Isabella and I were opening the bookstore, which opened at eleven on Sundays. We affectionately called it the hangover shift. The bookstore staff was made up entirely of college students and people in their early to mid-20s, so odds were good that Sunday morning would be a bit of a struggle, for one reason or another. During our four years together working at the store, Ellie, Isabella and I had each done our fair share of hung-over Sunday morning openings. This morning, though, we were decidedly not hung over. Ellie, even though she wasn't scheduled to go in today, had risen early to make us breakfast. "Make me cum like that, you definitely get breakfast," she had said, putting out dishes of eggs and bacon. I think Isabella and I were both waiting for a cue from Ellie when it came to verbally acknowledging our ménage à trois. She greeted us brightly and easily when we emerged, perhaps a little shyly, from our bedrooms that morning, and it set us at ease.
Isabella wore jeans, a loose-fitting navy-blue top, and a cute headscarf--the last an attempt to tame her mane of curly black hair. She was busy readying the back of the store while I got the cash register drawer out of the safe. Isabella walked up with a stack of customer holds and put them on the counter behind me. She smelled pleasantly like the green apple shampoo in our shared shower.
It was a slow morning at the store, the weather was way too nice to expect many non-regulars. Mostly we straightened shelves, played a CD by The Shins, and talked rather openly about our sexual histories. Although we were obviously encouraged by the sex we had had together the night before, this was not a completely uncommon topic for us around the bookstore. Two summers before, Ellie had tried to teach me about the G-spot, albeit not with the same hands-on approach we would be using from now on. The three of us had also been working a shift together when Isabella came out to us as bisexual. Ellie, attending an all-women's college, could hardly be disinclined that way herself. But as far as I knew she had never acted on it directly, save for a few margherita-fueled make-out sessions with some of her former-suitemates. Never acted on it until last night, that is.
"I started masturbating young," said Isabella, "but I didn't have a name for it until someone told me it was a sin." Isabella had been raised Catholic. Although she had long since stopped thinking of her acts and desires as sinful, there was something about the secrecy of them that could arouse her. "Hiding it was a huge turn on," she said. "I lived in an apartment with my mom, my older brother Luís, and my Abuela. There wasn't a lot of privacy. But I remember, when I was a senior in High School, I would play this little game with myself." Isabella grabbed a stack of new arrivals for the two of us to price as she talked. "Every Sunday we went to Church. My mom, Luís and Abuela would be downstairs. When they called up that it was time to go, I would tell them to wait while I used the bathroom. I'd go into the upstairs bathroom, close the door, pull down my pants, and masturbate sitting on the toilet. The game was I had to cum in five minutes or less. It was so intense--I would spend the whole week touching myself at night, bringing myself right to the point of orgasm and then stopping, making sure I saved it for Sunday. I would get so excited that every Sunday morning I'd wake up wet," she said, blushing a little at this admission. "I remember sitting on the toilet and biting down on a sock to keep myself from squealing when I came."
I asked her about the first time she came with a partner.
"My first sexual experiences were all with girls," Isabella said. "Just some heavy petting stuff with girls from my school. But then the summer before college, me and this girl I knew, Rosie, we hooked up a bunch of times that summer. She was the first person to ever see me naked." Isabella put the priced books on a cart, and we rolled it into the general nonfiction section to shelve them. "She was a lot more experienced than I was, she had had sex with other girls, and she taught me a lot. She was actually with me when I bought my first toy--she told me I couldn't go to college without a vibrator." I found myself wondering if she still had that vibrator. Our bedrooms shared a wall, and I knew she had heard me having sex on occasion. If she was engaging in any sort of activities of her own, she had been quiet as a mouse.
Isabella pushed a stray hair away from her face. It was a familiar motion, one she performed a hundred times per shift. I thought I had never seen her look lovelier, something about her recalling this story made her glow. Her voice sounded dark and velvety. "I remember she had these black combat boots that she never took off. I think she was self-conscious about her feet; it was the one part of herself she wouldn't let me see. It was actually really hot, though, seeing her completely naked besides the boots. She had this short hair dyed black, she always wore dark lipstick, and she had all these tattoos on her arms, colorful ones. One of her nipples was pierced. I loved playing with it with my tongue." Isabella cleared her throat. "Anyway, there was this time at her apartment in the East Village. Her parents were out of town, they were out of town a lot, and we had the place to ourselves. I don't know what it was, maybe it's because I knew I was leaving for college in a few weeks, but I wanted her to see...all of me. I had never taken off my clothes for anyone, but I just completely stripped. Fast, like I wanted to get it over with before I thought about it too much. I just wanted to feel her eyes on me, I wanted to feel her hands over my entire body."
