Second Time Around

by Christine L'Amour

  “Second Time Around”

  A Lesbian Romance

  Christine L’Amour

  © 2020

  Christine L’Amour

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is intended for Adults (ages 18+) only. The contents may be offensive to some readers. It may contain graphic language, explicit sexual content, and adult situations. May contain scenes of unprotected sex. Please do not read this book if you are offended by content as mentioned above or if you are under the age of 18. Please educate yourself on safe sex practices before making potentially life-changing decisions about sex in real life.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner & are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images & are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.

  Edition v1.00 (2020.01.22)

  www.christinelamourauthor.com

  Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: Suzanne, RB, Jenny, Naomi W., and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Free Book “Sealed with a Kiss”

  Chapter One

  Monica woke up with a very small child screaming in her face.

  It was not the most soothing way to wake up. Her eyes snapped open and she was startled nearly off the bed, throwing her arms up to protect herself from whatever monster was currently trying to murder her via stabbing her in her eardrums. She focused her gaze and tried to calm her heart, which was currently beating so fast and hard, she could feel it beating against her ribs.

  It was David. Of course, it was David.

  “I’m hungry I’m hungry I’m hungry!” he screamed, red-faced and angry. “I want food. I want b’ekfast. I’m hungry. I’m hungry—”

  “David,” Monica tried to say as calmly as she could, willing her blood pressure to go down. It’s not his fault, she told herself, as she often had to repeat to herself whenever her devil-spawn of a son threw a tantrum, which was every day, several times a day. He’s a toddler and doesn’t know how to deal with his emotions. “David, this is the third time this week you wake me up like this. What did Mommy tell you about waking her up like this?”

  “But I’m hungry!” he wailed, firming the fact that they were definitely going to receive another noise complaint this week.

  “I told you if you woke me up like this again, I wouldn’t give you the sweet corn flakes you like,” she told him evenly. “You’re getting toast and butter and apple juice.”

  He looked at her with his huge, betrayed four-year-old eyes.

  “But I hate apple juice,” he said, his voice one of someone who was gearing up for a tantrum that would make the way he woke her up look gentle and soothing.

  “Mommy hates being woken up by screams,” Monica told him, willing him to understand.

  If he didn’t understand, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Maybe it made her a terrible mother—Christ, it did make her a terrible mother—but she had no patience, and being woken up like that had put her in a foul mood, and she wished sometimes that she could leave David with his damn father and just… be free for a few days.

  She had never signed up to be a single mother.

  Guilt still wrapped itself like a vine around her throat. Monica sighed and rubbed at her forehead.

  At her words, David’s little face scrunched up in confusion. She could almost see it as he processed the information, as his little brain tried to catalogue the fact that she hated being woken up by his screaming as much as he hated apple juice, and apple juice was the bane of his existence.

  He decided to cry.

  “But,” he said, face twisting and twisting her heart along with it, “but I hate apple juice, Mommy. I hate it. You can’t make me drink it!”

  “I told you yesterday that this is what would happen if you did this to me again,” she told him firmly, standing up from her bed. She caught him under her arm, carrying him like a sack of potatoes. Usually it made him laugh, but today he crossed his tiny little arms and stayed angry and upset. “We’ll have breakfast and you’ll drink your juice and then you’re going to kindergarten.”

  “No!” he screamed, wiggling in her arms and nearly braining himself falling to the floor. She cursed, trying to hold onto him.

  “David, stop!” she snapped, but he wouldn’t stop. “Stop throwing this tantrum! I won’t give you the apple juice. You can have toast and water. Are you happy now?”

  He wasn’t. He was committed to being miserable.

  Monica felt weary down to her damn bones. She wished, again, that she could have a break, and again she felt terrible for it.

  It’s not his fault, she reminded herself, tried to remind herself, and tried to ignore the way her day had started badly and could only get fucking worse.

  ***

  Monica arrived at work and barely greeted people before she sat down at her desk and booted up her computer. She sat and sipped her piping hot coffee while her system resumed, and within five minutes she had a barrage of files and folders open on her screen that, if printed to physical copies, would weigh enough to crush somebody to death. As it was, they nearly fried her company computer into barely recognizable charred parts.

  Her coffee burned her tongue. She barely noticed, eyes fixated on her screen.

  “You’ve got to blink, woman,” came an amused voice from behind her shoulder. “You have to remember to blink every now and then, or else you’ll go blind.”

  Monica rolled her eyes but smiled, swiveling around in her chair to look at her friend. Sharon was her favorite coworker, mostly by virtue of her being one of the only people who didn’t mind Monica’s lack of skills in the social manners department. When Monica didn’t greet people, they got annoyed; Sharon understood that Monica hadn’t meant any harm by it.

  “You were looking at my back, you couldn’t see if I was blinking or not,” Monica argued,
easily passing her coffee over so Sharon could have a sip.

  “I didn’t need to see to know,” Sharon said with a serious voice, then cracked up. “But really, you just walked in and went straight for your desk. I take it shi—stuff’s about to go down with your project?”

  Monica groaned. “Nothing’s about to go down because there are no volunteers. I don’t know how many times I have to tell Jerry, people won’t volunteer for things because they would rather be earning money, until he gets it. I don’t know what I’ll do… I need at least three people per class. Maybe I should have chosen a different project to explore.”

  “You have time,” Sharon comforted her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll have a meeting in a couple of hours, as soon as Jerry arrives, and after that you can try and talk to him. If your project wins the competition, which it won’t because mine will, then you can talk about getting a budget to pay some interns, maybe?”

  “He’ll tell me to find some unpaid interns,” Monica grumbled, then sighed. “I’ll find a way. How’s your project going, by the way? Last I heard, you were talking about teaming up with Charles and Julie. The betrayal. I could not believe it.”

  Sharon laughed, finally giving her coffee back. “You wouldn’t have wanted to team up with anyone if I’d offered to pay you for it! Besides, it’s not really teaming up, that’s not allowed. The prize is a promotion, after all, and they can’t promote three people at once. But it’s been going well. I’m helping Charles design some basic interfaces and he’s hooking me up with some equipment I’ll need.”

  “You have to tell me what your project is about,” Monica said. “I have no idea why you need Charles’ expensive music equipment.”

  Sharon grinned. “It’s going to be a blast, even if I don’t win! Look, don’t worry. I’ll help you with the volunteers, okay? And we can go to some universities, campaign for interns. I know people never want to be an unpaid intern, but people have to do it anyway.”

  Monica grumbled. “It’s fine. I can do it.”

  Sharon rolled her eyes, but let it go. “You’re not alone, Monica. You don’t have to do everything alone. I can help.”

  Monica had heard that before, word for word: You don’t have to do everything alone, such a long time ago. She blinked up at Sharon, mind elsewhere, taken to another place and time, all of fifteen years ago, before she had gotten married and had a son and then divorced, before she had been out of college, before she had had her heart broken.

  You don’t have to do everything alone. Monica didn’t remember much about that day, but she could recall with precise detail the way Valerie’s eyelashes had clung together with yesterday’s mascara, how her hair had fallen in a mess around her head, the way she had looked at Monica. Her eyes brown, but the morning sun had painted them in golden tones.

  It was nearly a month to the day before Suzanna broke up with her without a word and simply vanished.

  “Where did you go?” Sharon asked, amused and surprised, waving a hand in front of Monica’s face. Monica blinked up at her, broken out of her reverie. “Are you back? You weren’t answering. Did you have a new idea or something?”

  “I… no,” Monica told her honestly, then backtracked. “I mean—don’t worry, it was nothing. I just—yeah, I had an idea,” she lied. “It probably won’t end anywhere. Um. Thanks for everything, Sharon.”

  “All right,” Sharon said with a shrug. “I’ll come get you when the meeting’s starting, god knows you’d end up forgetting the time like you always do.”

  “I’m getting better about remembering the time!” Monica complained, though she was smiling.

  Sharon shrugged, then went back to her table. Monica looked back at her screen. Suzanna belonged to her past and thinking about her didn’t even really hurt anymore. Monica was going to focus on the now.

  She wondered where Valerie had gone. Why she had left her. But she would probably never know.

  ***

  The meeting went normally, which to Monica, meant that it went terribly. Jerry was his usual self: ignorant, uncaring, unbending. He didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to actual management, which was almost hilarious, in a terrible sort of way, since he was the manager. He had been hired because he was friends with one of the owners and everyone knew this.

  One of the reasons it was only almost hilarious and not actually funny at all was that his stupid opinions were affecting her work and management of her project. He wouldn’t bend on the paid interns thing; he wouldn’t hear any of her other proposals either.

  Monica headed home hungry, with a headache, and wanting to quit her job, which was how she headed home every day.

  Wait. She paused, glad that a red light afforded her a moment to think. It was Monday, which meant Kristen, her kindly neighbor who usually brought David home from daycare, was visiting her mother, and David had actually been picked up by Monica’s mother.

  Monica resisted the urge to close her eyes and rest her forehead against the wheel. She didn’t want to see her parents. She never wanted to see her parents. They adored David and never failed to tell her just how much she was failing her son.

  She considered for one wild moment just not going. Heading home and drinking wine and falling asleep in front of the TV. They could take care of David for a damn day if they were so fucking proficient at taking care of children. She remembered just how her own raising had gone and sighed. She couldn’t do that to her son. She turned the first left she could and started to head to her parents’ house.

  It wasn’t the house she had grown up in. It wasn’t a house she had spent any kind of considerable time at. They had moved several years ago after her mother had been transferred and Monica had married not two years later, which for her had been just as well: she hadn’t wanted to spend another second in her parents’ home. Now she depended on them; she couldn’t escape.

  It was a terrible thing to think about one’s own parents. Monica took a deep breath, covered her eyes with her palms for a moment, tried to smile, and arrived at her parents’.

  She left her car and knocked on the door. Her mother answered it quickly, a look on her face like she knew Monica had forgotten her son had been here and she was feeling very disappointed and annoyed feelings about it. Before the woman could say anything, however, David shot through her legs and collided with Monica with the force of a bullet, winding his tiny arms around her knees and nearly making her topple back.

  “David,” Monica snapped.

  “Mom!”

  The beaming expression on his face softened her heart. He lifted his arms in an imperious, undeniable demand of up and Monica picked up him easily, bringing him close. He made a mad grab for her glasses and immediately started to kick her; ah, home sweet home.

  “Grandma made pie!” he shouted directly at her ear. “We ate pie and played with crayons and you are late I thought you’d never come!”

  Monica marveled at her son’s inability to speak without exclamation.

  “Remember what Mommy said about volume,” she told him.

  “Why does that matter! When you are late!”

  “He’s right,” Monica’s mother said evenly, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed. “You’re late. Forgot again that your son was here, did you?”

  “There was a lot of traffic,” Monica lied blandly. “Thanks for picking him up today. How are you?”

  “I’m doing just fine,” her mother said. “Please try to be on time, Mon. I’m not your babysitter, I told you that.”

  You should be my babysitter, Monica thought. You basically engineered this baby because you wanted a grandchild so badly, the least you could do is take care of him.

  “Right,” Monica said. “Well, say hi to Dad. I see he’s not going to come out to greet me.”

  “He’s busy,” her mother lied as blandly as Monica had. As obviously too.

  “Grandpa was watching TV with me,” David said very loudly, right next to her ear.

&n
bsp; “That’s nice,” Monica said. “We’ll be going. Thanks again. See you next week.”

  “You could pass by during the weekend or something,” her mother said before she could turn around and leave. She uncrossed her arms, her voice soft. She was tired of fighting. So was Monica, but what else could she do? “Have lunch with us, Saturday or Sunday.”

  Monica looked away. “Sorry, Mom. I’ve been so busy, what with the competition at work. Maybe later.”

  Her mother nodded and said nothing. She turned away and closed the door. Monica headed to her car and resigned herself to more guilt.

  Chapter Two

  Valerie knew she wouldn’t like the town as soon as she stepped a foot in it.

  It wasn’t a small town by any means, it was a city, it was big with its buildings and its businesses, including the one she had just been hired for, but for someone who had lived the past decade in the throng and crowds of New York, it felt to her like a sham to call this place a city. It was the kind of place, she thought to herself, shuddering, where neighbors knew each other’s names and children could ride a bike and get into adventures around the better neighborhoods in the summer.

  She sat in the back of a cab heading to her new apartment and steadfastly refused to engage in conversation with the driver.

  She was glad when the trip was over. She was tired from the flight and eager to settle in, she wanted to get to her new home. Maybe she would learn to like the town, for all she knew she would never learn to be a very sociable person. She got out of the cab after paying and hauled her bags from the trunk alone. She didn’t have much. She had never accumulated much. She had lived in New York for a decade, but she had never stayed in the same apartment for over a year.

  Valerie Dawkins did not grow roots.

  She walked into her apartment, set her bags down, swiveled around on a heel to take a look at the rooms, and felt satisfied. She got instant noodles from her bag and went to the kitchen, intent on getting some quick food in her so she could be in time for the meeting she would have in a couple of hours at her new job.