Best Lesbian Romance 2009

by Radclyffe

  I ran my fingers over the stitching, leaned in close and breathed in the faded smell of leather and her cologne. That’s when I noticed that the pockets were full. Intrigued, because she hadn’t worn the jacket in ages, I reached in and pulled out what looked like a handful of receipts and ticket stubs and dog-eared scraps of paper. I thumbed through them with dawning wonder and then sat down in the middle of the floor, awash with memories of days gone by.

  Here were our boarding passes for our first vacation together, a year or so into our relationship. I chuckled to myself—we’d wanted that trip to be so perfect, and in the end, about the only good thing we could say about it was that it was over. A pampered week in the Caribbean sun had turned out to be an overcrowded, overrated bust. The food was lousy, the snorkeling mediocre at best, and the weather—I’m sure it rained almost every day we were there. There was one day in particular where the clouds rolled in thick and heavy and the rain thundered down for hours on end.

  But you know? That was the best day of all. We stayed in our little shoebox room and listened to the rain and lay naked on top of the sheets. The air conditioner was broken, and the fan did little to move the hot humid air around the room, but it was perfect. Lying there with her, it felt as though we were somehow removed from time. Like there was no one else in the world but us, and there was nothing beyond those walls, beyond that bed, beyond her fingertips gently tracing the contours of my body. It was like she was discovering me anew, every curve and hollow, from the back of my knee to the swell of my hips. Can you ever really know all the little nuances of another person?

  “Did you have this freckle yesterday?” she asked with a furrowed brow.

  I giggled at the utter seriousness of her expression.

  “I’m sure I did,” I replied.

  “And this one over here?”

  “Yes, baby, that one too. I’m pretty sure they’re all exactly where they were yesterday. And the day before,” I deadpanned.

  “I’m not so sure...I think I need to take a count,” she said, fingers tracing over my ribcage, then grazing the underside of my breast.

  “That might take a while,” I replied. “Redheads are notoriously freckly, you know.”

  “I’ve got my whole life,” she said.

  She was right.

  I reached out and framed her face with my hands, brushed her hair back off her forehead, ran my thumb along the beautiful square line of her jaw and over her sensuous mouth. She kissed the pad of my thumb gently and then reached up to capture my hand in her own. I looked at our fingers laced together, at the warmth and love shining in her dark eyes, and knew without question that this was the best trip I’d ever been on.

  I sighed wistfully, remembering the hours we’d spent loving each other that day. How we’d stayed in that bed until the rain stopped and our stomachs rumbled threateningly and drove us out into the soggy Caribbean night in search of food. With our flushed cheeks and tousled hair and shy knowing smiles we must have looked like a couple of crazy kids in love, which, I suppose, we were.

  Here was something else—a receipt from the Church St. Diner, faded with age and bearing a date I’d never forget. We’d been seeing each other for a little over a month and were completely caught up in the whirlwind intensity that accompanies all such new things. We’d meet in the evening—almost every evening—for dinner or drinks or coffee, and spend hours talking and touching, telling our stories, and getting lost in the minutiae of one another. We’d debate the profound and the absurd, and then spend quiet hours trembling with the force of the passion that burned between us. But no matter how late the hour or how spent we were, invariably one of us would be shuffling out the door at four or five in the morning heading for home. Looking at it now, I had no idea how we’d lived through that crazy time, subsisting on a couple of hours of sleep each night and generous quantities of coffee.

  The thing of it was, despite everything we’d shared, we’d never given voice to the emotion that we both knew was there, shimmering between us. We’d speak in generalities about what a great connection we felt toward each other and about the amazing chemistry that we shared. But of love? Not a word. In the quiet of my heart I knew. But we’d both been burned in the past and had entered into this casually, not looking for anything other than a little lighthearted fun. To admit to love could be wondrous, sure, but it was also to chance hurt and pain.

  So there we were, brunching on omelettes and sausages and toast and jam, the early spring sun shining crisply in the windows and a fire in the grate behind us. But the light, though bright, held no warmth, and the fire did nothing to dispel the slight chill that lingered in the air. Our cheerful banter sounded forced, and her smile did little to hide the sadness I could see in her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She shrugged and looked down, pushing a bit of sausage absently across her plate. “Just tired, I guess...”

  “Come on...” I coaxed.

  “Generally speaking? Nothing’s wrong...”

  “And what if we weren’t speaking in generalities? What would you tell me then?” I said, heart beating in my throat.

  She paused, looking at me with such a wealth of emotion in her beautiful dark eyes that it made me catch my breath.

  “I am so in love with you.”

  The corner of her mouth rose a little then and I smiled in return, feeling as though she’d just gifted my soul with wings. I opened my mouth to tell her how I loved her—to tell her all the things I’d already told her a hundred times over in my mind—when raucous laughter erupted from a table of boys a few feet away, breaking the spell of the moment. We laughed a little then too, giddy in our discovery and with the relief of having braved those words that had gone unspoken for so long. We finished our coffees and paid the bill, eager to be anywhere alone where we could cradle this nascent love between us.

  As we settled into the car, I looked at her strong profile and reached over to gently stroke my fingers through her short dark hair. She looked at me then, and for one brief moment a shadow flickered in her eyes. My heart ached with the magnitude of what I felt for her. I reached over and wrapped her in my embrace.

  “You must know how much I love you...” I murmured into her ear, “you must.”

  I knew that day that what I felt for her was without equal. I knew that the only way for me to live my life was with her by my side. I knew it with a certainty that had no credible explanation but that I trusted implicitly. We hardly knew each other, and I knew that such a declaration would be viewed with skepticism from those who knew us until time proved otherwise. As it has.

  I ran my finger across the faded surface of the old receipt and set it aside with a smile, thinking of all the wonderful times we’d shared since that day, of the life we’d built together. I continued to thumb through the pile: here was the card that I’d attached to the first flowers I’d ever sent her—pale yellow orchids—with a message telling her I’d never forget that day in the diner. Here were the directions to a cottage we’d rented one year when the heat and noise of the city had driven us in search of cool waters and northern skies. We’d drifted across the tiny lake in a rudderless paddleboat idly fishing by day, and gone skinny-dipping in the silvery light of the moon at night.

  And here—here was card the realtor had left in the gift basket by the front door the day we got the keys to our house. I smiled, remembering our excitement that day. I don’t think two people had ever wanted something more than we wanted to be in that house—our home, together. The closing had been five torturously long months. We’d watched spring turn to summer, and summer to fall while we waited. We’d drive by, wistfully wondering what was in bloom in the gardens and making plans for all the things we couldn’t wait to do in our perfect, perfect home.

  We picked up the keys at six o’clock in the evening and tumbled from room to room with giddy abandon, delighting in tiny forgotten details or remembered favorites. The movers wouldn’t arrive until the day after
next, but it was unthinkable that we wouldn’t spend the night. The previous owners had left us with an old green sofa bed in the basement (we’d later learn their generosity was fueled by the knowledge that there was absolutely no way for it to come out, barring destruction of either said sofa bed or the doorframe—both of which we learned the hard way). So we dragged the worn-out mattress up three flights of stairs until we had it proudly lying in middle of the floor in our bedroom, draped in blankets and a sleeping bag we’d had the foresight to bring.

  We sat cross-legged on our makeshift bed, eating Chinese take-out in cardboard cartons, dreaming fantastic dreams, and toasting our spectacular fortune with a bottle of champagne. As dusk turned to night, she produced a quantity of candles and set them about the floor, so that we were bathed in the warm glow of their light, and our bedroom, though meagerly furnished, seemed the most beautiful place in the world.

  She kissed me then, a gentle kiss filled with love and tenderness and the promise of a lifetime of tomorrows. She pressed her forehead against mine and said, “You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “Likewise,” I smiled, and kissed her in return, my pulse quickening at the warm slide of her tongue against mine, the attraction between us undiminished by the passing of time. I could spend hours like that: kissing her, exploring her mouth, getting lost in the taste of her, the sensuous feel of her tongue rhythmically stroking into my mouth, the heady sensation of her body tight against mine.

  We moved together, mouths and limbs entwined, so that I was on my back on the mattress and she was beside me, braced on one elbow, one hard thigh between my own, her free hand caressing my breast, teasing my nipple through the fabric of my shirt.

  “I want to see you,” she said, her dark eyes glittering like obsidian in the reflected light of the candles. She slid her hand beneath the hem of my shirt, drawing it up over my belly, skimming lightly over my ribcage, and coming to rest against the underside of my breast. I arched my back for her and grasped the edges of my shirt where she’d left it, deftly removing it and tossing it aside.

  For a moment, cool air teased my nipples, only to be replaced by the heat of her breath and the warm stroke of her tongue. I moaned my pleasure as she suckled my breast, drawing it into the hot moisture of her mouth. My hands were restless, curling in the hair at the nape of her neck, exploring the expanse of her shoulders and back through the cotton of her T-shirt as she continued to lavish attention on first one, then the other breast. It felt like heaven, having her mouth on me like that; but more, it felt like every stroke of her tongue and nip of her teeth was directly connected to my clit. The more I felt the pull of her mouth on my breast, the more aroused I became, feeling my body open and swell, my hips rising off the mattress to grind sinuously against her thigh.

  I bit back a whimper of protest when she moved her leg from between mine, and purred my contentment when I felt her nimble fingers open the front of my jeans and slide inside. She found the hard swell of my clit with practiced ease, circling it with a teasingly light touch, then trailing lower to dip into the wet heat she’d created, coating her fingers with my moisture. She retraced her path then, making my clit a slick hard surface beneath her fingertips. She felt so good like that—with her mouth and hand working me—my mind was reduced to a singular thought:

  “More...” I moaned, my hips undulating, frustrated that I couldn’t feel her skin against mine, frustrated with the layers of clothes that still separated me from the contact I craved. “I need...”

  She kissed me again, but this time her kiss was filled with the heavy sensuality that vibrated between us. Her tongue filled my mouth, stroking deeply and fully against my own, its rhythm wreaking havoc with my senses—reminding me of nothing so much as the rhythm I wanted to feel her hand driving out inside my body.

  She drew back slowly, nipping my lower lip and sucking it into her mouth, then healing the tiny hurt with her tongue.

  “Tell me what you need,” she said.

  “I need to feel you—please...”

  She slid her hands across my belly, then lower to delve beneath the waistband of my jeans and panties, leaning over to press a tiny kiss in my navel. “Here?” she said.

  “Yes—no...more—I need to feel more of you...” I pleaded, trying in vain to capture her face in my hands, to draw her to me, to bring her closer. She evaded my seeking hands, moving lower, sliding my clothes down the length of my legs and off, leaving a trail of kisses along the inside of my thighs, down my calves to the tips of my toes.

  “Like this?” she asked, her face a mask of innocence as she continued to torment me.

  “What I want,” I said, holding her eyes with the heat in my own, “is your tongue in my mouth, my hands in your hair, your teeth on my neck, my fingernails scoring your back. I want your skin against mine, your clit hard and pulsing, your wetness against my thigh, and your fingers inside me.”

  I saw desire flare, strong and fast in her eyes—heard her swift intake of breath. She rose without a word and quickly removed her clothes, her eyes never leaving mine. I gloried in the sight of her, drinking in her high firm breasts, her tight stomach, her gently curving hips. She sank into my arms with a groan, fusing her mouth to mine in a kiss that embodied deep passion and intense yearning, rising desire, and overflowing love. I reveled in the feel of her breasts against my own, her nipples hard with arousal. I ran my hands down the length of her back and over her hips as our kiss intensified, our legs intertwined, and our bodies rocking together gently.

  “Please, baby...” I whispered, breaking the kiss and feathering her cheek with loving kisses, “I need you inside me...”

  She shifted her weight, sliding her hand between our bodies and groaning helplessly with desire, her forehead against my chest, as her fingers found my swollen core. She stroked my wetness with an almost reverent awe, looking up to meet my eyes in unspoken question.

  “Now...please,” I moaned, our eyes locked together as she entered me with agonizing slowness, my back arching off the bed as every nerve ending fired with pleasure, a pleasure that only intensified as she curled her fingers back, hitting me in the place she knew made me tremble. Her thumb found my clit, moving in slow circles in time with her thrusts until a sheen of perspiration covered my skin and my stomach muscles tightened; my heart beat out its rhythm like a trip-hammer in my chest, and I felt that delicious tension coil deep in my belly.

  I loved when she was inside me like this—for all the endless ways she loved me; I never felt closer to her than when we moved together like this, her flesh in mine, connected in these moments as closely in body as we were in our hearts and our spirits.

  “Come for me, baby...” she whispered, her eyes filled with love and desire. She increased the pressure of her thumb and the speed of her thrusts, rocking me with an irresistible rhythm until I cried out my release and pleasure exploded through my body like a starburst, leaving me spent and trembling in its wake.

  It was always like that with her. Overwhelming and all-encompassing and shaking me to my very core. I had never been as deeply connected to anyone as I was to her, and I knew that if I spent the next fifty years loving her, I’d still feel as though it wasn’t enough. I loved her then—telling her with my hands and mouth all the things for which I had no words until the candles burned low and the sky grew bright with the approaching dawn. We fell asleep in each other’s arms; which really was home no matter where we were.

  A car door slammed shut somewhere in the distance, breaking my reverie and bringing me back to the present. I looked at the wealth of cards and receipts and scraps of paper in my hand—anniversaries and milestones and memories spanning more than a decade—appreciating in that moment the richness of the life we shared and the depth of the love we’d been blessed with. I thumbed through them quietly, each carrying a memory of happiness, of some remembered moment she’d preserved.

  At the bottom of the pile, on a page torn from her day planner, was the address o
f my old place, scribbled next to my name and phone number. It was dated the day of our first date. I was so nervous that night; I felt such an attraction to her and such a connection with her, and I wanted so much for her to feel the same. I worried over my clothes, my hair, chiding myself for being so girly, and looking at the clock every other minute. And then she was there, standing on my doorstep in her faded leather jacket, with a slow seductive smile and looking too sexy for words.

  “Hi...” she said.

  She took my breath away.

  I heard the door open downstairs and looked at the bedside clock, amazed at how the hours had passed as I’d sat there on the floor immersed in memories of our past. I heard her footsteps on the stairs and quickly grabbed a pen from the night table, adding today’s date to the page from her day planner, and my own words below her distinctive scrawl. I tucked everything back in her jacket, and carefully replaced it in the closet, stroking the soft leather fondly, and thinking with a smile of the surprise she’d experience the next time she leafed through her pockets.

  You had me in your pocket right then and there—I’ve been there ever since.

  PURPLE THUMB

  Catherine Lundoff

  Lisa looked around at the riot of flowers that cascaded over the fences and up the trellis that leaned against the house wall. From there, they flowed in little rivers around the yard. Nearly ripe vegetables grew in neat rows and cages, their tidy order in sharp contrast to the flowers. To add to the whole idyllic picture, the early evening summer air was scented and a few bees still ambled from flower to flower.

  She snorted and took another gulp of her beer. How much time did it take to do all this anyway? Sure it was pretty, but what was the point? Even if her condo had a yard, she couldn’t imagine wasting her sparse free time doing something like this.

  The smell of barbecue wafted its way to her nose, and she turned away from the garden and headed back to the patio to join the crowd of women around the grill. She caught an appreciative glance or two headed her way and gave the assembled group her best flirtatious smile. “Lovely flowers,” she trilled, hoping her tone would pass for sincerity.