From the threshold of the living room Diana observed the blonde who was presiding over the party. The room was held in a hush, and the woman on the couch twisted her hands as she spoke, until a laugh broke out and she touched her fingers to her hair.

Diana shouldered her way into the living room as the laughter quieted. The blonde was seated in the center of a large sofa, cradling a half-empty tumbler and touching thighs with a bearded man who had begun speaking to her about something apparently urgent.

‘Who is that?’ Diana said to the woman beside her.

She gestured toward the blonde with her beer bottle. ‘That’s Lucy,’ she said.

Lucy wore a white tank top in which her breasts stood at attention, like loyal little pets, and she had the cheekbones and eyelashes that Diana associated with rarified, glossy womanhood.

The woman standing beside Diana introduced herself while on the sofa the blonde, Lucy, toyed absently with her necklace. Diana moved toward Lucy and softly touched the edge of the sofa.

‘Excuse me,’ Diana said to Lucy. She and the bearded man beside her both turned expectantly. ‘Could I get you another drink?’

A mild, appropriate blush washed across Lucy’s face. She was clearly used to being sought. ‘Sure. You know,’ she said to Diana, ‘I could use another drink, I’ll come with you. Okay?’ she said to the man, and rested her hand on his forearm for a moment, like a teacher reassuring a young boy that he will be just fine on his own.

Diana smiled, as much at this gesture as at Lucy’s acquiescence. As she led Lucy to the kitchen, her silver ring and the links of her watch gleaming against Lucy’s white top, she turned to see a crestfallen look in the eyes of the man on the sofa – a look that made her laugh out loud.

‘What?’ Lucy said.

‘Your friend,’ Diana said. ‘I think he’s jealous. What are you having?’

‘A gin and tonic, please.’

Diana arranged the bottles and located a knife in a kitchen drawer. She began to slice a lime. ‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ she said, indicating the apartment. ‘How do you know Minta?’

‘We went to high school together,’ Lucy said. ‘I only moved here recently, we haven’t seen each other in years. It was sweet of her to invite me.’

‘I think it was more a favor to us than to you,’ Diana said.

Lucy turned around on her heels, smiled, splayed her hands on the kitchen counter and leaned forward as though she were about to announce a dare. Diana saw that Lucy’s appeal was in the nostalgia of her looks: Hers was a teen beauty, at home nowhere more than in a miniskirt. Even in her bland slacks and loafers she had the flirtatious, dismissive charm of a girl at the height of her popularity, the challenge and invincibility of a team captain.

Diana poured the tonic into Lucy’s glass. When Diana was a teenager, no girl had ever given her the look Lucy gave her now. After an adolescence in which the very fact of her lesbianism had seemed to disqualify her from the contest of desire, she had, in her brief adulthood in the city, finally become attractive. She had natural qualities that hadn’t initially looked like advantages – height, broad shoulders and a face given to brooding – and she had learned to appropriate the mannerisms that made powerful men suspicious and irresistible, chief among them a degree of directness to which the world capitulated almost unconsciously. The spin, the smile, the crush of Lucy’s tits in the tank top: Diana recognized all this now with the wistfulness of a former adolescent boy who had once jacked off, in frustration, to a teen flick. In an hour she would make this bitch come around her fingers, and that’s how she would say goodbye to it once and for all – those excruciating sexless years – the slurs, the nights spent crying, the year she had starved herself and, perhaps worst of all, the relentless, disgusting, unconsummated wetness she had carried around between her legs, which marked her as an animal.

‘You know,’ Lucy said, taking a sip of her fresh drink, ‘I’m glad I came. I’m making friends already.’

Diana came around to Lucy’s side of the counter and placed her hand on the back of Lucy’s neck, where a light sweat had begun to collect. She could feel the thrum of intention beating in her own chest and along the muscles of her arms. There in the warm kitchen she let her ring rest against the first vertebra of Lucy’s spine and later, after the long charged walk to Diana’s apartment, when Lucy was supine on her bed, she felt with satisfaction the moment when the hard alien contour of the ring surprised Lucy, made her hitch her hips up before she could catch herself. Lucy smiled, to show she was game. From there Diana did what she had learned to do: make a girl feel absolutely surrounded, alternately by forcefulness and by utter softness, as though she were smothered in Diana’s desire. Diana could tell which kinds of girls would like this and which would find it overwhelming, and she intuited that Lucy’s capacity to receive passion had been so distorted by her excessive beauty that only a real showing would satisfy her. At the very end she crouched between Lucy’s legs and began to pet her softly, almost as though at any minute she would give it up. She kept at this for so long that Lucy began to shake, to say raggedly, no more, no more until, just a few moments later, she came with a humiliating trembling in her legs, her body splayed and limp like an empty bag.

‘Christ,’ Lucy said a while afterward, wiping her brow. A dank, sweet smell of success permeated the room.

‘You’ve never been fucked by a woman, have you?’ Diana said.

Lucy laughed – a lovely ripple, her breasts shaking – and then she turned, propped herself up on an elbow. ‘Did you really think that?’ she said. ‘Why do you think I came home with you?’

Diana made a neutral face. So who was that man Lucy had been sitting thigh-to-thigh beside, whose forearm she had touched so awfully – someone she teased for sport? The idea made Diana like Lucy better, maybe even grudgingly respect her. When Lucy left it was with shameless grace, the air of having won something flattering and inconsequential.

In the morning Diana made her way out for a coffee. She felt light and free. She was at home in the blare of traffic, roaming across blocks that smelled of bacon fat and sewage. The sun moved over her, confirming her strength. When she checked her phone, she saw that Minta had texted her. I heard you went home with Lucy! she wrote. Isn’t she special??

As Diana ascended the stairs back up to her apartment the word special echoed in her mind and conjured the disheveled hallway, the hush, the sight of Lucy glimpsed across the bay of heads, the spin of Lucy’s body as if she were suspended over a football pitch.