” Fran clutched their sheets.

I sucked on Fran’s left nipple and kissed it as a peace offering. “You know it’s not like that, Fran.”

Fran groaned. Through labored breaths they replied “You don’t…get to stand me…up, mid-fuck…and…. lie to my…face.”

“You want me to at least wait until you come?”

“Hal… Just go get… Your—,” they threw their head back, “—girl.”

Fran was laying on top of my dress, so I threw on one of their oversized button up shirts and didn’t bother to look for my underwear. I fully expected to be single, bored and horny next Sunday morning. Besides, Fran would likely wash them with their fancy detergent long before I would get to laundering them. I bit their shoulder goodbye and they shuddered.

“Next Sunday?” I called from their kitchen as I threw together a peanut butter and jelly. They really didn’t keep any breakfast food in their house.

“On the Sabbath?!” they yelled back at me. I heard them turn on their Magic Wand.

“You’re right.” I laughed. “Raincheck?” I yelled from the doorway grabbing my keys and my handbag off the hook of the door. I was out before I could get a response.

I took I-90 and tried to focus on the road. I didn’t realize how wet I still was until I sat down and became aware of the possibility of getting pussy juice on the driver’s seat of my new car when Fran’s shirt rode up. I tried to talk myself down.

Halle, this is Naomi. You are just picking up Naomi. Your very good friend, Naomi, whom you have only not-so-jokingly offered to take up on her not-so-joking offer to fuck for a decade. She literally just got emotionally gut punched by some fuckboy. Don’t be another fuckboy. Not today. Unless she initiates. Fuck, she always initiates. You would just have to not make a joke out of something for once in your fucking life. Fuck, I missed my exit.

When I finally made it to pick up Naomi, she was wearing Patrick’s fake flannel, and I pretended not to notice it was his when I remarked that she just missed the mark on true midwestern butch because her flannel couldn’t button over her plump tits.

“I know this house,” I said as we pulled away. “Like six people live there, right?”

Naomi confirmed that Patrick did, in fact, live in the same apartment as a girl I’d gone on a couple of dates with last Summer. You couldn’t pay me to live all the way out in Jefferson Park with five roommates, but the house was stunning, huge, and rent was cheap as fuck. Shit, what was her name again? Liz.

Liz. Remember Liz? Liz with the tattoos and more hair than she knew what to do with? Liz who somehow never had to pay a cover at any comedy club in the city? Liz, the champagne socialist who taught me how to steal Chanel Number 5 from the Macy’s in Watertower Place? Liz, who I believed was only so loud** when I fucked her to assert her dominance over the five men she shared a house with? Yes, that Liz.

Miraculously, Liz and the other roommates were all out of town for a wedding Patrick hadn’t been invited to.

Naomi’s mascara was smeared just enough that I knew that this one hurt a little. He’d fucked her all over his apartment and promised to spend the day with her while they were curled up together in bed, but when she woke up, he was gone.

I “uh-huh”ed Naomi several times and made all the appropriate listening faces, but I couldn’t help but picture her fucking all over that huge house that I knew well enough to see clearly. Him fucking her against the book shelf in the living room. Her body bent over the dining table. Her ass naked on the granite countertops of the island in the kitchen with me on my knees. Fuck.

I promise I tried really hard to listen to Naomi tell me the exact details of how Patrick had been terrible. It’s hard to be a good listener when you’re still wet and anticipating the orgasm you began the quest for hours earlier. It’s hard to be a good listener when you’re acutely aware that both people in the car still smell of sex and could easily go another round or two.

It’s hard to be a good listener when the most beautiful person that you know is sitting in the passenger seat of your car and the top button of a scrawny white man’s threadbare flannel is losing the battle against her tits. I wanted to dive face first into that ratty old shirt and take a swim between Naomi’s breasts. I wanted to play chicken with that top button until she spilled out. I wanted to know once and for all what color Naomi’s nipples were and confirm my suspicion that they tasted as good as her lips did the night senior year after a few drinks at a Frank Ocean concert when she shouted over the opener “Yeah, Halle, you’re definitely a little gay!” I was charting a map that would take my mouth from her nipples to her lips down to your other lips when she said:

“Why do I keep fucking the dumbasses I meet at work who won’t even give me head and then ghost me like that when there are people who would just love to eat my pussy?”

I rolled my eyes and without thinking blurted “Eat your pussy? Try fucking devour it. Try fucking drown in it. Try lace their skincare with your cum.”

Naomi’s eyebrows shot up. She blinked a couple of times and looked out the window.

“Halle, what the fuck?”

I kept my eyes affixed to the road. We both sat in silence for the rest of the ride to Naomi’s place in Uptown.

We pulled up at her apartment.

Naomi thanked me and got out of the car and started to walk towards her apartment. I watched her make her way to the front door and tried in vain not to zero in on the way that her hips swayed when she walked.

Naomi pivoted before reaching the door. She ran back towards my car and gestured for me to roll down my window.

“Halle, do you want to come up?” Naomi rested her elbow on my car door.

“I’m not really dressed to hang out.”

Naomi’s face was so close to mine that the memory of the taste of her lips came flooding back.

“You don’t really need to be dressed to do the kind of hanging out I was thinking.”

I grinned from ear to ear and leaned in to kiss her.

“Hal, have you had peanut butter today?”

Here we were avoiding another peanut allergy disaster. The only difference was that, this time, it was at the expense of my throbbing pussy. Fuck.

“Fuck.”

Naomi laughed. “It’s okay! Raincheck?”

* The first three occurred after one night of dancing hard enough to sweat out all the booze we’d coerced from a bartender in West Town who earnestly believed he had a shot at a threesome with us. I told Fran that I was “just one of those girls who couldn’t come” and they laughed and asked if I was sure that I wasn’t just “one of those girls who’d only been fucked by cis men.” Fran proceeded to plunge inside me as if their manicured fingers had magnets and my G-spot was made of metal and massaged it until I felt an earthquake under every inch of my skin. The next two occurred when they sucked my clit gently in their parked car at the top of the parking garage of their downtown office until I accidentally honked their horn when grasping for anything to hold onto and they instructed me to drive away with my underwear still down around my ankles as if nothing had happened in case the honk drew attention to us on the security cameras. The next five occurred over eight weeks of dates that always started after my bedtime and ended in Fran paying for my ride home because they “weren’t any good at making breakfast the morning after anyway.”

** Liz was a screamer. The first time she asked me to put a string of anal beads up her ass, she hollered so loudly as I pulled them out that I thought she was doing a bit. She truly never turned it off. I felt like she was doing a character, but every time she asked for a suggestion from the audience they shouted, “extremely excitable lesbian who cannot use an inside voice after one kiss on the neck.” Her pussy tasted like shrimp and grits, and she was not amused when I told her so. I can’t remember why we stopped seeing each other.

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