“I’m here only for a little while. A month, maybe less. Once that job comes through in New York, I’m gone again.”
“That’s so soon. I thought you’d at least be here through Christmas,” her mother replied.
Chloe shook her head. “Definitely not that long. If it hadn’t been for Jerica, I’d probably still be in LA at Creative Faces.” She named the special effects studio where she had worked until her ex-girlfriend’s antics in the parking lot got her fired.
She had loved that job, had taken pride in being able to call her mother and say that she’d done the monster makeup for a movie showing on TV. Most days, Chloe mourned the loss of her job more than the girl who’d cheated on her.
“I told you Jerica was bad for you,” her mother said. “You were much better off with that other one. What was her name? The artist who did nude paintings of you . . . Khaulah, I think her name was.”
Chloe exchanged a laughing glance with Kai. “You know very well that was her name.”
Her mother had liked Khaulah for Chloe only because she had had a minor straight-woman crush on her. The curly-haired artist had been profane and funny, perennially sexy in a V-necked shirt, with whiskey-colored eyes that laughed before her mouth did. But Khaulah had wanted important things that Chloe hadn’t, at least not yet—children, a home, marriage—so they had to go their separate ways.
Her mother looked at her with mischievous eyes and squeezed Chloe’s hip. “She was such a little devil. She would have made your life so interesting.”
Chloe swore that if her mother hadn’t been happily married to her stepfather for over fifteen years now, she would have made a play for the light-skinned artist.
“I don’t need interesting, Mom,” she said with a faint smile. “Jerica gave me plenty of that, and I’m so over it.”
Chloe nodded in greeting as they passed other people making the Saturday afternoon walk down to the little strip of restaurants and independent shops. The day hummed with the sound of the wind through the trees, the rustle of fallen leaves stirred up by passing cars, and the faint rattle of the MARTA train nearby.
“If you need anything regarding the job, just let me know, Chloe,” Kai said, breaking the comfortable silence. “I have some contacts in New York who might be able to help you.”
Chloe nodded, thinking the last thing she needed was to create any sort of connection with Kai in New York. Especially when she was trying to run away from her attraction to the woman. “Thanks, Kai. I’ll let you know if I do.”
They continued down the hill toward The Flying Biscuit, chatting about inconsequential things. The Southern food restaurant was one of her mother’s favorites and a place Chloe had practically grown up in. The staff and the signature T-shirts had changed over the years, but the menu had, thankfully, stayed the same. She was addicted to their wheat biscuits and apple butter.
Over lunch, she caught her mother and Kai up on the latest drama in her life, including Jerica’s latest stunt, which was the last straw. Not only had she come to Chloe’s job acting a fool so many times that the police were called and Chloe was eventually fired, but Jerica had also broken into Chloe’s apartment, begging for a second chance at the relationship, swearing that Chloe was wrong and that there was no other woman. Chloe knew Jerica had been telling the truth about that one thing: there had been no other woman. There had been dozens of women. So many that Chloe was embarrassed that she hadn’t realized the sheer magnitude of Jerica’s infidelity.
Jerica, a merchant banker, had been sleeping with three of the tellers at the bank where she worked, a neighbor in Chloe’s apartment complex, even one of her old professors at UCLA. It had been humiliating. Then Jerica had had the nerve to try and play her for a fool again, telling Chloe that there hadn’t been anyone else, when the evidence had slapped Chloe so hard in the face that she practically got whiplash. When a woman approached her with Jerica’s cum-stained panties, explicit text messages and tit-for-tat crotch shots, Chloe didn’t even have the luxury of disbelief.
But Jerica had been a player when Chloe met her. Chloe had been the fool for trying to change someone who was obviously still enjoying the way she lived her life. To be honest, though, the most beguiling thing about Jerica was that she looked like Kai.
“And that’s who you left Khaulah for?” Her mother shook her head.
“Noelle,” Kai said with a squeeze of her best friend’s hand as they sat around the lunch table. “That’s not what she needs right now.”
“Sorry, honey.” Her mother took a bite of her shrimp and grits, her dark eyes flickering with a wicked humor that Chloe had never quite gotten used to.
“Noelle is just kidding,” Kai said. She sliced into a fried green tomato and brought a piece to her mouth.
“No, she’s not.” Chloe wrinkled her nose. “Anyway, I know I made a mistake with Jerica. That’s in the past now. I have New York and a new life to look forward to.”
“Darling . . .” Her mother grew serious. “You know I tease you sometimes, but I just worry you won’t find the right partner for you. Someone who loves and cherishes you like you deserve.” She squeezed Chloe’s hand. “By the time I was your age, I already had Duncan in my life.”
Chloe tugged back her hand to sip her mango iced tea. “Kai’s still single, and I don’t see you worrying about her.”
“Oh, I do worry.” Her mother glanced at Kai with a grin. “But you’re still not old enough yet to hear those conversations.”
Kai chuckled. “Shit, I’m not old enough.”
The two friends shared a smile.
After lunch, they went back to the house. In the foyer, Kai announced that she was about to leave and give the two women time alone.
Chloe hugged Kai good-bye, the familiar feeling of longing mixed with relief sitting in her chest. She wanted Kai near but knew that she shouldn’t. Every time she’d thought over the years of declaring her love for her mother’s best friend, she’d forced herself to remember what the two women were to each other.
Noelle Williams had gotten pregnant in high school, when she was much younger than Chloe. She had barely known what to do with a child, as she was still one herself, a smart sixteen-year-old with a formerly bright future in front of her.
Kai, her best friend since kindergarten and an out lesbian all their lives, had been supportive of her friend throughout her entire pregnancy and the birth of her child, standing in place of Chloe’s father, who had been a high school senior at the time and had run as far from the responsibility of parenthood as his Harvard scholarship could carry him.
Even when Kai left for college, and eventually a job in New York, she remained a constant in her best friend’s life, helping to soothe her worries when Chloe came out as a lesbian, assuring Noelle, who was worried that her daughter would cut off her hair and start dressing like a boy, that if Chloe hadn’t shown those proclivities before, it was unlikely she’d start doing so now.
“She’s a femme who likes makeup and clothes,” Chloe remembered overhearing Kai say to her mother once.
And quietly, Chloe had said to herself that she was a femme who liked girls who dressed like boys. Much later—once Noelle had calmed down about Chloe’s compromised future entailing a house, a husband, and two-point-five children—she’d asked her daughter if it was because of Kai that she wanted to be a lesbian. Did the older woman glamorize her gay life so much that it made Chloe want to be her?
Chloe could only say no. She didn’t feel it was okay for her, as a fifteen year-old, to say that she didn’t want to be Kai, but that she wanted to be with her. No. Her mother would not have appreciated that at all.
While her mother walked Kai to the door, Chloe sat on the couch and waited out their good-bye. She leaned back and listened to the sound of Kai’s quiet steps in the loafers that she preferred, her feet barely making a sound against the wooden floor compared to the click of her mother’s high heels. Chloe took a deep breath, trembling, as she thought again of Kai’s
body. Her easy confidence and the way she moved with a slow, coiled energy made Chloe wonder how she would be in bed.
Her mother came back into the living room and sat on the couch next to Chloe. “Okay. What aren’t you telling me?”
Chloe shook herself from her daydream of Kai’s body. “What do you mean?”
“There’s something going on with you. You haven’t said anything, but I can see it on your face. Kai senses it too.”
Chloe forced herself to relax beneath her mother’s penetrating stare. “Your senses might be a little off. Everything’s fine.”
Her mother held her gaze for a long while. “Just because you’re almost twenty-four doesn’t make me worry any less about you. And it doesn’t make you too old to confide in me.” Her mother propped her elbow against the back of the couch and faced Chloe. “Please keep that in mind.”
“I will.”
Her mother drew a deep breath. “Okay. I understand if you’re not ready to tell me what it is. Maybe you can talk with Kai.”
Chloe automatically shook her head, recoiling at the mere idea of sharing her secret with the object of her desire. “No.”
“Ah, then there is something.” Her mother looked both pleased and worried. “That’s what I thought. And that’s fine. I hope you can resolve it while you’re here. Whatever it is.”
Can I make this attraction disappear in the next few weeks? She plucked at the knee of her jeans, avoiding her mother’s eyes. “I hope so too.”
A slender hand tapped Chloe’s thigh. “Well, if you’re going to mope around the house, you might as well help me out in the kitchen.” Her mother stood up. “I’m baking scones for a client.”
“Almond butter?” Despite her recent meal, her taste buds perked up. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to distract me.”
Her mother squeezed her waist, surrounding her with the scent of skin-warmed patchouli. “But you do know better, don’t you?”
Chloe smiled and leaned into Noelle Graham’s shoulder, grateful for her love and perceptiveness. Just then her cell phone chimed.
“Excuse me a sec,” Chloe said absently as she plucked her cell from her back pocket.
“Hey, girl,” a warm and Southern sweet voice sang in her ear.
It was her friend Zahra, who still lived in Atlanta. They had grown up together in the same neighborhood and had taken divergent paths after high school. Zahra had decided to stay in Atlanta and go to Spelman College, while Chloe had left for LA. But they had remained close during the five years they had spent on opposite coasts.
“What’s up?”
“You made it home yet?”
Her mother gave a little wave, indicating she was heading to the kitchen. Chloe nodded and propped her hand on her hip, slowly crossing the living room while talking to her friend.
“Yeah, about two hours ago. I just got back from lunch with Mom and Kai.”
“Oh, yeah, that hottie Kai.” Zahra laughed, a husky and filthy sound. “When are you finally going to get a piece of that?”
“Stop it!” Chloe hissed, flashing a panicked glance at the doorway her mother had just disappeared through. “Don’t say that.”
“As if you haven’t been thinking it for the past two hours.”
Chloe squeezed her eyes shut, regretting the day, drunk and horny from cheap Southern Comfort, she had confessed her Kai crush to Zahra. It was something that her friend had never allowed her to forget, bringing it up at the most inconvenient times, so she barely had a chance to forget about her foolish and impractical desires.
“I haven’t!”
“Liar!” Zahra chuckled. “Anyway, I didn’t call to torture you about your fantasy lover. My boss gave me free tickets to the fair for next Saturday. I think you should come with me.”
“I think I will come with you.” Chloe grinned.
She and Zahra had gone together to the fair as kids, but some of her best memories were from being there with her mother and with Kai, a girls’ day and night out that usually started with brunch and ended with hot cider in front of the crackling fireplace.
“Good. I’m glad I didn’t have to work too hard to convince you to come with me.”
Through the phone, Chloe heard the sound of glass tapping glass, the gurgle of liquid, as if Zahra was pouring herself some wine.
“I know you don’t like to work for it,” Chloe said.
“Damn right.”
Chloe laughed again. “Just text me what time you want to go, and I’ll be ready.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Zahra said. “Now, go back to baking cookies, or whatever Cosby Show shit you and your mom are about to get into. This vibrator is about to start screaming my name.”
“Too much damn information.” Chloe hung up the phone at the sound of her friend’s laughter.
It was good to have someone who knew her that well. Someone to tease her about her childhood crush and the fact that she and her mother always baked together. That was one of the things she’d missed out in LA, with only strangers around her, for five years. It was good to be home.
Chloe went to bed that night with that same feeling of contentment at being home and with her family. After a long hot shower, she slipped between the sheets, Diana King’s latest album playing on her iPod.
Now that she was away from the warm smells and the beautiful chaos of her mother’s kitchen, the memories of what she’d been trying to escape by leaving California came flooding back to her. Jerica. The lover who had been the most like Kai. So much like her that Chloe had even convinced herself that she was in love with her. At least for a little while.
The sheets rustled as she turned over in the bed, a pillow pressed to her stomach.
Jerica, younger than Kai by almost fifteen years, was arrogant and self-consciously sexy. But at the time Chloe saw those things as simply confidence. Jerica was aware that she looked good, with her long, wavy hair, seductive brown eyes, and athletic body. But she had no idea everything about her was a pale copy of another woman. A better woman.
There were nights when they made love and Jerica’s fingers gripped Chloe’s hips while she took her from behind, the splendid friction of their strap-on sex and the doggie-style position allowing Chloe to imagine that it was Kai who was fucking her. Kai stroking her so deeply with her detachable dick that Chloe felt the heat of it in her throat and her tightening nipples. Her head flinging back as she bit her lip and barely stopped herself from crying out the wrong name.
She stirred restlessly in the sheets, her thighs sticky with the remembered pleasure of those nights. She pressed her fingers between her legs and hissed in arousal. It was easy to let go of the specter of Jerica and reach for the preferred fantasy of Kai, the pain and betrayal of what she’d endured in California floating away as she called up the ready image of her dream lover. Kai’s mouth on her pussy, the glittering beacon of her eyes guiding Chloe toward orgasm.
She moaned and quivered in the bed.
Chapter 2
Late evening sunlight draped over the large fairgrounds, haloing the Ferris wheel, the cotton-candy carts, food stands, and the scarlet big-top tent that loomed above it all. Chloe leaned against the wall leading to the public restrooms, waiting for Zahra. To pass the time, she watched the other fairgoers wander past, talking and enjoying themselves, some carrying large stuffed toys they’d won. The smells of barbecue, freshly popped kettle corn, and roasting corn on the cob laced the air.
A woman walked in Chloe’s direction to go into the restroom, then did a double take when she saw Chloe. She nearly slammed into the wall as she tried unsuccessfully to walk and stare at the same time. The woman, a pretty femme in a maxi dress, with a lush Afro, smiled at Chloe, blushed, then disappeared around the wall toward the restroom.
Zahra came from the restroom, brushing a hand down the front of her tight jeans. Her long straightened and colored hair fluttered around her face as she shook her head. “Remind me never to take that sixty-four-ou
nce lemonade challenge again.”
Chloe laughed. “I already told you not to do it.”
“Yes, but did you see that hot stud behind the counter? I swear, she was eyeing me.”
“You swear that everybody is eyeing you.”
“Aren’t they?” Zahra stuck a pink lollipop in her mouth and struck a pose. Ass out, D-cup breasts on display in a low-cut gingham blouse, pouty lips fastened to the sticky candy.
With her thick hair pressed out around her shoulders and down her back, her big black eyes, and a mouth that had brought many women to their knees, Zahra was absolutely gorgeous. Her body was stacked in all the right places, and she never hesitated about showing it off.
When the two girls had met in middle school, Zahra had introduced herself by saying they either had to be best friends or enemies for life, since Chloe was the only girl at school as pretty as her.
“Girl, come on!” Chloe rolled her eyes and grabbed her friend’s elbow.
They had been at the fair for more than two hours, most of the time spent eating the ridiculous fair food, including doughnut hamburgers, and staring at the pretty young stud behind the counter at the lemonade stand. Although she was having fun with Zahra, Chloe was ready to do something else.
Zahra bumped her hip. “Let’s ride the roller coaster next. I feel a need for a good long scream.”
Chloe grinned. “Is that why you’ve been trying to get that young girl from behind the counter of the lemonade stand?”
“Oh, that’s a very good idea.” Zahra’s black eyes twinkled, as if she’d never thought of it. “Let’s go by there one more time and give her one last chance to ask me out.”
Before Chloe could protest, her friend was dragging her toward the bright yellow lemonade stand, which already had a long line in front of it, mostly what seemed to be thirsty femmes waiting for a taste of that same stud Zahra wanted. But the girl wasn’t behind the counter.
Her friend made a sound of disappointment. “Damn! She probably already went home for the day.”
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