Three Women

We pretend to want things we don’t want so nobody can see us not getting what we need

sometimes we worry so much about what frightens us that we wait to have an orgasm until we are alone

it’s women, in many of the stories I’ve heard, who have greater hold over other women than men have. We can make each other feel dowdy, whorish, unclean, unloved, not beautiful. In the end, it all comes down to fear

I think about how much I have wanted from men. How much of that wanting was what I wanted from myself, from other women, even; how much of what I thought I wanted from a lover came from what I needed from my own mother.

One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would.

Some people, Maggie thinks, live their lives as if they are sure they’re going to get another one. One more chance to be cool and popular or smart and rich and have a lot of sex. They act as though it’s okay to hang back on this one, and merely watch it like a movie.

because that is what love does, Lina has begun to see. It feeds and eviscerates you at once, so that you’re full but you are also empty. You don’t want food or the company of others. You want only the one you love, and your thoughts of him. Everything else is a waste of energy, money, breath.

Their tongues are wetter than water slides, and she can feel every single bud.

syncing with a married man’s self-loathing. Perhaps he had not paid a bill on time that month and his wife looked at him like he would never measure up to even her lowest expectations

There is a formula, Lina believes, for when men see women they don’t want to see. It has to do with the level of a woman’s doggedness