Best Lesbian Romance 2009 Page 6

  She showed me how to tie a knot using one hand to loop the rope around, because with your other hand, you were always holding the end of the rope near where it was attached to the bird’s ankle by a ring.

  I deftly mimicked her movements.

  “Wow!” she said, and I could hear the admiration in her voice. “I’ve never seen anyone pick that up so fast. Well done!”

  I’d been practicing at home with a length of twine. I didn’t tell her that, though. I wanted her praise, any way I could get it.

  The tasks were simple, repetitive. Get hold of the bird. Move the bird to an empty cage. Rake out the bird’s cage, clean the water dish and refill it, and then move the bird back. Pam took the cages on one side; I handled the ones across from her.

  Rudy, a red-tailed hawk, put up a fuss when I picked him up, spreading his four-foot wingspan, the bells on his jesses jingling like an ice cream truck gone mad. I set him on the thick leather glove that covered my left hand and arm to my elbow, and he calmed down a little. Not completely, though: he continued to ruffle his wing feathers and glance around sharply, readjusting the way his sharp talons dug into the scarred leather.

  “Keep your elbow a little lower than your wrist.” Pam had moved up next to me so quietly I hadn’t heard her hiking boots crunch on the gravel walkway. “They want to be on the highest spot possible, and if you drop your wrist, he’ll try to climb up your arm.”

  Her soft laugh fluttered the hair along my neck. “I once had a golden eagle try to sit on my head,” she said. “I learned fast after that.”

  She made a low, crooning noise at Rudy. He looked at her, contemplated whatever she’d apparently said, and settled down a bit more.

  “He likes you,” I said.

  “He doesn’t like anybody,” she said. “It’s not in their nature. For them it’s all about respect. Ever read those fantasy novels about the kids who had magical kestrel familiars?”

  I admitted that I had, only willing to do so because she obviously knew about them, too.

  “We get slews of kids come through, wanting to make friends with the birds, and they’re so disappointed.” Pam shook her head. “As much as we often want them to, they’re never going to like us. They’re not like cats or dogs or even horses; there’s no devotion. The best you can do—and believe me, it’s not a minor thing—is be someone they can respect. There’s a level of trust they’ll give you, but only if you earn it.”

  Respect. I looked at the hawk on my wrist. He looked back at me, dark eyes expressionless. Jennifer hadn’t shown me any respect, and I didn’t know if I was worthy of it. I’d been taken in by her lies, blinded by her sweet talk. She’d probably mocked me, laughing, as she’d walked out the door with the shattered remains of my life.

  “I’m not very good with trust,” I said.

  Pam cocked her head, the action reminiscent of Hecate, the horned owl. “You and Rudy seem to be finding a comfortable balance, though.”

  “I trust him not to eat my eyeballs out of my head,” I admitted, and was rewarded with one of her delicious gentle laughs.

  “Well, that’s a start, then,” she said. “C’mon, let’s get this finished up, and then we’ll go grab a beer.”

  I hadn’t been around long enough to know Pam’s sexual proclivities, and despite my enjoyment of watching her (okay, and smelling her, even if that makes me sound like a creepy stalker) I assumed she was straight. I wasn’t looking for a relationship anyway, and why get my hopes dashed even if I was?

  We went to a local bar that night, a quiet one that had more in common with an English pub than a sports bar or redneck dive. My pale ale was frosty cold and fizzed a little when I worked the slice of lime down the narrow neck into the beer.

  “I know you’re doing community service hours for us,” Pam said. She looked down and then back up at me. “You don’t have to tell me why, but if you’re okay with it, I have to admit I’m curious.”

  “The short answer is unpaid parking tickets,” I said. “The longer answer involves an ex, her unrequested use of my car, and her flagrant disregard for slips of paper tucked under the wiper.”

  Pam rolled her eyes. “And I thought not replacing the toilet paper was bad. I’m sorry you got screwed. You didn’t deserve it.”

  I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Dunno. Maybe I did.”

  She paused in the act of taking a swig, revealing the long, slender line of her throat. “What do you mean?”

  “I shouldn’t have trusted her. I did, and she took advantage of that.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for what she did.”

  For a moment I couldn’t figure out how to respond, because Pam had put her hand over mine. “Maybe I’m a bad judge of character,” I said finally.

  “And maybe your ex was a manipulative shithead.”

  I blinked, startled by her bluntness, and also by the realization that she hadn’t really reacted to the fact that my ex was a woman. “She was, but I didn’t see it, and that’s my fault.”

  Pam’s hand, warm on mine, squeezed just a little. “There are people who’ll take advantage of us, yes. But that can’t stop us from loving again.” Before I could say anything, she forged on. “Take Rudy, for example. We rescued him from a house where he’d been ignored, underfed, and crammed in a tiny cage. But he’s okay now. He’s learned to trust again.”

  I wanted to say, “But he’s a bird,” but instead, I said, “Food for thought,” and changed the subject to the song that was playing.

  She accepted that I’d closed off, and I appreciated that. Still, I felt a painful twinge at the end of the evening when we parted, and she said, “By the way, I’ll make sure the time you helped me out today gets logged into your total hours.”

  I hadn’t worked overtime to pay off my debts, but I didn’t have the courage to tell her the real reasons.

  I did, however, make it clear that I was interested in learning more about the raptors, and when the gift shop didn’t need me behind the register, I was outside. Pam encouraged my interest; she loved to share her own enthusiasm.

  When my community service hours ended, I simply started volunteering at the center.

  “That’s fantastic!” Pam said when I told her, and hugged me. “I wasn’t looking forward to losing you.”

  I told myself she meant as an extra pair of hands to help out. I enjoyed the hug all the same, relishing the feeling of her breasts pressed against mine, her strong arms encircling me, her hands on my back.

  Despite my best efforts, I was interested in Pam. I just wasn’t willing to take the chance of another disappointment, another heartbreak. She might not like girls. She might not like me in that way.

  I was happy being her friend—happy but frustrated. I savored the time we spent together, even as I sighed with longing or had to catch myself out of a fantasy of nuzzling her neck, smelling the sunscreen and sweat, or licking my way down to her glorious breasts.

  It didn’t help—or maybe it helped too much—that the closer we grew, the more apparent it became that Pam was a touchyfeely type of girl. A hug, a pat on the shoulder, a touch on the arm.

  I would just enjoy it, I told myself.

  That worked for several weeks, in fact. Until the day Pam said, “Rudy and Falco need some air time. Want to learn how to fly the birds?”

  I’d sort of already learned. I’d trailed along on two of the daylong Falconry Experience Courses when the trainers took the class out in the field. But I knew what Pam was offering here—the opportunity for me to be officially in charge of one of the birds.

  Honored and thrilled, I agreed.

  We drove to the nearby hills in a truck with specially designed cages in the back for raptor transport.

  It was a gorgeous late-summer day. The leaves were still dark green, not yet starting to turn to autumn’s flaming palette. It had rained a few days before, and the ground was lush with grass, clover, and tiny white chamomile flowers. The afternoon sun was warm, and we stripped off our o
uter shirts before we’d gotten out of the truck. Pam slathered sunscreen on her arms and offered me the bottle.

  I dutifully smoothed it over my own arms, the smell turning my brain to mush because it reminded me so strongly of Pam. I was definitely going to have some solo fun tonight with this scent permeating my sheets.

  “You missed some. Here.” Pam squeezed some lotion onto her hands and, before I fully realized what she was going to do, ran them over the back of my neck.

  My hair was pixie-short—Jennifer had liked it long, so in defiance I had chopped it all off after she left—and thus Pam had easy access to my skin.

  Specifically, the very sensitive skin at the nape of my neck, the place that a former lover (not Jennifer, thankfully) had referred to as my sexual bull’s-eye.

  I shivered. I could feel the gentle massage of her hands against my skin all the way down to my clit. My nipples clamored for attention, pressing against my bra and T-shirt. I never wanted her to stop touching me.

  Unfortunately, we don’t always get what we want. She capped the bottle and tucked it into the truck.

  The birds were excited, sensing the chance to soar. They rustled their features and shifted their feet on our wrists as we hiked out into a sloping meadow surrounded by tall pines. We let Rudy and Falco fly, tempting them back to us with bits of raw meat. Then we allowed them to swoop up into the trees, where they perched high and surveyed their surroundings like kings.

  Pam pulled a thermos of coffee and two metal cups out of her backpack, along with little packets of sugar. She offered milk, but I shook my head. We sprawled on the soft grass and sipped, chatting idly about the weather, the falconry center, all lighthearted topics.

  Then Pam fell silent, and I sensed her shift beside me. Not just physically—her mood shifted, too. I couldn’t quite read it, but something about it made me shiver deep inside.

  “I wanted to say…” She trailed off, glancing at me and then away, as if unsure if she should continue.

  “What?” I said. “Go ahead, spill.”

  “It’s just…I’m really glad that you’re enjoying the birds so much,” she said. “Not because the center needs volunteers, but because…I like spending time with you.”

  My breath caught in my throat. As much as I’d been trying to deny my feelings for her, I really, really wanted her to say more.

  “I like spending time with you, too,” I said, knowing how lame it sounded.

  Suddenly she laughed, the sound spilling from her throat like golden sunlight. “What a pair we are! Okay, I’m going to put myself on the line: I’m attracted to you. I know you had a bad relationship, and I don’t want to scare you off, but I can’t keep suppressing it. If you want me to back off, I will, but—”

  Yeah, Jennifer had messed me up, but a girl has needs, and I liked Pam as much as I lusted after her. So I gave in to what my body wanted, put my hand on her cheek, and cut off her words with a kiss.

  Gentle at first, exploring, seeing how we fit and moved together. In fact, we eased down on the carpet of grass in the late-summer meadow and just kissed, tasting each other. She liked it when I nipped at her bottom lip, and when she responded in kind, I moaned into her mouth. Her laugh was breathy, and hitched when I ran my tongue behind her ear, tasting salt and something that was uniquely her.

  I could’ve stayed there until the sun sank behind the hills, just kissing her like that, but thankfully she had the sense to pull back and say, “We need to get the birds back.”

  I felt bereft when we stopped touching, but I didn’t take it personally. I slipped on my glove and whistled for Rudy.

  The falcon dropped down from the tree; if it hadn’t been for the bells, he would’ve been completely silent. He landed on my wrist, and I fed him a piece of meat.

  “Look at that,” Pam said. “He comes right back to you. He trusts you.”

  I wanted to say that I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want to break the moment.

  “Hey,” Pam said, and I looked at her, at the tiny beads of sweat dotting the bridge of her nose. “The important thing is, no matter what anyone else does, you don’t break a trust. Your girlfriend screwed you over, but that didn’t change the way you deal with people—or with the birds. Rudy trusts you, and I know you’d never give him any reason not to.”

  I understood what she was saying: that she trusted me, too.

  And if this was going to work, if this was going to go any farther, I had to trust her, too.

  The only thing I didn’t trust right then was my ability to speak. I just nodded. Pam smiled, gave me another kiss that sent a fresh wave of moisture to my panties, and called Falco to her arm.

  We put the birds in for the night and closed up the center. We didn’t stop at the bar for a drink. Instead, I just followed her home.

  Her apartment was like her—simple, clean, bold lines and colors, no pretense or artifice. I didn’t get a good look at most of it because I was looking at her, and then we were in the bedroom, and I could see only the wide bed with its wine-colored spread and imagine her spread out across it, wanting me.

  We kept kissing, lips sliding over lips, whispering little sweetnesses, as we tugged at each other’s clothes, breaking apart only when a shirt had to be pulled off overhead or a fastening proved particularly stubborn.

  “So pretty,” she whispered, bending her head to capture my aching nipple in her mouth. Hands and fingers, lips and teeth, and I’d been wanting her for so long that it took only a few moments before my legs were weakening and I needed to feel her more.

  She knew, somehow, and she pushed me back on the bed and trailed her tongue down between my breasts, along my belly, to a spot just above where I really needed her to touch me.

  She looked up at me then, and threaded the fingers of her left hand through the fingers of my right. “Trust me?” she whispered.

  I nodded.

  Her touch wasn’t gentle anymore. We were far past careful and tentative and exploring. “So wet, so sweet,” I heard her murmur before her tongue began a dance on my clit, swooping and diving and circling like a hawk intent on its prey, and I had no escape.

  Her fingers slipped inside of me, and I soared.

  I flew, because I knew I could come back to her.

  KRISPIN

  Rakelle Valencia

  Krispin rode down from the hills as each spring dawned. The early morning sun sparkled off of the dew in her wake as she passed through pastureland of hibernating forage. Breath from her horse’s nostrils preceded her with fog so that she rode through a constant ethereal mist in her approach back to the main ranch holdings from one of the winter line shacks.

  About ten winters’ endings now, since being orphaned at seventeen, she had made this ride, usually atop her rawboned, strawberry roan gelding still retaining its shaggy winter coat and the heavy feathers on its lower legs, toting a brawny mule behind with a now empty pack saddle.

  And the last six of those ten years, I hovered around the corrals gripping tightly to a thermos of hot coffee, black and strong, waiting to exchange the reviving liquid for the cold leather reins and solid cotton lead of both animals.

  Five years my senior, Krispin had never really seemed to notice me, even though we had been acquainted through primary schooling in town and the sweat of summer ranch work. She was somewhat of an enigma, a loner, hardened, and a woman of few words.

  But a woman she was. And knowing my own preferences since before puberty, I held Krispin up against all others, and none had compared. Perhaps it was only a girlish lust borne of my unconsummated fantasies that had made Krispin grow in my heart to a love I felt would burst, or that could be read easily on my blushing face whenever I was in her presence.

  Regardless, the exchange for coffee and leads to the animals was made silently again this year as Krispin shouldered her laden saddlebags and twitched her rifle from its scabbard, and I quickly took the beasts in the barn for untacking, rubbing down, and a hearty meal of grain mixed into the leftover
second-cut hay from the long winter. She followed at a slow mosey, wrestling the rifle into her arms like a squabbling babe while trying, with chilled fingers, to wrest the screw-cap off the thermos, dangling its plastic mug by a looped pinky finger through the small handle.

  The big mule, in his two-inch wide leather comfort halter, stood statue-still with patience as I hefted the saddle from the roan and loosed the bridle before directing the horse to the feed bunks to await currying. Krispin’s mule wore an old-fashioned sawbuck that she had carved specifically to nestle into the back of this animal. I ran my hand over the worn wood, admiring its warm lines and detail to fit before releasing the double cinches, breast strap, and brichen to extricate the rigging.

  Without prompting, the mule went to the side of Krispin’s gelding, sharing in their bountiful breakfast. I toted saddle then sawbuck one at a time to the tack room, returning with brushes, curry, and hoof pick. Krispin leaned against the open barn doorframe, eyes closed, breathing in the scent of her coffee.

  I watched her for a moment. Her head tilted over the mug as she inhaled deeply. The ten-X beaver felt hat hid her shoulder-length hair that usually escaped in unkempt straggles. She was wearing her familiar thick wool overcoat of red-and-black plaid with a sheepskin liner and collar. Her collar was pulled up around her ears as if early springtime had not deigned to touch her yet. Her chinks (short chaps) had new overlays of rugged leather crafted to look as if they belonged there. But even the overlays bore the marks of rope work that had chewed through the original layer of leather. The bottoms of her Wranglers were stacked atop serious Wellington work boots that showed no fancy stitching, except what surrounded the saddle that had been added as a buffer to her spur straps. And her spurs were simple, muddied, and quiet, with small, blunted rowels. She had shed her work gloves in favor of the warmth emanating from her plastic mug. My heart leapt at the simple joy she seemed to be taking from the cup of thick coffee.