Best Lesbian Romance 2011

by Radclyffe

  I dig through my bag for my two-piece. When I don’t find it in the main compartment, I search the outside pocket, then the laundry pouch and the side zippers. I empty my clothes and hair dryer and toothbrush onto the duvet. But when it’s all spread out on the bed and floor, my swimsuit isn’t there. It’s in a box at Jenna’s apartment or in my mother’s craft room.

  I don’t feel right looking through my cousin’s drawers for a suit I can borrow. For all I know, she only owns one, and she’s taken it with her to sun on a private veranda with her husband. I throw on my clothes and grab my wallet, because the drugstore in town sells cheap suits as bright as traffic signs.

  The far end of the street, pitch-black with new asphalt, ripples like boiling water. My car’s seats hold heat from the windshield in their dark vinyl, and the metal of the belt buckles is so hot I can barely get them fastened. If I drive to the drugstore, I’ll melt in the driver’s seat by the time I park. Saffron and Cinnamon will starve. My cousin’s fuchsias will wither to potpourri. Burglars will use stethoscopes to break into the safe for the jewelry, snatching my cousin’s twelve-speed blender, her husband’s basalt mortar and the good sheets on their way out.

  I go back inside and take my clothes off again. Holding a towel around my body, I check to make sure the walls around the Henleys’ backyard are tall enough to block the view from the cul-de-sac, the palm fronds thick enough to hide me from other house sitters in upstairs windows or terraces.

  The gate falls shut behind me, and I let the towel drop to the sandstone deck. With a dive from the deep end, my hands pierce the still pool, then my arms and shoulders. The water swallows my bare breasts and hips, and my body finishes its arc as my ankles and toes vanish under the surface. The cold tingles across my skin, and light bows through the dark pool like slow lightning. I hold my legs together and kick, and my hair cuts through the blue like dark kelp. Circling my arms, I arch my back and turn over, reaching for the blueberry-colored bottom and then for the light.

  When I open my eyes, I see a blurred figure standing in the yard, back to the pool. Startled, I fall from my orbit and breathe in. I cough to clear the water from my nose and throat, flailing to get above water.

  I break the surface and throw my head back to clear my hair from my eyes. Now’s she’s in the pool, waist deep, the legs of her overalls full with water, and her hair half-covering her eyes. One of her overall straps is unhooked, leaving one side of the bib hanging away from her body and revealing the curve of her breast, the only way I’m sure she’s a woman.

  She doesn’t come closer, and I scramble to climb onto the deck and wrap the towel around me.

  “I didn’t see anything.” She lowers her head more and backs up toward the steps.

  I’m about to dart for the gate and toward the house to call the police when I notice the dirt-stained gloves on her hands. A canvas sack, sagging with clippings, leans to one side near the rosebushes, hedge trimmers sitting at its base. A crate of nursery pansies sits in the shadow of a camellia bush in bloom. I dove into the pool so quickly, I didn’t notice if they were there before.

  “You’re the gardener,” I say.

  She nods once, pulling her soaked pants from the water. They drag on the deck, darkening the stone.

  I hold the towel tighter under my arms. “You trying to swim with your clothes on?”

  She hooks the undone buckle on her overalls. “Looked like you were drowning.”

  I smooth the towel behind me. “I’m not trespassing. Or crazy.”

  “I know. Henleys said you’d swim.” She wrings out her pant hems. “But I figured it’d be with something on.”

  The bottoms of my feet are drying, and I shift my weight on the hot stone from one to the other. I look down at the terry cloth, barely spanning my breast to my thighs. “I forgot to pack my suit.”

  She inclines her head, but doesn’t look up. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I keep my left forearm against my chest to keep the towel in place. Leaving seems rude. I wonder what kind of small talk I’ll need before it won’t.

  I hold out my hand. I expect the scent of pool water clinging to my skin, but I smell like a sea tide. I always forget the Henleys use salt, not chlorine. “My cousin lives next door. Her and her husband.”

  She pulls the glove from her right hand and shakes mine. “I do their yard too. Few others on the block.”

  I walk on the balls of my feet toward the gate. “It’s beautiful.”

  She puts her glove back on. “Don’t not swim. ’Cause of me.”

  “I’ll buy a suit.”

  “I’d lend you one, but I don’t swim.”

  “Don’t want to mess up your hair?”

  She laughs and ruffles her grown-out pixie. “Sure.”

  My hair soaks the back of the towel, and I gather the strands onto one shoulder. “I’m sorry. I should’ve waited. Until I bought one.”

  “Nobody else here.” She kneels next to the pansies. “I don’t care.” She kneels in the grass and plunges her hands into the soil. I slip out the gate, trying to close it quietly behind me, but the latch clatters as it shuts. I run back to the house without looking to see if she’s turned her head to watch me go.

  The last of the sun dissolves into the ocean. The sky turns bright as sherbet before it deepens to turquoise. But the heat doesn’t go with the light. It thickens in the house, warming the area rugs and bobbing up against the ceiling like a hundred helium balloons. Even the night winds don’t disperse it. They only ruffle tree branches and flower bushes, pushing the air through the leaves like a hair dryer on low.

  Cinnamon scampers to the kitchen as soon as she hears me rattling food into her bowl. Saffron stays curled on an upholstered chair, blinking slowly to tell me she’ll eat her dinner when she’s good and ready.

  I drop an ice cube on the kitchen floor for Cinnamon, my cousin’s way of getting her some exercise. The cat bats it near the fridge and the cupboard, chasing after it when it skids toward the living room, almost frictionless against the tile floor.

  Saffron follows Cinnamon with her eyes without turning her head. I go after Cinnamon to make sure she doesn’t abandon the ice cube where it will soak a sofa dust ruffle as it melts.

  Cinnamon follows it out to the balcony, where overhanging palm fronds shade the tile from the day’s heat. The ceramic feels warm under my bare feet, but not hot. Breezes part the branches, and the lit blue of the Henleys’ pool flashes into view. The warm wind pulls whole camellias from their bushes, and their petaled rounds spot the grass with pink. A few land in the pool, and the blush-colored flowers turn slowly on the surface of the dark water.

  I went into town earlier to pick up groceries and ice, but I didn’t buy a suit. I couldn’t bring myself to wear a bikini the color of a crossing guard’s vest, or a one-piece as fluorescent as a yield sign. They’re the discount version of the kind of clothes everyone in Shore Vista wears. Men play golf clad in pants as pink as indigestion tablets. Women favor dresses that match the tennis balls at their private lessons. Children run through sprinklers in vitamin-orange shorts and frocks as bright as blue neon. It’s like they’re all trying to be seen from space.

  The gardener will be gone by now, but I throw on a bra and panties in case the Henleys have their housekeeper stopping by. I step through the grass, careful not to crush the fallen flowers. I don’t dive in because I don’t want to disturb the ones floating. A splash might fill their shallow cups, causing them to sink, and I want them to stay, patterning the blue. My fingers graze the polished rail, and I step in slowly, one step at a time, first to my ankles, then my calves, my hips, my waist.

  One of the garden lights at the far end of the yard seems to flicker, and I see the gardener’s shadowed figure kneeling by the far flower bushes. I stumble off the last step and grab at the water like it will help me get my balance, but my palm only slaps through the surface.

  She turns her head at the noise.

  I climb the steps to g
et out. “Sorry.”

  She stands up and comes into the light. “You don’t have to leave.”

  I slowly sink back down the steps. “You work nights or something?”

  “I’m staying till they’re back.” That one overall strap is undone again. When she catches me looking, she fastens it. “Looking after the place.”

  I stir the water, sending the flower heads spinning. “They never hire a house sitter.”

  “Daughter got a beta. Threw a fit when they didn’t let her take it, so they promised her they’d get someone to look after it.”

  “They’re paying you to feed a fish?”

  “They wanted me to pull out the viola beds and replant anyway, so I’m around.” She kneels on the side of the pool and dips a garden glove to the water to fish a camellia head from the surface.

  My hand flies to hers before I think about it. “Don’t.”

  She looks up.

  “They’re pretty.” I bend my head and hide behind my hair, embarrassed at touching a stranger. “When they wither I’ll get them out.”

  She blinks instead of nodding, and I let go of her hand.

  I swim under the camellias, darting near their shadows on the bottom of the pool. Between their spinning petals I can see her working in the flowerbeds, her outline softened by water.

  I surface and feel the noon heat drying the fine strands along my hairline. “Come in,” I say.

  She barely turns her head toward her shoulder.

  “Come in.” I cross my arms and prop my elbows on the warm sandstone on the side of the pool. “You’ll melt in those clothes.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’m decent today. I promise.” I hold the rail and climb the steps until she can see my bra and panties. Water runs from the lace down my back and thighs, and I check to make sure the fabric hasn’t gone translucent, hinting at the brown tips of my breasts or the dark triangle of hair between my legs. But the nylon is only a shade or two lighter than the pool. Nothing shows. “See?”

  “I’m not much of a swimmer,” she says.

  “Don’t know how?”

  “I know how.”

  I climb out and cross the grass toward her, blades sticking to my wet feet. “Nothing to be embarrassed about.” I crouch in the grass next to her flat of nursery pansies. “If you don’t.”

  “I know how to swim.”

  My fingers graze the heavy denim of her overalls. “You’ll die in these.”

  She shudders, her irises barely visible through the hair in her face, and my hand opens and freezes on the side of her thigh. The shiver spreads through her back, her shoulder blades and muscle showing through her thin shirt. Her fingers gently tighten and loosen on the packed-dirt pansy in her garden gloves. I kiss her, and she drops it, the outside layer of soil shaking free from the flower’s stem.

  She falls back into the grass, and her palms spread the cold of damp earth down my spine. I kneel on her, straddling her hips and weighting her down in the grass. The right side of her overall bib is loose, again. I take the undone strap in my hands, laughing.

  She props herself up, her elbows behind her. Her bangs shadow a shy smile. “What?”

  I twirl the strap on my fingers. “You’ve always got one loose.”

  She shakes the blush from her face.

  “It’s always the same one,” I say.

  “It’s cooler. Lets air in.”

  “If you’re hot, why aren’t you swimming?”

  “Don’t want to.”

  I reach to undo the left strap.

  She stiffens.

  “What?” I ask.

  She shakes her head, wriggling out from under me.

  I slide off her. “What’s the matter?”

  She leaves her gardening gloves in the grass and goes toward the house.

  I swim the next afternoon, and I don’t see her. I stay until evening and don’t see her. I look out for her until the end of the week, and she stays gone.

  Each night I fall asleep to the soft clicking of Cinnamon chasing an ice cube down the hallway, and I catch myself gripping a handful of sheet and remembering the soft weight of her breast in my palm, covered in thin cotton.

  The flat of pansies stays untouched in the grass. Early in the morning, they catch the spray of the lawn sprinklers, and the violet petals don’t wither. Each evening the night winds pull more camellias from the bushes, so that the lawn is half-covered in them. They carpet the surface of the pool in red and white and blush pink. By the time they’re so thick that not even a slice of salt water shows through, I’m sure I imagined her, the messy hair, the earth-stained fingers of her gardening gloves, the half-fastened overalls.

  Cinnamon bats the last of her ice cube against the hallway wall. She slides it away and strikes it so it ricochets against the molding again. I groan from half-asleep to awake and flick on the light. Saffron sits in the middle of the floor, blinking at me like I should stop Cinnamon from making such a racket, since I gave her the ice in the first place.

  Shifting the ice cube from one palm to the other, I get Cinnamon to follow me upstairs. I throw the balcony doors open, taking the ice and tossing it onto the warm deck. Cinnamon chases after it, and I lean against the railing and watch to make sure she doesn’t slip through the bars down into the yard. Slouching, I rest my elbows on the sculpted brass and wait for the next breeze. But just as it comes, Cinnamon sends the ice cube skidding back into the living room. I’m about to go back inside when the palm fronds part enough for me to see into the Henleys’ yard.

  The gardener stands by the pool, hands in the pockets of her overalls, watching the stirring of pink and red petals. One side of the bib is undone, like always. My shoulder blades pinch when I remember cupping her breast. I press my lips shut to keep from gasping when she reaches for the other strap and unhooks the buckle. The other side of the bib falls away from her chest, the strap and buckle falling down her back. I turn off the porch light, hiding behind the thicker palm branches. The heat lies so heavy on my body it feels like it’s covering me, keeping me invisible.

  Pulling the socks from her feet, she steps into the pool. The solid cover of flowers ripples away, revealing a ring of glowing blue around her ankles, then her legs, her thighs and waist. She undoes the side buttons on her water-darkened overalls and steps out of the legs. They drift away from her body, floating among the camellias before sinking. She leaves the last step, and her briefs disappear under the blossoms. Water and petals lap at the hem of her undershirt.

  The wind rattles my cover of palm fronds, and she glances up and sees me. I jump back, but she doesn’t startle, keeping my gaze. She knows I’ve been watching her, and I know I can’t run inside like I want to.

  She parts her lips. A deep inhale lifts her shoulders. They fall again when she breathes out. I take the rubber band from my hair and let the strands fall to my shoulders, trapping the heat against my upper back. Still watching me, she pulls off her shirt, reaching behind her and tugging it off by the back of the collar. She holds her arms over her chest before I can see her breasts.

  She’s still there, her arms still hiding her, when I get to the backyard. She doesn’t move, and I stay back near the gate.

  “Fell off a horse.” She tosses her head, clearing her bangs from her face. “I was thirteen. Didn’t get checked out for a couple years.”

  I come closer with every word she says, but I can’t help shaking my head, because I don’t understand.

  She holds her left arm tighter against her. “They said my mammary artery was so shot this side’d never come in right.”

  My eyes settle on her upper body. Her left breast holds her right arm from pressing flat against her, but her right forearm is straight against her chest.

  Coming toward her so slowly my bare feet are silent against the sandstone, I follow her into the water, dispersing loose petals.

  “I knew her. That horse.” She fidgets with her own body, digging her fingernails into her sides
just above her ribs. “I shoulda known she was in one of her moods. Shoulda known she wanted to throw someone.”

  I stand in front of her, sliding my hands under hers and pulling her arms away from her chest. She tenses, but I hold her hands to my hips and she lets her shoulders go slack. I cup her breasts in my hands and kiss them, my lips grazing the full left one, then lingering on the smaller right one that barely curves from her chest.

  She closes her eyes and unhooks my bra with two fingers. It falls to the water and floats with the flowers. She pulls my panties down to my knees. I step out of them and let them sink to the bottom.

  I come closer so she doesn’t have to reach for me. My slight movement shifts the current, floating her hand toward my body. I part my legs to let her find me. Her fingers graze my folds and she shudders, letting her other hand fall to the hollow at the small of my back.

  “Sorry.” She tucks a damp camellia into my hair. “For running.”

  I slide my mouth onto hers and reach for her briefs. She bucks a little as I move the waistband down her thighs, to help me get them off her or because she can’t help it. We pull each other into the water, letting the blooms hide our bodies. She keeps one hand on my back, the other between my legs, and I grab the insides of her thighs to hold on to her. Her briefs and my bra drift with the camellias, the only evidence we were ever there, until we surface again.

  THE PANACEA

  Colette Moody

  Their flirtation had started months ago, essentially on a dare. Hope had noticed the leggy redhead within the first week that she started working at the downtown coffee shop and had committed her name to memory the instant that Hope first scrawled it on the side of the paper coffee cup—Simone. The name seemed perfect for her. It was sexy, alluring and classy.

  While it wasn’t unusual for Hope to remember the drink orders of the regular customers, she took special pride in remembering Simone’s brew of choice. Of course, the fact that Simone came in every morning on her way to her upscale office job didn’t hurt matters. Hope was always impressed by Simone’s business attire—frequently silky in nature, sometimes low cut, other times slit high and always provocative yet tasteful.