Hotel Hollywood: A Lesbian Romance

by Nicolette Dane

  “That’s okay,” Kelsie said. Leaning in closer, she planted a small, sweet kiss on my lips. Our eyes met. “Just be open to it.”

  “I am,” I whispered.

  You just have to be open to life, whatever it may bring you. Sometimes life’s no good, it brings you pain, it’s difficult, but you must be open to those bad times too. Because if you can accept those bad times as just another part of this journey, it’ll make it far easier to see the good times when they appear. I’ve been pretty down on myself for a while, mired in indecisiveness and fear, but I persevered through it all and came out on the other side. Sitting there on my favorite beach, holding hands with Kelsie Kent — even I, someone who isn’t obsessed with celebrity, can admit that’s pretty insane — about to have my life changed forever. I’m a realist, I know I’ve got to take the moments as they come, I know that there’s always a possibility that this isn’t forever, but I had to take the chance that it was. I had to take the chance that this could be my new normal.

  “I still have to talk to my father,” I mused softly as we sat on that log, the waves lapping up against the beach.

  “You do,” said Kelsie. “That’s the right thing to do.”

  “I love him,” I said. “Deep down, you know? But it’s just been such a battle to actually respect him. He really just let his life fall apart.”

  “What about you?” asked Kelsie knowingly. “How can you judge him when you’ve just been coasting as well?”

  That really hit me in the heart. If I hadn’t spent so much of the last decade under intense self-evaluation, I might have been offended by Kelsie’s words. But she was so right. I’d definitely been coasting. I’d taken the easy way, which was the way of no risk, and I was just as guilty as my father for whatever charge I’d laid upon him.

  “Yeah,” I peeped. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”

  “You need me,” said Kelsie with an affirmative smile. “I can push you to take the leaps you need to take to become a more whole you.”

  “And you need me!” I countered, mimicking her smile. “I can keep you grounded in your weird celebrity life.” Kelsie laughed at me and nodded.

  “True,” she said. “I admit, sometimes I can get a little batty. Especially when there’s an award show coming up. God! I can definitely turn into a freak. You’ll see.”

  “I hope so,” I said, slithering my arm around Kelsie’s arm and hugging against her. Our skin stuck lightly together from the humidity of that wonderful summer afternoon. I never wanted to leave her side. Something was fundamentally changing within me, a greater confidence was growing inside, something magical. I felt like I could do anything with Kelsie next to me. She was an inspiration. A beautiful inspiration.

  “What are you going to say to your father?” she asked slowly, looking at me out of the corner of her sunglasses.

  “I’m just gonna… do it,” I said. “I don’t really have any plans. I’m just going to talk and see what happens.”

  “Don’t get mad,” she said. “Whatever you do, don’t let any anger out… even if you feel it inside.”

  “All right.”

  “Be frank and true and confident,” Kelsie continued. “It’s going to be emotional for you, I’m sure, but Champlain obviously isn’t doing it for you and this is an adventure you need to go on.”

  “You’re just saying that because you selfishly want me all to yourself,” I said, beaming, trying to stifle my grin. I wanted her to want me all to herself.

  “So what?” she said with a mock-sneer on her face. Then she laughed. “Rockstars like me always get what they want.”

  “You’re a goof,” I said.

  “C’mere,” said Kelsie. I obeyed her command, moving in closer to her, and our lips met in a slow, sensual kiss. I adored her. I felt Kelsie drop her hand to my hip, giving my side a soft pinch and dipping her thumb into the band of my shorts, as our mouths moved in unison and the passion of our kiss intensified. I knew I was making the right decision. I felt it deep in my heart.

  Most of all, I was really feeling worthy. I had been questioning our budding relationship, even as the heat between Kelsie and I grew, I still had a nagging voice inside that told me that this was just pure fantasy. That a beautiful woman like her could never go for someone like me, someone who appeared so normal, but that was just shame talking. Unfounded shame. I could admit now that I was pretty, I was a good person, smart, worthwhile, and there was no reason someone like Kelsie wouldn’t be interested in me. I was just at a different stage of life than her, that’s all. People take different paths, they move by their own timing. Kelsie was successful and I was still figuring things out. But in love, that kind of stuff doesn’t really matter. Patience and acceptance are key to building a nice, long-lasting love affair.

  “Mmm,” I softly sighed as we simultaneously pulled back from our kiss. Kelsie and I smiled at one another. While I demurred, averting my eyes down in a stifled and shy giddiness, Kelsie raised her finger up and lightly brushed it over my lip.

  “I like this,” she whispered.

  “Me too.”

  When I was much younger, I think around the time I was thirteen, I had the opportunity to join the traveling competition team for gymnastics. I’m not going to pretend like I was good or anything — I was just okay — but considering Champlain, and a few other very small towns in the area, didn’t have many young girls doing gymnastics, it was just kind of like the door was open for me to join up and go compete against some of the bigger cities near us. Holland, Grand Rapids, those kind of places. But in doing some of this traveling, I was told that I would have to spend the night at hotels, nights away from home, without my parents, and that I’d have to bunk up with the other girls on my team.

  I declined the invitation. I didn’t want to be away from my family and I didn’t want to be in hotel rooms with other girls.

  I think it was just fear of the unknown that made me nervous to be away from my family. My family life wasn’t particularly pleasant, as I’m sure you can imagine, though neither was it particularly awful. It just sort of was. It was even, more or less. My parents fought, like I assumed most parents did, though I obviously had no idea at the time that my mother was so eager to get out of the scene and that my father was developing a dependency on alcohol. At thirteen, you can’t really see the specifics. You know something might be weird, but that’s the extent of it. Still, I didn’t want to be apart from what I knew. I was a pretty insular kid. I was content to read my books at home, buckled down in my room. Alone.

  But the other reason… the other reason… I didn’t want to be alone in these hotel rooms with other girls my age because I worried that they might discover how different I truly was. It was about this time in my life that I started developing an attraction for other girls. This was something that nobody talked about when I was young. It wasn’t even a thing, it wasn’t a possibility. It wasn’t on TV, in movies, it was barely even in books. The books I was reading at that point, at least. Then again, some authors have a sneaky way of working subversive ideas into their writing. So maybe I was exposed to something when I was young that helped me, I don’t know, recognize what was happening on some level.

  I just knew that were I to get together with other girls my age, girls on my team, girls at the competitions, I knew that the topic of conversation would eventually lead to boys and it just wasn’t something I could discuss with any authority. I didn’t care about boys. I cared about other girls. In fact, I can remember my first crush was on this girl Alexa who was on my gymnastics team. I can’t remember anything particularly special about her, to be honest, she just had something, some sort of verve for life, that sparked my curiosity and made me feel kind of funny.

  Maybe it was this uncertainty of who I was, or where I stood, both in my home life and my pubescent romantic life, that kept me in hiding somewhat. It kept me paralyzed in a way, it kept me from getting out there and living the life I knew I was capable of living. Was it fear of what
others might think or say about me that kept me in Champlain? Maybe. But I had read enough books with strong female leads to know that getting out of your house, taking chances, exploring the world, this was all possible. And yet I didn’t do anything. I didn’t go off to university, where I’m sure I would have flourished in my sexuality, just because we couldn’t afford it. Couldn’t afford it. A few student loans and I might be a totally different, totally liberated person. Community college wasn’t the same.

  I mentioned before that I had left Champlain — well, left Champlain and the surrounding area — exactly one time in my life. We drove across the state to Detroit to attend my grandmother’s funeral and help my mother straighten up the house, box things up, clear the house out to sell it. I didn’t know my grandmother very well, my mother’s mother, because my mother and her weren’t all that close in my grandmother’s later years. But I did know she was a bit kooky. Just like my mother, just like me.

  Going through my grandmother’s house at that time, I was sixteen, it really opened my eyes. My mother and I found some letters that my grandmother had written back and forth with another woman, Genie was this woman’s name, and from what I had gathered from the letters my grandmother and Genie had had a sexual relationship together years and year prior. That was absolutely crazy to discover for a sixteen year old Audra, a girl who was still trying to come to terms with her own sexuality. There I was, reading about my grandmother lamenting that nothing greater ever came from what her and Genie had together. And Genie agreed.

  It was a wake up call, you know? Like, holy crap, my grandmother was a lesbian? And sadly for her, apart from a tryst with an old friend, she never got to live her real life out in the open. She passed not really knowing the love she craved.

  That trip gave me the boost of confidence I needed to admit to myself, and to my parents, that I was just like my grandmother. Discovering my grandmother’s secret made my mother cry, as she also did when I reveled to her my secret. But it was for different reasons. She cried over my grandmother because she wished her own mother could have been open with her when she was alive. And she cried over my revelation because she knew we had something different, a better relationship maybe, though I’m sure at that point she still felt like a terrible mother. I think she knew she was going to leave. And she did, just over two years laters.

  I’ve got a lot of baggage, as you can surely see. I still haven’t been able to effectively process it all. But I’m grateful that I can at least recognize it. And that’s the first step to fixing it. Luckily, I don’t have a lot of baggage when it comes to actual physical stuff. Funny, that. It seems to me that not having a lot of stuff would be ideal for a person who intended to move around a lot. Yet being a wanderlust was never my thing.

  Looking back now, I can see that it was quite silly to decline to do travel gymnastic competitions and that those events probably would have been good for my social development. But that’s looking at it from more of a nostalgic perspective, or the perspective of someone who’s had to learn some things the hard way. I should have traveled. And maybe, I should have went for Alexa. Because who knows? You can never know if something will be one way or another unless you try.

  With Kelsie, I was going to try and I was going to succeed. This whole thing with her, this nutty romance that fell out of the sky, it felt truly like the world slapping me in the face. I could have spurned her, I could have grimaced at having to service some pretty celebrity, I could have stayed locked in my room. But I didn’t, for whatever reason. And I was happy that was the case.

  “So you’re ready?” asked Kelsie, looking over at me from the passenger seat of my Jeep as we sat parked in my driveway, hand up on the bar, black sunglasses covering her beautiful green eyes. “You need a pump up speech?”

  “A pump up speech?” I asked with a small laugh. “What do you mean?”

  “Yeah,” she said, grinning. “You know, like… ‘you can do this! You flippin’ rock! Go, Audra Go!’” With that, Kelsie raised her other arm and made her hand into a fist, pumping it in the air.

  “I mean, those are kind of just platitudes,” I said. “It’s not really a speech.”

  “All right, kid!” said Kelsie, going into sort of a coach-like demeanor. “You’re down, but you’re not out. We’ve still got time on the clock and you’ve still got enough gas in the tank to win this fight!” I laughed.

  “C’mon,” I said, slightly embarrassed. I reached over and squeezed her arm.

  “You wanted a speech!” Kelsie grinned.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I needed it.”

  “I’ll be right here,” said Kelsie. “I can have the car running if you need to leave in a hurry.”

  “It’s not going to be anything like that,” I said. “I think it’s just going to be sad. Besides, we’ll have to leave my Jeep here. I can’t take it with us and it’s registered in my father’s name anyway.”

  “I can call for a car to come get us,” said Kelsie. “I’ll call once you’re inside.”

  “All right,” I said, unbuckling my seatbelt and sliding my feet out of the side of the doorless car. “Hey, one thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember last night,” I began. “When we were kinda, you know, rubbing on each other.” This gave Kelsie a big laugh.

  “Yeah!” she said, looking excited. “Go on.”

  “Does your stomach, like, really ache?” I asked. “I mean, your abs?” Lowering my hand to my belly, I gave myself a tender rub.

  Kelsie laughed again and smacked her hand against the roll bar above.

  “It does that,” she said, snickering. “ It takes some skill. Fortunately for me I’ve had my ass beat by one too many personal trainers for my job, I don’t get the ab pain like you’re experiencing.”

  “It’s not, like, awful,” I said. “Just noticeable.”

  “We’ll do it again soon so you can get better acclimated,” said Kelsie with an impishness in her lips. “But you’re stalling, Audra. I know it’s a little scary but know this… you’re not your mother, leaving a child behind. You have every right as an adult to go off and do your own thing. You’re a good person. You deserve this. You deserve good things to happen to you. Love conquers all.” Leaning over, Kelsie reached out and tugged my elbow, giving it a tender squeeze.

  “Now see, that was a pump speech!”

  “Thank you,” she said, bowing her head dramatically.

  I couldn’t help myself but smile and shake my head. Kelsie was amazing.

  It was quiet inside of my house and even though I knew he was around somewhere, I didn’t see my father. I took the opportunity to saunter into my room and begin packing things up. I didn’t have much I cared to take and Kelsie said she would help me out with things once I got to LA. In fact, she had told me not to worry about money at all which was mind-blowing. It’s like, I knew all those words but had never heard them constructed in a sentence in that way before. Not worry about money? Not something I had experience with. But I was eager to learn.

  Lifting my mattress up, I pulled out a white envelope from underneath it and let the mattress fall back to the box spring. I peeled open the envelope and looked inside, a thick wad of bills living under the flap. Quickly counting through it, I came to the conclusion that there was just over three thousand dollars in it. I had been saving for a long time to get that money, years probably, and I just laughed to myself. Kelsie had probably already earned millions during her stay in Champlain. I spent my life in this town and only had three thousand dollars to show for it.

  I packed up my backpack tightly with my favorite clothes, a small black notebook, a couple little trinkets that I sentimentally held onto. I had these earrings from my grandmother, found when I helped clean out her house. I don’t know why I had them. I didn’t even have my ears pierced. Funny, right? Just sentimental. I pushed them into a deep pocket of my bag. They had diamonds in them so I guess if I really hit on hard times, I could probably sell them fo
r something. But I didn’t want to.

  Looking around my room, it was a strange sight. It looked like the room of a teenager. But I was 27, nearly a decade past my teenage years. I had been living in this state of arrested development, not progressing very much in my life and that idea was personified by my bedroom. It was hard to put my fingers on anything specific. It was just a feeling I got. Like, an adult did not live here. I wanted nothing more to do with it.

  Taking a deep breath, I hefted my backpack onto my shoulder, gripped the envelope in my hand, and exited my bedroom, closing the door behind me with a soft click of the handle. I strode down the hallway, trying to focus inward and figure out what kind of words were going to come out of my mouth. When you’re in that situation, though, it’s hard to formulate. The anxiety gets in the way of plotting. It’s like you’re truly living in the moment and it’s scary.

  I yanked open the doorwall and stepped out onto the back porch where I saw my father sitting in a chair and sipping on a beer. He looked up to me and raised his eyebrows as I approached.

  “Where you off to?” he asked casually, noticing my backpack.

  “I’m going on a trip,” I admitted, readjusting my backpack for comfort. “I’m leaving now.”

  “A trip?” he said. “Where to?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “That’s far,” he said. “Why would you want to go there?”

  “It’s just… different,” I said. “I need a change. I need to go out and do something.”

  “This sounds like more than a trip.” My father took a long pull from his beer can.

  “It is,” I affirmed. “I’m going out there for a while.”

  “What about the hotel?”

  “I quit my job,” I said frankly.

  “Huh,” mused my father. “So you’re leaving.”

  “I’ve been a bad daughter,” I said. “I shouldn’t have stayed so long. I should have grown up. I should have spread my wings. That’s what I’m trying to do now.”

  “You haven’t been a bad nothing,” he said. “I’m just sorry that I haven’t been able to be a better father.” I wanted to cry when he said that but I held it back. I had to remain firm.