Best Lesbian Romance 2012 Page 6

  So is sugar, until it gives you diabetes. “Um, sure.”

  She slips her well-manicured hand in mine and snuggles against me. “I think that could be us one day.”

  I snort. We were them at one point. And that’s why we’re no longer an Us.

  She must have mistaken my reaction because she turns to face me, a serious look in her eye. “I know we didn’t work out before, but I want another chance. I’m such a different person now. I know we can have something special.”

  I start to speak, but she presses a finger against my lips. “You don’t have to answer now. Just think about it.”

  I catch the approving glint in Merrill’s eye and pull away from Kizzy. Raquel’s studying the menu, but her face isn’t as friendly as it was moments before. For some reason, my spirits lift just a little.

  We sit down and Merrill reaches for her glass. “Now that we’re all here, I want to make an announcement.”

  Here it comes, the moment of truth. My stomach feels tight and I wonder if I’m going to be physically ill.

  “As you know, Raquel and I have been together for eighteen months now. And they’ve been the happiest months of my life.”

  She pauses dramatically to beam at Raquel, who I’m pleased to see looks as ill as I feel.

  Merrill takes a deep breath before continuing. “I love you and I want us to take the next step.” She pulls a box out of her pocket and places it gently on the table. Raquel stares at it hypnotically as Merrill lowers herself to one knee.

  Beside me, Kizzy squeeze my arm. “Here it comes.”

  “Raquel, I want—”

  “Don’t do it!”

  It takes a moment before I realize the words came out of my mouth. And now that everyone is staring at me, I can’t take it back. And I can’t ignore it.

  My mouth feels like a desert and I’m super aware of my heart thudding in my chest. Half of me wants to curl up and die, but the other half is bitch-slapping me, daring me to grow a backbone and fight for the woman I love before it’s too late.

  “So maybe you’re right. I’m not the most open or demonstrative person.” Once I start talking, the words seem to trip over themselves to come out. “And I totally fucked things up between us and I know what you wanted to hear in my kitchen and I was too chicken to say it because I didn’t want to fuck everything up between us…and I guess that didn’t work ’cause I wouldn’t be here and I know you totally don’t owe me anything, even listening to me now, but I am asking, begging you. Don’t marry Merrill.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  From the corner of my eye, I see Merrill push back from the table. She looks pissed, but I’m only focused on Raquel, who’s staring back at me.

  “Danielle?” Kizzy whimpers, but I shake her arm off mine.

  “I love you, Raquel. Seriously. I always have.”

  “Raquel, what the hell is this?” Merrill demands.

  Raquel opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Finally, she manages an “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, I do.” Merrill jerks up so quickly I think she might hit me, but instead she throws some money on the table. “Don’t think I didn’t know you were after my girl. Fuck, Dani, this is pathetic, even for you. Grow up and stay the fuck away from us.”

  She starts to storm out, muttering something I can’t hear, and tugs Raquel’s arm. Kizzy sweeps behind them with a scathing backwards glance. “So selfish,” she mutters, her beautiful face twisted in a scowl. Even worse, I can feel everyone else in the restaurant watching us, like we’re some characters in a bad play.

  “She’s right, you know.”

  Raquel speaks so quietly, at first I think I imagined it.

  Merrill stops in the middle of her tirade to stare at her lover. “Raquel, what are you saying?”

  Raquel’s eyes lock with mine as she frees herself from Merrill’s grasp. “She’s right about us. We’d never work out. We hardly do now.”

  “Wait, what? You can’t be serious. You’re leaving me? Because she made some stupid public speech?” Merrill seems caught between anger and confusion as she stares at Raquel.

  “No, this has nothing to do with her. We’re just not meant to be.” She turns to face her now-ex. “I’m sorry, Merrill. I should have said something ages ago.”

  Merrill looks back and forth between us, then shakes her head and throws up her hand. “Whatever, bitch. This is so not worth it. Come on, Jess, let’s go.”

  That leaves me and Raquel together in the middle of the restaurant, staring at each other.

  “Impressive speech.”

  I can’t tell if she’s angry or not. “I meant every word.”

  She tilts her head as if she’s considering me, then gives me the first smile of the evening. “You owe me a ride.”

  My heart speeds up as I step toward her. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

  Our mouths meet and I kiss her like we’re the only people in the room. The patrons, waitresses, everybody has faded away. I try to put everything I’m thinking and feeling into the kiss and I think she understands because she’s giving everything back to me.

  “Take me home,” she whispers as we break apart. “Now.”

  I stroke my beautiful Raquel’s cheek and grab my purse. “As you wish.”

  Note to Self: Sometimes, just sometimes, things actually work out in your favor after all.

  Note to Self: New relationship loving beats ex-sex any day.

  A TIME AND MATERIALS JOB

  Anna Watson

  I like going into homes early in the morning. Usually kids are just waking up, parents are making breakfast, and it always smells good. Sometimes people are doing a whole bang-up breakfast—bacon, eggs, pancakes, the works—and sometimes it’s just coffee and toast, but it always smells friendly and cozy, full of life and family.

  Her house was completely breakfastless, though. No cocoa on the stove, no oatmeal bubbling, no glasses of juice on the table. Her two little girls, about ten and seven, were standing in the hall with their backpacks on, fighting in low, tired voices.

  “I know math about an infinity better than you!” The older one’s auburn hair was held off her face by two barrettes made out of blue ribbon. “You don’t even know two plus two, you’re such a baby, you’re so fat.”

  “Nuh-uh, I do so know. And plus also, I’m a way better speller than you, you can’t even spell, you couldn’t even spell variety, come on, try and spell it, I know you can’t!” The younger one, with her curly strawberry-blond hair, jounced her Hello Kitty backpack aggressively and glared at her sister.

  “Can so. V, e, r…”

  “Loser! Loser!”

  Their mom glanced over at them wearily and said, “Girls, please stop. I know you’re hungry, but we’ll pick up a bagel on the way to school.”

  The kids shut up for a moment to look at her, then started back in, even more nastily. I saw the older one pinch the younger one. They weren’t at their best right now, but I thought they looked like pretty nice kids.

  “Please just go ahead and start,” she told me, taking her car keys from a basket on the hall table. “You have my cell?”

  I nodded, smiling, and watched them leave, the girls still going at it. Then I got to work. She had a great 1930s bungalow—she’d just bought it, and there were still boxes everywhere—but she was worried about the wiring and I was impatient to see what we were up against. I was alone today because Randy, my apprentice, had the flu. I started in the attic, pulling up floorboards and beginning to map things out. I’ve found the most interesting things under attic floorboards, like old pictures, vintage toys, desiccated food, and this attic was no exception. I set aside an old hat pin, a wooden puzzle piece with half a daisy painted on it, and a metal soldier with the paint rubbed off—I guess he was probably made out of lead. Usually homeowners get a kick out of seeing that stuff.

  Even though it’s dirty and can be frustrating, I love rewiring old houses. It’s highly perso
nally satisfying to make a house safe for a family. It’s funny, because people go around baby-proofing like crazy, making their kids wear helmets to ride their tricycles, but never give the wiring of their houses a second thought. I always tell people, “Take electricity seriously! It could save your life.” I was humming to myself, getting to the heart of the matter, which was, as I’d suspected, a lot of knob and tube shit as old as the house, when I heard the front door open downstairs. I thought she would call up to me, see how it was going, but the phone rang just as she came in. I heard her answer.

  I never work with a radio on the way a lot of electricians do. I figure you’re already in someone’s intimate space, knocking through walls, poking and prying, all obnoxious with your presence and power tools, so there’s no need to add insult to injury by cranking Melissa Etheridge or whatever. So I could hear her voice clearly coming up through the laid-open attic floor.

  She was talking to a lawyer and she was really upset.

  “But he knows the girls do better with the other schedule!” she was saying, and it sounded like she was trying not to cry. I kept working, but I couldn’t help hearing the whole conversation. Maybe I wanted to hear it. I heard her start to cry halfway through and keep on crying after she hung up. In fact, I finally turned on the drill, even though I didn’t need it, just to give her some privacy. When I turned it off, her car door was slamming and then she drove off. I looked over at the little clutch of things I was keeping to show her. I’d just added an exchange—a junction where the wires meet. Some previous owner, some Mr. Fix It, had done his own wiring, and how he’d done it is he’d kept it all nice and neat and modern-looking anyplace you could see it, but back inside the walls where it’s hidden, he’d sloppily spliced new wires onto old, a total safety disaster. At this particular junction, the wire had shot a spark. You could see the little charred place on the metal. Lucky for whoever was in the house at the time, the wire had jumped back and hadn’t started a fire. But it could have. It sure could have.

  The next morning, it was the same thing. The tired, angry kids, the sad-eyed mama. She sure was beautiful, though. She had that alabaster skin with a sprinkling of freckles, big ones, that probably used to embarrass her when she was a kid. Her eyes were brown with these almost-transparent lashes. The first time I met her, she was wearing mascara, but today she’d forgotten, or just not bothered, and the way it looked, it made her eyes seem really vulnerable, not to have that barrier. If you looked closely, you could see her lashes, delicate and pale. Fluttery. The most amazing thing, though, was her hair, this curly, frizzy, thick, alive mass of red hair. Not just red, but all shades of red, I mean, from golden and bronze to dark auburn. A person could get lost in hair like that.

  That day, she didn’t come home after she left with the kids, but the lawyer called mid-morning, and because she had the volume up on the answering machine, I could hear what he said. I went and turned the thing down as soon as I could get there, but from what I heard, it didn’t sound too good. It sounded like her ex was a real motherfucker, is what it sounded like.

  The next day, Randy was back on the job, and things went a lot more quickly. She’s a wiry, skinny little dyke and can get back into crawl spaces better than me. I’m a butch of substance, or at least that’s what my last girlfriend called me. Big around and tall, too, which helped when I was coming up in the trade, I mean with guys who didn’t like women who wanted to be electricians. Or maybe just didn’t like women, period, and for sure not gay ones. Well, sometimes it helped because they’d keep their distance. Other times it was like it pissed them off even more that I wasn’t small and dainty or whatever, and they were even shittier to me than ever. Fuck them, though, because I’m a better electrician than they’ll ever be.

  Friday when she came home—Maeve, that is, that’s her name—Randy and I were working in the girls’ bedroom, surrounded by Polly Pockets and stuffed animals. This bungalow rewiring was turning into a lot of work, which I had told her at the beginning it could. I told her this one was a time and materials job and that I wouldn’t have a very good idea of any of it—how long it would take, how much it would cost—until I got under the floor and into the walls to see what we were dealing with. She said that was fine and didn’t kick up a fuss the way some people do. Trying to boss you around, thinking they know something about it. Maeve said she was prepared for whatever it cost, that she was determined to make the house safe. She seemed to trust me and Randy, and plus, she was interested, even though she was obviously going through a hard time. I took her around Friday afternoon and showed her everything we were doing. She asked great questions and got a kick out of looking into the walls and seeing the insides of her new house. At one point, I brushed against her when I was handing her the fixture I mentioned earlier, where the wire sparked, and afterward in the truck when we were driving away, Randy was messing with me, saying I got all red in the face. I punched her on the arm and told her to mind her business, but it was true. Being so close to that beautiful, hurting woman was doing something to me.

  Monday morning, the girls weren’t there. When I asked her about it, she turned even paler than usual and tears came up in her eyes.

  “They’re with their dad this week,” she whispered, and I could have kicked my own ass all the way around the block. What was the matter with me? It was just I somehow wanted to let her know I liked her kids, that I thought they were cute, but here I was just helping her heart break even more. Seeing that raw, desperate pain on her face, I just about lost it. I wanted to help her so bad. I know it’s corny as hell, but I wanted to rewire her heart the way I was rewiring the house, put in good, clean, safe wire where old, faulty, dangerous ones had been. I started to tear up a little, too. She saw and gave a little laugh.

  “Do you have kids?” she asked. So I told her about being with Alison, who I guess you would call my first wife. We were together six years, and I helped her raise her little boy, Mason, right up until she fell out of love with me and kicked me to the curb. She still let me see Mason, though, and he and I are still tight. I even learned how to text on my damn cell phone so we could stay in touch now that he’s in college. That made her laugh, and we talked about technology for a little bit, and then she started telling me about her girls, Kiera and Laney. Randy came back from a supplies run, took one look, and just clumped upstairs. I would have to join her pretty soon, but I liked watching Maeve talk about her babies. I liked how her face flushed and her eyes lost a little bit of their sadness. She was telling me about how Laney, the younger one, loved animals so much that she used to dig in the garden to find earthworms to kiss and how Maeve had been worried she would get some weird disease from it. I was laughing, thinking about that little curly-headed toddler smacking on those worms, when Maeve shook her head and looked up at me.

  “I’m keeping you from your work,” she said. I wanted to reach out and touch her cheek, but I just shoved my hands in my pockets and shrugged. She said she had to make a phone call and I went upstairs to join Randy, who smiled at me and shook her head, biting back some joking remark, I could tell. She knew how lonely I’d been since the last woman I’d been dating turned out to be one of those polyamory lesbians and told me she wanted to start seeing someone else along with me. Live and let live, is what I say, but I guess I’m old-fashioned when it comes to myself—monogamous and all that. We parted on good terms, but like I said, I’d been lonely. I’m not that good all on my own. I like to have someone to relax with at the end of the day, someone to spoil, someone I can talk about the world with. And here I was falling for a straight woman. A beautiful, brokenhearted straight woman.

  Which is why I choked on my beer when Randy and I spotted Maeve dancing by herself at Women’s Night at the local gay bar a few months later. We’d finished the job a long time ago, and I’d managed to completely fail to ask her out. I’d wanted to call her, many times, but I never managed to dial. Usually, I’m not so shy, but I guess I was so worried that she would say no, let me
down gently in a nice, straight-lady way, that I just couldn’t get myself to do it.

  Randy smacked my shoulder and gave me a double thumbs up. My heart had started pounding the moment I saw her, but I tried to play it cool.

  “She’s probably here with a man,” I told Randy, wiping foam off my chin. “Slumming or something.”

  Randy laughed. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think she’s sitting with her.” She gestured to another really femmey woman who was at the bar flirting with the bartender, a virile, tattooed number with about a thousand piercings.

  “Do you think they’re together?” I asked. Now my stomach was hurting, too. Randy laughed again.

  “Somehow I doubt it,” she said, still looking over at the bar. I looked back over there just in time to see the bartender lock lips with the femme and not come up for air for a long time.

  “Yes!” Randy and I said together, clinking glasses. I looked out on the dance floor and found Maeve again. She was dancing kind of self-consciously, but there was also an excitement about her, an electricity. I wondered if she’d ever been to a gay bar before.

  “Well, go ask the lady for a dance!” urged Randy. “What are you waiting for?”

  I was just waiting, I guess, prolonging the moment, watching Maeve close her eyes and lean into the beat, the colored lights flickering over her sweet face. I was waiting, just watching her spin and boogie.

  The song ended and she opened her eyes, searching for her friend, who was still kissing the bartender. Sometimes I wonder how that girl keeps her job. I got up and waved, gesturing to the chair beside me Randy had hastily vacated.

  Maeve came over, out of breath from dancing, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Her lips were very soft.

  “The girls were just asking about you this morning,” she said, sitting in Randy’s chair. She picked up a napkin and fanned herself. “It’s hot out there!”