Sweet Lesbian Love Stories

by Giselle Renarde

  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 those 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. “Ooops. Sorry. I’ll clean that 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’s presence 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 cheated on him, and he was just really sensitive about 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.

  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 ‘til it’s gone things.”

  My head is pounding, but I can’t conceive of a more perfect moment. I take that chance I don’t usually take, and 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 chest, and I want nothing more than to applaud the risk she’s taking. Now I’m the one 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 down, 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.

  2

  Beginning Badly

  “Why do you want to work here?” the scary girl asked.

  She had that look on her face like I had some nerve darkening her doorstep.

  I’d already been through the interview process with Becky, so I hardly saw the need to explain myself to this little weirdo, but ego got the better of me. I said, “Helping Hands seemed like the perfect place to donate my time. It’s awesome, what do here—providing free suits and stuff to street youth breaking into the job market. I’m a fashion consultant, so it’s a perfect fit. Plus, I want to help people.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Isn’t that why you do volunteer work?” I asked. “To help people?”

  Yes, my tone was fairly lofty and a little defensive, but it wasn’t half as rude as hers when she spat, “No.” The pierced girl scrunched her nose so the diamond stud flipped to the side. “You come in here like Marie Antoinette, all fancy, thinking you can clothe a few winos to save your immortal soul...”

  “I never said anything about my immortal soul...”

  “Well nobody around here needs your pity.” Her voice was dark, but monotonous, like she couldn’t be bothered to expend energy on this conversation. “Nobody needs you looking down on them from your mansion in Rosedale.”

  I laughed at the thought of me in a mansion. “I live in a basement apartment—in Scarborough!”

  “And nobody needs your three hundred years of experience in boutique fashion. We’re doing just fine without little miss designer suit.”

  I tried to stay calm, but the back of my throat made a growling sound. Despite the wealth of fashion in the shop, the exit door was the most appealing thing around. There I was, trying to make a good impression while this little nightmare seemed hell-bent on alienating me. How could I possibly work side by side with this girl for a whole year?

  Struggling to maintain my world-famous composure, I said, “Maybe Becky didn’t tell you we’ll be volunteering together from now on. I’m Liz. Elizabeth, but Liz is fine.”

  My extended hand received only a blank stare.

  “Elizabeth like the Queen or the Taylor?” she asked. “Not that there’s much difference—attitude’s the same.”

  I plastered a smile to my face. I was determined to stay positive. “And you are...?”<
br />
  She rolled her eyes, taking a sip from the soda can hidden under the counter. No food or drinks on the sales floor! That was the rule. Good, at least I had something to use against her.

  “My name is Venetia,” she said. “And you can call me Venetia.”

  The name was too pretty for the girl. Not that she was physically off-putting, but her character was immensely unattractive. I couldn’t wait to see how she’d behave with the clientele. She didn’t seem equipped to help anybody with anything.

  “Alright!” I exclaimed with a smile so forced it gave me a headache. “Put me to work. What should I do?”

  “You should think about why you wore a designer suit to work around the homeless and underemployed,” Venetia sneered, taking another sip of soda.

  I shrugged. “It’s just what I put on.”

  “Okay, so that’s the bullshit reason. The real reason you dressed all posh was to set yourself apart from the poor bastards who come here. To establish yourself high up on the us versus them hierarchy. I’m right, right?”

  I didn’t know quite what to say, but that didn’t matter because Venetia wasn’t finished.

  “...because what that outfit says to me is, ‘I’m important and you’re not. I can afford a fancy suit and you can’t, and that makes me better than you.’”

  “Well, I suspect my sense of style is why Becky took me on,” I said, a little more arrogantly than I’d intended. “In my interview, she said it would be great if I could share my flare for fashion with the clients...” I wasn’t sure if I should finish the quote, but I did anyway. “...and the other volunteers.”

  Venetia glared at me with a burning hatred in her eyes. “Whatever,” she said. “But if you want to help people, you have to respect them first.”

  Well, if she wanted my respect, she sure had a funny way of showing it. If she wanted anybody’s respect, why was she dressed like dark mistress of the BDSM parlour? Seriously!

  Just then, the bells on the front door jingled behind me and Venetia’s imposing expression lit up like a Christmas tree. “Hey, Sweety. How’s it going?”

  “Venti! I missed you!” The woman rushed over to give Venetia a hug. She was one of these people who looked forty-four and acted fourteen, wearing jean cut-offs way too short for someone with such thick thighs. My heart palpitated at the excitement of finding her something more suitable to wear.

  “You just saw me last week,” Venetia replied, still beaming.

  “I know, but I missed you since then.”

  With my fellow volunteer still wrapped in her arms, the Sweety woman looked over at me. I wanted to run for my life. There was something weird about her eyes, like they were vibrating, almost. It was unsettling.

  “Who’s this?” she asked, giving me a menacing once-over.

  Venetia shook her head, easing out of the hug. “Doesn’t matter. I took those pants home to hem for you. Let me run and grab them.”

  Were these two friends or something? It seemed above and beyond for Venetia to take volunteer work home with her. Hard to believe she could be that devoted.

  Combating the silence, I introduced myself to the strange woman. “I’m Liz. I’m a fashion consultant by trade, so I can give you all sorts of advice.”

  “No, I like Venti,” the woman replied, flipping through the rack.

  When she pulled out a lace-bordered satin camisole and a silver sequined mini-skirt, I couldn’t hold back. “Oh, I would go with something a little more mature, a little more subdued. You don’t want to look like a hooker, do you?”

  The woman turned sharply to Venetia, who had somehow appeared at my side with a pair of dress slacks folded over her arm. With a panicked look on her face, Venetia said, “Sweety, she didn’t mean it...”

  “Fuck you!” the Sweety woman cried. She threw the outfit at me, hangers and all, and barrelled toward the exit. “You don’t know me, motherfucker! You don’t know anything!”

  She swung the door so wide I thought the chimes would fall off. When she slammed it behind her, they did, hitting the floor with a muffled clink.

  “Do you not think?” Venetia growled, running out the door with the woman’s hemmed slacks.

  She must have been out there a minute or two, but I didn’t move, not even to hang up the skanky skirt and cami. When Venetia marched back inside and scooped the bells off the floor, I thought for a second she might throw them at me. I flinched as she stormed over to the storage closet to grab the stool. She bolted in my direction and I pressed my back against the desk to get out of her way.

  She stopped short, turning on a dime to stare me down. “Seriously! Do you not think?”

  “I’m sorry!” I bleated.

  Venetia shook her head, the little braids in her ponytail flipping violently side to side. “You can’t...” Her breath raged through flared nostrils as she hyper-enunciating each word. “You can’t say stuff like that. This isn’t your world of rich bitches buying three hundred dollar shoes. You think you step in here and you’re Eva Peron clothing the descamisados? Most of our clients operate at subsistence level. Can you even conceive of what that means?”

  “No,” I whispered, teetering over a river of shame.

  “It means if you’re all judgemental about how they live, they’re not gonna come back. We’re here to do one thing: give clothes to people who need them. That’s it. Don’t judge what they do to survive.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “You came here to help?” Venetia said. “You can help by keeping your mouth shut.”

  That hit it on the head. I had no clue what I was doing. I was all wrong for this place. Sure, I knew a thing or two about fashion, but these people were alien to me. In a grand and giving sense, I wanted to help my fellow citizen, but just then the idea of collapsing in front the TV was far more attractive.

  “I should go,” I told her.

  Venetia breathed hard, gazing up at the chain across the top of the door. “Don’t,” she sighed, handing me the stool. “Here, you can hang the chimes back up.”

  When she placed the metal bells in my hand, her fingers lingered for a moment against my palm. It nearly bowled me over when she released the chimes and ran a soothing hand up my arm.

  Squeezing my shoulder, Venetia stepped so close I could almost taste her breath. “It’s good you want to help, but you need to see yourself as allied with our clients. We work with street youth and the underemployed, alongside them. You can’t be all lofty about this. If you see yourself as walking ahead, dragging them along while they lag behind...”

  “Then I’m not really helping anyone, am I?”

  “Only yourself, to feel better for what you have and they don’t.” With a smidge of a smile, Venetia said, “We’re all in the trenches, sister, and they’re the strong ones, to live the way they do. We’re fighting with them, not for them.”

  That I’d never considered. It seemed to me only compounded failures would land a person on the streets. “It’s such a vast undertaking, though.” I’d never felt so small.

  “It’s really not,” she said, running her hand through my hair and then back down my arm. “We’re just giving clothes to people. Think of it that way; it’s like having a retail job, except we’re volunteers so we make a little less money.”

  That was the first time Venetia produced a smile just for me. She was actually quite pretty when she smiled, though I wouldn’t have thought it possible. Pretty isn’t a word I’d usually use to describe a girl wearing scuffed boots over tight black pants jutting with all kinds of pockets and chains and cords. Over a fitted black top, she wore some kind of red plastic bondage corset. That wasn’t the image that normally sprang to mind when I thought “pretty,” but somehow Venetia was. Even with her dark hair in messy braids pulled into an even messier ponytail. Even with pimples plaguing the golden-olive skin of her forehead, even with the multitude of piercings in her ears, the one in her nose, the other in her eyebrow, Venetia was a pretty girl.

  “I’ll
fix the... the...” I couldn’t remember what it was called. I had to slip away from the hand caressing my arm if I ever wanted to regain my sanity. “The chimes.”

  But even perched on that stool with Venetia in the back room, her warmth burned my flesh like a branding. I felt like I was breathing through cotton batting and I didn’t want to think about why that was.

  I knew why: Venetia was hitting on me.

  Why else would she stand so close? Why else would she touch me like that?

  My insides rattled.

  Venetia decided I should sort donations for the rest of the afternoon, but I could do that behind the desk as I watched how she interacted with clients. As much as she said it was like working retail, she wasn’t sickeningly sweet the way I had to be at work. While I was on commission telling people what they wanted to hear, she was honest and straightforward. If an outfit looked crap, she’d tell you. I guess that was the distinction between trying to make money and trying to make a difference.

  From that week to the next, my thoughts were haunted by Venetia. Curiosity, at first: was I misreading her? Was she just an affectionate person, or did she actually like me?

  Then came the intrigue: maybe this would build to something. How would I respond if she asked me out? If she kissed me? If she wanted more?

  And finally, as my next volunteer shift drew closer, the apprehension: would I really go through with it? I would. I think I would. But would it mean anything? In a relationship sense, would it mean something or would it just be a bit of fun? That’s always the hard part: not knowing the other person’s intentions, and not wanting to ask in case yours aren’t aligned. Or in case they are aligned, because how fricken’ scary would that be?

  The curiosity was familiar. I’d noticed girls before, maybe had a bit of a crush on one once, but never actually did anything about it. I’d looked but never touched. Wanted to, but never had the guts. Seemed to me Venetia had guts to spare. And, really, there was no grand narrative to life, was there? Wasn’t life just a series of events? If something happened between Venetia and I, couldn’t it be just that: something that happened? Or, if we fell madly in love, got married and adopted three hundred kids, wouldn’t that just be something that happened too? People take life too seriously.