***
By the time the waiter came to clear our dinner plates, Gemma was rubbing her forehead. I’d lost count of how many times she tried to get Cormac’s attention. Secretly, I was pleased Cormac was such a storyteller.
When the waiter finished, Cormac said, “Did you read our letter last week about Grandma Mavis and her dog?” He locked eyes on me. “She took the dog to the vet because she was absolutely convinced he’d swallowed her wedding ring. When I caught wind they were going to operate on the poor creature, I had to confess that I took it to have it resized for—”
Gemma balled up her fists, snapped her eyes shut, and belted out, “I’m a lesbian!”
Several people near our booth craned or swiveled their necks to spot the source of the admission. Many stared slack-jawed. No one in sight moved or uttered a word. If this were a piece of art, it’d be titled Gemma’s Lesbian Proclamation.
Thank God the sorority chicks had left, or this news would spread faster than a herpes outbreak.
The song “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” played in the background, and I had to suppress a nervous giggle. I twirled a mood ring around my middle finger. It was blacker than black.
Cormac’s surly frown faded, but the new expression was completely devoid of any emotion.
Ava tutted and picked up a stray fork. Slowly, she ran her thumb over the tines, and I wondered if she planned on stabbing herself in the chest to end her suffering. If it were my mother, I would be ducking, fearful she’d plunge it into my eyeball. I shuddered, imagining the sucking sound of her yanking out one of my peepers.
Gemma studied her father’s blank demeanor and then her mother’s determined face.
I wished for a magic carpet to sweep us away. The clamor around us sluggishly returned to the normal pitch. Except at our table.
Gemma’s cheeks flushed, paled, and then flushed again. The silence at our table was excruciating, and I desperately tried to formulate a joke to ease the tension, but all I could get out was, “Ur…”
“Okay, sweetie,” Ava said after several seconds had scratched by. She fidgeted with a loose thread on her turquoise sweater, and I wondered if she wanted to unravel it and start over from scratch.
“Okay?” Gemma’s eyes narrowed as if trying to detect a trap of some sort with her mother’s two words and conduct.
I was, too. I examined the petite schoolmarm frame to sense whether her use of the word sweetie was a ploy to lull Gemma into thinking everything was all right and then POW! Off she’d go to a straight conversion camp that zapped inmates for impure thoughts about people of the same sex.
Cormac rubbed his jawline, as if calculating the correct words for a verbal tightrope. “It’s not such a huge shock, dumpling.” His fingers tapped on his chin as he forced a supportive half smile that didn’t look at all natural.
“What do you mean?” Gemma asked in a shaky voice.
“I think what your father’s trying to say is we suspected, dear.”
Both of them seemed sincere. My initial thought that this was a trap started to ebb.
“You thought I was gay?” Gemma’s tone suggested she couldn’t wrap her mind around their reaction.
I was flummoxed. This was the perfect outcome for the lesbian bombshell, and Gemma was upset that they weren’t shocked. I wanted to shout, “What’s wrong with you? Your parents aren’t crying or dousing you with holy water. Chalk this up as a victory.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a lesbian.” Her father bobbed his head supportively.
I glommed onto the table with all ten digits to stop the room from swirling. What the fuck? All day I’d been preparing for different scenarios and thinking of things to say to comfort Gemma. Not once did I picture Cormac proclaiming there was nothing wrong with being a dyke. What was wrong with him? And why did everything always have to work out for Gemma? I wanted to be her savior for once. For her to cry on my shoulder. I cringed. What was wrong with me?
“Gemma, gay, straight, it doesn’t matter.” Her mom patted Gemma’s hand. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Look at Aunt Ruth,” Cormac threw in.
“What about Aunt Ruth?” Gemma asked.
Cormac raised his eyebrows, doing his best to force the meaning telepathically into Gemma’s mind.
“Aunt Ruth is a lesbian?” Once again, there was a hush at the tables nearby.
“Of course. She and Aunt Hannah have been together for years.”
“Hannah!” Gemma palmed the top of her head. Was she trying to keep her cranium from exploding?
“Your aunts are incestuous lesbians?” I blurted.
Cormac’s boisterous out-of-character laugh snapped Gemma out of her funk.
“That’s funny!” Cormac slapped his thigh. “Incestuous lesbians. Wait until I tell this story in the shop. I like you, Tegan.”
I clapped both hands over my mouth, stifling my shock. Would he tell them about Gemma, too? My parents would probably never speak to me again if I told them, and there was no way in hell they’d confess to their friends and neighbors.
Gemma noticed I was struggling with the Ruth and Hannah connection. “They aren’t related to each other or us. Everyone calls them Aunt Ruth and Aunt Hannah. They own Violets, a sewing and yarn shop.”
“Oh,” I said, now wondering if the word Violet was code for lesbian in Keller, Nebraska. Nothing was making sense.
“Does everyone know about them?” Gemma spun her head Exorcist style back to Cormac.
“Mostly. Really, I thought you knew. It’s known, but not talked about.”
Ava cleared her throat. “Not because there’s anything wrong with it.” She locked eyes on me. “It’s how we are. If we don’t talk about you, that means we accept and like you.”
I nodded as if that made total sense. Inside, I was screaming and starting to wonder if I would ever understand anything after this dinner. The creepy theme song for The Twilight Zone invaded my mind, getting louder and louder. The dee dee DEE dee and then the bongo drums repeated over and over until Rod Sterling’s voice announced, “You’ve entered the lesbian Twilight Zone.”
Chapter Two
Gemma and I trudged back into the dorm, kicking off our snow-caked Doc Martens in the small entryway of our room. Her parents were staying at the Best Western across the street, and Gemma planned to have breakfast with them before they drove back home.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked, rubbing her hands together and then blowing into them. Before I had a chance to respond, she was filling the teapot and flipping on the illegal hot plate. Smuggling in this possession was one of Gemma’s rare rebellious acts, though she only used it for the teakettle because she was addicted. Once I’d asked why she didn’t heat the tea water in the microwave, which was permitted by the university. She’d been aghast by the mere suggestion, and her squished-up face had proven I’d committed a tea sacrilege. I didn’t understand, but I was a coffee gal who wasn’t afraid to drink instant in a pinch. It wasn’t until I met Gemma that I knew there was such a thing as loose leaf tea. She claimed larger tea leaves were better for the body. I wasn’t a health nut, but slowly she was converting me to the soothing drink.
Still bundled up in coat, hat, and scarf, I sat down heavily on the Laura Ashley comforter I had begged my mother to buy.
“You okay, Teeg?” Gemma shucked her jacket and unwound her hand-knitted Cornhusker scarf, a Christmas gift from her grandmother last year.
I nodded while rubbing my tongue back and forth over the gap in my teeth, a nervous tick that drove my mother insane.
Gemma squatted in front of me and clasped both of my hands. “What’s wrong? You’re doing that tongue thing.”
“I can’t believe it,” I mumbled.
“Believe what?”
“Ruth and Hannah…”
She laughed. “I can’t believe it. All these years, I never knew I lived in one of the most
progressive cities in the country.” Gemma snatched the wool hat off my head. “You’re turning beet red.” Next, she shook my right arm and then my left out of the coat.
“And your parents didn’t care. Not at all. They suspected even!”
She carefully draped the coat over a desk chair.
The kettle whistled, and Gemma busied herself making tea. She proffered my “Same shit different day” mug then and gripped her Nebraska one with both hands.
“Can you tell me why you’re so upset?” Her voice wasn’t accusatory, considering she was the one who had just come out to her parents and not me. Gemma never got around to telling them about us, which was a huge relief, I thought. She was curious. Maybe she was slightly concerned by my reaction to her parents taking the news much better than expected. Hopefully, she didn’t have an inkling I had been secretly wishing the announcement would crash and burn a tad. I was tired of being the spazzy one all of the time. And now that it had gone so well with her folks, would she push me to tell mine?
“I’m in shock, I think.”
Gemma nodded, giving me time to sort my thoughts, but it was hard to locate them, as if everything I thought I understood had shattered to bits and was waiting to be reassembled into logical patterns.
She unbuttoned her flannel shirt, revealing a Rugrats T-shirt given to her by her youngest sister for her nineteenth birthday. I loved this side of Gemma: sweet, sentimental, and playful. But right then, even her cuteness couldn’t knock me out of my ill mood.
“Don’t get mad, but I thought they’d take the news differently. Not disown you or anything, but not simply say, ‘Hey, it’s cool that you’re a dyke.’ What I witnessed tonight—it doesn’t happen that way, not that I have any experience, but seriously, it’s not how I imagined it. Not at all.”
“They didn’t say it that way.” She laughed.
“No, they were even nicer about it. Accepted you completely without shedding a tear or preaching. Fuck, my mom has been pointing out for years how I’m different from all those around me. And not in a kind way. For her, being different is a sign of weakness.” I motioned to my Carhartt jacket on the chair. “My mom knows more about fashion trends than I do. My Doc Martens, baby doll dresses, overalls, skorts—she buys everything for me. Individuality is not a word, but a curse.”
Gemma wrapped an arm over my shoulders, nudging my head against her chest. “Are you scared to tell your folks?”
I clutched her T-shirt, strangling Tommy Pickles’s image. “I don’t see them ever accepting it. Accepting me. What I am. Never.”
“But you thought the same about my parents.” I knew she was trying to talk me off the ledge, but her hopeful tone and shoulder squeeze irritated me. She would never be able to understand what it was like growing up with my mother. When I was eight, I had needed glasses, but Mom had insisted I wear contacts. The memories of sitting in the optician’s office for hours, tears streaming down my cheeks, my mother’s lip snarl, and the poor lady trying to steady my hands as I failed over and over to place the lenses on my burning corneas were forever etched in my mind.
“Your parents are nothing like mine. Your parents aren’t like any parents I’ve met. All of you live in a warped version of The Waltons.”
Gemma’s body tensed.
“I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m jealous. So fucking jealous.” Gemma’s tension slipped away as quickly as it appeared. She kissed my cheek. Quietly, we sipped tea, not speaking.
“I’m going to hop in the shower.” No matter what, she showered every night before going to bed.
“Okay. I’m going to sit here and try to figure out this thing called life.” I half-heartedly smiled.
Her eyes crinkled, and she bit her lower lip.
“Kidding. Go. Enjoy.” I waved her toward the bathroom.
***
The creak of the bathroom door alerted me that Gemma was done in the shower. She was normally quick, but it didn’t seem possible that several seconds had whizzed by, let alone enough time for Gemma to shower. Was I trapped in a time warp?
I had to pee and bolted upright when Gemma shimmied into the room towel drying her hair. Before we kissed the night of the blizzard, she usually dressed before leaving the bathroom when I was around. But tonight, she was stark naked.
“Well, hello,” I said lamely. I practically had to go on a hunger strike for weeks to convince my tightwad father to splurge for the dorm room with a private bathroom. Not once did I envision this perk.
“Hello.” A confident smile and a seductive wink knocked all thoughts about what had transpired earlier at the restaurant out of my head. “Going somewhere?” she asked in a sexy tone.
“Pee.”
Gemma chortled. “Don’t let me stop you.” She stepped back to give me space.
I couldn’t peel my eyes from her bare skin, even though we’d spent the past several days in bed exploring each other’s bodies. “I don’t think I have to go anymore.”
“Are you sure?” She sidled up next to me, and I inhaled the Irish Spring scent radiating from her skin.
“Yep.”
Our lips met. All the muscles in my body relaxed. So did my bladder, almost. “Hold that thought.” I placed a finger on her lips. “I really do have to go.”
As soon as my butt hit the seat, the pee gushed out. “I can’t believe it,” I muttered.
“Can’t believe what?” Gemma shouted from the other side of the door.
I finished my business, stepped out of the bathroom, and washed my hands at the sink by our closets before answering. Gemma stood behind me, still towel drying her hair.
“You. I can’t believe you.” I flipped around and squished her aquiline nose with a finger.
“What about me?” Her face inched closer to mine.
“Strutting out of the bathroom in your birthday suit.”
“Considering everything that’s happened this weekend, I decided why not? You don’t like it?” she teased. “At least this time you aren’t running out of the room screaming your head off.”
I ignored her dig about the other day, considering I still felt foolish. “Like it? I love it. It’s a new house rule.”
During our first floor meeting back at the start of the academic year, the resident assistant had suggested we set house rules to help us ease into our new living situations. I’d laughed it off. Gemma had taken it seriously and forced me to sit down that night to craft the rules. She’d jotted all of them down on a pad of paper. When we’d finished, she even taped the final product onto her closet door.
Gemma grabbed a pen off her desk. “Shall I add it?”
“Maybe just make a mental note. We don’t want visitors stripping down. Not all of them, at least.”
“Ah, good point.” She snapped the cap back into place.
“Not sure I could handle seeing April in all her fake glory.” Rumor had it she’d already had a boob job, which was her high school graduation gift from her mom, who was engaged to a plastic surgeon. I wasn’t sure what bothered me more, that she’d gotten a boob job or that her mother’s lover had sculpted April’s new breasts. Yuckers!
Gemma’s eyes transformed. “You over your shell shock, yet?”
“Not yet. But totally willing to table it for the night.”
She crossed her arms. “And why’s that?”
“Because my girlfriend is smoking hot and standing naked right in front of me.” I tugged her arms apart, exposing perky breasts. I traced the outline of her butterfly tattoo.
“They’re tiny,” she whispered, and embarrassment crept into her voice and body language.
I circled a nipple with my finger, making it hard. “They’re beautiful.”
She closed her eyes, and I pushed her up against the closet door.
“Oh,” she squealed.
“You like?” I didn’t wait for her to speak. I captured her lips with mine. Her tongue forcefully pushed its way in. That was an
swer enough.
It was hard to believe that only days ago we hadn’t ever kissed, let alone fucked. Now, we couldn’t spend thirty minutes alone without getting it on.
I had her pinned against a poster I got for free from the health clinic during orientation week. My mom was horrible at keeping track of records, and I had to get re-immunized before I could attend any classes. They were handing out posters that stated chlamydia wasn’t a flower. A photo of a colorful bluish green mushroom-looking thing caught my eye. How could bacteria associated with an STD look so beautiful?
Gemma pulled away, panting. “You’re thinking of the poster, aren’t you?”
“Sorry, it’s too funny considering you’re naked—”
She rolled her eyes, not a trace of anger on her beautiful face. “You. Naked. Now.”
I saluted her. “Yes, ma’am!”
After tearing my shirt off, Gemma reached around to unhook my bra and then gently kneaded my breasts. “I wish I had tits like these.”
I stepped back to strip out of my jeans and panties. “What’re you talking about? I’d kill for small boobs. You can sleep on your stomach. You have no idea how good you have it.”
“It’s overrated.”
“Trust me, having a C cup in the seventh grade was not fun.”
She nodded but continued to ogle my now double-D jugs.
“In the seventh grade, I was flat as a board, and it wasn’t much fun when boys ran their hands down my back, checking to see if I was wearing a training bra,” she said with a faint blush.
I nodded, recognizing her pain. “The grass is always greener.” I cupped a breast. “You aren’t flat now.” My thumb and forefinger pinched her nipple.
A wicked smile appeared, and Gemma slipped a hand between my legs, separated my lips, fingered me gently, and then sucked the juices.
“Feeling frisky now that you got the lesbian monkey off your back?” I wiggled my eyebrows.
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s the effect you have on me.” Gemma lifted my chin with a slender finger.
I sucked her finger into my mouth.
Her eyes closed, and she moaned. “Kiss me.”
Girl Love Happens Boxed Set: Books 0-2 Page 13