Best Lesbian Romance 2009

by Radclyffe

  Krispin could make my stomach jump into my throat and my heart drop to shaking knees with her presence alone. My hands trembled as a flutter moved swiftly throughout my body to end in the juncture of my legs where spring long johns and denim jeans began to feel wet and clammy. Blushing embarrassment took me back to the job at hand. I squeezed between the two solid stock animals and began to work the circulation back through their tight muscles.

  Krispin, shed of rifle and thermos, moved in behind me, effectively blocking my escape. “I brought you something.” She reached into one side of her bloated saddlebags tugging a string-wrapped, large square package free.

  Dropping the grooming tools into the feed bunk, I tentatively took the offering while staring too blatantly into eyes that were ice blue, framed by sun-creases at the outer edges.

  When I hadn’t moved, Krispin pulled the latigo string holding the bundle together. “Mountain cat.” The supple hide spilled over my arms and reached for the barn floor on either side. “It was harassing the brood cows near to a week before I got a real good sight on it.”

  The golden fur was thick and full, luxurious. I ran my fingers through it and brought the pelt to my cheek, squeezing my eyes shut as the succulent sensation ran through more than just my face. Krispin. She smelled of horses and wood smoke with the fading crispness of winter struggling against springtime. And she was, to me, as rare a beauty as the tanned hide that she had gifted me with.

  My eyelids flew open at the shock of wayward thoughts. I dropped the fur from my cheek to hold it tightly against my chest. Krispin reached out to stroke that same cheek with the back of her cold hand before turning to retrieve her rifle and coffee.

  Then she was gone.

  I thought I felt her fingers lingering along my cheek. I replayed her touch in my mind over and over as I settled her stock in the barn. My mind drifted into that warm daydreaming state. Parts and pieces in pictures real or imagined flooded my senses. I reached out, brushing hair from her eyes, and taking the moment to run my fingers through the even lengths that hung to frame her weather-worn face. I cupped her ear and she leaned into my touch, closing her eyes with a look of wanton need coupled with seeking the comfort of another human, another body in all of its sensuality and compassion. My mind had taken away her hardened silence and gave me visions of her needing me as much as I felt I needed her. But was that still Krispin?

  Taking the exquisite hide to the smaller room of two in the bunkhouse, I brushed my hand along Krispin’s bunk that had been empty and cold for far too long, as I made my way over to my own. There were no other women in residence in the bunkhouse room this early in the season. I had actually just arrived to help my uncle during spring break from the university and after an all too short stay, would not see this room again until summer began.

  Spreading the fur over my bed, I knew what I wanted to do. I stoked the wood stove to glowing and then stripped off all of my clothes. Like a child I dove to land the length of the pelt and then rolled myself into it. The sensation was both intoxicating and relaxing, drawing me quickly into a fitful sleep plagued with visions of Krispin.

  Her calloused hands slid over my buttocks, squeezing playfully before they moved up my sides to my small rounded breasts. Krispin thumbed each nipple until they turned dark red and stood stiff. We were laughing. She clasped under my jaw, moved in to brush a kiss across my lips, then turned my head to the side as she suckled one of my breasts into her warm mouth.

  I woke to the sound of the shower running. It was my turn to lean against the doorframe, luxuriating in the warm steam emanating from the hot streams of water that brushed several scents of soaps to fill the humid air.

  The shower room had three standing showers with hazy glass doors, three toilet stalls, and a tub in an enclosed area at the far end. Sinks and a long countertop lined the opposite wall, with a large length of mirror that made the room appear to be doubled. Krispin was in the first shower stall that could be seen fully through the open doorway. She had always taken the first stall, leaving the further stalls for those shyer.

  Her confidence in her own body and strength of character could come off as snotty. But I had known Krispin far too long to let negative ideas invade that knowledge, or fall prey to false perceptions she would allow others to believe. Krispin was her own person, with no explanations and no apologies. And the few who could understand that had mostly come to jealously despise her for her inner strength.

  To me, that alone made all the difference. She knew what she wanted and would take it. I often wished she would take me in the same manner—no questions, no explanations, just a raw coupling of our bodies and our beings.

  She leaned back to rinse her hair before taking up a razor and lifting a leg in cramped quarters. Then she bent to her work. Krispin remained in the shower longer than usual, emitting audible sighs and standing for periods to allow the hot water to rush over her face or shoulders. It was the little things in life most of us passed by without any particular notice that Krispin took in as if each touched her very soul.

  My pulse pounded throughout my body. I could hear and feel it in my ears. The hard thumping in my chest reached to my belly. And a rhythmic throbbing tortured my nether lips, which felt like they were swelling.

  The water abruptly stopped. I could see Krispin’s hazy form leaning against the side wall while she wrung her hair behind her head in both hands, staying a minute in a position of leisurely stretching. She was like the cat I wrapped around my naked body—lithe, sleek, strong, and dangerous, an animal to be avoided in most situations.

  I should have moved back into the bunkroom. I shouldn’t have stayed there leering. The textured glass door popped open, and out walked Krispin in all of her naked glory, toweling her hair and squeegeeing water from her ears. She knew I was standing there. She knew I was staring. She had probably known the second I arrived to lean against the doorframe.

  Krispin roughly rubbed the short towel over her wet, glowing skin, ignoring me for the moment. She dumped the sodden cloth on the countertop and then turned to look me straight in the eyes. I froze until her minty breath woke my senses. “You look good in that.” And she tugged the hide up a little, rolling a lapel of sorts at either side of my neck.

  “Thanks. You look good too.” Which I regretted saying as soon as it escaped my lips. I felt like a starstruck schoolgirl floundering in front of a world idol.

  She laughed, a deep-throated sound that echoed off the walls.

  “I mean—”

  A rough pointer finger pressed across my lips, stifling any other ridiculous quips I might have come out with.

  She was beautiful, more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In her nakedness she wasn’t vulnerable like most would look or feel, but more real, maybe surreal. In that moment, I was ashamed of wanting her, or not ashamed, more like afraid. Fear flushed through me quickly, and my knees turned weak in response. My brain interrupted to tell me that maybe I had come too far, that this might be more than I could handle.

  I remembered the day that we sat across from each other at a table in the mess hall, near a window, sunshine flooding in. Her hat was set on the chair beside her, and a rogue lock of hair fell forward as her head tilted downward, reading a slip of paper my uncle had handed to her. Her eyes were intense with seriousness. And right then and there I had wanted to reach over just to tuck that wild lock of brunette hair behind her ear. Just to touch her.

  My body had shivered, stirring to a greater passion than I had ever experienced. It went from my head to my toes, and I felt in that moment that there would be nothing as powerful, or fulfilling, or as enrapturing, than the passion that overtook me for those few seconds. And if there ever was…I might not survive it.

  She must have surmised the fleeting fear in my eyes because she didn’t kiss me. She had never kissed me, even though one kiss might have satisfied my carnal hunger and my newfound passion for probably the rest of my life.

  Krispin passed me in the doorway, p
icking clean, almost new clothes from her bunk and slowly donning them. She plucked her wool coat from the wrought iron hooks on the wall near the door, adjusted her Stetson atop her head, and left.

  My heart grew too heavy in my chest. Krispin. Perhaps one day.

  Krispin.

  EYES

  Maggie Kinsella

  Claire,” she says. She asks if she can touch my face, and I let her. Her fingers map my face with cobweb brush. Cheeks, eyelids, mouth, hair. “The name suits you. It sounds like ‘clear.’” Her fingers drop away. “Are you blond?”

  “Yes. You’re good.”

  She smiles. Her milky eyes are like pebbles washed by a river. “And you’re beautiful.”

  “No,” I say.

  “Can I take you to dinner?” she asks, and I let her.

  She takes me to one of the restaurants overlooking the harbor, an overpriced, understated place where the waiters are barely polite. They have to let her dog in too, although you can see that they’re not happy about it.

  The waiter leads us to a small table near the back of the room. It’s sandwiched between the spare cutlery and a trailing ivy on a plinth. The only view is of the door to the restroom.

  “We’d like a table with a view please,” says Lydia, and her voice holds just the right touch of authority.

  The waiter’s mouth tightens, but he leads us to a table by the window. Baltimore Harbor shines beneath us like the Milky Way.

  Her dog sits under the table, rests his nose on his paws, and sighs to himself.

  Her cloudy eyes are fixed on me, and, suddenly self-conscious, I try to chew quietly.

  She touches my hand. “Be yourself,” she says, and smiles.

  It’s as if the sun has slanted into the room and touched her face.

  We leave, replete, and walk around the harbor where the water taxis flutter past on the glassy water.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  “You’re the beautiful one,” she says.

  She kisses away the denial on my lips, and I let her.

  Summer glides along, and we’re a threesome. Her. Me. Her dog.

  “What happened to your face?” she asks one day, as her fingers slide over my cheek. They linger on the scars.

  “Flammable nightgown, open bar heater,” I say. “I was eight.”

  Her sigh whispers over my skin like her fingers. When the sun sets, she takes me to her bed, and I let her.

  We spend our days together. We walk around the harbor, and I describe for her how the seagulls wheel and soar. She smiles when I buy ice cream and give half of mine to her dog. I drive her to Virginia, farther than she’s ever been, and she runs her fingers over the bark of tall trees and feels the sounds they make in the wind.

  The woman in the gay-friendly B&B gives us a downstairs room. “It will be easier for your wife if she doesn’t have to navigate the stairs, and easier for you to let the dog out in the night,” she says, and I don’t correct her assumption.

  “Wife,” Lydia says, complacently, and kisses the taut, shiny skin where the scar pulls my eye permanently open.

  “Will you move in with me?” she asks, as we lie together, wrapped in fine cotton sheets. Her fingers strum patterns on my breast.

  I’m too breathless with the moment to answer her immediately. Me, I think, my fingers stealing up to rub my scar. She wants me. Instead of answering, I let my fingers walk in silent pathways over her body. I stroke her cheekbones and her eyelids, and she hums in response. I dare to think of a future.

  Back home, she has a letter. There’s an experimental research foundation in Los Angeles. Money is available: for the operation, for medical care, for travel. She will travel to L.A. and have the operation. Maybe then she will be able to see.

  “I’ll have to go without you,” she says, and I let her.

  I stay in her house and look after her dog, who is pining. We pine together. I’ve moved in without giving her an answer, but it feels right. The dog and I sleep in her bed and console each other. We both lose weight, and my scar pulls tighter.

  Lydia calls. The operation was a success. She can see; a little now, more each day. One day she tells me how she can see the outline of the palm trees along Santa Monica Boulevard; the next day she describes their fronds. She tells me about a woman she saw; a woman with a face of calm, serene perfection.

  “But not as beautiful as you,” she says. She believes that, and I let her.

  The dog and I wait for her calls, which come every day at the same time.

  “I’m coming home in a week,” she says. “I can’t wait to see you.”

  The dog and I meet her at the airport. She walks alone with no attendant to assist, slowly, cautiously, stopping to study each sign, her mouth moving as she spells out the letters. My hands grip the metal railing in the arrivals hall. The dog pants by my side.

  I don’t know if she recognizes me or her dog from the old pictures in her head, but she walks straight up to us. She studies my face, runs her fingers over the scar as she used to do, mapping the reality with new eyes. I tuck my hand over her arm out of habit, and she lets me. She sees the hastily averted glances of the curious, she sees me, and she sees her dog.

  “My dog is beautiful,” she says.

  When winter comes, and the snow hides the ugliness of Baltimore, my scar pulls tight with the cold, and her dog dies.

  “There goes my old life,” she says, and she cries.

  She has a job now, and she stays out some evenings, drinking pints in B.J.’s Sports Bar with her colleagues. She talks about work, about friends, about independence and freedom, and I let her. Sometimes she’s late home, stealing into our bed with red ale on her breath. I pretend to be asleep, and she lets me hold the lie.

  “Where shall we go on vacation?” she asks. “Europe? Hawaii? Somewhere warm and cheap like Mexico?”

  I remember how we walked together, my hand tucked over her arm. Lydia needs me less and less now; she knows which shirt to wear to match her eyes, the spice rack is no longer arranged alphabetically, she knows if someone tries to shortchange her without my steely-eyed gaze to guilt them into honesty.

  I am waiting for her wings to unfurl to the heavens. I am waiting for her to leave me, and I will let her.

  Lydia comes home with vacation brochures. She spreads them in a glossy multicolored fan on the coffee table. They are all for the same place: Toronto.

  I arch an eyebrow in question. “I thought you wanted someplace in the sun?” I say. “Toronto in March will be no different from here.”

  She sits on the couch, drawing me down beside her. Her hands encompass my own, sliding over them in soothing rhythm.

  “One big difference. We can get married.” She searches my face. “Will you, Claire? Will you marry me?”

  And I let her.

  HIDE

  Alison Tyler

  Leather. I have always loved the smell, the feel of it on my skin. There is something insanely sexual about the texture, the way, after years of wear, it molds to the owner’s body. Perhaps it’s the Neanderthal left in me, the cave girl clad in a mountain lion’s hide, but wearing skins makes me feel more alive.

  For myself, I choose sleek leather pants and riding boots, a leather vest worn open over a white T-shirt. On a lover, I like to see a black leather jacket cut close to the body, thigh-high leather boots pulled over opaque black stockings, and nothing, or very little, in between. I like to stroke a woman’s skin through the skin, her hide through the hide, testing the dangerous “give” in the texture, the supple caress. Breathing in the sinful scent, the medley of near-intoxicating odors.

  My love for leather has lasted close to twenty years, since I bought my first motorcycle and its accompanying biker jacket. And, despite a Harvard education and an inclination toward writing poetry, my fixation has become my means of employment: I own a leather goods store in the hip part of L.A., on Melrose Avenue.

  At thirty-seven, I’m older than the kids who walk down the strip i
n racer-back tank tops and baggy jeans, younger than the matrons who glare as they drive by in their Jaguars and Saabs. About the same age as the woman who walked into my place in the middle of a slow day, a Wednesday afternoon.

  She was stunning, just my type: long legs, red hair falling in loose curls past her shoulders, golden-green eyes that flashed at me in the late afternoon light. She strode into my store like a lioness on the prowl, the smell of her prey teasing her, making her fine nostrils flare as she moved up and down the aisles. I watched her from my perch behind the counter, watched as she touched the skimpy, pounded-leather dresses, ran her fingers along the smooth jackets, the shiny slacks.

  I watched her, but I didn’t say anything.

  There are some customers who come in looking to buy clothes that will make them look cool. I recognize the posers, the Hollywood Rocker set, who belong to the young L.A. crowd. They’re happening only because they’re young and in L.A. These jokers snag the vinyl jeans, the butt-hugging suede, the thigh-high micro minis. Others, my raunchy sex-fiends, buy shiny black chaps, cutaway dresses, unbelievably short shorts, bras and bikinis studded with silver. They spare no expense to buy what it takes to make them come, and I cull most of my money from them.

  But I wait for, and wish for, and fantasize about the she-tigers, the lady lions, the ones, like this redhead, who need the feel of the hide on their naked skin. Need the scent of it caressing their lovely bodies. These customers are the ones I opened Hide for in the first place, and they are the beauties I wait for.

  And watch.

  She had on a mint-green halter top that made her eyes glow the same color, and cutoff jeans that showed me a bit of her panties when she bent to look at the boots lined on the wall. Her ass made me dizzy, the way it filled out those shorts, the way the faded denim hugged her sweet tail. She was a beauty, a thoroughbred. A prize.

  “Do you have this in a sex?” she asked softly, startling me from my daydreams of what she’d look like in a black leather jacket, fishnets, and black motorcycle boots. Startling me from a picture of her tied down to my bed with all leather gear in place and a pair of stiff scissors in my hand.