by Cara Malone
She had already straightened all the magazines, and then the candy bars and the refrigerator full of soda at the end of her register. All of it took no more than fifteen minutes, during which time a few customers trickled into the store but none came to check out. Lisbon was a town of about thirty thousand people, most of them school-aged or employed during the day, and very few of them found reason to go to the store at one in the afternoon on a Tuesday. It made for long shifts sometimes.
Jessie sighed with boredom. Her feet hurt and the padded floor mat did very little to lessen the ache of being on her feet up to sixteen hours a day between her two jobs.
She turned her attention to tidying up the space behind the register, where plastic clothes hangers tended to get tangled and spare rolls of register tape were haphazardly stacked. Jessie began to take everything out of the cubby hole beneath the register to organize it, and behind the register tape she found a tattered paperback book.
Pulling it out, Jessie stifled a laugh at the cover, a cheesy romance bearing all the trappings of cliché – the long-haired, bare-chested man. The damsel with heaving breasts who clung to him. The horse. Jessie ran her fingers over the raised letters of the cringeworthy title – Master of Desire – and then with a roll of her eyes she chucked it on top of the register to finish her cleaning job. Some other cashier must have brought the book with her to sneak pages from it between customers, stashed it at the back of the cubby and forgotten about it.
Jessie tidied up the whole area, her eyes going back to the book again and again. She was sure it would be awful, like all cheesy romances were. She helped a customer or two, checked the time, and then there was nothing left to do. With a sigh and a quick glance around to make sure there were no managers nearby, she reluctantly picked up the book. It was better than staring at the clock, and she was a little curious about these romance rags that every other woman on the planet seemed to be obsessed with. What could be so great about a contrived love story between such stereotypical characters?
She flipped the book open to a random page near the beginning and began reading, ready to hate it. The next time she looked up from the book’s pages, though, a cashier was standing impatiently in front of her.
“Huh?” Jessie said, feeling a little disoriented as she realized how absorbed she’d become in the book.
“I said I’m here to relieve you,” the cashier said with a roll of his eyes. “Your shift’s over.”
Jessie looked at the clock and was surprised to find that it was already three minutes past five. “Oh, okay. Thanks.”
She looked at the book and thought about shoving it behind the register tapes again, but she’d become invested in the characters, and the last ten pages had been real nail-biters with the tension between the hero and heroine building to a fever pitch. Jessie slipped her thumb into the book to hold her place and then held it behind her back in what she hoped was an inconspicuous move as she squeezed past the cashier and went to clock out.
She had an hour before she had to be at the diner and Steve and Ellie were expecting her to come home for dinner in between like she usually did. But the moment Jessie climbed into her car at the back of the darkened parking lot, she opened the book again, tilting it toward the streetlamp nearby to read. Jessie didn’t know what had gotten into her – she always used to detest anything with a remotely romantic element, but she couldn’t just stop reading in the middle of the scene.
The hero – a Master-at-Arms in the Navy – had just learned that he was shipping out in the morning to a dangerous war that he likely wouldn’t come back from, and he was on his way to say goodbye to the woman he loved but who he was too pragmatic to marry. He didn’t want to leave her a widow, but he had to at least give her a suitable goodbye. She was a proper, chaste young lady, but they let passion win and fell into bed together.
Jessie could feel her pulse quicken as the pace of the scene sped up and the characters’ clothes fell away. She imagined the hero transforming into a woman as the Master-at-Arms’ hands played over the heroine’s bodice, and then she imagined the two characters becoming herself and Melody. Heat rose into her face, among other places, and she knew she shouldn’t be thinking like that but it was too late. She’d fallen into the pages of the book again and the rest of the world melted away.
The hero – Jessie – was trying to resist the heroine’s advances, telling her that it was a mistake to be together like this because it would only make the pain so much more exquisite were they to be separated by the ravages of war. The heroine – Melody – would abide by no objections, though, and she took the hero by the hand, pulling her into the bedroom.
The hero unlaced the bodice of the heroine’s dress, and then put her hand on her bare chest, tracing her fingers down her sternum and then over the soft flesh of her breast, and Jessie felt a jolt of pleasure course through her as her breath hitched.
She glanced around the parking lot, but there wasn’t a single car nearby and she was free to lose herself in this explicit fantasy. Her eyes scanned the words quickly and her pulse pounded in her ears.
The heroine continued to trace the hero’s hand down her stomach, and then she pressed her fingers between her thighs. The hero bit her lip as they both let out a low moan of desire, and then she pushed the heroine down on the bed, crawling in to meet her and bringing her fingers back to seek out that warm, deliciously wet place. The heroine’s back arched against the mattress and she reached for the hero, clinging to her in her ecstasy.
Heart pounding in her chest, Jessie unbuttoned her khakis and thrust one hand beneath the waistband, stroking her clit to the rhythm of the scene.
The heroine wrapped her body around the hero, her thighs clinging to Jessie as her hand continued to slide up and down over her and elicit cry after cry of pleasure. Just as she felt the heroine reaching the point of no return, the hero withdrew her hand and swung her leg over the heroine’s hips, straddling her and bending down to kiss the impossibly soft flesh of her lips just as she penetrated her with two fingers. The heroine turned her face to the pillow, an exquisite agony playing out across her face as she cried out and bucked her hips against the hero’s hand, and as the heroine came, so did Jessie.
Panting, she doubled over toward the steering wheel, her body contracting around her fingers, and the book falling into the foot well beneath her.
“Oh my god,” she whispered after a few moments spent composing herself and catching her breath.
In her whole life she’d never come that hard, nor had she ever been so helpless to pursue her desires, and as she buttoned her pants a strong sense of guilt washed over her. She should be home with her daughter and husband, not thinking about Melody like this. Jessie retrieved the worn paperback, tossing it onto the seat beside her with the intention of putting it back where she found it as soon as possible.
That had been a desperate moment, but she had to admit it felt good to let herself explore the idea of Melody, even if it was only in her head.
***
Jessie didn’t keep her promise to herself about returning Master of Desire – at least not right away. She kept the book for two more days, long enough to finish the story and commit a few impactful scenes to memory, altering the pronouns and characters to fit her preferences. By the time she closed the back cover and the hero and heroine walked away into the sunset, they had completely ceased to be the military man and his damsel in distress. They were Jessie and Melody, transplanted to war-torn eighteenth century America.
She had a hard time putting the book back because of that. It was an awfully cliché romance, but it had become hers in a way that no romantic film had ever captured love for her before. Usually, they just made her feel a little sick to her stomach because of how impossible they were to relate to – the last romantic movie she’d seen was The Notebook, which her best friend, Blaire, brought over on a day when Jessie was having a particularly bad bout of morning sickness and couldn’t get out of bed.
She was
engaged to Steve by then, and becoming aware of her attraction to women, and she ran from the room to be sick during the climax scene in the movie. Blaire blamed it on the pregnancy, which probably didn’t help, but it was more than that. Jessie felt so hollow when she watched that love story unfold. She already knew that a life with Steve meant she’d never get to know what it felt like to be so passionately in love.
Jessie took the book to her next shift at the grocery store, telling herself she’d tuck it away beneath the register, but it came home again with her in the oversized pocket of her ugly blue vest. It seemed like a tragedy to give it away – it was like giving away the version of Melody and herself that she’d created within its pages. What if they only existed within the pages of that book?
She kept it almost a week, and she felt ridiculous carrying the tattered paperback around, constantly afraid that someone would see the cheesy Fabio-on-a-horse cover and judge her for it, or worse – Steve might find it. But if she didn’t have the book, then all she had was a passionless marriage built around assuring the financial security of her daughter.
Then one day it occurred to her that there was a better way to get what she needed than pretending that the Fabio-type hero was a girl. On her lunch break, she went online in search of books whose characters matched the ones in her mind a bit better – ones that didn’t require quite so much gender-bending – so that she could finally put Master of Desire back into its hiding place behind the register tape.
Jessie’s heart was pounding as she typed the words ‘lesbian romance novels’ into the search engine, the first and only time she’d been explicit about her sexuality, and a couple thousand results came up. Jessie spent most of her fifteen-minute break reading synopses, hoping to find the perfect book to stand as a proxy for all the things her heart ached to do with Melody. In the end, she settled on a couple of promising novels and then she had to go back to her register.
The store had a pretty strict ‘no cellphones’ rule to go along with its other ‘no fun’ rules, and Jessie was forced to leave hers – and thus, the novels - in her locker. That was one benefit of the paperback – easier to disguise, easier to pretend it had been left behind by a customer.
Waiting out the last three hours of her shift turned out to be almost unbearable as Jessie wondered what was waiting for her in those lesbian romance novels. If Master of Desire had done so much for her, then these books must be even better.
Every time Jessie thought about them, her heart began beating a little faster. As much as she wanted to indulge her fantasies and explore a part of herself that had been closed off for so long, what she was doing felt wrong. She’d put so much effort into hiding Master of Desire from Steve, and even though she hadn’t consciously thought about it while she was downloading the books to her phone, it had occurred to her that it would be a lot easier to hide an ebook from her husband than a paperback. She knew he’d be upset if he saw what she was reading.
Steve was no bigot, but having a lesbian for a wife was bound to put strain on their relationship. Jessie knew from the moment that she found out she was pregnant that she and Steve would never be compatible, but because her ultimate goal was just to make Ellie’s life a happy one, it hadn’t seemed worth announcing her sexuality to the world. It had become a moot point the moment she accepted Steve’s proposal in the name of making a good life for her daughter.
Steve knew the level of intimacy in their relationship was almost at zero, of course, but in their five and a half years of marriage, he’d never guessed the reason. Jessie figured it was hard to see something when you didn’t have time to pay attention to it, and even harder when you didn’t want to see it.
She had no idea what effect it would have on their marriage if she were to come out about her sexuality now that she was beginning to explore it. Continuing to stay in a relationship with someone who would never want him back would be a tough conversation to have with Steve. She hoped he would see it from her perspective – it was all for Ellie, every decision she made up til now was for Ellie – but this was so far beyond the scope of any problems they’d had in the past, Jessie didn’t know what to expect.
The best thing would be for her to continue keeping the secret. If Melody had awoken something inside her that couldn’t be ignored, then the best she could do was relegate that part of her to fantasies that she kept hidden away from the rest of the world.
CHAPTER 15
Melody sat on a bench in the locker room while a dozen other dancers moved around her. They became a blur of tulle and silk, and Melody was feeling a little dizzy. She’d been sick all week, a stomach bug that seemed to work through everyone else in a day or two but which lingered in her. It didn’t matter how feverish she felt, though. Missing this audition wasn’t an option.
Neither was missing class, or her scheduled time in the practice studio, or her academic classes.
Melody threw up and then pressed a cold compress to her forehead in the dorm bathroom before dragging herself across campus to the auditorium this morning. She still felt a little sick to her stomach as she laced up her pointe shoes, and her fingers felt fat and clumsy. This was the last audition before Christmas break, the last opportunity to get out of the chorus and prove that she deserved to be here and all her time and effort, as well as and her parents’ money, was well-spent.
After she stuffed her blistered, sore toes into her shoes, Melody still had about ten minutes before her call time. She should use it to warm up, to stretch and practice her routine one more time, but all she could do was lean against the cool metal of the lockers and watch a few dozen girls bustle back and forth, getting ready to dance or packing up after their auditions.
None of them seemed half as concerned with the outcome as she was, and none of them was this sick.
Melody pressed her fingers to her cheeks, trying to derive a little coolness from them, and the sound of classical music filtered in from the stage. She felt her pulse quicken and something hot rose in the back of her throat. There were only two auditions ahead of her, and another bout of sickness seemed imminent.
“Melody Bledsoe?”
She turned her head, following her name. There was a woman standing in the open door with a clipboard tucked into her elbow, and Melody thought she looked wavy somehow, not entirely real. Or maybe it was just the fever.
“Melody?” The woman called again, and Melody raised her hand limply.
“I’m here.”
“You’re up next,” the woman said, checking something off on her clipboard. “Come to the stage now, please.”
“I’ll be right there,” Melody said, and then she watched the woman float through the door. It swung shut, and suddenly she felt very alone in this room full of people. Something lurched in her stomach and she dragged herself up off the bench.
Walking proved difficult. Her vision continued to be distorted and the locker room she’d become so familiar with in the last four months suddenly looked almost unrecognizable. With a great deal of effort, Melody found her way to the back of the locker room, and though she’d been looking for the toilet stalls, she found the showers instead. She went into the first one, drawing the curtain shut and allowing herself to collapse against the cool tile wall.
She just needed to cool off and she wanted to sit down, just for a moment before her audition. It felt like she was in an inferno even though her cheek rested against the cool shower tile, and in her half-delirious state, her hand found the cold water knob. She jumped as the water hit her face, icy and soothing as it soaked her leotard and ran into her pointe shoes, and as her legs gave out and she slid down the wall, her wrist caught on something sharp.
“Ouch!” She hissed, white-hot pain shooting up her arm as she slumped to the floor. She looked down and saw a bright red river flowing from her forearm and swirling down the drain.
She looked up and saw the culprit, an old metal soap dish affixed to the wall and broken off at an odd angle. Her arm caught on the jagged edge, s
licing open as she slid down the wall.
Melody looked back down at her wrist. It was alarming how much blood there was, and how calm she felt about it. She reflected curiously on the fact that her stomach didn’t hurt anymore, now that her body found something more important to focus on. The last thing she remembered was the pleasant realization that she would miss her audition, and she would never need to know whether she was a failure. She closed her eyes and let the cold water run over the open wound on her forearm.
CHAPTER 16
“Why don’t we talk about New York today?”
Dr. Riley was sitting in her customary position, chair turned toward Melody with her notepad in her lap, and Melody had been sitting pensively for the first ten minutes of the session. She’d been grumpy about work ever since Mary Beth and Jessie ganged up on her at the Halloween party, and she didn’t feel much like talking.
This was a mistake – Melody had learned pretty early on in her sessions with Dr. Riley that it was best to fill the silence with anything she could think of until the hour was up. If she did all the talking, she could direct the session steer clear of topics she wasn’t comfortable with. They’d only talked directly about New York once before, in her very first session, and even then it had been as brief and factual as Melody could make it.
“I’d rather not,” she said. “Can we talk about the fact that my kid sister doesn’t go a single day without needling me about the fact that I’m a failure who had to move back in with her parents?”
“Is this Starla’s session?” Dr. Riley asked, a little more sarcastically than was warranted, Melody thought.
“No.”
“Let’s talk about your breakdown,” Dr. Riley said abruptly, and Melody saw her pen dip toward her notepad. She knew Melody hated it when she took notes, like she was an animal being studied, but she also knew Dr. Riley had been itching to get around to this subject for a while. This was what Melody’s parents were paying her for, after all.