Oh. My. I put down the can of Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper. Jaye’s hold is loose enough for me to turn around and face her, and I feel a shiver of excitement at having those gorgeous eyes inches from my own. My ability to speak abandons me. I swallow hard and find it again. “But I’m your cousin.”
She totally brushes that off. “Distant cousin.”
“Distant enough?”
Her expression starts to smolder. “My dad’s parents are second cousins. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip are second cousins, through both sets of parents, and it’s no big deal. Third cousins? Definitely distant enough.”
Point made, she leans in, touches her lips to mine, and my world explodes.
Jaye’s kiss is soft, a simple, lingering touch. But the sensations radiate through my body like a lightning storm, simultaneously waking up every single nerve ending and shocking me into stillness. I’m pretty sure my lips return the kiss. But the rest of me is more or less paralyzed, in the most amazingly good way.
Jaye stops before I hit total meltdown. I’m not moving, and she notices. “That was okay?” she says, a little uncertainly.
I swallow, head still reeling. My heart rate has tripled. But I manage to stutter “Uh, uh-huh.”
Her uncertainty vanishes. “Then I can kiss you again?”
I literally cannot form a coherent reply. “Uh-huh,” I squeak out.
This time my nerve endings overrule the shock enough to let me be a more fully involved participant. The next few minutes evolve into a long, slow, deliberate exploration of incredible intensity. I’ve never gotten enough kisses in my life (does anyone?), and I savor this one like a rare and exquisite sunset. Sunrise. Day at the beach. Night on the mountains. All of the above, all at once.
We don’t go crazy, we never quite ratchet things up to wildly passionate, but the heat steadily increases. Jaye and I are completely into each other. I know I’ve never kissed or been kissed like this, and I don’t want to stop anytime soon.
But I’m the one who pulls back, finally. I get a glimpse of Jaye’s face, lost in the moment, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life. Then she opens her eyes and comes back to planet Earth.
“Wow,” she says.
“Yeah.” My tone is a mere echo of hers.
She leans in again, this time to nuzzle my ear. “I’ve wanted to do that since we met.”
“You have?”
“Mm-hmm. I’d like to keep doing it.” She trails a series of soft kisses down my neck, and I fight to keep my knees from buckling, which means I hold Jaye more tightly, which plays right into her plans. Her mouth finds mine again, and its touch is pure fire.
“Can I stay?” she asks.
The words, and the implication, finally wake up something practical in my brain. I feel Jaye’s arms around me, feel the firm, muscular lines of her body where it presses against mine. To take this further, to have sex with this woman, would be nirvana. Touching her already is. But, brain says to heart, how much will this mess us up?
Is there something to mess up? “If I say yes, is that it? Is one night all you want?”
Jaye doesn’t let me go, but her body tenses, and her up-til-now confident expression falters. I have no idea if the time she takes to answer me is a good or bad thing.
Finally, she asks “What do you want?”
“I don’t know.” She looks crushed. Quickly I elaborate. “I mean, I write romances. I don’t live them. I’m not used to this.”
Jaye envelops me in a close but gentle hug. I rest my head on her shoulder, let her presence encompass my body, my aura, my entire being. I feel protected, and safe, and the feelings are utterly wonderful. Suddenly I’m fighting back tears. If anyone has ever held me like this before, I don’t remember it.
She tightens the hold a little. “I know I surprised you.” Understatement of the month. “But I’ve been thinking about touching you since February.”
“You never said anything.”
“This is the first time I’ve had you alone. You can’t text a kiss.”
I file the line away to use in a book someday, assuming I ever set something in the 21st Century, and gently caress Jaye’s cheek. “Thank you. You’ve made an old recluse’s night.”
“You’re not old,” she says promptly.
“But I’m definitely a recluse.”
“Because you want to be?”
“Sometimes.”
We both pick that as the signal to step back, and we end up with Jaye’s hands on my hips, my hands on her shoulders.
“Can I see you tomorrow and try this again?” Jaye asks.
“I leave for Denver in the morning. I have business back home.” This is actually true, though now I’m wishing it wasn’t because I sense something inside her backing off.
“You’re not trying to let me down gently, are you?”
“Are you kidding? I’m giving you the chance to let me down gently.”
“Why?”
God, am I fucking this up or what? “Remember what I said about my depression? You need to know that story. I can come back next weekend.”
“We’re in Portland next week. And Washington the week after.”
Ouch. I rest my forehead against Jaye’s chest. The comfort of the contact almost negates the disappointment of not seeing her for three weeks. Wait—what am I thinking?
I lift my head, raising my eyes to hers. “We can talk on the phone if you want.”
Her expression brightens. “Do you Skype?”
“No. But I think my computer has FaceTime or something.”
“Perfect. Are you sure you have to leave town?”
I sense I’m making a mistake again, but stand my ground. “I think we both need to think about this. I want you to be sure you know what you’re getting into.”
And I, too, want to figure out what I’m getting into.
Chapter Three
Monday morning I’m back in Denver, standing in front of my mirror, post-shower, verifying that I have not turned into a runway model. Eyes, still light brown. Hair, still beauty-salon brunette with the gray roots starting to show (hmm, time to make an appointment with Krystal, my stylist). Face, still fairly wrinkle-free, but some definite age lines around my mouth and eyes. Body, decent shape thanks to a nearly-obsessive swimming routine (I have in fact already hit the pool this morning, up at dawn for an hour’s worth of laps), but gravity has taken its toll, and I’m certainly nothing to call Playboy and rave about. I’ve always considered my features pleasant—and unremarkable. Definitely fifty-two years old. Definitely not a runway model.
What on Earth does Jaye Stokes see in me?
I beat myself up for half of my drive home Sunday: I should have stayed, I should have slept with Jaye, I should have stayed, I should have slept with Jaye, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Those kisses on Saturday night were amazing, but we’d parted awkwardly and I felt like it was my fault.
Jaye, though, said all the right things to make me feel better when I called her Sunday evening. She insisted I let her know when I arrived home safely, and I obeyed. She understood she’d rushed a little. She wanted to talk to me every day. She wanted to know my story. And she wants more than a one-night stand.
And by the gods, I think, as I dry my hair and get dressed, I want more, too. A sweet, intelligent, sexy curveball has been thrown into the carefully constructed compromise of my life, and I don’t know whether to succumb to delicious temptation, or duck out of the batter’s box.
Surely this can’t come to anything. Maybe Jaye is simply satisfying a curiosity she’s yet to articulate, something quickly answered and left behind. After all, there’s the age difference, my hermit tendencies, the fact we live in different states. I can probably hope, at best, for a lovely spring-to-autumn affair, something I’ll treasure and from which I may get a few immortal lines.
I roll my eyes at this thought and smirk at my reflection in the mirror. “Yeah. Right,”
I say out loud.
My ringtone of the month is Kelly Clarkson singing about getting stronger, and it sounds loud and clear as my phone goes off. I consider there are no coincidences, check the Caller ID, and feel mild disappointment that it’s not Jaye.
“Toni.”
“Rachel.” Toni, like me, is Texan. Like a lot of Texans, she does not waste words. “Please tell me you have yet again revised your Wikipedia page?”
The Fyrequeene’s Wikipedia entry is a running joke. Literally. Toni had someone at her company make up an article with the usual Born There, Lives Here, Did This, Did That, and now Writes Books, etc. Dull. Also, far too revealing since it mentions my real name. I read the article once and immediately decided to see if it was true that anyone could revise a Wikipedia page (it is). I took my name out and remade my bio into a “raised by this cute family of feral cats” and “lives in a small cabin on a crystal mining claim west of the Moon” sort of thing. The page now accurately lists my writing credits. Everything else is fantasy. Toni is not amused, but there’s nothing she can do because each time she has the entry “fixed,” I change it again.
Not helping Wikipedia’s credibility, I know. But life’s too short to pass up a chance to maintain my privacy and have fun at my own expense.
“I did some work on it last night, yes,” I tell her. I’d been too restless to sleep after the long drive and my spirits-lifting phone call with Jaye.
Toni quotes: “‘Shadow Woman for the NWSL’?”
“It’s a soccer thing.”
“Are you saying you finally slept with Nickerson?”
“You know me better than that.”
“Sadly, yes. Change your mind about the book’s ending yet?”
“Maybe.”
As a rule, lesbian publishers want happy endings. My latest effort centers around the Triangle Fire of 1911, which killed eighty-three people, mostly young immigrant women (early Twentieth Century disasters for four hundred dollars, Alex!). The first unhappy ending I’ve ever written in my life kills off the lovers. Toni is not pleased, and we’ve been arguing over me changing it since January.
“You yourself said you write books because—wait. What?”
“I said maybe. I’m thinking about rewriting it.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. I could even be working right now except I’m talking to you.”
A suspicious puzzlement comes wafting over the cell signal. “Are you sure you didn’t sleep with Nickerson?”
“Positive. In fact, I turned down the chance to have mad passionate sex with a bright and sexy soccer player not named Nickerson.”
Silence. I press my ear to the phone, hoping not to hear the sound of a fainting body hitting a floor. But Toni is made of stronger stuff.
“What the hell happened in Kansas City this weekend?”
I laugh. “I think I entered an alternate universe.”
“Right. You’re coming over for dinner tonight, and you’re going to explain everything.”
“Is Paula cooking?” Paula is Toni’s long-time partner. She was my air traffic supervisor for a while and the reason Toni and I met in the first place. She’s also a goddess in the kitchen.
“No. She’s in San Diego on business.”
Bummer. “Then why don’t you come over here. I’ve got spaghetti. But come tomorrow. The sexy soccer player is calling tonight.”
“Aren’t the painters coming today?”
Oh, yeah. Any minute, as a matter of fact. “Yep.”
“I’m not having dinner in a disaster area. My place. Tuesday at seven. I’ll have something delivered. Bring wine.”
I had not lied to Jaye when I said I needed to be at home today. I was coming to the long-awaited end of several remodeling projects to make the house in Denver my home. I’d had the basement finished, bought some new furniture, replaced the carpet in my loft, and installed a large bay window and window seat there to take advantage of its view of the mountains. New paint, inside and out, was the last step, and this job had been scheduled two months ago with a woman-owned company of fabulous reputation. Sexy soccer player or no, I wasn’t going to put it off.
The painting crew arrives at ten a.m., right on schedule, and they get right on taping off trim and prepping wall surfaces. I spend the next hour talking to Teri, the company owner, going over the colors and plans we’d discussed previously.
“Should be less than ten days if the weather is good,” she tells me. “Most of the work is prep. Painting will be a snap. Have you got a place to stay? We get kind of noisy.”
“Bose headphones and the basement,” I tell her. The basement has already been painted. “I promise to keep out of your way.”
She nods. “We should be painting by tomorrow. We’ll do the interior first, which will take a couple of days. You probably don’t want to be here then. Paint fumes are powerful. Stay with friends, or treat yourself to a hotel or something.”
Hotel? The tiniest spark of an idea flares in my head. “Good idea.”
After we’re done talking, I watch as she efficiently coordinates with her two workers before she departs for another job. I go down to my basement hideout to work on the revised ending to my book. The day passes quickly. I emerge only for lunch, buying pizza for the crew and myself. When they knock off for the evening, I come up to find an alien terrain of ladders, tarps, covered furniture and edging tape all over the place. It’s a mess, but a mess with purpose, and I smile, anticipating the end result.
I nuke the last two slices of pizza for dinner, then go back to the ladder-free, tarp-free comfort of the basement and settle in to call Jaye. She’d sent me an email with detailed instructions on using FaceTime, so I’m able to get her gorgeous face up on my computer almost right away.
“Hi, Jaye.”
“Hi, Rachel.”
“You look great.”
“You look better.”
I shake my head to clear the sappiness. “Haven’t changed your mind yet?”
“I’m not going to.”
We spend a couple of minutes talking about how our days went before Jaye gets serious. “Please tell me about the depression.”
I’d planned on doing exactly that, but Jaye getting right to the point still startles me. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”
She shrugs. “I’m going to tell you it doesn’t matter, so we may as well get it out of the way now.”
I zone out for a moment, take a deep breath, and come back to the computer screen. “Have you ever been depressed?”
“Yes,” she says immediately.
“Have you ever been depressed for more than a week at a time?”
“Yes.”
I believe her, and wonder briefly what her story is, but I’m not done yet. “How about for thirty-five years?”
Now she blinks. “I’m only thirty-one.”
I nod my head slowly. “I’ve suffered from depression since I was seventeen. Since before you were born. I don’t come with baggage, Jaye. I come with a big fat steamer trunk, and it goes with me everywhere.”
Jaye’s turn to take a deep breath. “I’m listening.”
Okay.
Depression, for some, is a chronic illness. I’m one of those unlucky ones. I can still remember waking up every morning of my junior year in high school, getting out of bed, and feeling misery descend on me like a thick black blanket. I was enveloped in a shroud of darkness and insecurity, filled with shame about my sexuality, guilt that I couldn’t “get over” being sad all the time, and battling constant thoughts of suicide. A voice from within this shadow regularly told me I was worthless and hopeless and perverted, so it would be a big favor to everyone if I found a gun and blew myself away.
I didn’t grow up in a state or a family where I could talk about this, so I dealt with it alone. Somehow I survived high school and escaped to Lubbock and college where no one knew m
e, and things eased up. On the surface, I did okay. I got a bachelor’s degree, earned and held a responsible job, even ventured out to a few gay bars once I moved to Colorado. I was functioning, I was fooling people, but even at my best the darkness hovered over everything I did.
I kept hoping to find a lover, a woman who could help me banish the hell I was living in, but of course, I didn’t. Either my own social ineptness or the depression managed to sabotage every attempt I made at building my sexual encounters beyond brief affairs. By my mid-thirties, the misery was so awful I was thinking about suicide all the time, though I never actually attempted it. Still, the darkness combined with the stresses of being an air traffic controller finally became too much, and something inside of me snapped. The resulting nervous breakdown cost me a year of my life and very nearly my job. But it also forced me into therapy, forced me to find better ways to cope.
When I came out the other side I was eating better, exercising more (this is where swimming became an essential part of my existence), sold on the benefits of having a therapist, and recovered enough to work again. But the depression, while better controlled, wasn’t gone, and I knew it never would be. I could still hear that shadowy voice telling me I was worthless, so I made a conscious decision to stay single. Inflicting this pain on anyone else didn’t feel fair.
“After the breakdown,” I say in conclusion, “I managed to make an okay life for myself. I got serious about my writing and found it a good counterbalance to the depression. If I could bring characters together and have them fall in love, find happiness in their lives, then what my own life lacked became easier to deal with.”
I shut up, finally, and watch Jaye’s image. The FaceTime connection is almost HD quality, which is great eye-candy wise but also shows me her very serious, sober expression. Well, I think silently, better to know now if she’s going to run. I won’t blame her one tiny little bit, and maybe we can stay friends.
“Nobody ever came along to challenge your solitude?”
“Not after my breakdown. I never gave anyone a chance.”
“Until now.”
Game Changers Page 5