Best Lesbian Romance 2011 Read online

  Penny peered into the pot. The peas looked even more revolting now that she’d scooped into them. And tomorrow was her day off. “Um. Okay. I guess.”

  “I have to work in the morning, but I could swing by at about one.”

  Penny tucked a blonde curl behind her ear. Should she be making this kind of commitment when she was high on champagne? “Sure,” she said, not at all sure that she was.

  Lil stood. “Good. I’m going to turn the breakers back on.”

  A yawn slipped from Penny’s mouth. She tried to disguise it with a smile. There was no way she wanted Lil to think the yawn had to do with their date. Or was it a date? Her brain was so muddled from the champagne she really had no idea. But she knew she had to say something. “You fixed it?”

  “Won’t know until the breaker’s back on, but I found some loose wires. If this doesn’t work, I’ll come back tomorrow to check the switch. You want me to turn off this switch so you’re not blasted by light when they come back on?”

  Another yawn threatened to slip out, but Penny held this one back. “That would be nice.”

  Once Lil was out of the room, Penny stretched out on the couch next to a purring Screech. His soft rumble made her eyelids heavy. She let them close. Once again, she felt comforted by the sounds of Lil in the bedroom. She moved with such confidence, such self-assurance.

  Penny pulled the throw blanket from the back of the couch and tucked it in around herself and Screech. What was she doing making a date with someone she’d just met? Again she wondered if it actually was a date. Maybe Lil just felt sorry for her. That seemed more likely. Who’d want to make a date with a sloshed crybaby obsessed by peas?

  She woke briefly when Lil blew out her candle and slipped out of the apartment, clicking the door shut softly behind her. At some point in the night, Penny made her way to her bedroom where she slept uninterrupted until noon.

  She awoke feeling refreshed, excited and a bit nervous about her date.

  Once out of bed, she checked the light. Sure enough, the flicker was gone. She padded her way to the kitchen where Screech rubbed up against her leg as if she might forget to feed him. “Okay. Okay. Hold your horses.” As she reached for the cat food, she noticed a note on her counter weighted down by the pot of peas.

  Miss Penny,

  If you’ve changed your mind about today, call me. 335-3700. Otherwise I’ll see you at 1:00. Lil

  She smiled. No one had ever called her Miss Penny before.

  As a reminder not to get her hopes up, she dumped the loose peas into the garbage disposal then filled the pot with water to soak the rest of them out. You barely know her.

  At one sharp there was a knock at the door. Penny glanced in the mirror. She’d been unsure how to dress so had chosen casual: jeans, her favorite tank top that showed just a strip of midriff, and sandals. She was glad for her choice when she opened the door. Lil was wearing shorts, a T-shirt and work boots.

  “You still up for this?” Lil asked.

  Penny picked up her purse. “If you promise it’ll keep me from eating those gross peas.”

  Lil laughed. “I can’t promise, but I have a hunch.”

  As they walked down the stairwell, Penny couldn’t help but feel sheepish about the night before. “Thanks for fixing my light.”

  “No need to thank me,” Lil said. “It’s my job. Besides, it was my pleasure.” She unlocked the passenger side of an old pickup. “And this is my chariot.”

  Penny slipped in. The interior was meticulously kept up and smelled as if it had recently been wiped down with something slightly citrus. “Nice,” she said when Lil came around the other side.

  “Thanks. She might not be fancy, but she’s paid for.” With that, Lil turned the key in the ignition and pulled into the light Saturday stream of traffic.

  A wave of panic passed through Penny. She barely knew this woman, and now here she was in a truck with her going to god-knew-where. She tried to think of something to say. “So, what was wrong with the light?” was all she could come up with.

  “The usual. A few of the wires were loose. It can happen over time.”

  “Especially when you have a guy upstairs who jumps rope.”

  “In his apartment?”

  “Monday through Friday. Six a.m. Right above my bed.”

  “You shouldn’t have to put up with that.”

  “What choice do I have? He pays his rent just like I do.”

  As Lil seemed to be mulling this over, Penny sat back trying to appear casual and observed her driving.

  She moved through traffic with confidence, like she belonged on the road. And she stopped for pedestrians. This was something Penny appreciated, as she herself did not have a car so she was often walking. And yet there was something about Lil’s confidence that also frightened Penny. Where was she taking her?

  Just as she was about to ask, Lil said, “I’m going to talk to Mr. Baratelli.”

  “The landlord?”

  “Yup. He and I have a pretty good rapport. I’ll let him know that the reason your lighting fixture needed work was because of unnecessary physical activity upstairs.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to. I hate the thought—” Lil slammed on the brakes to keep from hitting a blue Mazda that had run a stop sign. Her arm instinctively reached across to protect Penny. “You okay?”

  Shaken, Penny said, “Fine.”

  When Lil removed her arm, an unexpected longing passed through Penny. “My dad used to do that,” she said.

  “He didn’t want anything to happen to his precious cargo.”

  “I don’t know about precious.”

  Lil glanced at her briefly before returning her attention to the sudden cluster of traffic. “I do.”

  Penny looked out the window and said, “Thank you,” very softly. Who was this Lil? And why was Penny still apprehensive?

  A few minutes later they pulled up to a row of Victorians that had been split up into apartments. “Mine’s the blue and gray one,” Lil said. “I’d invite you in, but one of my roommates is down with the flu. No need exposing you to that.”

  Penny cocked an eyebrow. “So why did we come here?”

  Lil smiled. “You’ll see. Now follow me.” And before Penny knew it, Lil was out of the truck and making her way down a small dark walkway between two Victorians.

  Penny hopped out of the truck and trotted behind. What was this girl up to?

  The walkway opened up onto a large community garden.

  Lil stepped to the side of the entrance made of marvelously twisted wood, bent slightly at the waist and swept her arm wide. “After you.”

  Penny, acting all serious, pretended to lift a heavy ankle-length skirt, tilted her chin toward the sky and stepped through the arbor, then stopped dead in her tracks. The garden was stunning. Rows of raised beds, each scrupulously kept up, filled the quarter-acre plot. And there were little sculpted sitting areas here and there—and wind chimes.

  Penny walked over to a bed lined with luscious green. “Is this butter lettuce?”

  “The best in the world.” Lil grinned. “And completely organic.” She broke off an outside leaf. “Want a taste?”

  Penny opened her mouth and Lil tucked the crisp leaf between her lips. The back of her hand gently brushed the side of Penny’s cheek.

  Was that on purpose? Penny wondered. A slight shiver passed down her spine as, with great care, she closed her mouth around the lettuce leaf. It would be the freshest thing she had ever eaten and she wanted to savor it.

  “Oh, my god. It’s so…”

  “Buttery?”

  “It is! Store-bought never tastes like that.”

  “Taste this,” Lil said, ripping off a dark green leaf from another plant.

  An impossibly sweet burst exploded in Penny’s mouth. “What is that?”

  “Italian parsley.”

  “Parsley? I thought parsley was just something you got on the side of your plate at a resta
urant.”

  Lil popped a sprig into her own mouth. “I use it for a breath freshener.” Then she walked over to a raised bed full of beets and carrots. “Soon we’ll be putting in the summer stuff. You know, tomatoes, squash, eggplant.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Penny asked, suddenly praying it wasn’t a girlfriend.

  “Our collective. But I’m one of the main ones. I work out here almost every day.”

  Penny watched as Lil tenderly inspected the underside of a broccoli leaf. “I had no idea broccoli grew like that,” she admitted.

  “Isn’t it beautiful? The heads are actually flowers.”

  The thought of eating flowers delighted Penny. She brought her nose to the broccoli head and inhaled. It didn’t smell like a flower but had a rich musky scent. “Yum.”

  “I’ll make you up a bag of produce before you go.” Lil took Penny’s hand. “But now let me show you why I brought you here.”

  Penny let herself be led to the back of the garden, loving the feel of her hand in Lil’s. They fit so perfectly, Lil’s larger, stronger hand wrapping around her smaller, softer one. “Thank you for blowing out my candle last night.”

  Lil gave her hand a squeeze. “Seemed like you were having a pretty rough night.”

  They rounded a tall trellis covered in climbing green vines.

  “Voila!” Lil said. “My pride and joy.”

  Penny laughed. The vines were covered in pea pods. Of course! She stepped in for a closer look and noticed threadlike tendrils reaching out from the vines to curl around to the slender bamboo rods of the trellis. Along with the pea pods, each vine was sprinkled with the most delicate white flowers. Apparently peas started out their lives as flowers.

  “Now these are birthday peas,” Lil said. “Go ahead. Pick as many as you want.”

  Penny glanced at Lil, her grip on Lil’s hand involuntarily tightening. “You expect me to eat these?”

  “Why not? You were going to eat those crappy burned ones last night.”

  “But they’re not cooked.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never had fresh peas off the vine.”

  Embarrassed, Penny shook her head. Until last night, she generally avoided peas altogether.

  Lil let go of her hand and plucked a pod off the vine. “Promise to keep an open mind?”

  Penny nodded. What choice did she have? This woman, who she was finding herself more and more attracted to, was offering up what she called her “pride and joy.”

  Lil slid her finger down the seam of the slender pod and cracked it open, revealing six perfectly round peas. “Take one,” she said as she stepped in close enough for Penny to smell her clean, parsley-scented breath.

  Much as Penny was excited by the sudden intimacy and Lil’s obvious delight in the peas, she couldn’t help noticing a mild nausea heating up her belly. What am I doing? I hate peas. But she couldn’t refuse, not after all the trouble Lil had gone to. So she braced herself for yet another disappointment, and said, “Okay. I’ll try.”

  She chose the plumpest one, right in the center, and tugged lightly. The round orb popped out easily. Now she’d have to eat it. Or at least put it in her mouth. Lil’s hopeful gaze was giving her no choice. She slipped the pea between her lips. The small hard ball rested on her tongue, so innocent, so devoid of expectation. She rolled it around in her mouth a couple of times, testing, then without another thought bit down.

  “You like?” Lil asked.

  Penny thought for a moment and, to her surprise, found she wasn’t the least bit repulsed. It was sweet. Fresh. Nothing like the bland peas of her childhood. She took the whole pod from Lil and, using her tongue, flicked the rest of the peas into her mouth.

  Lil laughed. “I guess the answer is yes.”

  Penny wanted to say the answer was more than yes and that this was the best birthday present she’d ever received—in her whole life—even if it was a day late. But before she could put this thought to words, Lil pulled another pod from the vine, popped it open and let the peas tumble into her palm; only this time instead of offering them up for eating she just let them rest there. “It just blows my mind that inside each of these peas is the beginning of a whole plant.”

  “Kind of like people,” Penny said softly. “Each one of us is full of so many things that nobody knows about. Like you with this garden.”

  Lil picked up a pea and pressed it to Penny’s lips. “I’d like to know more about you. If you’d let me.”

  Penny let her lips curl around Lil’s fingertip and linger for a moment, then took the pea into her mouth and circled it with her tongue before biting down and swallowing. “I should tell you, I’m not always easy. I can be kind of like…”

  “A princess. You told me. But from what I’ve seen, you’re the real thing.”

  An icy wall inside Penny began to melt, releasing a single tear. She brushed it back.

  Lil let the peas in her hand drop into the rich soil and rested both hands on Penny’s shoulders. “What’s more, I think real princesses deserve to live happily ever after.”

  The warmth of Lil’s hands made Penny’s knees go weak. “I’d kind of given up on that whole notion.”

  Lil cocked her head. “You’d given up on peas, too. So what do you say we give this princess thing one more try?”

  I THINK I WILL LOVE YOU

  Rebecca S. Buck

  The rising moon was a milky haze in the blue satin sky. The faintest sprinkle of stars held the promise of the beauty to come, when twilight deepened into night and the rich indigo faded to inky black. The breeze of a midsummer dusk crept over my skin, still sticky and heated from the day, soothing and chilling in the same breath. The woodland in the valley below rippled softly, a sound like a gentle flow of water, as the wind crept through the leaves of the tall oaks and chestnuts that predominated there.

  The scents of a summer evening in the central European countryside reached me, carried in the cooling air. The heady fragrance of flowers, honeysuckle with a trace of petunia, the nostalgia-laden essence of freshly cut grass and the slightest acrid tinge of wood smoke from a smoldering fire somewhere on one of the farms farther down the valley. The day had been overpoweringly, swelteringly hot, and the earthy odor of sun-baked soil beginning to grow damp as the atmosphere cooled made it impossible to forget I was anywhere other than the middle of the countryside.

  No artificial lights illumed the streets here. Someone across the valley had turned on an electric lamp in their house, and the bright square of the window etched a vivid point of yellow against the black shadows of the hillside. Everything was shadows and silhouettes now, not quite obscured by the night, not yet, but otherworldly and mysterious already. The dark green of the trees, the depths between them, made a patch of almost total blackness in the valley bottom. Above that, the hillside seemed to recede into the farther distance, darker stripes marking out where the terraces of grapevines grew, row after row. Paler, more regular shapes demonstrated where cottages dotted the hillside opposite and the hillside beyond it.

  The almost oppressive silence was the one part of country living I had yet to become accustomed to. It wasn’t a true silence—a faint breeze rustled in the trees, an animal scuffled in the undergrowth. I even heard the distant throb of a tractor engine, but compared to the English city I had lived in until almost a year ago, this was a muted, whispering world, and though I admitted it was peaceful, I found it also left me unsettled from time to time. I could only fall asleep if I had the radio murmuring quietly in the background. Silence left too much space for thoughts to creep in, and I had, after all, moved to another country to distract myself from thinking too much. Isolation I could deal with; I enjoyed it and found plenty of things to do to fill my time. But I had to have noise. Silence combined with isolation was just pushing this escape too far.

  I reclined the sun-lounger I was relaxing in until I was more lying than sitting and let my eyes drift out of focus, staring blindly at the darkening skies. I was relaxed. I was
at peace. If I wasn’t truly happy, what did that matter? There was no one here to see it, no one to subject me to merciless sympathizing, endless cheering up and interminable relationship advice. I could cope with unhappiness. It wasn’t as though I was a stranger to it, after all. And I’d really known from that first week that the thing with Kimberly was never going to work. I’d just clung to her out of some sort of unbalanced need to demonstrate that I was attractive, my skills of seduction had not yet dried up, and I was capable of turning a night of passion into something longer and more meaningful, even if I wasn’t head over heels in love. Of course it had all ended when I discovered that she had been clinging to me in a similar capacity, with the added complication of an ex-girlfriend she was still in love with and desperately trying to prove that she was not.

  Life was simpler here, in my little cottage in rural eastern Slovenia, surrounded by trees and grapevines, and neighbors whose language was largely incomprehensible to me. Much simpler. I sighed and closed my eyes because that wasn’t true anymore, not as of a month ago. A month ago, everything had grown far more complicated again.

  Karmen Jurkovič. On a hot day in May, my closest neighbors had invited me to a birthday party in their garden. Self-conscious and out of place, the invisible wall of language difference making me at once the subject of curiosity and too awkward a prospect to attempt a conversation with, I was contenting myself with glasses of the local sweetly floral Traminec white wine and enjoying the early summer sunshine. Then I had seen her walking toward me, petite and dark haired, with smooth olive skin and sharp, almost black, eyes.

  “Dober dan,” she had greeted me tentatively, though her stance demonstrated plenty of self-confidence, which she had every right to. Close up she was beautiful, in a striking sense. Not pretty, perhaps even a little sharp featured, but indisputably beautiful. Blue jeans clung tightly to slender thighs and a perfectly formed waist, and a red halter-neck top revealed toned, slightly angular shoulders with pronounced collar-bones beneath that smooth, dark skin. Her hair was cropped short, and unlike that of most of the women in this part of the world, still its natural glossy black, not dyed or highlighted red or blonde.