Best Lesbian Romance 2009 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  FEMME FATALE: 1992

  CHRISTMAS BLIZZARD

  THE USUAL

  LAST CALL

  FINDING MY FEET

  IN FLIGHT

  KRISPIN

  EYES

  HIDE

  UNBUTTONING

  SAND CASTLE QUEEN

  CUTS

  ABSINTHE

  IN YOUR POCKET

  PURPLE THUMB

  A GHOST OF A CHANCE

  THE TRAVELER

  SUGAR ON SNOW

  MÉLANGE

  PLACE, PARK, SCENE, DARK

  MUSIC ON THE WIND

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION

  Romance is as difficult to define in literature as it is in life. Over the centuries the popular view of the concept has evolved from the grandly defined “heroic quest” to something far more personal, if sometimes just as elusive. Whether thought of as a noun, “an intimate physical and emotional relationship,” or as a verb, “to court or seduce,” the sine qua non of romance is intense, passionate emotion. Love.

  Searching for love, discovering love, and celebrating love are way stations on an emotional expedition that is as varied and complex as we are ourselves, and yet we all recognize those quintessential moments when what we feel can only be love, and nothing else. Sometimes love drives us to distraction and beyond (Potter’s “Place, Park, Scene, Dark”), sometimes it gives us the strength to be our best selves (Kallmaker’s “Last Call”), and sometimes it haunts us (Graham’s “A Ghost of a Chance”). But always, by stirring our deepest wants and desires and needs, love reminds us that we are alive as only the most critical of emotions can. From the excitement and uncertainty of a first date (Bergquist’s “Femme Fatale: 1992”) to the celebration of enduring passion (“Music on the Wind”), these sensual, erotic stories capture the many shapes of the intimate encounters we call love.

  Radclyffe

  FEMME FATALE: 1992

  Kathie Bergquist

  The new underwear was my best friend Gabi’s idea. “You can’t go on a date with the same old Jockey for Her white cotton hipsters you’ve been wearing for the past three years,” she reasoned as we strolled through the lingerie section of Marshall Field’s. “You’re a new girl, with a new attitude. You need new underwear.”

  We were shopping before my first post-break-up date. Cody and I, who had been together for three years, were so freshly broken up that we still lived in the same one-bedroom apartment, but tonight I was going on a date with Angel, a poet Gabi introduced me to.

  “How will Angel even know what kind of underwear I’m wearing?” I asked.

  “What kind of attitude is that! Think positive! You’ll know you’re wearing sexy new underwear. Not those libido killers you usually wear.”

  “They’re comfortable!” I argued.

  “This has nothing to do with comfort. This is about getting some action.” She held up a black thong.

  “I can’t wear that!”

  “Why not? It’s hot.”

  “I’m not having a string up my butt all night! I’ll feel ridiculous.”

  In the end we compromised. I bought some black lace underwear that covered my whole bottom and a sexy bra that matched.

  Gabi also gave me some of these plastic latex squares that dentists use for I don’t know what. They were called dental dams. Lesbians were supposed to use them for safe sex. Like, when you go down on a girl, you spread it over her vagina so you don’t swap juices, kinda like a lesbian condom. Nobody knew if lesbians could even give AIDS to each other, but the theory behind dental dams was better safe than sorry. The ones Gabi gave me were pink and smelled like bubblegum.

  My bedroom looked like a helicopter had landed in it. Clothes were strewn everywhere as I paced around in my itchy underwear, trying to figure out what to wear. We were going to a performance art show at a club. I wanted to look stylish but not too dressed up, casual but not like a slob. I also wanted to look kinda sexy but not slutty. I wanted Angel to want to have sex with me.

  There, I said it.

  I wanted to get laid.

  Besides Cody, and rolling around on my futon with Gabi that one time before she deemed us sexually incompatible, by the age of twenty-two my entire sexual history consisted of making out with a few guys in high school and giving one hand job, which was the last convincing I needed that I liked girls. When actually faced with the prospect, I was nervous about the idea of having sex with someone new. How would I know what she liked? What if I was no good?

  And not only did I want to get laid, Gabi had practically convinced me that I had to get laid. “A palate cleanser,” she’d said, “so you can move on.”

  I’d finally decided on a pair of nice jeans with no holes in them and this shiny black satin button-up shirt—something soft to the touch—and (hopefully) to encourage more touching. At first I had the shirt buttoned up to the top, but then I undid one button, and then another. After the second button, you could see a hint of my cleavage. I buttoned it back up. Then I unbuttoned it again.

  I checked myself out in various poses and positions in the full-length mirror and decided I looked pretty good. My crazy, curly hair was behaving somewhat with the help of pomade. I don’t usually wear makeup, but I put on a little mascara and a thin smear of reddish lipstick.

  In the meantime, Cody came home from school. “Wow, look at you! You look sexy.”

  That’s right, I thought to myself. Too bad for you.

  “Are you coming home tonight?” she asked. She was in the bedroom, examining the stains on her various work shirts.

  “How would I know?” I responded coyly. Then, thinking about it, I added, “Probably.” After all, no matter what happened tonight, the last thing I wanted was to come home to find my ex-girlfriend with her new brunette “friend” in what used to be our bed.

  Despite not having a car, Angel offered to pick me up so we could walk the eight or so blocks to Club Lower Links together. The door buzzer rang right on time, to the minute.

  Angel looked nice. She was wearing what looked like vintage men’s trousers with a white shirt and a suit coat, and like me, she had some makeup on, too. “How are you?” she asked, kissing me on the cheek. We started walking.

  “I’m excited about this show,” Angel said. “I love Paula Scott. Have you seen her before?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I know the name…”

  “She does all this great performance stuff around town. She’s the most famous performance artist in Chicago.”

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  Performance art was something that I guessed I liked in theory, although I had not actually seen very much of it. To be honest, I’d never even really heard about performance art until last year when the National Endowment for the Arts took back grants that they’d awarded to these four performance artists because they decided that their stuff was obscene. One of the artists put a crucifix in a jar of piss, and another one poured a can of pork and beans over her bare behind. I don’t know what the other two did besides just being gay and talking about it. Anyways, since then it seemed that performance art was popping up everywhere. Everyone was doing it. It was about free speech or something.

  When we got to the club, they weren’t letting people in yet, so we waited in the line outside. We were early enough that we were close to the front of the line. Because it was the middle of summer, it was still light out and warm, even though it was almost eight p.m. Angel took off her suit coat and held it over her arm. A trickle of sweat skidded down my ribcage.

  To ki
ll time, I checked out the crowd. People were in their late twenties or thirties. The crowd was mostly women, and mostly white, and a majority were wearing glasses. Cool glasses. I wished I had some cool glasses, despite the fact that I had 20/20 vision.

  By the time they finally opened the door, the line snaked around the corner. Angel had bought our tickets ahead of time. She handed me mine, and we shuffled in.

  The club was small and dark. The walls were painted black, the floors were black, the chairs and tables: all black. White candles on tables lent flickering light, and spotlights illuminated some artwork hung on the walls. Rectangular-shaped, the room had a bar along one of the sides, a small cleared-out area that made up a stage down at the far end, and bathrooms across the way from the bar. Tables and chairs were scattered with little rhyme or reason.

  The rest of the line filed in behind us, the bar filling in our wake.

  We took a table near the stage, and then Angel went and got us beers. By now the place was pretty full—the indecipherable murmur of collective voices, the heat of bodies and anticipation, and thickening blue smoke rose up to create a chaos that made the air feel heavy and the walls compressed. A cold sheen of sweat covered my skin. Under my satin shirt, the lace of my bra was making my boobs itch like crazy. I twitched. Angel was taking a long time.

  I scanned the throngs clustered around the bar to see if I could spot her. It took a while. Finally there she was, emerging from a group, with a sweating brown bottle in each hand. She was talking with some girl I didn’t know or recognize. They laughed. An arrow shot through me.

  Then I saw Angel gesture with a beer in my direction. Both Angel and the girl turned to look and caught me gawking at them. Angel smiled, and with a hand still gripping the beer bottle, raised her pointer finger as if to say, “Give me one minute.” I faintly returned her smile and nodded.

  What was this? Was Angel cruising another girl on our date? Now, not just my boobs but also my ass was starting to itch. Maybe I should just leave, I thought.

  “I’m sorry that took so long.” Angel set two Bud Lights on the table. “The crowd at the bar was ruthless.”

  That’s it? I thought. No explanation about the girl?

  “That’s okay.” I picked up my beer and took a swig. It was barely cold. “Thanks for the beer.”

  “I ran into this girl,” Angel continued, “who I haven’t seen for a long time.”

  “Oh?”

  “She used to date this guy, Gary, who I know. Then she dumped him for the bass player in that group Struck by Lightning, that dude—what’s his name?” Angel looked up as if the answer existed above my head.

  Relief washed over me. The girl was straight. Of course! The girl was straight. Sometimes I forget that, statistically speaking, most of the people in the world are heterosexual.

  “Whatever, it doesn’t matter,” Angel concluded. “I always thought she was a bitch. Now I guess she has an album coming out.”

  “Really?” I looked back to where the girl had been standing, but she wasn’t there anymore.

  “You girls okay?” A pretty cocktail waitress hovered over us. She had dark hair and lots of makeup on. It was hard to tell how old she was.

  “Want another?” Angel asked me. I looked at my beer bottle. It was only half empty.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Two more,” Angel told her.

  Club Lower Links was getting more and more crowded. Angel and I were each on our third beer, and there was no sign of the show starting. My new panties were wedged up in my asscrack. I leaned on the table over my folded arms so I could discreetly try to scratch my tits.

  Meanwhile, I had also edged a little closer to Angel, or she had to me. We were sitting side by side, out thighs touching, and our faces inches apart. We kept having to talk louder to hear each other over the mounting din. All the noise and smoke was making the space on my forehead between my eyes throb, and the beer had filled my bladder.

  “I’m going to try to go to the bathroom before the show starts,” I yelled to Angel.

  I started to rise but right at that instant a spotlight came up on the stage, and the crowd hushed. I sat back down.

  A giant breast came through the crowd, up to the front of the stage. That is, a woman wearing a giant breast costume—papiermâché or what, I don’t know. What she was were skinny legs in pink tights, giant Caucasian breast with round, brown areola, spindly arms, and head.

  “Stop staring at my tit,” she said, deadpan. The audience broke out into appreciative laughter.

  “Paula Scott,” Angel said. “She’s a trip.”

  “Thanks for coming out tonight, and for those of you for whom it’s relevant, thanks for coming out in general. Ka-boom!” Paula Scott hammed it up, doing some vaudeville-style dance moves.

  “Tonight, ladies, and…” she paused and looked out as if scanning the crowd, “…ladies…Everyone check your tickets to make sure you’re in the right place because this ain’t your Friday night church bingo game! If you think it is, you walked in the wrong door! That’s down the street! This is Femme Fatale.”

  Some woots erupted in the audience.

  “A night of female performance art on the edge! We’re on the edge, ladies, so fasten your seatbelts! We have a great showcase lined up for you tonight. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to stick an ice pick in your eye. Now everyone give a big hand for Daphne LaRoche performing ‘All Is Vanity.’ ”

  “Woo-hoo!” Angel hooted, along with scattered others in the crowd. Paula Scott stepped off of the stage. A moment later, a bare-chested young woman wearing a ballerina skirt took her place. Her boobs were kind of uneven—one pointed downward, the other one shot out sideways. She stood in front of everyone and stretched her hands out to her sides, revealing brown stigmata drawn on her palms. Closing her eyes tightly, she started reciting. “The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanities.”

  “Ecclesiastes,” said Angel.

  I wondered how she knew that. As for me, I’d had no idea what this topless chick was spouting off about. Furthermore, wouldn’t it be “all are vanities?” I had this thing about subject-verb agreement.

  Two minutes into the performance, and my mind started to wander. Would it be rude to get up and go use the bathroom? I scanned behind me. It would be tough to work my way through the crowd. I glanced down at my third beer, long empty. My mouth was dry and gummy. Angel’s eyes were fixed on the performer. Was she into this? I tried to refocus my energy to the stage.

  “…I have seen all the works that are done under the sun and behold, all is vanity…”

  The woman’s arms were beginning to droop a little bit. Her eyes remained squeezed shut.

  What if I didn’t have sex with Angel tonight? Would that be the end of the world? I mean, this was only our first date. It wasn’t that unusual to not have sex on the first date. On the other hand, we did already kiss. Did Angel assume we were going to have sex? I wondered how many people Angel had had sex with. She’d once had a threeway with Gabi and Jamie, so she must be pretty adventurous. Did she just have casual sex all the time? Maybe I was in over my head.

  “…And he that increases knowledge, increases sorrow…”

  Everyone burst into applause. I snapped to attention. Daphne LaRoche curtsied in her tutu and then scurried off the stage.

  “I’m going to try to use the bathroom,” I told Angel.

  I pushed myself back into the crowd. Paula Scott, now dressed in black jeans and a turtleneck, had retaken the stage and was introducing the next act. When I finally made it to the bathroom, there was someone standing in front of the door.

  “Are you in line?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the line.” She gestured back with her thumb, and in despair I followed the length of the line, which seemed to close ranks; each woman was prepared to defend her position. The line was at least, at least, twenty pe
ople deep.

  “That was quick,” Angel said when I returned a few minutes later to my seat.

  “The line was too long,” I explained. “I can wait. What’s this?” I asked, gesturing toward the stage.

  Two women were sitting back to back about two feet away from each other.

  “Shh…” Angel fluttered a finger up to her lips. “Just watch.”

  One of the women was speaking in a completely monotone voice. “I want to touch you,” she was saying. “My hands shake with passion.”

  “For your arms to envelop me,” began the other, her voice equally flat. She sounded almost robotic. “Your legs wrapped in mine.”

  “Your breath in my mouth,” robot lady number one continued.

  At a table across from us, a woman with protruding eyes and frog jowls seemed to be maliciously blowing smoke in my face. Where was the cocktail server? I couldn’t believe Angel was into this crap. I now knew what Paula Scott meant when she predicted I’d want to stick an ice pick in my eye. My boobs itched insanely, and I couldn’t sit comfortably for the pressure on my bladder and the lace panty wedged up my ass. At that moment it seemed ridiculous that I had purchased this horrible underwear just for this date.

  If this kinda thing was what Angel was into, then maybe we were not meant to be. I sized her up. Her eyes were fixated on the action—if you could call it that—on the so-called stage. Minutes of my life ticked away from me.

  “Control, alt, delete,” both of the robot women said in unison. Then each stood, picked up her chair, and walked off either side of the stage.

  Please let this be over soon, I prayed to no one in particular.

  “Would you like another beer?” Angel asked over the applause. Suddenly, as if appearing in a vapor, the cocktail waitress had reappeared. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll get this one.” Why not? If my bladder exploded, at least I’d have an excuse to leave.

  I dug in my back pocket for the twenty I’d shoved in there, but felt instead something I couldn’t identify—something plasticy. I started to pull it out when it dawned on me—the dental dams! Fuck! I quickly shoved them back in and felt around until I had located the lone bill.