Lunatic Fringe by Allison Moon Read Free Book Online Page B

thought that
you and he . . .”
    “ She is my partner, yes,”
Blythe corrected.
    “ Oh,” Lexie replied, her
confusion mounting. “Sorry, I just asked, um, her and she said ‘he’
works, too.”
    “ She’s mistaken. There is
no place for the male pronoun in the Pack,” Blythe said. Lexie
cringed. She regretted having brought this up, particularly without
Mitch present to defend his point of view on the matter. But then,
something about Blythe’s domineering bluntness made Lexie think
that, even if he were here, he would keep quiet.Blythe moved on.
“To address what I believe was your original point, Renee and I
love each other deeply. We are sisters until the end, like all the
women here. Renee is closer to me than most; inner sanctum, you
could call it. We’ve been through a lot together.”
    Renee smirked, “Nah, babe, I think she
meant, ‘Are we sleeping together?’”
    “ No! I wasn’t--”
    Blythe smiled and looked down at Renee.
“Either way, the answer is yes. Sex is something we share . . .
have shared.” Blythe stroked Renee’s freckled cheek, and Renee
purred. “It’s something we all share. It’s nothing to be ashamed
of. Women giving pleasure to one another is the most subversive and
beautiful thing we can do together. No one can please a woman like
another woman. And women feeling joy, pleasure, and love without
male aggression, oppression, or their ridiculous organs--it’s
downright revolutionary.”
    “ And a hell of a lot of
fun,” Renee interjected. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her
pocket and shook one out, bringing it to her lips to light
it.
    “ Sisterhood is powerful,”
said Blythe. The two girls snickered at her joke.
    “ So, is this a sorority?”
Lexie asked.
    Renee snorted, the first plume of smoke
swirling out of her mouth as though she were a disgruntled dragon.
“Hardly.”
    “ A sorority is based on a
hierarchy, just like any other political organization,” Blythe
said. “And we reject all hierarchy out of hand as one of the more
pernicious aspects of the patriarchy.”
    “ But aren’t you in
charge?”
    At that, Renee smirked, but she kept
her eyes trained on the mouth of her beer bottle and massaged away
the moist particles of the disintegrating label.
    Blythe answered. “No leaders. No
proletariat. No chairwomen or pledges. Equal footing all
around.”
    It sounded good, but Lexie had a hard
time believing it. Sure, Renee was captivating, Hazel was fun, and
Jenna was sweet. Each of the other girls had their own vibe, but
Blythe was clearly the leader. Lexie recognized that her first day
on campus when Blythe commandeered her moving boxes. Whether it fit
their ideals or not, the women of the Pack looked to Blythe as
their leader, and she did nothing to reject that role.
    “ Okay,” Lexie conceded.
“So, you live here together in. . ?”
    “ We call it The Den,”
Blythe said.
    “ The Den of Iniquity,”
Renee joked.
    “ The Den of Ubiquity!”
Blythe countered.
    “ The Den of Inequity!”
Renee lobbed back.
    “ What? More like the Den
of True Equity! We
role-model equality.” Blythe’s feigned offense earned her another
sympathetic kiss from Renee.
    Lexie struggled to follow the women as
they lobbed jokes back and forth. Even if her own powers of
discourse flailed in comparison, the women seemed to like her, and
that was enough for now.
    The way Blythe touched Renee made Lexie
think of her mother, who had left to pursue a man who offered her
nothing but the chase and some pain. She had followed him first
across the country, then further still. She might still be
following him; there was no way of telling. Years ago, Lexie
stopped wondering if she’d ever hear from her mother again; it had
become clear that she wouldn’t. So she buried her mother in her
mind, while holding on to a few select memories. Like her voice,
which occasionally drifted through her dreams, sometimes in song,
sometimes in dream-language gibberish.The day her mother