Double Grades

by Kristine Robinson

  She raised one of her slim eyebrows. “More than you know,” she said coolly. “But not all of us have a masochistic complex, you know.”

  Heat flared to my cheeks. I supposed I should apologize, but I was too angry. Not really at Gabi, but at the therapist for springing this on me so suddenly. My brain boiled with new emotions, ones that I’d kept closed off for so long. It was overwhelming.

  “Connie, that’s enough,” the therapist said firmly. “Gabi is here to help you.”

  “Nobody can help me,” I mumbled.

  “Well, yeah, not with that attitude,” Gabi replied.

  I glared at her, but couldn’t think of an adequate retort. I pulled my gaze back to the therapist. “All right, fine. How is looking at the spitting image of my dead best friend supposed to help me?” I gritted my teeth and forced back the impending tears.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a brief flickering of pain in Gabi’s eyes. But before I could say anything, the therapist was speaking.

  “I thought it’d be a good idea for you to talk to someone who’s going through the same thing as you, Connie. Perspective and a shared experience can work wonders for a person’s mental well-being. Simply put, I want you to start spending time with Tina’s sister; not just here, in my office, but in the real world in a natural setting.” She glanced at the two of us. “Talk to each other. Connie, allow yourself to really feel your emotions. Don’t hold anything back, no matter how much it hurts you.”

  How in the world was this a good idea? Panic fluttered in my chest. How could I survive this?

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Gabi said quietly. “Nobody’s forcing you to do anything.”

  As I gazed into Gabi’s eyes, I saw again the pain lingering within. With a jolt, I realized that I was looking at the one person (other than maybe Tina’s parents) who did know exactly what I was going through. Maybe Gabi blamed herself for Tina’s death, too. She was clearly dealing with it better than I was. Maybe there was something to gain from this, after all.

  I sighed and fidgeted. Finally, with reluctance, I said, “Fine. Okay. Let’s give this a shot. What can it hurt?”

  The therapist looked smug, and Gabi gave me a tiny smile.

  Oh, hell. This was a terrible idea.

  But a part of me actually longed to get acquainted with Gabi. It would almost be like speaking with my long-lost friend again.

  ***

  “The food here is terrible,” Gabi said as she sat down in the booth, “but the drinks are okay. After a couple of margaritas, you won’t care that the fajitas are dry.”

  “I can’t drink,” I said automatically as I sat down opposite her. “I’m only nineteen.”

  Gabi laughed. “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting.”

  I mumbled a response. I was still in no mood to talk.

  But I couldn’t just leave. I couldn’t resist the temptation to be around Gabi. I drank in her presence like a cool glass of water. Incredibly, unbelievably, I felt a tiny bit better around her.

  The waiter came and took our orders. I picked the first thing on the menu that I saw. I wasn’t hungry in the slightest.

  I was shocked when Gabi ordered an entire pitcher of margaritas. “I told you, I can’t drink,” I said as the waiter sauntered away.

  “I know. It’s for me.”

  “All of it?”

  “Yeah. Why, is that a problem?”

  I met her challenging gaze. “No.”

  She smiled, breaking the tension. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from her perfect white teeth and her soft, full, ruby-red lips. Against my will, I imagined myself kissing those lips, running my tongue teasingly across them and listening to her pant with desire. My heart raced and unease ran through me. What the hell was wrong with me? She was my dead friend’s sister!

  The smile faded from her face. “You agreed to talk,” she said, fiddling with her menu and staring at the tacky Mexican décor. “We’re away from that therapist now, so let’s talk.”

  So soon? My stomach lurched. I wasn’t ready.

  “You first.” Her eyes met mine.

  What on Earth was there to say? My lips seemed to be frozen.

  “You can talk to me,” Gabi said, her voice low and encouraging. Her hand inched across the table and grasped mine. Her skin was warm and soft. “I lost her too, you know.” She glanced away from me and let go of my hand.

  My lips trembled, and finally the words that I’d been restraining for a month burst out. “But it wasn’t your fault.” I swallowed back the guilt and misery that welled up inside me.

  Gabi openly stared at me, her mouth slightly open. That was it, then. Now she knew. She knew who was to blame for Tina’s death, who practically pushed her into her own grave! She probably despised me.

  “Jesus, is that what’s been eating you up?” she finally asked incredulously. “You really think it was your fault?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but at that moment the waiter reappeared with plates of greasy-looking food. He sat my plate of quesadillas in front of me, and gave Gabi her drinks. As Gabi poured a glass and drank the entire thing in one go, I pondered over her words.

  “Of course it was my fault,” I said dully. “We got into this fight…this huge fight…I never apologized to her. A week later, she died.” I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood. I wasn’t going to cry in front of Gabi if I could help it.

  There was an odd expression on Gabi’s face. It was almost pitying. “I know how you feel. Taking the blame for her death…it helps make sense of the entire thing. If you can blame yourself, then you won’t have to question what other motives she might have had for taking her own life. And, in a way, it feels kind of good, doesn’t it? Torturing yourself with the guilt. It’s like, I don’t know, a penance for being alive. Survivor’s guilt.”

  My breath caught in my throat. What was she saying? It sort of made sense, but…

  “Of course it was my fault,” I said through clenched teeth, and I told her all about the fight between Tina and I. “There was this girl in the club,” I said. “She was absolutely beautiful. Really tough-looking, lots of tattoos. Sexy, really. She was interested in both Tina and I. We got into an argument about who could have her for the night…” I shook my head and let out a deep, pent-up sigh. “It was stupid. But we were really mad. I told her she was selfish.” I stared at her defiantly, waiting for her to tear into me and blame me for her sister’s death.

  But she only smiled sadly. “I felt the same way as you at first. I really did. But I’m telling you right now, it wasn’t your fault.” She drained her second margarita. Her eyes were a little shiny and her voice a couple of pitches higher than normal, but otherwise showed no signs of getting drunk. “Connie, Tina killed herself because she had chronic severe depression and a manic-depressive personality disorder, which she hid from my parents and me. We all knew she’d been depressed for a long time, but we never knew it was that bad. She wasn’t getting the mental help or the medicine that she needed. You had nothing to do with it.”

  My eyes widened. “What? I had no idea!” But even as I said it, pieces began to settle into place in my mind. For about a year before she committed suicide, Tina had seemed, well…off. Every time I asked her what was wrong, she’d simply shrugged and said she was stressed. It had been senior year, after all, what with finals and senior projects and graduation and college applications, and of course I’d believed her. I hadn’t even questioned it.

  “But it’s still my fault,” I persisted. “I should have known. I was her best friend.”

  Gabi’s lips thinned as she frowned. “If it’s any consolation to you,” she said icily, “I was her sister and I didn’t know, either. If you’re to blame, then so am I.”

  Somehow I didn’t like the idea of Gabi blaming herself. “No, it’s not your fault.”

  “Then it’s not yours, either,” she said simply.

  The implications of what she was saying finally hit home. But
my mind rebelled, insisting that I was to blame. Even if Tina did have severe depression, surely our fight had been the last straw.

  “Listen,” Gabi said in a low voice. She leaned forward and grabbed my hand again. My heart skipped a beat. “Tina loved you like a sister. She never stopped talking about you. You meant a lot to her, and I can tell you right now that she would be heartbroken to see you in this much pain. You need to let go.”

  It was the same words that practically everyone had been telling me for weeks now. Useless advice. But it didn’t seem so now coming from Gabi. Something in my chest loosened.

  “It’s not that easy,” I said. My lips were numb. “It still hurts. It hurts worse than anything I could have ever imagined.”

  Gabi lowered her eyes. “Oh, I know,” she said quietly. “Trust me, I know. But you’re not doing yourself any favors by holding onto it any longer than you have to.”

  What she was saying made sense, but I didn’t have the faintest clue how to let go of the guilt and the grief.

  “In any case,” Gabi said as she swirled her drink around, “you don’t have to go through it alone. I’ll be your friend, Connie. You can talk to me whenever you want. We can get through this together.”

  “I…thank you. You have no idea how much that means to me.” At that moment, I felt lighter inside, as if a great toxic weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I still hurt, I still hurt a lot, but I felt better.

  I almost felt alive again.

  “How do you do it?” I asked Gabi suddenly. “How do you deal with the pain?”

  She smiled at me. It was a strange smile. She drained her glass; almost the entire pitcher was gone. “We all have our ways,” she said simply.

  I stared at her glass. I didn’t like how much Gabi was drinking, nor the way that the alcohol hadn’t even seemed to affect her at all. It suggested that Gabi had done quite a lot of drinking lately, enough to build up a resistance to it.

  But Gabi was right. We all have our ways.

  As we bid each other goodbye and made plans to meet up again soon, I wondered if Gabi might just be my way.

  Chapter Three

  As the weeks went by, I saw a lot of Gabi. We met up after my shift at work. Sometimes we went over to my house, more often we grabbed dinner or drinks, or went to the mall. By mutual consent, we avoided going over to her house. I wasn’t sure if I could bring myself to see Tina’s house again. I spent so much time there when Tina was alive, and I wasn’t ready to face the pain that seeing it again would bring.

  But being around Gabi wasn’t nearly as painful as I’d feared; in fact, the more time I spent with her, the better I felt; like a deep wound slowly healing. Gabi was like her sister in many ways, but she was also her own person and not just a carbon copy of Tina, as I was quickly beginning to realize.

  It made the fact that I was quickly falling for her that much more bearable.

  At first, I tried to fight the growing attraction towards Gabi. Whenever I was around her, my heart raced and my hands shook, and I tried without avail to push away the delicious fantasies swirling in my brain.

  The dreams first began about two weeks after first meeting up with Gabi.

  In the first one (and there were oh so many more afterwards, nearly every night) Gabi lay on her back on a sandy, deserted beach, wearing nothing but a pair of skimpy denim shorts that were unbuttoned and soaked with sea-spray. Her tanned skin glistened with baby oil, and her lips were moist and parted. Her eyes, glittering with passion and desire, found mine.

  “Connie,” she purred. I knew it was only a dream, but damn! This was the most vivid one I’d ever had. I couldn’t take my eyes away from her firm, perky bare breasts. She arched her back, thrusting them up higher. My eyes dipped down her smooth, flat stomach, to the waistband of her shorts, which were unbuttoned. I caught a peek of her hot-pink panties, and I shivered with a delicious wave of pure lust.

  “Touch me, Connie,” she whispered huskily, and I smiled to myself. Who was I to deny this beautiful angel anything?

  I knelt down in the sand beside her, my movements slow and deliberate. When my lips brushed against hers, she drew in her breath in a quick gasp. The hunger consumed me, and I slipped my tongue in her mouth. She tasted sweet, like cherries, and oh my fucking God, it was heaven.

  I cupped her soft, firm, round breast, running my thumb slowly across her pink nipple, and she sighed with pleasure. I massaged it, teased it, felt it harden underneath the ball of my thumb. I caught it in between my thumb and forefinger and rolled it around, pinching it a little. She bit her lower lip, and oh dear lord, she was so fucking sexy.

  I trailed kisses down her throat, across her collarbone, and my lips grazed her nipples before I finally moved back up to her soft pink lips. She gasped for more, and I smiled devilishly at her.

  Oh, I’d give her more, all right.

  My fingertips traced her smooth, flat stomach, the curves of her hips, and her eyes were bright and starry as she let out a whimper against my lips.

  She was driving me wild!

  My fingers dipped lower, and her breathing grew rough and ragged as I slipped my hands underneath the waistband of her panties, dipping between her thighs, and oh fuck, she was so soft and smooth and wet!

  I swirled my fingers around, and her moans were music to my ears.

  “Make me come, Connie,” she whimpered.

  Oh, fuck yes.

  The waves crashed against the beach, their power echoing the roar of my own burning hunger as I knelt down in between Gabi’s parted thighs, slipping her panties off and tossing them on the sand. My eyes were glued to her. Her lips were plump and swollen, and glistening with the evidence of her desire.

  My mouth drifted down, my tongue darting in between her smooth, dripping wet, clean-shaven folds, and oh fuck, she tasted so sweet, like honey. She tossed her head back and let out a deep, husky moan as I slipped my tongue back and forth across the top of her lips, tracing slow, deliberate circles in her sweet wetness. The taste of her, so sweet and delicious, filled my mouth and intoxicated my mind, and as I increased my tempo, her soft moans and gasps and squeals increased in pitch and frequency. She ran her hands through my hair, gripping it and pressing me against her more urgently. She tossed her hips, and her thighs began to quiver. Her climax was approaching, and oh fuck yes, she was going to come--

  Just like that, my dream shattered and I jerked into a sitting position. I was drenched with sweat, and tremors of delight coursed through my body. I was achingly wet, my panties hot and soaked. I let out my breath in a shuddery sigh as disappointment overtook my pleasure. It had been such a good dream; I wished it was real.

  I dreamt of Gabi every night from that day on.

  I felt so guilty; surely I had no right to feel this way, especially not towards Tina’s sister. I swore to stop thinking about her.

  But it was futile. Gabi was incredibly sexy; she had a tight college girl’s body, and with her waterfall of shimmering blond hair and bright hazel eyes, and her soft, kissable lips, it was hopeless.

  But it was so much more than that. Gabi was smart, and witty, and funny. But most importantly, she was helping me heal.

  I began to live again. I wore makeup and actually tried to make an effort to get through the day. Sometimes I even talked to my parents. I was still grieving, still dealing with the loss and the guilt, but it was easier. And one night, as I was falling asleep, I jolted awake as I realized that I had gone most of the afternoon without thinking about Tina, for the first time since her death.

  One Monday afternoon, about three weeks after first agreeing to talk to Gabi, she called me and asked if I wanted to go swimming with her.

  “Sure,” I said casually, even as my heart pounded at the thought of her in a tiny bikini.

  Then I caught myself, and cautiously I asked, “In your pool?” My heart sank. I spent so many summer afternoons swimming with Tina in her pool. The thought of going back there without her, splashing and having fun and taki
ng indecent peeks at her sister…it seemed more than wrong.

  “No,” she said quickly, and it seemed to me that she was thinking the same thing. “Community pool. Who knows, maybe we can see some hot babes.”

  My heart leapt in my throat. “Uh…what?” That was new to me. She already knew I was a lesbian, of course, but her?

  Was I going to be in luck?

  Then I immediately shut that voice down. I couldn’t think about that, no way.

  “Don’t act so surprised,” she said with a little giggle. “I was in college, remember? It’s practically written on the acceptance letter that you have to experiment.”

  All through the drive over to the community pool, I had an internal battle with myself. Should I or shouldn’t I?

  I met her at the edge of the shimmering water, which in this heat was already crowded with swimmers. I was already dressed in a white bikini (and for a split second I thought I saw her eyes lingering on the swell of my chest, and my heart about stopped), but to my disappointment she was dressed in a t-shirt and long basketball shorts.

  “You’re not planning on swimming in those, are you?” I asked jokingly.

  She looked uncomfortable. “Why not? I have a bathing suit underneath.”

  I smiled. I was going to get those clothes off of her one way or another. My days were unbearable enough as it is. I was allowed a cheap thrill here or there, right? Besides, my dreams needed new material. “I think it’s in the rules that you have to wear a bathing suit,” I said, pointing at the long list of rules pinned up by the lifeguard tower.

  “Really?” She squinted at the sign.

  “Yeah, definitely.” I actually had no idea. Probably not. But maybe she wouldn’t look too closely at the sign.

  She bit her lower lip, then sighed. “All right, fine.” She bent down and stripped off her clothes.

  Wow. With difficulty, I restrained myself from staring at her too hard. Her skin was the perfect shade of summer bronze, and the silver bikini clung to her curves, leaving very little to the imagination. A silver piercing glinted at her belly button, and her golden hair fell in soft waves across her shoulders.