Vina Green
A young woman learns to unlock her own pleasure and fulfil the desires of another when she enjoys her first lesbian encounter – with her employer. Their forbidden romance reaches an unexpected climax in this short coming of age story set within the sweet confines of an apple orchard.
Apples were the first fruit that I couldn’t have.
When I was growing up, we always had apples. We didn’t have any apple trees, but there was no shortage of apples. My mother bought them from local orchards, and road side stalls, or picked the ones that fell on the ground from our neighbour’s trees and carried them home in her apron. The apples sat in baskets, or in buckets in the corners of our kitchen, or in empty ice cream containers on the bench, catching the shafts of light that fell through the window and casting strange, mountainous shadows onto the kitchen walls.
During one particularly hot summer’s day I crept into the kitchen while my mother was sleeping, in search of a snack. We didn’t have sweets in the house unless she had baked them, and the pantry held only a sweaty looking fruit cake, too brown and heavy for my greedy child’s eyes, and rows and rows of baking ingredients, tins of golden syrup, spices in boxes, and half a dozen different sorts of flour and sugar standing side by side in thick glass jars with cork lids.
My eyes settled on a pile of apples sitting in a silver colander on the bench next to the kitchen sink, nearly, but not quite out of my reach. They were Granny Smiths, my favourite variety at the time, largely because I loved the colour green, and these glowed like kryptonite in the midday sun. My mother had procured them from our neighbour earlier that day, and I had watched her rinse them one by one under the faucet, checking each apple for rot, tossing the bad apples into a bucket and placing the good ones into the colander, ready to be peeled and sliced and put into a pie.
I stood on tip-toes and stretched, grasping the brightest, most luscious looking orb with the tips of my fingers, and bringing it to my mouth in one swift movement. I regretted passing up the fruit cake in favour of the Granny Smith with the sharp fright of my first bite. Not only was the apple horrifyingly sour, but when I peered closer at something moving within, I saw a fat worm, it’s long body gently probing at the new pocket of air my bite had left. My mother came running when she heard me scream, and said that these were ‘cooking’ apples, not ‘eating’ apples, and it served me right for taking something from the kitchen without permission.
Despite the shock associated with my first fruity memories, I went on to pick apples for two summers during my University holidays at an orchard just outside of a very small town on the East Coast of New Zealand. I had planned to move there with a friend who had grown up in the local town. She arranged an interview for me, and rooms for us both to rent with her Grandmother, but then ended up taking on summer classes, so I went alone. I loved the orchard from the moment that I set eyes on it. You couldn’t see much from the road, but as soon as you turned onto the long bumpy track that lead through the orchard and up to the staff offices and break room, the apple trees fanned out like an ocean, waves and waves of them in rows, swaying in the breeze. I always wound down my window for that part of the drive, to feel the air, filled with the fresh scent of earth and the energetic pull of new things busily growing.
On my first day I met the orchard manager, and I was jealous of her immediately, because she had spent her life doing what I wanted to do but probably never would – work with my hands. I was studying law, and commerce, and most likely would spend my life in an office on a reasonable, perhaps even good, income, but what I really wanted to do was sit spread eagled astride a red 4×4 utility quad bike, wearing ripped stone washed jeans and a white cotton singlet, skin brown and weathered too soon from spending days in the sun, thick steel-toed boots on my feet, good for stomping, and my hands wrapped firmly around the bikes handlebars, revving the engine. Her name was Tessa, a soft name for a strong woman, and she owned that orchard.
Tessa cast her eyes over me, evaluating most likely from the paleness of my skin and the softness of my hands that I didn’t have a lot of (nay, any) experience with outdoor, physical work. She told me that I could work a day unpaid if I liked, by way of interview. I did, and I got the job.
I was a very poor apple picker, but inexplicably, Tessa kept me on, though most other apple pickers who were as productive as I was, which was not very productive at all, were sacked. I suppose it was because I agreed to be paid by the tree, rather than by the hour, which sometimes meant that I earned only enough to fill my car with petrol each week and buy lunch, but I suspected it was also because she knew that I loved picking apples. I loved absolutely everything about it. I loved the slow, early morning drive through the countryside, I loved the handsome sweep of the trees across the field, I loved the very slight scent of apple in the air, I loved standing at the top of the ladder and leaning precariously over the branches, I loved the press of an apple, the firm curvature against my palm as the weight fell away from the tree and into my hand. I loved choosing which apples to pick, learning how a tree will elect one fruit to feed, and give that apple everything, so that it balloons whilst the other apples wilt, like berries next to a balloon. If you thin a tree in just the right way, then the apples grow evenly, just the right size, none too large and watery, and none too small and sour.
I was thorough, but I wasn’t quick. By the time I finished with a tree, it was a work of art, a perfection of symmetry, just the right number of apples removed and the remainder hanging like jewels in a posh shop window. But the other apple pickers were ten trees ahead. The most successful were tall, with big hands, all of them were men. Some were sacked for being too rough. The ones who got it just right swept through the trees plucking half a dozen apples in one cavernous hand where I could only pluck one at a time. They didn’t get under all the branches of course, and they missed the apples at the top, which I painstakingly repositioned my ladder to retrieve.
The most skilled workers, those who were both quick and gentle, with a real eye for spotting which apples to thin to give the rest of the bunch the best chance to grow, were assigned to work with the Golden Apples, the most expensive of the produce we exported. These apples, I learned from the ‘new employee induction pack,’ were sent to Asia, where they were not eaten, but offered at Buddhist temples, to the Triple Gem. They were grown especially for this purpose, and were rumoured to be the crispest, sweetest apples of them all. Stickers were put on the fruit when they were young, in the shape of characters symbolising ‘rebirth,’ ‘enlightenment’ or ‘truth’. The stickers were placed on the youngest fruit, and removed when the apples reached maturity, leaving a symbol on skin which had never seen the sun.
Tessa spent most of her time working with the Golden Apples, away from my section of the orchard, so I didn’t see her often. When I did, it was usually flying through the rows on her quad bike, her back as firm and upright as the trunk of a tree, and her hands gripping the throttle so tightly that the bike never dared misbehave. When we ate together in the lunch room, and she walked in, the other staff would fall silent. Her second in charge was John, ten years her senior, but he called her ‘Miss’, and didn’t seem at all affronted by the fact that she’d been promoted to manager ahead of him, though he’d worked at the orchard longer. I’d worked in male dominated professions before, my gap year spent working on the checkout in a timber yard and hardware store. The place was run by men, most of the customers were men, the vast majority of the DIY experts in each department were men, and the girls just beeped hardware items through the register and made cups of tea for customers who lingered longer. It was full of winks and smiles and innuendo.
Here, there was none of that. They weren’t afraid of Tessa, but didn’t seem angry with her either. John went out of his way for her, picking up sandwiches and bagels from the local bakery in the morning and leaving them on her desk, though she rarely ate them. I’d have thought his attentions amorous, but the few times I caught him staring at her, his expression was full of pity, rather than lust. Sometimes, if school was out and she couldn’t get a babysitter, she bought her son, Ben, to work, and John made much of him, showing him how to work the tools or lifting him into the branches so that he could thin the trees. It was rare that I saw Ben and Tessa together, but when I did, he clung to her, and she laid her arm loosely over him, wrapped like a vine around his shoulders.
Few people stayed at the orchard long. Tessa and John had worked there most of their lives, but new workers came and went as quickly as the apples fell from the trees in picking season. The workers didn’t get paid if they didn’t work, but still, they were unreliable on sunny days, as well as days with only the slightest threat of rain. I worked every day, and I enjoyed it even more when the other workers stayed away, when the orchard was quiet, when it was too hot and the other workers abandoned their ladders and disappeared to the creek to swim, or when it rained, and they stayed indoors.
We had one week of unseasonably and particularly stormy weather, weather predicted to be so rough that Tessa and John spent most of the week before the storms began helping the other workers fix plastic sheets over the younger Golden Apple trees to protect the fruit from hail which would ruin the crop.
On the Friday before the storms, the sky gathered into ominous grey pools of cloud, and we pushed hard to get all the sheets in place before the weather turned worse. Tessa worked alongside me, though she didn’t speak, for most of day. She was slimmer than I was, but much stronger. She helped me to pull my end of the sheets taut, and fix them to posts hammered into the corners of each row. The wind made the sheets as stiff as sails, and as she held her hand down over mine her grip was strong and firm, though the sheets, the post, and my hand were slippery with the beginnings of rain. She leant into the wind, and whispered into my ear.
“Pull tighter.”
I felt a strange jump inside, at her hot breath against my ear, and her quiet command, and I nearly lost my footing and stumbled, letting go of the sheet. She grabbed my right hand with her left, to stop me from falling, and grabbed the sheet with her right, so that I fell forwards against her in a strange kind of embrace between her arms, the post and the plastic sheeting. I lay there for a moment, and felt her press against me. She didn’t wear a padded bra, and was very flat chested. She often, I suspected, wore no bra at all, and I imagined that only the thinnest layer of material protected our breasts from touching. She quickly shifted her weight so that I was upright again, and took the hammer and bolt from me, fixing the sheet to the post herself.
“Go back to the office,” she said, “dry yourself off. It’s too wet to work today.”
I walked back to change, and she stayed behind, to check that the protective covers were secure. I caught a few glimpses of her, from the staff room window, her sodden jeans pressed tight against her skin and her long russet-coloured hair blowing a tangle in front of her face. I noticed, as I pulled my own wet trousers down to my ankles, and rubbed myself with a towel, that the thought of her wet body brushing through the leaves aroused me, and I lingered with the towel, rubbing it between my legs furiously until one of the men interrupted me with a knock at the bathroom door.
It wasn’t the first time that I had thought about women in that way, but I’d never been with one. I’d often been a little awkward around girls as I grew up, and awkward around women, because I did think of them that way. I thought of men sexually too, but men were so much easier than women. I knew, for the most part, when they wanted me, and it was easy for me to run a finger around the top of my glass at a bar, whilst meeting the eye of a man on the table opposite, or to pretend that I needed to use the bathroom so that I could press my body against the man sitting next to me while I scooted in and out of my seat, or to lay a casual hand on a friend’s shoulder and ask if he wanted a drink. Or to make eye contact, with any man at all, the grocer or the petrol station attendant or the trainer at the gym and then think of a reason to bend over so that whatever I was wearing stretched provocatively across my arse which I always made sure to wiggle a little when I walked.
But women, I didn’t know what to do with women. For one thing, I could never tell whether they were interested in women as well. And for another, I couldn’t bring myself to make an obvious move, to accept the possible rejection from a woman if she wasn’t attracted to other women at all, or if, worse still, she just wasn’t attracted to me. There had been friends when I was growing up, we had showers together and touched each other’s secret places, there was even one girl who wanted to suck my nipples, as if I were her mother. But all of this open sexuality ended when we pubesced, and touching a friend suddenly became a much heavier thing. I looked at women, when I was in swimming pool changing rooms, or in bars, watching the way that their skin glowed through the flimsiness of a Friday night dress. But I was too afraid to do anything about it.
I didn’t speak to Tessa for two days into the next working week. She worked in the office, catching up on overdue paperwork while the weather prevented outdoor work. Most of the other staff didn’t bother to come in at all, using the rain as an excuse for a lay-in. I enjoyed it, the wind whipping my skin and the way my shirt clung to my breasts as I stretched my arms up to pluck the hardest to reach fruit. But I didn’t get much done, because the rain made me move so slowly, the ladder too slippery for me to be sure of my footing. I returned to the office several times, more often than necesary, to make cups of tea and use the toilet. I didn’t usually use the toilet at all during the day, I just crawled under a tree with low hanging branches, peeled my trousers and knickers down to my feet, and pissed against the trunk, careful to aim away from my clothes. In the break room, I caught Tessa glancing at me through her open office door several times, as I bent over to take a cup from the lower shelves, although I could have easily rinsed one already in the sink. I wondered what would happen if I walked into her office, pulled my jeans and knickers down and sat on the desk in front of her. I had a vision of myself with my arse resting on her accounts and my legs spread directly in front of her so that she could see straight up between my thighs.
On Wednesday, the storm really began, the wind blowing so fiercely it nearly knocked me over walking from the house to my car, and still, I went to work. I was the only one, in the whole orchard, again, this time for safety reasons. It was insanity, of course, to climb to the top of a seven foot ladder in wind and rain like this without anyone to hold the bottom steady, but still, I went right to the top of the trees and stood at the top step of the ladder and leaned into the wind as it sang a merry gail through the leaves, and the rain flew in my face so I couldn’t see, but I could feel which apples needed to be taken off the trees. Eventually, I heard the steady thrum of Tessa’s quad bike, as she sped through the rows, coming to an abrupt halt next to the tree I was swaying at the top of.
“I knew you’d be here,” she yelled, her voice flying into the wind like a scream.
I couldn’t see her, because I was too unsteady to look down, and keep my balance, but I felt a slight shift in the weight of the ladder as she braced her weight against it.
“Come down!” she shouted up to me.
It took me a minute or two to reach the bottom of the ladder, each step feeling precariously slippery under my thick boots. As I reached the bottom, she put a hand on either side of my waist and lifted me onto the ground, turning me around so I faced her.
“You’re mad,” she said, and then she kissed me.
Her kisses were rougher than I had expected a woman’s to be, and consuming, she flicked her tongue not just in and out of my mouth, but licked my face too, as if she wanted to eat me. She tasted like rain, earthy, and she smelled like the orchard. Her hands were rough, her skin cracked from years of working with her hands, and she was eager, eager and rough, and much quicker to get to the point than I had expected. She untucked my shirt from my jeans and ran her hands immediately up the small of my back, unclipping my bra so that my breasts fell free, wet against my damp shirt. She ran her hands over my front, grabbing my breasts and tugging, pulling and squeezing each of my nipples with a thumb and a forefinger until I yelped. She kept one hand under my shirt, grabbing my left breast, and with her right hand, she pulled my hair back and half dragged, half carried me under the low hanging branches of the tree, sheltered from the worst of the weather.
She lay down on the ground, pulling me on top of her. I tried to roll her singlet up, so that I could suck her nipples, but she stopped me, taking my wrist in her hand.
“No,” she said. “Lick me out.”
I obliged, unpeeling her from her jeans with the same tentative movements that one might apply to unwrapping a gift from an unknown relative, which might turn out to be either wonderful or disastrous. I ran my tongue from her navel down to her pubic hairline, seemingly slowly, as if to tease her, rather than as a means of assuaging my panic. I didn’t know what to do with a pussy. Despite having had two long term boyfriends and several lovers by the time that I was 22, I had never had an orgasm, and I was swept with a sudden fear that I wouldn’t be able to find her clitoris.
She picked my head up by my hair and pushed my face between her legs, so that I felt her cunt might swallow me up. She wasn’t wearing any knickers, and the smell of her sex rose like steam from her mound of pubic hair. I buried my face in it, obligingly, flicking my tongue around the edge of her lips. She moaned, and thrust her hips forward, pushing closer against my mouth. She tasted of sweat, and salt, but sweet with it, an unusual but not unpleasant juice which coated my mouth and chin as I pushed my face against her. My own inner lips were small, hidden inside my outer lips like a gift sealed inside an envelope. Her labia hung down, vivid and red and unashamed, and as I took turns flicking my tongue through her folds and pressing it inside her she raised up her hips and ground her cunt against my face, until she let out an almighty shudder and then collapsed back against the wet earth. She lifted me up into a soft embrace, and I tangled one leg inside hers, as she kissed my face.
“Was that an orgasm?” I asked, hopefully.
“Yes,” she replied, “thank you”.
I still wasn’t sure if I’d found her clitoris.
It was cold now, freezing, and she shivered against me. She grabbed my hand and pulled me up, then stooped down again to pick up my muddied shirt, but she didn’t return it to me. I sat behind her on the bike, my bare breasts pressed against her wet back as we drove through the rain, back to the shelter of the office. She took my hand and pulled me into the bathroom, turning the shower on, the water up as hot as it would go so that the room filled with steam. She pulled off my jeans, and her own, so that we were both naked, other than her singlet. I began to peel it up, over her torso, and she lifted her arms over her head so that I could pull the singlet over her breasts. As I did, I realised that her breasts were not where I expected her breasts would be. Both had been removed, and two diagonal scars ran across her chest and up to her underarms, one on each side, where her breast tissue and nipples had been.
“I had them removed,” she said softly. “Cancer. My mother had it too. She died.”
“They’re beautiful,” I said, of her not-quite breasts, because they were. I had never really understood what people saw in large breasts. I found my own annoying, and ungainly, and always admired the bodies of flat-chested women who seemed so graceful in their androgeny. Her scars had faded to a soft furrow, like a seam joining two parts of her together, and I ran my tongue all along first one, and then the other. When I had finished, she took my hand and pulled me into the shower.
There wasn’t any soap, but still she ran her hands over me as if in a lather, running her palms down over my shoulders and then cupping my breasts gently. She ran a hand down my torso and then between my legs, and then she dropped to her knees, and parted my lips with her tongue. I always shaved, and suddenly wished that I didn’t, I felt more than usually exposed to her, and ashamed of my hairlessness now, as she seemed so confident in her own womanhood.
I had felt much more at ease having my own head between her legs, much as, when I was with men I liked to have their cocks in my mouth. It felt good, her tongue pressed against me, but I didn’t orgasm. She stopped, eventually, and pulled herself up to standing.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” she replied, and she pulled me out of the shower, and into the embrace of a dry towel.
The next day, the sun came out again, and all the workers returned to the trees. She stayed in the office, although it was the first dry day for a week. We didn’t speak to each other in front of the others, though she rested her hand lightly on my waist as she bent forward past me in the kitchen to flick the kettle on, making my cheeks flush. I worked even more slowly than usual that day, distracted by thoughts of the smell of her.
She came to find me, amongst the trees again, at the end of the day.
“Come home with me,” she said “leave your car here, no one will know.”
I had seen her son, Ben, a few times at the orchard, but we had never been formally introduced. Tessa told him that I was someone she worked with, and he nodded his head and then disappeared into his room to play computer games, leaving us alone together in the kitchen. Her house was small, just two bedrooms, and littered with small piles of DIY equipment, she was renovating. She had a small yard, but no garden, just a couple of apple trees.
“Don’t you get sick of apples?” I asked her, looking out at the trees through the kitchen window.
The sound of her laugh suddenly made the room seem warmer than it was.
“No,” she said. “Those ones are Pink Ladies,” she added, “they’re my favourite fruit.”
“I prefer Coxes,” I replied.
She laughed again.
We spent the rest of the night, and the next, and then the weekend, in her bed, tangled up in the sheets and in each other. She was determined to make me come, but I didn’t. I always felt as though I would, it was like swimming in the ocean, and watching a wave rise into a crest and then fall back softly into the sea, instead of breaking.
“Don’t think about it,” she said, “it will happen.”
But it was hard not to think about it, because she came so easily, sometimes three or four times in a row, and if I flicked her clit with my tongue in a certain way while I fingered her arsehole, then she sprayed salty liquid into my mouth.
One night, we were lying together in her bed and she had half wrapped herself over me, so that the weight of her thigh pressed against mine.
“What would your friends say,” she asked, “if they knew you were in bed with a woman twice your age?”
“I won’t ever tell them.”
She lay still, for a few minutes, until I broke the silence.
“Will you have any more children, do you think?”
“I doubt it,” she replied, with a throaty laugh. “The cancer spread to my ovaries. I had both of them removed too.”
She threw the blankets off and walked out of the room, leaving me alone with the weight of her words. I lay still for a while, and then got up to find her. She was standing outside, naked, beside the apple trees. She stood so straight and erect, from the kitchen window, I couldn’t tell which was her and which was the trunk of a tree, until I saw the light of the moon gleaming on her hair. I stood alongside her and leant my head against her shoulder, until the moon disappeared into the night, and we returned to the house, and to bed, without saying another word.
It wasn’t the same after that.
To my immense shame, whenever she opened her legs to me, I imagined something dead inside her, something rotting beneath her sex, and it filled me with a strange sort of grief which overpowered my arousal. I began to avoid her, eating my sandwiches under the trees instead of in the break room, and finding reasons to go home alone after work instead of visit, and soon, the summer, and the apple season was nearly over, and I still hadn’t orgasmed.
One day, I called in sick, and I broke into her house while she was working. I crawled in through the kitchen window, walked to her bedroom, took my clothes off, and lay naked on her bed. I found a pair of her dirty knickers on the floor, and laid them over my face, inhaling the musty smell of her sex, mixed with the faint scent of her urine. The day-old smell of her sent a sudden rush of arousal through me, and I unfurled her panties further. I lay on her red cotton sheets with my legs spread, and nothing on me at all other than her knickers, the gusset covering my mouth and nose, filling me with her smell each time I inhaled. I pulled the fabric tight over my face with one hand, and fucked myself with the other, imagining that she was standing over me, smothering me with her dirty underwear, and suddenly, suddenly it was as though I was filled with the heat from the world’s sweetest fire, and I moaned, and then lay still.
The following week, I resigned. I drove from the offices along the bumpy track to the main road for the last time. I had my foot on the clutch, waiting for a gap in the traffic so I could turn onto the road, when she stepped out from between the trees and leaned through my car window. She handed me a Golden Apple, one of the forbidden fruit, the apples meant for the Buddhist temples. It was large, round, perfectly formed, and an unearthly pale yellow, almost white, like some strange moon fallen from the sky. It had a symbol on it, though I don’t know what it meant. She watched me bite into it, and lick the stream of juice that ran down my chin, and then she disappeared, back into the trees.
It was the most perfect apple I’ve ever tasted, as sharp and sweet as heartache, a taste that returns to my mouth each time I think of her, and the orchard.
