Best Lesbian Romance 2012

by Radclyffe

  The knot in my belly erupted, and I was halfway to my desk before I realized I was laughing. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, but I wouldn’t let them spill just yet. Pulling my purse from my bottom drawer, I yanked out a subdued shade of pink lipstick and scribbled I QUIT on the wall above my desk. When my lipstick broke, I grabbed a Sharpie and followed that up with go fuck yourselves hard. It wasn’t clever, but I was angry and thinking on my feet.

  I wished Fazil good luck as I stormed past his office—he was still seated slack-jawed behind his desk—and when I turned to push the door open with my back, my gaze locked with Zarina’s. She stood like an arrow outside Dennis’s office, her plump lips parted, her brow streaked with lines of disconcertion. I’d never seen her eyes so wide, until today.

  Zarina’s flicking my forehead now and I bat her hand away like a kitten. She smiles, but her eyes are still heavy with worry. “I put your groceries away,” she says, “and the kettle just popped. Want some tea?”

  “Do I want some hot chocolate?” I ask. I’m less mature now than I was when we met, plus my body wants sugar.

  She sighs as she slides off my bed, walking to the little kitchen nook. “I really think I should call a doctor. There’s something wrong with you.”

  “It took you this long to figure that out?”

  Turning from my cupboards, she gives me a smirk, and my whole body feels alive. While she searches unaided for mugs and hot chocolate mix, I gently remind myself why I don’t like her: she spread that rumour about me and Fazil, she never called me or stopped by after I quit even though she lives three streets down the block, and worst of all she’s dating the assface who didn’t believe I was a lesbian. He’d be pleased with my appearance now, I’m sure. I cut my hair, pierced my eyebrow, I never wear skirts anymore, and I’ve got him to thank. Cheers for the complex, Dennis!

  “How’s your boyfriend?” The words hurl themselves across my apartment like airborne venom. I hate myself for asking, but I blame the concussion.

  Zarina turns from the kettle, and her expression tells me she has no idea what I’m talking about. “Dennis,” I clarify, though I still feel like a jerk.

  She laughs, and then groans. “Oh God, don’t remind me!” She picks up two mugs and wanders slowly toward the bed, spilling a little hot chocolate on my carpet. “Oops. Sorry. I’ll clean it up.”

  “Don’t worry,” I blurt, wanting to know, hoping, praying, wishing she might be available. “It’s okay, just…what happened?”

  I sit up in bed and she hands me a mug, snuggling in next to my hip. I feel her warmth and her sweetness through the covers, and Zarina does more for me than the cocoa. “I quit right after you left,” she tells me. “Everybody heard what Dennis said to you. He was a jerk. You know, he was the one who started that whole rumour about you and Fazil. His first wife had cheated on him, and he was just really sensitive to that stuff. Not that I’m making excuses. It was so brave of you to come out like that, and he cut you right down.”

  Sheepishly, I admit, “Well, I got a nice severance cheque in the mail. I guess they didn’t want the Ministry of Labour involved, or whatever.” But I feel awful, now, that I held a grudge all this time and it wasn’t Zarina at all. “I’m sorry you lost your job because of me.”

  She pets my arm as I sip my hot chocolate. She’s already put her mug down on my night table, and she moves in closer, consoling me. “It wasn’t your fault. Fazil gave me a good reference, and I found a better job pretty quickly. I just got so mad. If he didn’t believe you, I knew he wouldn’t believe me, and he didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask as she takes the mug from my hands and sets it down. I think I know, but I want to be sure. I’ve never been one to take chances.

  With a half shrug, Zarina sets her head down on my chest. All I feel is her warmth, and all I smell is the springtime in her hair. “I’ve always been more attracted to girls than guys. I dated Dennis, and I dated other boys before him, but I thought…” She chuckles, but there’s a wry quality to it. “I just thought that’s what women did: fell in love with other women, but dated men because… because we’re supposed to. I think I always believed that until…” She gazes up at me like a fawn, and my heart soars with her breath, though I can’t seem to breathe myself. “Until you quit, that day. It was one of those don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone things.”

  My head is pounding, but I can’t conceive of a more perfect moment. I take that chance I never take, and I ask, “You fell in love with a woman?”

  Her bottom lip trembles, and tears soak her eyes as she falls across my chest. “I should have come after you when you left. I should have told you how I felt, but I was scared. I should have stopped Dennis from saying all those things about you. I knew in my heart you were different, and you weren’t having an affair with Fazil, and if you were going to have an affair with anyone it would be with…”

  She sobs against my breast, and I want nothing more than to applaud the risk she’s taken. Now I’m doing the consoling, running my fingers through her long hair and whispering, “Shh, honey, it’s okay. It’s okay now.”

  All at once, she stops and lifts her head, gazing into my eyes. “I should have done it a different way.”

  “It’s not too late,” I tell her, feeling at once young and maternal. “You take care of me tonight, keep flicking my forehead and bringing me sweet drinks, and I’ll take care of you every night after. How about that?”

  She smiles and then laughs, her cheeks streaked red but her eyes gleaming like diamonds. I can’t say I never expected to see her again, seeing as she lives three streets away, but I don’t think I anticipated falling on the ice trying to get away from her, only to be taken into her care. It occurs to me that I might be dead, or in a coma, or dreaming, and a sudden panic makes my heart race. Then she leans in close and sets her lips against mine, and I know this moment is real.

  DUMB BUNNY

  Lee Lynch

  Frenchy had been retired less than a year when the store asked her to come back to train a new employee.

  “They begged,” she’d bragged to Clove over coffee at Café Femmes. Clove had a live-in girlfriend, so they were just friends right now. Outside the plate glass window, umbrellas covered everyone except for a swarm of little kids headed home from school.

  “Does that stop your pension?”

  Frenchy sipped her latte, savoring the telling of her new title. She’d only told her brother over the phone. He’d whistled and asked if she would still come to Florida that winter. “I called the shots when they offered me the job and made it a condition of employment,” she’d answered. “Told them I’m practically a snowbird now.” Serge had laughed. She really only went down there to house-sit for him and his wife so they could travel, but she’d been thinking of getting a little condo of her own down there. This part-time work would help.

  “I still get my pension checks and health coverage,” she said to Clove. Then she whispered, “I’m the Training Consultant. Thirty-five an hour. I told them I wouldn’t take less.”

  Clove was watching a driver back his rig up to a loading dock across the street. “Should have held out for forty. That’s a big job.”

  Clove reminded her of Mercedes that way—she always found the negative. Her mother had been like that too. “I get travel time,” she said, hating herself for being so defensive. “That’s the only part I don’t like—the trainee works all the way over in Staten Island. The company pays for a car service, though. Door to door.”

  “Why don’t you get that boastful look off your face, short stuff. You know the company’s saving money on you somehow.”

  She glowered at Clove, but Clove insisted. “When I was your cashier? Look at all the hours they got out of you free, just for letting them call you Store Manager.”

  Of course Clove had been right, Frenchy admitted as she boarded the ferry. On the other hand, the company would have had a driver take her all the way to Staten Island
today, but she liked to go by boat. There would be a car waiting for her on the island side.

  “This is a tough one,” her boss had told her on the phone, “but that’s why we wanted you back, Genevieve.”

  “It’s what I get for being good at my job. You guys are always throwing me the hard balls.”

  Her boss had cleared his throat and continued, “You’re going to train Dom Sausilito’s daughter, Muriel.”

  “He’s trusting me with his daughter?” she’d cried in alarm. Dom owned the whole chain. “Does he know I’m…you know.”

  “Yeah, he knows you’re gay and he knows you don’t want to lose your pension.”

  How, she puzzled, could they take her pension away? It wasn’t worth risking that just to feel useful again. She had her SAGE members, two of them, to visit every week. She figured she’d need Services and Advocacy for Gay Elders someday too. She was in charge of food for the women’s dances and she was on her co-op board again this year. Once every couple of months she got together with Mercedes, always a little bit hopeful she could rekindle the old spark they’d shared, but afraid of it too. On the other hand, she couldn’t turn down her boss. She loved him like a father—sometimes.

  “Not a prob,” she said aloud. “Dom’s, what, seventy-something? How old is this daughter?”

  “That’s the strange part, Genevieve. She’s fifty-three and she’s kept house for him since she was in her teens. Dom calls her Bunny, by the way, and that’s what she goes by.”

  “Bunny? What kind of name is Bunny?”

  Of course Dom, who was from Staten Island, would want his daughter close, she thought when the car dropped her off. She plucked a dark thread off the sleeve of her brand-new white shirt, shrugged into her red blazer with the gold crest, and told the driver to come get her four hours later. No cashier took more than four hours to train.

  This Staten Island Apple Cart was brand new, with wide, clean aisles. The trainee was adorable: small, but curvy. Really curvy under that slightly gaping lemon yellow blouse she wore. Bunny remarked on their nearly identical navy blue slacks. She was all pink and white like her name, Bunny. Her skin was completely unwrinkled and she wore gold wire-rimmed glasses. Bunny would have looked about thirty-five except for the fine short early white hair, like a rabbit’s fur, only curly. Frenchy wanted to pet it. Not enough to lose her pension, though.

  She first suspected Bunny wasn’t a very worldly person when Bunny went hunting for number keys on the cash register.

  “Oh, Frenchy, I feel so silly,” Bunny declared in her breathy, little-girl voice, small in the noise of canned music and the coolers, refrigerators, blowers, chatting customers, and electric shopping scooters. “I should have known there wasn’t a number eleven key from using calculators!”

  Was Bunny kidding? She nodded in case she wasn’t, to show her it wasn’t such a bad mistake, though the truth was that it was the first time she’d run into it. Bunny would definitely not have been hired if she was doing the hiring.

  Yet when Bunny babbled, as she seemed to like to do, Frenchy found herself smiling. It was like listening to an excited child on her first day of school. The woman was always cheerful. She never said anything against her father for the years she’d lost while taking care of him even though, now that he had remarried, he was making her go to work.

  “He says it’s good for me,” Bunny explained. “He says who knows how long he’ll be around and I should work till I’m seventy to get good social security, so I guess he’s leaving his money to Krista. She’ll have longer than me to use it.” From which Frenchy eventually deduced that the new wife was younger than the daughter. Maybe Clove was right about the owner being a bum. Or maybe Bunny was joking.

  “Ooh, Frenchy, look at that. You don’t want to pay me $5,002.35, do you?” Bunny asked the customer with a smile that made her look helpless. It took Frenchy a good two minutes to fix the cash register error.

  Over the next weeks, as four hours turned into four hours a day, she learned that she hadn’t seen everything on this job after all. Working at the store hadn’t rattled her in years, but Bunny had a knack.

  “Ooh, Frenchy, Frenchy,” Bunny called when Frenchy was talking to the third key manager, a guy who wanted Bunny out of his store yesterday, owner’s daughter or not. The third key was telling her how Bunny had mangled the price changes the week before.

  “What is her problem, Frenchy? Anybody could figure out that eighteen cents is the price increase, not the price.”

  Bunny had a yard of register tape wrapped around her wrist.

  “Oh, Frenchy, I’m all thumbs when it comes to changing the tape.”

  The customers were looking at one another, jiggling keys and craning their necks for a shorter line.

  For the life of her, Frenchy could not find what Bunny had done or how to fix it. She apologized to the customers and had Bunny herd them to the next register where she signed herself on and played cashier at top speed. Bunny bagged and entertained the customers with funny stories about her mistakes.

  “This woman,” Frenchy complained later to her long-distance girlfriend Gloria, who had called as she got on the ferry the first evening of daylight savings time. The city was dressing itself up in lights for Friday night outside her window. “She’s not dumb.”

  “She sounds dumb,” countered Gloria.

  “She’s nervous. She’s good with numbers, just not with machines. She tells me she can cook like a chef.”

  “Has she asked you over to demonstrate?” The amusement in Gloria’s voice came through all the way from Texas. “And don’t tell me you wouldn’t go, even if she wasn’t the owner’s daughter.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t go. I’m not dumb either.”

  That weekend when she went home with Bunny for a celebration dinner, she remembered what she’d told Gloria. Bunny had made it through an entire shift with under three mistakes, though, which was the goal Frenchy had set for her.

  Was Bunny always this easily excited? You would have thought she’d won a gold in the Olympics the way she chattered. Frenchy had never known anyone with such a sunny attitude, or who was so open about her failings. She was right, too, about being a great cook.

  “Daddy always said that he’d have to hire a chef to replace me if I ever found a guy who wanted to steal me away. As if.”

  A guy? She was surprised by how disappointed she felt. “As if what?”

  “I’d leave him!”

  “But he just left you.”

  Bunny frowned. “I never thought of it like that.”

  She was pretty, Dom’s daughter. It was a gentle prettiness, nothing to knock you flat and everything to do with that sweet, if sometimes clueless, smile. She wanted to kick Dom the next time she saw him, for holding this woman hostage to his loss when her mother died. If that wasn’t some form of abuse, she didn’t know what was.

  He must have bought her this great apartment out of guilt, because Bunny sure wasn’t paying for it on cashier pay. She had two bedrooms, both doors closed. Bunny had explained that her society finches had the run of one room. They were chattering nonstop, like Bunny. Plug-in air fresheners pumped out the scent of oranges. Once again, Frenchy watched lights come on in the city, this time from the twelfth floor of a high-rise not far from the water.

  “I have a park nearby,” Bunny was saying as she cut an avocado in half, extracted the stone, and deftly peeled it. Based on Bunny’s problems at the store, Frenchy cringed every time the knife neared her thumb, in particular when she skinned the cuke, leaving strips of green to alternate with the pale flesh, but she was an expert in the kitchen.

  “Do you like rice vinegar?” Bunny asked.

  “Never had it.”

  “Ooh, it’s so good. It’s my favorite. And here, just some dill and the salad’s all ready for the fish.”

  She was sitting on a stool across the counter from Bunny, who turned to heat up a ribbed cast iron pan, something else new to Frenchy. She felt so relaxed she
could lay her head down and nap right there. To keep herself awake she asked about the pan.

  “It was Mommy’s.”

  Could this woman really be a New Yorker, with her openness and childlike confidence? Bunny brushed olive oil on salmon fillets, then salted and peppered them from grinders, not shakers. She was so quick, yet so careful, like a musician doing a tune she’d played a hundred times before.

  “See,” Bunny said with an authority that transformed her small voice, “you make the oven real hot, to about five hundred degrees. Then you heat the pan and,” she dipped into a salt cellar with a tiny spoon, “you sprinkle salt on it.”

  “I feel like I’m watching a cooking show on TV.”

  “What a nice thing to say. But look, it’s smoking. This is when you put the fish in the pan and slide it onto the bottom rack of the oven.”

  Frenchy watched Bunny’s bottom, in clingy black pants, as she bent.

  “Now, you be the timekeeper while I set the table.” Bunny also slid a CD into her miniature sound system. Smooth jazz, maybe Grover Washington. Bunny turned suddenly back to Frenchy. “Ooh! What a terrible hostess I am! You’re my first guest ever in my own place, and I didn’t ask if you want soda or juice.”

  Bunny bustled back and forth to the dining area. Frenchy couldn’t get over how calm she felt inside, how easily she breathed, how a smile spread so naturally on her mouth. Bunny had a motherliness to her, except for that heavenly body.

  “Frenchy,” Bunny scolded as she hurried back to the stove. “You’re not keeping time very well.”

  She chuckled at the scolding.

  “Perfect!” Bunny flipped the fish without splashing her bright yellow pullover top with the lacy scoop neck the way Frenchy would. “I guess I’ll forgive you. This time.”

  Would there be other times? She found herself hoping so. Then she recognized Bunny’s tone. Was the owner’s daughter being just a little bit flirtatious?

  Two minutes later Bunny had the fish out of the oven and was chunking it into the salad. Bunny let her carry it to the table.