Best Lesbian Romance 2011 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  HEARTS AND FLOWERS

  MOTHER KNOWS BEST

  TWELFTH NIGHT

  BOILED PEAS

  I THINK I WILL LOVE YOU

  CAMELLIAS

  THE PANACEA

  LOST AND FOUND

  A WITCHY WOMAN CALLED MY NAME

  GET THE GIRL

  REBOUND

  THINGS I MISSED

  DIRTY LAUNDRY

  THE GAME

  THE GIFT

  ROCK PALACE

  WHEN HEARTS RUN FREE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION

  Love and romance are a classic couple, inextricably bound but subtly individual. Love is an emotion and to be in love, a state of being. Despite uncertainty, disillusion or loss, love seduces us again and again with the wonder of that singular connection with another heart. Once experienced, love marks us so indelibly, we continue to search, at any age, for those precious moments. And when we find them anew, the joy is still as sweet as the first time.

  When reading through the scores of superb submissions for this collection, I was struck by the many ways in which we write about romance. Style, tone and voice vary every bit as much as the delicate nuances of the experiences we seek to capture with our words. These seventeen selections embody the eroticism and lyricism of love from the first blush of recognition… It was the kind of first date you know will change your life forever, the kind for which “first date” is much too casual to ever properly apply.… She looked at me like she could fall for me, fall in love with me, or maybe like she already had. She looked at me like she wanted to know everything I had to say, to peek inside my brain and tease out the parts I kept deliberately tucked away.

  —“Mother Knows Best,” Rachel Kramer Bussel

  …to the forever embrace of shared hearts:“I’m not really your type, am I,” she said, like she was sad, but also resigned.

  I was baffled. I looked at her, her body so ripe and luscious that her handmade bikini didn’t even begin to contain it. I felt a pain in my heart, a hairline fracture, watching this girl lose her confidence. She was sitting there in a swimsuit she had been taught her whole life she did not have a right to wear, and she looked so fucking beautiful I thought I might hyperventilate or dissolve if I didn’t get my hands on her soon. How could she possibly not be aware of her effect on me?

  “You are exactly my type…”

  —“Rock Palace,” Miel Rose

  Romance encompasses a panoply of emotions: euphoria, despair, exhilaration, the thrill of sexual awakening, the excitement of new beginnings and the quiet contentment of the familiar. Here in these pages is the proof that just as love never grows old, romance never fails to touch to our hearts.

  Radclyffe

  HEARTS AND FLOWERS

  Theda Hudson

  What’s romantic? Hearts and flowers? I have a heart and I think cut flowers are a crime, a waste of money, an expensive throwaway.

  What’s touching? It’s a hand reaching out to pinch a nipple, a fingernail running down the length of a chest, tracing the pouch of a round belly.

  Call me jaded. Call me jealous. I never had a lover who brought me hearts or candy or flowers. I never had a lover for a year before either. But in five days it’ll be our anniversary. A year.

  I’m terrible at dropping hints. Gina says not to even bother anyway, just spit it out. So I did.

  “Our anniversary is on Friday,” I said. “I want to celebrate.”

  Gina looked up from where she was settled in on my ugly brown corduroy couch, her book flopped on her lap, her dark, smoky eyes staring right at me like a banked fire on a snowy night. Her skin was pale and silky to the touch. She put lotion on every day. She’d even held me down a few times and put it on me.

  Of course, then I had to wrestle her down, finally flipping her over, shrieking with laughter, tie her up and rub myself all over her, which led to other rubbing and then a nap, a glorious nap, curled up in her arms. After I’d untied her, of course. That’s always the best part. Like unwrapping a present.

  “Okay, Jen. What do you want to do?”

  “I dunno. I never had an anniversary before.” At least not this kind.

  “Do you want to do dinner? Do you want to go to the Club? They’re having a ladies night.”

  I considered. “Maybe dinner, but not the Club.” We didn’t meet at the Club, although we’d gone a bunch of times since she’d discovered it. We met, of all places, in the library. I was looking for CDs, she was looking for thrillers. She told me later I was more thrilling than anything she’d read all year.

  No, I didn’t want the spectacle and everybody’s eyes in the club on us while we celebrated what had been the best year of my life. You really don’t know what you’re missing until she chases after you out the library doors and asks if you’d like to have coffee, a drink, anything, so she can keep looking at you.

  Well. How can any red-blooded woman, American or not, say no to that?

  We had coffee, then some dinner, then some pool at the neighborhood bar. She’s got a good eye and she’s definitely not a table ornament, as I found out to my surprise and pleasure.

  “Okay,” Gina said, putting her book down on her lap. “Not the Club. You want to see a movie? Camden’s Prize is down at the Regal.”

  She really wanted to see that movie. It was our anniversary. And she had taught me that relationships are give and take.

  “Sure, we could do that.”

  “Okay. I’ll put it on the list.”

  “The list?”

  “I figure we’ll throw a bunch of stuff out on the table and then figure out which ideas get swept off, and then we’ll do what’s left.”

  I couldn’t help it. I immediately went to the night we had sushi the first time. I’d never thought watching anybody eat raw fish was sexy, but watching Gina’s red mouth open to receive the pink fleshy morsel (yes, that’s how I thought of it) with her dark hair framing her pale face, accenting the charcoal eye shadow she used and the eyeliner that made her eyes look huge and all knowing, I couldn’t catch my breath.

  I had to have her. Being practical and a bit of a masochist, I waited, watching her eat every single piece of fish. She realized I was enjoying watching her, and she gave me a real show with the last bit.

  “All gone,” she said, pouting those super red, luscious lips.

  “Not quite, there’s one piece left.” I stood up, swept everything onto the floor and hoisted her up onto the table amongst the remains, smeared wasabi all over her pussy and held her down while she squirmed and screamed. I ate her until she came, explosively, adding her juice to the mess on the table and the floor.

  I cleaned it up, smiling to myself, as I mopped the floor.

  I smiled now, remembering it.

  She recognized the smile, even if she didn’t know what prompted it. She squirmed a little on the sofa.

  “We could stay home,” she said. “Go to bed early.”

  I considered. “We could. But I think it would be more interesting out here.”

  “I believe you,” she said.

  Yeah, so my apartment is a dark cave.

  After a long moment, she asked, “You know what I want?”

  “Twenty whacks with the bunny fur paddle?”

  She blushed. She loved that paddle. Well, she loved the bunny fur. I loved the paddle. I loved the way it cracked when the leather smacked the apples of her ass. I loved the way her skin glowed red after a while. I really loved the way she wiggled around when I ran the fur over her hot flesh after I’d given her dozen good whacks.<
br />
  “No, I mean yes, but that’s not what I mean.”

  Her eyes were dark and deep and I thought I could just fall into them. And I didn’t care what happened after that. Looking out of Gina’s eyes couldn’t be any worse than looking out of John Malkovich’s eyes.

  “I wanna know what this anniversary means to you.”

  I stared at her. What it meant to me? I drew a blank, and I just shook my head. That was the wrong thing to do. Totally, because I saw how much it hurt her, which was a revelation because even though she was hippy hoppy cute, I had never realized she might have something invested in this, in me.

  “I, uh, I…”

  “Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important.”

  But it was.

  “Hey, Gina. It is.” And it was. I had only just realized it was more important than I’d thought. More than just a year.

  “But you don’t know what it means to you.” She lifted her book.

  “I just never thought about it. The days, they just go by and I’m either at your place or you’re here at mine.”

  “So, you just expect me to be around? As the days go by.”

  “Yes, no, not like that.”

  She closed the book and sighed. “I’m going home, Jen. It’s late and I have an early morning.”

  “But, wait. You were going to spend the night.”

  “No, Jen. You just expected that I was going to spend the night.” She sat up and slipped into her Danskos.

  “No, Gina, really, don’t go.” What had I just done? What had just happened?

  “Yes, Jen. I am going.”

  She walked across the room, pulled her coat off the tree and slipped her cavernous red leather purse over her arm, sliding the book into it.

  “Good night, Jen.” She opened the door, shut it and was gone. Without a smile or the blown kiss that I always caught.

  I slumped in the ratty matching oversized armchair.

  Really. What had just happened? And why did I feel so crappy about it? That was something to think about.

  I texted her in the morning. Hey! Dinner 2nite? Fuzzy Smith is on Wahoo.

  She didn’t answer until late afternoon. No, thx, 2 much 2 do.

  No CU, no XO, no nothing.

  Except for a huge gaping hole in my heart and a knife of pain that spitted my gut every time I thought about why I might have a hole.

  What did it mean? We’d been seeing each other for a year. We hadn’t said I love you, hadn’t made any plans. It was fun. It was comfortable. I liked being around her. I could laugh. And she was hot and eager. I looked forward to seeing her. I liked waking up next to her.

  I thought about it all day and called her after I ate a crappy dinner of microwaved chimis with a can of Miller Lite.

  She answered.

  “This is Gina.” She always answered the phone like that. Even in this age of caller ID. She said it was a business thing. Except that usually when she recognized me, she said something like, “Hey, Lover,” or “Hey, Babe.”

  I wanted to say, “This is a miserable person,” but I thought I should put a good face on it. You know, push through.

  “Hey, how you doin’?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Well, I’m shitty. “I been thinkin’.”

  “Yeah?”

  She wasn’t going to help one bit.

  “Yeah, about what you asked.”

  “What was that?”

  I tried not to sigh into the phone. “About what this anniversary means to me.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “That I like it when you’re around. I feel good. I like waking up next to you.”

  “Makes me feel like an accessory. Or a toy.”

  What?

  “No, you’re more than that. You’re fun and I like looking at you, at your eyes.”

  “Now I feel like a pinup girl or a call girl.”

  “I never said that. You’re just twisting my words around. Why are you doing this, Gina?”

  “Because you’re telling me that in the entire year we’ve been seeing each other, you think I’m fun, good to look at, and you like waking up next to me. That’s not a lot to hang anything on.”

  “But that’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean then, Jen?”

  “I, I—” How could I explain what it meant to me to see her tousled hair spread out over the Egyptian sheets we bought at that midwinter fair, sleep marks all over the side of her face from sleeping so hard, the way her warmth made me feel welcome, her smile when she woke and saw me looking at her?

  “I see. I have to go.”

  She hung up the phone.

  I sat there staring at the phone like a dumbshit.

  I drank the rest of the six-pack and fell into my crappy bed, crawling across the valley in the middle and sleeping on her side. The sheets smelled like the musky lotion she used (no animals harmed in the manufacture) and her sweat.

  I breathed it in until my throat swelled up with tears. A few leaked out and I passed out feeling sorry for myself.

  Wednesday I was worthless at work. Not just the hangover, but trying to figure out how I could explain what this anniversary meant to me. I’d never seen anybody for more than a few months. Mostly, I just played. That’s what the Club was for. I found plenty of good times there. Good scenes that made me hot and gave me fantasies that I could replay later on.

  But with Gina, the fantasy was there all the time, totally real, surprising, exciting, sweet, tender. She introduced me to things I had never known, never cared about.

  When I got home I looked at my apartment and realized that I hated it. The dark cave of the living room was filled with my ratty couch and chair that I’d had since right out of college. The art was just shit I bought at a garage sale so I’d have stuff on the walls.

  Why was I here?

  I loved Gina’s place. It was a tiny studio with a twin bed and barely room for the air mattress she bought so we could sleep together there, but the room was light and filled with funky modern furniture and art from galleries she’d haunted while she was working for that interior designer a few years before she met me.

  I skipped the chimis and just got drunk this time. Thursday I didn’t even bother to go in. I just sat around on that ugly couch and skipped the hair of the dog. Hell, I was going straight for the entire pooch.

  My life had gone from pretty fucking good to absolutely fucking awful in the course of two conversations.

  “Fucking bitch, just like all the rest,” I grumbled.

  But that wasn’t true.

  This was truth: I was drunk by myself in the middle of my ugly ass living room and I hated it.

  I woke up on the couch the next morning, Friday morning. My anniversary. I rolled off of it with a groan and a thunk.

  “Yuck,” I said when I got a whiff of myself.

  I called in to work again and took a shower. After I got dressed in clean jeans and a T-shirt with a cardigan, I went out.

  Breakfast was the first order.

  I texted Gina. Plz come over tonight. Plz. 630pm. Plz.

  I drank coffee, ate scrambled eggs, bacon and pancakes dripping in pecan syrup while I watched for her response.

  It came as I was finishing the last cup.

  OK. 630pm.

  Well, at least she answered, and she said she’d come.

  I was busy the rest of the day. I took another shower at five-thirty, got dressed in the new black brushed-denim jeans I’d bought, slipped on the new cable-knit sweater and blow-dried my hair. It cooperated nicely, one of the nicest spiky dos I’d ever managed.

  I ran over my preparations one more time before the doorbell rang. And it did ring. She didn’t open the door and yell, “Hey!”

  At least she was here.

  “Hey, Gina, come on in,” I said, opening the door.

  She looked great. She wore one of those knit skirts that clung to every curve, the super high-heeled boots that made me lick my li
ps every time I saw her in them, and a low-cut, V-neck, clingy sweater with a pear-shaped amethyst nestled just above her cleavage.

  “God, you look great.” I leaned in to buss her cheek. She was wearing Poison. The lotion, if I wasn’t mistaken. “You smell great too.”

  She smiled at me, just a little, but her eyes were sharp, questioning.

  “Let me take your coat.” I hung it on the tree, her purse too.

  “Have a seat. You want some wine? I got some Toody’s pinot grigio.”

  She loved this wine. I hated it, too thick, trying too hard, I always thought.

  “Please.”

  I brought two glasses, a plate of little canapés that I’d picked up from our favorite deli and the single red rose I’d bought on my errands today.

  “For you.”

  She cocked her head and the ghost of a smile haunted her lips for just a moment. Then she was all business.

  I pulled out the red paper heart with the lace edging I’d made this afternoon. “This too.”

  She took it, a frown line straight down the center of her forehead.

  “What is it?”

  “My heart.”

  I sat down on the easy chair and sipped the wine, managing not to make a face, then put my glass down.

  “So, okay. I’ve been thinking really hard about your question. And what I discovered is,” I paused, swallowing. This was it. If she wouldn’t accept this, it was over, and I’d be left with the realization of this truth in my life and no place to put it to use, because I couldn’t imagine ever finding someone like her again.

  “The truth is, Gina, that I love you. And I’ve been selfish. All the stuff I said, it was all about me, because I never thought, I never dared to think, to imagine that there was anything else but a good time between us. I should have asked long before this, and that was wrong.”

  I took her hand. She let me, but never took her dark eyes off of mine. They were boring straight into me, my heart, my soul.

  “You mean everything to me. I want you to know that. I’m ready to do whatever it takes to keep you in my life. I’ll buy a house so we can live together. I’ll buy a new bed.”