An Erotic Education

The cavernous campus library is lit with dozens of hooded lamps reposing on their respective desks. The library is empty except for a naughty young couple who hid away until past closing so that they may have the illustrious racks all to themselves. Amelia—a redhead with long straight hair and pale freckled skin—is lounging in a cushioned chair with a stack of vintage erotica at her feet. Her girlfriend, Alma—a curvy Latinx woman with Betty Page bangs and a penchant for dark lipstick—sits facing her with one leg swinging over the arm of an identical chair.

It started with an assignment for their queer literature class: write an essay on the poetry of Michael Field. Michael Field, their professor explained, was not a man, but the pseudonym for a late 19th century lesbian couple—one woman the niece of the other. As Alma and Amelia studiously exhumed the history of this pioneering couple, they discovered the lush and thriving garden of vintage queer erotica. 

Most famously, there was Sappho, the woman-adoring poet and muse from the island of Lesbos in Greece, from which the word “lesbian” comes from. Lesser-known was an anonymously-penned book of kink and BDSM called Astrid Cane, published in 1891 in which a young girl is initiated into womanhood by an older dominatrix. Next, Alma and Amelia found the book Mysteries of Verbena House, published in 1882 under a pseudonym—an erotic, flagellatory fiction that follows a British headmistress as she maintains discipline and order among her 50 curious and unruly students, whipping any young lady who steals into another young lady’s bed.

The mischievous, willful deviance of Victorian-era erotica captivated Alma and Amelia, arousing their senses more than the modern-day lesbian porn they liked to watch together in their dorm room on the weekends. In an age of anything-goes, nothing seemed quite as deliciously obscene as the printed pornography from an age of sexual regulation and restriction. 

As though designing their own pornographic plot, the two young women decided to sneak into this symbolic home of higher learning to further educate themselves in the wicked ways of secret smut that was gathering dust on the shelves where few students sought their learning.

“Listen to this,” Amelia says to Alma, holding open a text by Anaïs Nin. “‘I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.’”

“Her passion practically drips off the page,” says Alma. “I bet she was a generous lover.”

“Did you know she was openly bisexual?” asks Amelia. “She had countless lovers, both men and women. And she had an illegal abortion in the 1930s despite the stigma. She knew what she wanted, and she went after it her whole life. Erotic writers are just as important and valid as the literary canon,” Amelia adds, twirling a lock of her strawberry hair as she puts down the Nin and flips through a Victorian novel. “Their work helps awaken people’s senses and inspires them to know themselves fully. It shows us that we’re not perverted for entertaining certain fantasies.”

“Or it shows us that everyone is perverted, and that there’s nothing wrong with that.” Alma winks at Amelia under the shadow of the lamplight. “Go on, then. Read something from the other book.”

Amelia sits up straight, her legs spread slightly apart so that Alma can see a swatch of her lacy-pink panties peeking out from beneath her skirt. She begins reading in an innocent voice from a collection of fictional letters called School Life in Paris. “‘Suddenly she flung herself along the foot of the bed, and forcing my legs still further apart, she thrust her head down between them, and in another instant I felt her long and ardent tongue forcing its way between the throbbing lips of my excited cunnie, tickling the top of the entrance to it with steady friction, and from time to time exploring its inmost recesses, so as to stimulate every organ of it to the highest enjoyment of sensual pleasure.’”

Alma wiggles in her seat, massaging her ample breasts.

“Shall I go on?” teases Amelia.

“Don’t you dare stop now,” Alma commands, looking flushed.

Amelia spreads her legs a little wider and unbuttons her satiny blouse so that her matching pink-lace bra can be seen pushing her modest breasts up toward her collarbones. Alma bites her lip.

“‘As soon as she could feel that all the nerves in my cunt were fully aroused and excited, she made a sign to the other girls—’”

“Wait, there are other girls?” interrupts Alma. “Who are they? Where are they?”

“They’re students at an all-girls boarding school in Paris who are initiating the newest girl into their lesbian society.”

“Dear sweet Gaia,” swoons Alma. “Please continue.”

“‘She made a sign to the other girls, who immediately quickened the action of their tongues upon my tiddies, and of their fingers upon my spine, while she somehow managed to slip inside my pussie one of her fingers, with which she began to irritate it by rubbing the upper part of the inside with as much speed and energy as she could, thereby leaving her tongue free to act continuously on a small spot on the top of the entrance to my cunnie where it caused me a most delicious sensation.’”

At this point, Alma is practically panting. As Amelia continues to read in her sweet yet sultry voice, Alma slouches forward in her chair and raises her right foot, sliding it up along the inside of Amelia’s legs and pressing it directly against the lacy fabric between her creamy thighs. Amelia gasps, thrusting forward into her girlfriend’s exquisitely arched foot, and continues.

“‘With all these agencies at work, the thrill of pleasure, which was throbbing through every part of my body, became more and more intense, until at last I could scarcely bear it—’” Amelia pauses mid-sentence when Alma presses her big toe against her swollen clit—the contact dampening the delicate lace of her panties. 

“Don’t stop reading, or I’ll take my foot away,” says Alma, her eyes locked on Amelia’s.

Obediently, Amelia reads on. “… something, that the other girls called the liquor of love, escaped from my cunnie and I seemed to die away in a swoon of voluptuous enjoyment.”

At the phrase “voluptuous enjoyment,” Alma kneels on the floor and begins to enact the very same delights as the school girls upon the story’s narrator. “Don’t. Stop. Reading,” Alma hisses, and then envelops Amelia’s plump lips with the flat of her greedy tongue.

“‘When I came to myself the girls were all gathered round me on the bed, some of them kissing me, and all congratulating me on the way in which I had gone through my initiation, for they declared that, while it was going on, the lasciviousness of my movements and the voluptuous contortions of my body had clearly shown what an intensity of pleasure I was experiencing, thereby proving that I was specially endowed by nature for appreciating the viscous enjoyment of sensuality.’”

Amelia can go on no longer. Caught up in incoherent pleasure, she pushes her pelvis into Alma’s face, squirming against the finger charming her insides like some seductive serpent. Alma grips her hips, pinning her to the chair, and flicks the tip of her tongue against the soft button of her girlfriend’s fragrant sex. Amelia arcs her back and cries out, tugging at Alma’s raven hair as she vibrates with the electric climax of sensual release.

“Yessss,” hisses Alma. “You deserve every last drop of pleasure for how good you made me feel with only the sound of your voice. And when you recover, I’d like to see if I can make you feel the same by reading the sinful smut of The Nunnery Tales.”