More Than a Kiss

by Layce Gardner

  More Than a Kiss

  by

  Layce Gardner & Saxon Bennett

  This is a work of fiction; names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Square Pegs Ink

  Text copyright © Layce Gardner & Saxon Bennett

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without the authors’ permission.

  Editor: Kate Michael Gibson

  Katemichaelgibson.com

  Cover designed by Lemon Squirrel Graphics

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  Jordan Falls Out a Window

  This story takes place in the lovely state of Oregon in the city of green, politically enlightened hipsters who love coffee, trees, and have the most amazing system of bike trails. I am describing Portland, of course. There’s music and museums and a humongous book store and the ocean is nearby. It is April, the star of spring, the season of love. Very little of this has anything to do with the story, but I wanted to let you know that it is a good travel destination especially in the spring. (And the bureau of tourism paid me for this advertisement.) The people in this story like Portland and liking where you live makes for happy people. However, the people in this story are not too happy because they are still looking for love. And their errant search for love is the point of this tale.

  Disclaimer: No trees were harmed during the making of this book.

  Meet Jordan March. Jordan lived in the Piedmont historic district in an old Victorian house four stories tall that had belonged to her grandmother. Jordan was an artist at heart. Unfortunately her heart couldn't pay the electric bill or buy groceries, so she labored as a writer and illustrator of children’s books. She had three children’s books available to buy on Amazon. These books had mostly good reviews. However, her sales numbers did not reflect the mostly 4 and 5 star ratings. Her books kept getting edged out by her competitors, Jamie Leigh Curtis and John Lithgow. She has a tendency to get upset over that, so it's best not to mention it.

  Jordan was a sapphist. She was also lonely. She hadn't had a girlfriend for a year. And she had talked herself into thinking she liked it that way. You see, Jordan didn't know she was lonely. She thought she was in a slump. Two slumps actually - a creative slump and a sexual slump. Jordan had a theory that stated that creative juices and sexual juices flowed from the same fount. If one dried up, so did the other. She hadn't written or drawn anything decent in 276 days. She hadn't been laid in 277 days. You can see how she came up with her theory.

  Jordan’s greatest fear was that she wasn’t a great artist. That the bright flame of artistic passion she felt burning in her breast was actually only heartburn from all the coffee she drank.

  At the beginning of this story, Jordan was sitting in her attic studio, bent over her drawing easel with chalk smudged across her forehead and oil paint spattered on her arms. She was surrounded by paint cans, piles of raw lumber and stacks of drywall because her crumbling Victorian house was in the throes of remodeling.

  Jordan was drawing and muttering to herself about Jamie Leigh Curtis and Activa commercials when a remote control car careened around a corner, balancing on only two wheels. It flipped over twice and miraculously ended up on all four wheels. It sped off again, hitting maximum speed within a few feet and popped a wheelie without slowing down. It hit a bump, skyrocketed in the air, performed a slow-motion somersault and landed upright in just enough time to crash into a wall.

  Mr. Pip jumped to his feet and shrieked. He arched his back. His tail went rigid. He bared his fangs and hissed. The little remote control car backed up, slowly turned to face Mr. Pip and accelerated. The cat screeched and leapt onto the drawing table, knocking over a glass of iced tea.

  Jordan jumped to her feet as the tea splashed all over her lap. "Dammit!" She grabbed the nearest book, a dog-eared, yellowed paperback copy of Moby Dick, and threw it at the speeding car. She had not been reading Moby Dick. But she had tried to read it several times over the years. She had even gotten so far as the chapter on A Bosom Friend, but couldn't make it any further. Not one to give up though, Jordan kept the book on her to-read pile right next to her easel on top of the copy of Catch-22 that she couldn't get through either.

  So, Jordan threw Moby Dick at the car but only succeeded in taking out another hunk of crumbling drywall. In the space of three seconds, the car had attacked the cat and the cat had attacked the tea and the tea had attacked Jordan's lap and now Jordan was attacking the car.

  Jordan yelled, "Edison! I'm trying to work up here!"

  Sorry!" Edison yelled to Jordan. "I’m trying to fix it!"

  Meet Edison Burnett. Edison was short and rather plain looking, but not without her charms. As the French are wont to say, she had a certain je ne sais quoi. Edison tried to overshadow her plainness by dressing and behaving oddly. She was under the mistaken impression that the stranger she was, the more people would love her - like how people with lousy comic timing think that the louder they say the punch line the funnier it is.

  Edison was Jordan's ex-lover and still-roommate. Actually, classifying her as an ex-lover would be overstating the case. Edison and Jordan had only had sex once and Jordan didn't remember much about it as they had spent the evening sampling what was left in her grandmother’s abundant wine cellar. Despite the wine and the drunken sex, Jordan and Edison remained best friends.

  At this point in the story, Edison was sitting in her bedroom, two floors below Jordan's attic studio. She sat in a rolling office chair in the middle of her dark laboratory wearing a pair of sunglasses that weren't really sunglasses. They only looked like the type of mirrored sunglasses that cops always wore in the movies. They were actually monitor screens. Edison held a remote control in her hands and was moving the little joystick in tiny circles with her thumb. Edison had invented a remote control that you could control from a distance of up to one mile. By installing a teeny tiny camera on the front of the remote control car, she could see from the car's point of view on the monitor in her sunglasses.

  Edison had invented dozens of things. All of which were abject failures with the exception of sex toys. Edison was quite well-known in lesbian circles as the mother of sex toys. She thought this invention may be her best one to date. And if she could just fix the glitch that made the camera see things in reverse--left was right, right was left and sometimes up was down and vice versa - then she could patent her invention. Edison was ironing out the bugs on the long-distance remote on the car. If she could master the car, then she was going to up the ante and use it on a vibrator by connecting the glasses to the fiber optic network to the gadget itself. She could then market the item to long-distance couples. That way a lesbian could sit in her hotel in Paris and make love to her partner in Omaha.

  Though, as Jordan so eloquently pointed out, "Why the hell would a lesbian in Paris want to hole up in a hotel room to have weird long-distance sex through a camera when there's all those sexy French girls who are notoriously bisexual?"

  Edison believed in her idea, though. She thought it was a breakthrough in the adult toys market and one that would put her on the map right next to Steve Jobs. That is, if Steve Jobs didn't work with computers and instead worked with women's personal massagers shaped like the male organ.

  While Jordan was upstairs with a tea-sodden lap, Edison was frantically working the remote control and seeing things on the sunglasses monitor upside d
own. She didn't know if the car was upside down or if something had happened to the camera in the car and it was upside down. Then again it could be another glitch in the glasses. She pushed the little joystick on the remote control to the forward position. Nothing happened. Maybe the car's wheels were stuck.

  Edison jumped when she saw the face of Mr. Pip in a gigantic close-up in her glasses. She yelped. His face appeared gargantuan this close-up. It was like sitting in the front row of a 3-D movie. Mr. Pip bared his teeth and hissed, spraying feline spittle all over the camera. A giant cat paw swiped at her. Edison screamed, toppled over backwards in her chair and the remote control skidded across the wooden floor and under the bed. The force of the throw wedged it between the bed post and the wall with the joystick stuck in the 'Go' position.

  Meanwhile, upstairs in the studio attic, Jordan was mopping up the tea spill with a crusty paint rag when she heard a loud crash from downstairs that rattled the paint cans and shook the already crumbling plaster.

  "I'm okay!" Edison yelled.

  The little car was turned upside down on the carpet, its wheels spinning crazily. Mr. Pip crouched in his attack position, eyeing the car from the safety of beneath the drawing table.

  Jordan was angry enough to kick Edison in the butt. But since she couldn't kick her friend, she did the next best thing. She threw down the rag, marched across the room and kicked the little car. It flew across the room, smashed into the wall, bounced, rolled over twice and landed on all four wheels. The wheels spun for a second, then dug into the carpet and the car popped a wheelie and took off.

  That wouldn't have been so bad except the car was aimed right at Mr. Pip. Mr. Pip's eyes widened in horror and he turned tail and ran.

  The car gained on him.

  Mr. Pip ran in a circle and jumped over the table.

  The car went under the table.

  Mr. Pip jumped over the sofa.

  The car went under the sofa.

  Jordan ran across the room to head the car off.

  The car caught up to Mr. Pip and ran over his tail. Mr. Pip howled.

  "Run, Mr. Pip, run!" Jordan yelled.

  Mr. Pip screeched, dug his claws into the carpet and sprung forward.

  The car followed.

  Jordan jumped in front of the car. It crashed into her leg. She yelped in pain, grabbed her shin and hopped on one leg in a circle.

  Mr. Pip jumped up on the drawing table safely out of reach of the car. The car rammed into the table's legs. Mr. Pip squalled and jumped, shredding Jordan's art work with his claws. Confetti flew in every direction.

  "Edison! I'm going to kill you!" Jordan screamed.

  A streak of gray fur that was Mr. Pip ran by Jordan with the car in hot pursuit.

  "My joystick is stuck!" Edison yelled back. "I'm not responsible!"

  Jordan chased the car in circles around the room, cussing with each breath. Every time she almost caught the car, it would either change direction or disappear under the sofa.

  Like in an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, Jordan chased the car; the car chased Mr. Pip; the car chased Jordan; Jordan chased Mr. Pip; and Mr. Pip got confused and chased his tail.

  Edison ran in circles in her bedroom. She was seeing what the car camera saw: Cat butt; Jordan butt, shredded paper flying, more cat butt, under the sofa, over the rug, Jordan's foot; cat face. She worked frantically to unstick the joystick as she spun herself in circles chasing the car in her monitor. Then she got dizzy and toppled face-first onto her bed.

  Back in the attic studio, the melee continued until Jordan officially put an end to it. She hadn't played soccer on her high school team for three years for nothing. She brought her leg back and as the car raced by, let loose with a kick that Mia Hamm would have admired.

  The car sailed out the open window.

  Goal! Jordan celebrated with fists pumping the air and a dance that involved several exaggerated pelvic thrusts.

  She stopped dancing when she heard a whirring noise behind her. She turned around and the car bashed into her toes.

  How could that be? She had kicked the car out the window. Hadn’t she? If it wasn't the car she kicked, then what was it?

  "Mr. Pip!" she screamed. She ran to the open window and leaned out. "Mr. Pip!"

  "Meow!"

  Jordan looked up. Mr. Pip was dangling from a tree branch right outside the window. He looked like that inspirational poster from the 1970's. The one with the kitten hanging from a tree limb with the caption "Hang in there, baby."

  Jordan cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, "Hang in there, baby! I mean, hang in there Mr. Pip! I'll be right there!"

  Edison ran into the studio to find Jordan leaning out the window and talking to Mr. Pip. Jordan reached out the window, stretched her arm as far as she could, but her fingertips were about a foot too shy.

  Edison took off her sunglasses. She blinked her eyes and shook her head and the dizziness subsided. "What're you doing?" she asked.

  Jordan leaned further out the window. "Mr. Pip is dangling from the tree branch. He's going to fall if I don't grab him first."

  “How’d he get out there? Why is he out there?” Edison said.

  “I kicked him. It was an accident,” Jordan said defensively. “This is all your fault.”

  “It’s my fault you kicked the cat out the window?”

  Jordan threw a leg up on the window sill and reached out again. She still needed another four inches. She held on to the window sill with one hand and leaned out further.

  Edison dashed across the room and grabbed Jordan by waistband of her shorts. "What're you doing?"

  "I'm going to rescue him. What does it look like?" Jordan said.

  "You're three stories up! It's too dangerous!"

  Jordan looked over her shoulder at Edison. "You want to do it?"

  "No."

  "Okay then, shut up and let me go."

  "Meow!"

  "Okay, okay, but be careful." Edison turned loose of Jordan's shorts. She stood back, watching fearfully, and making whimpering noises.

  Jordan turned until she was sitting on the windowsill with her legs outside. Very carefully, she pushed herself to her feet, balanced on the sill, grabbed the lattice on the outside of the house with one hand and reached toward the tree branch with the other.

  "Meow!"

  "I'm almost there, Mr. Pip," Jordan said.

  Edison bit her fingernails as Jordan leaned further and further. She breathed out a sigh of relief as Jordan's hand grabbed Mr. Pip by his scruff.

  "Thank God," Edison muttered.

  Crack!

  “Oh no,” Edison amended.

  Jordan was slowly moving further and further away from the window – the lattice was peeling off the house.

  Edison ran for the window. But she was too late. Jordan and Mr. Pip plunged three stories. Edison covered her eyes and screamed.

  “For God’s sake, stop screaming,” Jordan yelled from below.

  Edison un-peeked her eyes and looked out the window. “You’re alive!” she said.

  Jordan lay spread-eagle on her back in the dumpster they had rented for the construction project they called home. Luckily, she’d landed on carpet padding that they’d removed from the den. Mr. Pip sat regally on Jordan’s chest. Without so much as a thank you, Mr. Pip leapt out of the dumpster, leaving Jordan covered in dust.

  “You’re welcome,” Jordan said. Then she noticed her bloody hand. As is the way with injured body parts, she didn’t notice the pain until she saw the blood. Then she screamed. She surveyed the area and saw the piece of glass from the broken shower door. After she finished screaming she called up to Edison. “Will you please bring me a towel?”

  “Why? Did you pee your pants?”

  “No, I’m bleeding,” Jordan yelled back up at her.

  Edison turned and ran out of the room, panting, "ohmygodohmygodohmygod!"

  Amy Meets Jordan

  "What do we have here?" Amy asked.

  Jordan looked
down at her bloody shirt and answered, "A ruined shirt and a really bad home first-aid job."

  Meet Dr. Amy Stewart. Amy was too-short, too-brown, too-fat and too-smart. That's what she thought anyway. She still pictured herself the way she looked as a sophomore in high school. Since that time, Amy had shed twenty pounds, gotten contacts, highlighted her hair and made good use of her brains. But when she looked in a mirror, she still saw her old self. It was like reverse alchemy. Her mirror turned gold into lead.

  The first time Amy laid eyes on Jordan was in the emergency room at University Hospital. Amy sat on the rolling stool in a curtained off cubicle and surveyed her patient. To say that Jordan was good-looking was an understatement. Amy thought Jordan was perfection personified – speaking purely from an anatomical viewpoint. Not that Amy was much of a judge of anything other than medicine, but to her this woman with the sculpted body and long dishwater blond hair looked like one of those Olympic volleyball players everyone went gaga over. In short, she was the type of woman Amy despised. Well, maybe despised was too strong a word. Loathe? No, she didn't loathe Jordan just because she was the type of woman that stared out at her from magazine covers, made a sports bra look sexy and made her feel inadequate and homely and invisible. Hate? No, she didn't hate Jordan either, not exactly. She hated the idea of Jordan. Amy hated that there were women out there who looked like Jordan and made women like her feel like something you had to scrape off the bottom of your shoe.

  Jordan asked, "You look like you're going to be sick. You're not going to throw up over a little cut and some blood, are you?"

  "Of course not," Amy said, lifting her chin defiantly. "I'm a doctor."

  "Yeah, but that was an 'I’m going to puke' face if I ever saw one."

  Amy took a deep breath and assumed her professional look. Her professional look consisted of knitted eyebrows, a squinted right eye and pursed lips. If she wanted to be super professional she tapped her fingertip on her chin. She had perfected this look in front of her mirror in the bathroom at home. She thought it made her look smart, knowledgeable, caring and in control all at the same time.