Second Chances: A Lesbian Romance

by Mia Archer

  Another double buzz. Another new message. Who the hell would be messaging her that much? It was the telltale vibrating phone and it was driving me insane.

  I listened again. I still didn’t hear her out there. I reached for the phone. My hand closed around it and felt like it was on fire. I felt guilt pulsing through me and almost put it down, but there was another buzz. This time a message popped up on the screen and I blinked as I read it. A message from some girl named Felicia.

  “Wake up! We need the details about operation revenge fuck!”

  I felt as though the world was falling out from under me. I felt as though a giant hole had opened up under me and was threatening to swallow me. Hell, a sinkhole opening up and swallowing my room might’ve been preferable to what I was feeling right now. At least then it would all be over quickly instead of leaving me feeling this torturous mixture of emotions. Terror. Anger. Disbelief. Denial.

  Whoever this Felicia chick was she couldn’t possibly be talking about me, and yet that was the only thing that made sense. Who else would Claire be getting a little revenge on? I’d certainly never heard of her having a relationship with any other girls while she was at school. I was the only one who fit the bill.

  And she’d gotten one hell of a “revenge fuck” the night before. She’d have plenty to report to this Felicia bitch when she finally got around to telling her how the weekend went.

  I felt lightheaded. I felt short of breath. I felt betrayed. More than anything else I felt so angry. So taken advantage of. Sure there was a part of me whispering that this was my karmic reward for what I’d done to Claire, but I thought we were over all that. I thought last night meant there was finally a chance that I could be the real me. That I could explore a relationship with the one person in the world who’d ever gotten me really hot and bothered.

  Apparently I’d been wrong about all of that. I felt like an idiot and a fool all wrapped up into one nice package that I’d presented to Claire with a happy bow the night before. Talk about making things easy for her!

  I couldn’t help myself at this point. There was no way I wasn’t looking at her messages now. I needed to see what she’d been texting back and forth, because it was starting to look like she’d been sending out status updates on getting a little bit of revenge on me!

  Thankfully she didn’t have a lock code on her phone. That would’ve been infuriatingly annoying if I could only see that one message and nothing else. Thank goodness she didn’t believe in security, even if I did feel like a slime for invading her privacy like this. Still, if she’d been sending messages like that, if she really just thought I was a “revenge fuck” then I figured she deserved everything she got.

  It was weird, but in that moment I was starting to understand why she’d been so damn angry with me. I guess it took feeling an all-consuming rage at being taken advantage of to really and truly understand why someone else might feel that way and not be in a mood for forgiveness.

  As I read through the messages I was in less and less of a mood for forgiving as well. Sending messages talking about how she was getting one hell of a revenge fuck out of me? Getting pictures back from a bunch of women at what looked like a lesbian bar judging from the short haircuts on display giving her a thumbs up?

  I was so furious that I had to fight the urge to take her phone and chuck it through the window. No, that wasn’t the way to do this. If I did that then I’d have to buy her a new phone, which I really couldn’t afford, and I’d have to explain to my dad why the window in my room was smashed to pieces which I definitely couldn’t afford.

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d finally come to terms with how I felt about Claire and it turned out the entire evening had been one big joke to her. She’d been playing with my emotions because she knew she could. And meanwhile a bunch of her stupid dyke friends from back in the city had been cheering her on and probably talking about how great it was that one of them was finally getting revenge on a girl who jilted them back in school!

  I finally heard noise outside. What sounded like someone coming up the stairs. I briefly considered putting the phone down and acting like nothing had happened, but from the tears that were starting to stream down my face I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to be able to cover up how I was feeling.

  Damn it. Why was I crying? This was not what I needed right now. This was why I didn’t want to have anything to do with Claire at the beginning of the weekend. This was why I’d been reluctant to come to this damn reunion in the first place. Now I’d come here against all of my better judgment and look where it got me. Sitting here in my room crying and staring at some pretty hurtful text messages sent by someone I’d thought cared about me for a brief fleeting moment.

  Claire reached the top of the stairs and I tried to compose myself as best I could. Which wasn’t all that great to begin with. Let her see me sitting here with her phone in my hand. Let her see that I knew everything she’d been texting about the night before and that I definitely wasn’t happy about it. More sad than angry, but definitely not happy about it!

  Let her…

  The person out in the hall rounded the corner and leaned against the door frame smiling at me and I felt my breath catch. I felt my heart skip a beat. I felt terror replacing the anger that had been there just moments ago.

  Claire appeared a moment later and she didn’t look happy. No, she looked royally pissed off. About as pissed off as I was feeling, and why not? She looked at my phone in her hand and one of her eyes seemed to twitch, but that was the only reaction that registered on her face.

  I could understand why she’d be pissed off even as for the second time that morning I felt the solid anger I thought I was standing on shifting like so much quicksand. Of course she had a reason to be pissed off. Kyle was standing right there with that goofy grin on his face that told me he had no idea what had passed between me and Claire the night before while at the same time the angry look on Claire’s face said that he’d told her everything about who he was.

  Damn it. I was angry at Kyle. I was angry at Claire. I was angry at myself for not being honest with her the night before as much as I was pissed off at her. More because my dishonesty meant I didn’t have a pot to piss in now that I wanted to get good and mad at her for her text messages.

  “Good morning babe!” Kyle said. “Surprised?”

  “What the fuck are you doing here Kyle?” I snapped. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t entirely fair to him, but I’d made it clear that I didn’t want him out here for my reunion. I’d made it clear I needed the weekend to myself and here he was inserting himself where he definitely wasn’t wanted.

  Claire looked between the two of us and then marched into the room, snatched her phone out of my hand, and marched out.

  I wanted to follow her. I wanted to ask her to stop. To tell her that we needed to talk. That we’d both done stupid things in the past twenty-four hours but as far as I was concerned that didn’t destroy what we’d shared the night before.

  Only I didn’t do any of that. I don’t know why. I think Kyle standing right there is what really stopped me. I needed to take care of things with him before I patched things with Claire, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the hell I was going to do that. The guilt I felt for what I was going to do to him today was almost as overwhelming as the guilt over what I’d done to Claire last night by not telling her about Kyle in the first place, and he looked so pleased with himself standing there grinning at me that I couldn’t bring myself to dump him right then and there any more than I could bring myself to kick a puppy that was staring up at me wagging its tail with no idea what it had done wrong.

  Yeah, my life had just gone from complicated to a fucking impossible emotional knot that I was never going to be able to untangle. All because I decided to come home for this stupid reunion.

  “So what’s for breakfast babe?” Kyle asked, still completely oblivious to the chaos he’d just created.

  21: Esca
pe

  I couldn’t believe I’d been such an idiot. I couldn’t believe I’d thought Allison could change. The entire time I thought we were having a great time together and she was just using me for some fun before she ran back to her boyfriend.

  That I was able to walk into her room, snatch my phone right out of her hands, and walk out without her trying to stop me was proof exactly which one of her lovers she was really interested in. Damn it.

  Why did I ever think it would be different this time around? She was obviously terrified of admitting the truth, and I’d pushed her too far, but at the same time it’s not like that was my fault. It was just a simple statement of fact. If she wanted to live her life in the closet that was her business, but I wasn’t going to let her drag me back into the closet after I’d been out for so long.

  No, I’d been there and I didn’t like it one bit. No girl was worth going back. It wasn’t my scene. I’d been sincere when I said she could stay there, just not with me.

  And now I was following through on that no matter how much it hurt. I was having trouble seeing the damn road ahead of me. Everything was blurred as tears kept streaming down my face. It was a wonder I didn’t run right off the road and into a tree or something.

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a wonder I didn’t run off the road and into a tree. The farmers made sure there weren’t that many trees along the side of the road. Just fields full of corn and drainage ditches that were barely deep enough to swallow a bike, let alone a car.

  Which was a pity, because with the mood I was in running into a tree and being put out of this misery that had been stretched out across five years seemed like a pretty good proposition.

  I wasn’t even sure where I was going. I just knew that I was heading back towards town which was probably the second to last place I wanted to be right now. The last place I wanted to be was back at that damn lake where I’d had my heart broken twice over at this point. No, if I never went out to that damn lake for the rest of my life I’d die a happy woman.

  I glanced down at my phone and I wanted to kick myself even as I did it. I don’t know why I was expecting her to call me. She’d made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t interested in coming after me back at the house.

  The phone. Back at the house. She’d had my phone in her hand and I remembered her looking pissed off for the briefest of moments before she saw Kyle. I wondered if she’d gotten a look at the text messages I got the night before from Felicia and I smiled as I thought about it. That would serve her right if the last thing she saw before her boyfriend showed up and ruined her weekend was me talking with the girls about how I was planning on using her and losing her.

  It couldn’t be farther from the truth, but it was a vindictive lie that felt pretty good considering her boyfriend had just dropped in after that incredible night of good old fashioned red-blooded American girl-on-girl action.

  Damn it.

  I blinked through the tears again. I shouldn’t be crying. Why was I crying when I wasn’t surprised that Allison had screwed me over again? At least this time she’d screwed me over in the bad way after screwing me over in a very good way, but somehow that wasn’t much consolation.

  As I blinked away my tears I realized that I recognized where I was. I’d pulled onto a familiar street with a familiar house made of tan and brown bricks. I must’ve been going on autopilot more than anything else. I’d planned on staying here the night before, before Allison showed up and changed all my plans, but I hadn’t told my parents I was in town because I didn’t want to feel obligated to stop by in case things went really bad at the reunion and I decided to head home.

  To my real home. In the city. Though I guess I was feeling the need to stop by the ancestral home before I made my escape from this shit hole and never looked back aside from the inevitable and interminable holiday visits.

  I pulled into the drive and hit the button to open the garage door. As the door pulled up I saw that my parents’ car wasn’t in there, but it looked like Amy was home. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  They were probably at the grocery store or something, they couldn’t afford to fly down to Florida on a whim like some people’s parents, but either way they weren’t at the house and that was just fine with me. I didn’t want them to see me like this. I didn’t want to deal with my mother, well, trying to mother me. I didn’t want to deal with my dad doing that weird thing where he tried to talk to me about my dating life like I was his son which was just weird even if I could appreciate that he was trying his best.

  Amy I could deal with, though. Amy was always in my corner. We were far enough apart that we’d never really done the whole fighting siblings thing. It probably helped that by the time she was old enough to get into her really moody teenage years I’d already graduated and moved to the city. She was home from her first year of college which made me feel ancient since it seemed like just yesterday I was being forced to change her diapers and help babysit for my parents who couldn’t really afford an actual sitter growing up.

  Time flies and all that.

  Either way it was much better to have her at home than the parents. I turned the car off and made my way in through the garage door which they always kept unlocked even though that used to drive me nuts when I lived here. It didn’t drive me quite as crazy now. I figured it wasn’t my problem if they got robbed blind.

  “Mom? Dad? That you? What happened to the movie?”

  I let out another sigh of relief. They were at a movie. That meant they’d be gone for awhile. They were the only people I knew these days who actually went to a movie theater to watch a movie rather than just waiting to watch it in the comfort of their own home. Maybe it reminded them of when they started dating and that was the only thing, aside from fucking, that you could do for fun in this town.

  Not that you could even do that for fun in this town anymore. The last movie theater went out a decade back and it was a luxury that required traveling these days, which meant they’d be gone even longer. Good.

  Amy moved into the kitchen and stopped. Blinked. “Oh. Claire.”

  “Hi Amy,” I said.

  “You look like shit,” she said.

  I blinked. That wasn’t what I was expecting. “Well fuck you too!”

  Amy grinned and moved across the room to envelop me in a warm hug. I sighed as I felt her pressing against me and I melted into the hug. Damn I needed that. I needed someone to comfort me and let me know everything was going to be okay even if that was the last thing I was feeling in the moment.

  “So what happened? Was it that Allison bitch again?”

  I sighed. Amy really knew too much about my love life for her own good. She was one of the only people who knew the full story of what happened on the lake that night five years ago. I hadn’t told another soul since, though I was sure there were rumors. There were all sorts of rumors about me back in the day, though surely the small town gossip mill had moved on since then.

  “You wouldn’t believe what happened if I told you,” I said.

  Amy leaned against the kitchen counter and fixed me with a look that said she wasn’t going to put up with any bullshit, up to and including not putting up with me trying to evade a question. I sighed. I never could keep anything from her, which was part of the reason why I usually just went ahead and told her everything.

  “Fine, you really want to know?”

  And so I launched into my story. Told her everything. How I’d been reluctant to come to the reunion. How I’d laid down that ultimatum that Allison could stay in the closet if she wanted to but I had no intention of going back in there just to be with her. How Allison had been blowing hot and cold all night until finally she started blowing hotter than an open door on a blast furnace making me think there might be a chance.

  “Hold on, are you telling me that you, and Allison?”

  “Yup.”

  “You actually… y’know?”

  “Yup.”

  Amy surprised me by squeali
ng and running around the counter to envelop me in another hug, only this time it wasn’t a sympathy hug. No, this time she was lifting me up off the ground and I found the breath getting knocked out of me. Damn!

  “What was that for?” I asked when I was finally back on the ground and safely out of my surprisingly strong little sister’s grip.

  “Sorry,” Amy said. “I was just thinking you deserve a little bit of fun considering the zap she put on you after that night.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “What?” Amy asked, plastering on her best sweet and innocent face, the one she used to use on our dad when she was trying her best to get out of trouble.

  “What is it with everyone thinking I was spoiling to get into Allison’s pants as some sort of revenge scheme? First the girls at the bar and now you?”

  Amy fixed me with a level stare, the sweet and innocent face gone. No, we were back to the “no bullshit” look, and she was hitting me with the most intense version. I managed to weather the look for about thirty seconds before I finally sighed and buckled.

  Like I said, it was hard for me to be dishonest around my little sister. She knew me too well.

  “Okay, so maybe I was looking forward to getting into Allison’s pants. Just a little,” I said.

  “Just a little?”

  “Okay so maybe that was the whole reason I came to this damn reunion! Are you happy now?”

  I blinked. Damn. I hadn’t even been willing to admit that to myself and now here I was blurting it out to my little sister. Admitting that the whole reason I came out here in the first place was because I was horny and there was a not insubstantial part of me that was perhaps looking forward to getting a little bit of revenge on Allison if she showed up and was willing to have fun, which I never in a thousand years believed would actually happen.

  Until it had happened.

  “Right, so you got what you came for. What’s the big deal?”

  I sighed. “The big deal is that I might’ve come out here looking for revenge, but I was feeling so much more with her last night.”