Learning to Love Again 2

by A. K. Rose

  “A few,” Jess admitted, “that I can see. She just has a really kind look, though, which I know sounds odd considering everything. But, she seems . . . nice.”

  “This is good. You could do with a little nice in your life. I’m excited for you. I expect a full debrief afterwards, you know.”

  “Oh, I know. Who else can I talk to about this?” Jessica laughed. Her life sure had changed in the past few months. Not three months ago she was grieving a horrible breakup with Tony, the man she was sure was it for her, and now, she was about to go on a date with a woman. Never say never, she thought as she took a sip of coffee, the comfort of the dark roast soothing her, the familiarity of a conversation with her best friend helping erase some of the nervousness she felt about the date she had that night.

  FOUR

  Cassie sat alone at the kitchen table in Rachel Gifford’s—soon to be their—house, laptop on, her blog dashboard open, trying to make sense of the traffic report in her view. She was an attorney, not an internet marketer. She had no idea if the numbers she was looking at were good, the audience she was building was significant, or the blog was on the right track from an analytics perspective.

  Truth was, she didn’t really care. If she reached one person—if she helped only one person because of her blog—it was a success. She’d started it from the couch when she was holed up on medical leave and unable to do much of anything for herself. When she was tired of sulking and feeling sorry for herself, she decided to start writing a victim’s advocacy blog. So far, she’d only written a few posts; she was trying to write at least one per week. Cassie had found writing the blog strangely cathartic. Now, everywhere she turned she saw info she thought could be worked into a post. It was almost effortless to think of content ideas.

  As she sat, trying to sort the numbers but still thinking about her earlier coffee date with Jessica, Cassie felt warm hands on her shoulders. Rachel had been out buying groceries and was now staring over her at the laptop. She placed a soft kiss on Cassie’s cheek as she always did when she said hello.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Rachel asked, indicating towards the screen with her head.

  “It’s the blog stats. I’m trying to make a little sense of it, just to understand what the traffic patterns are like,” Cassie said, matter-of-factly.

  “This seems like a really big spike,” Rachel noted, pointing to a portion of the line chart that peaked much higher than any other of the milestones on the screen.

  “Yeah, it is. It seems like over a thousand people read the blog I posted that day.”

  “Cassie! This is amazing! You’ve had more than a thousand people reading what you wrote?” Rachel was genuinely excited. She’d been reading the blog as Cassie posted, but hadn’t heard any information about readership until now.

  “It is, isn’t it? I haven’t done any marketing, I just started writing, and somehow people found me.”

  “Wow, hon, this is really exciting! Why don’t we go out to dinner to celebrate? I’m really proud of you about this. I think you’ve stumbled onto something with the potential to be really great.”

  “I’d like that,” Cassie agreed, then decided to spill the news she’d received just an hour earlier. “You know how I saw Jess for coffee?”

  “Yep, how was it?”

  “It was . . . she has a date with a bass player tonight,” Cassie said, closing the lid on the laptop. The numbers would be there later; the blog would still need to be written later that night or the next day.

  “And that’s surprising?” Rachel was confused. This sounded exactly par for the course for Jessica Taylor.

  “Just a bit. The bass player is a woman, Lana. Here’s the thing, though . . .”

  “The thing? Other than she has a date with a woman a week after trying to kiss you? That has to be the thing, right?”

  “Yes and no. I know a bass player named Lana. I don’t know if it’s the same bass player, but the odds are pretty good, right? There’s a social worker I see in court sometimes named Lana Parker. She doesn’t really look like what Jess described, but then again, she could be polishing things up for court.”

  “You didn’t ask her last name?” Rachel questioned.

  “No, I didn’t put the pieces together until I was back in the car on the way home. I was a little stunned that Jess was going out with a woman, and then I spent the rest of the time talking her off the ledge. She’s a little . . . unsure.”

  “Unsure? Like she doesn’t want to go?”

  “No, she definitely wants to go. She has the hots for this woman, it’s very clear. She just feels insecure. She’s never been with a woman past a little drunk making out in college; she’s nervous.”

  “She wasn’t all that nervous when she . . . oh, never mind,” Rachel stopped herself. It wasn’t the time to pick a fight about Jessica. There was no point, anyway, she knew Cassie loved her.

  “Hey,” Cassie said, holding her arms out in an indication that she needed help getting up, “let’s not, okay?”

  “Okay,” she agreed, pulling her future wife out of the chair and into her arms, giving her a big hug before continuing the conversation. “Did you tell her about us?”

  Silence.

  “You didn’t?” Rachel pressed.

  “I planned to. But she was having such a life-transformational moment, I didn’t want to take away from it. I’ll tell her, today just wasn’t the time. I spent most of the time convincing her to go watch a couple episodes of The L Word before her date. Then, we talked about how I fainted getting the cast off, and before I knew it, it was time to leave.”

  “She didn’t ask about the ring on your finger?”

  “Sweetie, it’s Jess, you know how she is. She was so in her own little zone. She may have noticed, she probably did in fact, but she didn’t ask.” Cassie found herself making excuses for her friend. She knew it was odd that she didn’t tell Jess the big news. Perhaps in the back of her mind, she wanted to make sure they had a reason to have another coffee date. She was still slightly worried Jess was slipping out of her world.

  “Okay, alright. Shall we go to dinner and talk about your blog? Let’s go celebrate—you’re internet famous!”

  “That’s a great idea,” Cassie agreed, pushing the guilt building in her stomach off to the side. A dinner out was definitely in order, and she could use the change of scenery.

  # # #

  At six o’clock in the evening, Jessica only had three hours until she needed to be at The Back Door for Lana’s set. She’d just gotten home after a quick stop at the drug store. It occurred to her while she was talking to Cassie that she was a little behind on personal grooming. After all, what was the point? She knew how to prepare for intimacy with a man, and it really didn’t matter all that much anyway. When it came to women, she really didn’t know. Sure, when it came to hair other than on her head, she knew less was better. Legs she understood. Underarms made sense. But she seriously questioned just how much of the bikini line to remove. Men don’t care, she thought. She’d been guilty of letting herself go from time-to-time, even with Tony. In her mind, it just didn’t matter all that much to most men if they were getting lucky. But now, faced with this date with Lana, she was unsure.

  So, she did what anyone living in the twenty-first century would do. She consulted Google. Google held all the answers, right? Google would steer her in the right direction, certainly.

  She picked up her phone and opened a web browser, and then stared at the search box. What did one even search for to learn the answer to this question? She tried an assortment of queries, all of them coming up with not exactly the answers she was looking for.

  She started with the simplistic: How much should I wax my bikini line?

  When that didn’t work, she moved on to more and more specific queries, none of them working. She just kept getting waxing salon menus with disturbing anatomical accuracy, laser treatment center before-and-after shots, reviews of various at-home waxing kits, but not the answer
s she wanted: how much was too much? How little was too little? Why did no one talk about this? Certainly she wasn’t the first person in the history of new lesbians to question personal grooming protocol? She was a researcher for a living; she was known for her ability to find any precedent for any legal problem a client could have, and yet she had trouble finding the answers to such a simple question.

  The clock was ticking, so instead of continuing to search and building up a pattern that would certainly make the Google algorithms think she had a private area hair fetish, Jess decided to just go with what she’d always done. Just go for tidy, she thought, as she grabbed the wax kit she’d gone out of her way to get. She recognized that she must really like Lana. She’d never put so much thought into such a mundane life task. I really shouldn’t have waited until the last minute for this she scolded on the way to the bathroom. She was just assuming something was going to happen, but as a lawyer, she’d always thought it was better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. You just never knew what might happen in the courtroom or the bedroom, and by God, she was going to be prepared.

  Jess winced in pain as she became intimately reacquainted with wax removal strips, one at a time, and then cursed herself for calling Lana in the first place. If she hadn’t called Lana, she could be hanging out in sweatpants watching a bad romantic comedy. Then she remembered the touch. That electric spark. The sexy smile and the spiky hair and the way Lana asked her about her favorite song. Of all the musicians she’d dated, not one had asked her to tell them her favorite song. It was such a simple gesture, and yet it said everything. Lana was actually interested in her, not what she could do for her, not the stature of her job, her connections, her physical looks. It was enough. It told her everything and nothing all at once. She knew absolutely nothing about this woman, and yet she couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  As she stood in her walk-in closet later, her fair skin still tinted red from a hot shower, Jess assessed her wardrobe and landed on a pair of leather pants and a tight T-shirt, then added a pair of knee-high boots. Casual but rocker, she thought. The leather pants could turn out to be a huge mistake if she was nervous, and got sweaty, but she’d risk it for the sake of fashion.

  Time passed in the blink of her emerald green eyes, and before she knew it, Jess found herself sitting in the front row of a roped off area at The Black Door. Her groin still tingled from her last-minute grooming, and she kicked herself again for waiting so long to take care of that business. She had a Lone Star, though, and was getting comfortable in her seat when it happened again: a tap on her shoulder. A spark shooting through her entire body.

  Lana.

  FIVE

  The door closed with a thud, auto-close hinges reliably doing their job, dark of night surrounding them as they stood in the compact foyer of Lana’s small apartment. The faint glow of streetlights outside filtered through partially-closed blinds, providing exactly enough illumination for her to catch a hint of anticipation in Jessica Taylor’s eyes. She could’ve flipped on the lights easily enough; the switch was right there.

  But she didn’t.

  They’d gotten here by way of Lana’s motorcycle; Jessica had held on for dear life as they roared through the unusually quiet streets of downtown Austin, the bars long since closed, patrons long since departed. It was the time of night when the wind whipped up discarded trash on the street, when the only people about were asleep in the corners and crevices, when the roar of a motorcycle muffler most definitely woke those sleeping in the high-rise apartments that had popped up almost overnight. They’d stayed at the bar after Lana’s band played. They’d talked. They’d kept it light, first-date worthy. But after the bar closed, when they still had more to say, they went on a long walk, swapping stories and laughing at each other’s jokes. At some point, their hands found each other and fingers entwined, and then, behind the shelter of a bus stop, Lana made the first move. She kissed Jess in a surprise assault. Her touch was soft and inquisitive, but it soon turned passionate. That kiss told them both everything they needed to know.

  Now they stood in the dark, completely silent save for the sounds of breath being drawn in and released. Not touching and yet not moving; neither quite ready for what would happen next.

  As their eyes locked—this time for good—tension mounted, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. Lana desperately wanted to kiss the young lawyer again. She wanted to taste those perfect red lips and feel the heat of Jessica’s skin against her own. She wanted to hear a moan of approval as her tongue sought entry, as her hands cradled ears, as her body leaned in and her thigh put just the right amount of pressure in just the right place.

  She reached out and placed one hand behind Jessica’s head, red hair laced between her fingers, and waited. Just a beat. When there were no objections, when she was sure, Lana leaned in and pulled gently on the back of Jess’s head, drawing their lips together in one swift motion.

  The kiss was electric on impact—just as it had been behind the bus stop. It wasn’t a fluke. The sensation she received when touching this woman was unlike anything she’d felt before. Sure, she’d kissed plenty of women, some more beautiful than others. She found Jessica to be beautiful on the outside, but after the last few hours they’d spent together, she realized she was beautiful on the inside, too. Lana knew physical beauty was only skin deep, the real measure of a person came from within. They barely knew each other, but she wanted to know more, fast. It was late—or early, depending on your perspective—the inhibition that comes with the light of day completely cast aside.

  As Jessica kissed her back, the heat between them escalated, and Lana pushed them together as one, step by tiny step until there was nowhere else to go. She’d backed Jessica firmly against her front door, her thigh acting on its own accord. Without thinking, she wedged it between Jessica’s legs and pinned her to the fiberglass slab that separated them from the outside world. There was no escape now, they were in the moment and they were in it together, pure passion coursing through veins and pulses racing uncontrollably.

  Jessica was lost in the kiss of the mysterious bass player who was becoming less mysterious by the minute, the softness of Lana’s lips on hers a new sensation. She was backed against a hard surface, yes, but everything else about the moment was completely soft, completely gentle. She was used to kissing men, the roughness of stubble like sandpaper on her face, the aggressive pressure of a man’s one-track mind rushing through the tender moments. This moment with Lana was heated and gentle at the same time. Lana took her time, she was patient. Lana’s lips fit hers with such perfect precision; it was as if they were made just for her. Her nervousness was melting fast, the heat on her skin like a flame against the wax of a candle.

  As a hand pulled on the lower hem of her untucked shirt, she felt herself completely give in, completely relinquish control. She relaxed into it as Lana’s hands worked their way under her top, her fingers sending sparks of electricity straight to Jess’s heart. This was a new sensation—she couldn’t remember anyone having this effect on her before—and her mind went back to the bar where they met. The first time Lana touched her, she felt it. That first time, it was simply a tap on her shoulder, and the resulting feeling was unexplainable, almost as if she’d received an electric shock. And it was happening again, this time with an intensity ten times as strong.

  Time stood still as lips brushed against each other, as Lana used her teeth to pull gently at Jess’s lower lip, as tongues intertwined in an exploration that showed no signs of stopping anytime soon.

  “Do you want to move this someplace more comfortable?” Lana finally whispered into Jess’s ear, taking the opportunity to tug on a sensitive earlobe, her tongue tracing the perimeter around the full ear and causing a visible shudder from the woman in her arms.

  The answer came without words, as Jess’s T-shirt was in a puddle on the floor in no time, and she pushed off the door enough to move them both towards the bed she could barely see, following the glow on th
e hardwood floors. It was a studio apartment—not much was left to the imagination—and they stumbled less-than-gracefully in the direction of the bed, to the unknown.

  Jess had planned for this. She’d imagined it. She’d obsessed too much on the minutia of it. She’d even done her research—she couldn’t help it—but research was very different from real life. If what happened next was as good as that kiss, she was going to be fine. She didn’t have time to think further before they landed on the bed completely nude, the only hint of her outfit left in the form of earrings. They’d managed to make quick work of the rest of their clothing, even Jess’s leather pants had been discarded with ease. Funny how that works when it’s important—when there’s lust in the air and the only solution is getting naked as fast as possible.

  Lana, even with her sensitive social worker soul, was traditionally a top when it came to her romantic encounters. She was still a rocker, after all. She had the swagger. She was a bit of an oxymoron sometimes, and she was fine with that. She guided Jessica into a prone position on her bed and crawled over her carefully, with purpose, until she reached an ear shrouded in red hair. Her hand instinctively moved a few tendrils out of the way, hot breath anxious to reach Jessica’s ear canal.

  “You are absolutely gorgeous,” Lana whispered from mere millimeters away, taking the lobe in her mouth for only a small moment before finishing her thought, “I’ve wanted to get you here since the moment we met.”

  Jessica shivered in reaction, the warm air in her ear rendering her speechless. Her heart was racing; she could feel the heat on her skin as if she was standing in the middle of a wildfire, and she stood no chance of extinguishing the flames at this point. Lana did something to her she couldn’t quite explain, and now that they were here—now that they were skin on skin—her mental faculties were failing her.