Just Friends: A Sweet Lesbian Romance

by Mia Archer

I’d listened to her griping about the library often enough to know that griping about not having enough money was one thing that seemed to be a constant in Kirsten’s world. To be perfectly honest it was something I’d tuned out long ago, though I still tried to nod at the appropriate times whenever she griped about it.

  “Enough about work,” Kirsten said. “Are you ready for this weekend?”

  I grinned. “I don’t know. Are you ready? Moving is a pretty big deal, you know.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “I’m still not sure I’m ready to move away from the big city, but I suppose it’ll be worth it in the end.”

  “Trust me, you’re going to love being out on the farm. And it’s not like the commute is that bad either.”

  “My commute right now is literally walking a couple of minutes to work. Now I’m going to have to drive into town. Anything is longer than what I have now.”

  “Well yeah,” I said, moving around the desk and plopping own in her lap. “But don’t you think it’s worth it if you get to spend your evenings with me?”

  I leaned down and gave her a kiss for good measure. Not a heated kiss like what we’d done back when we first got together, though to be honest the lack of heat in my kiss had less to do with a lack of passion in our relationship and everything to do with the fact that the door was wide open. Sure Ethel was probably the only other person in the library right now, but I figured it was still a good idea to show some discretion.

  “I think having you around all the time might make the commute worth it,” she said. “How’s your mom dealing with the idea of you shacking up with some girl?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Don’t even get me started on that. All she’s been going on about is how sinful it is that we’re moving in together without getting married. Talk about a conversation I never thought I’d have to have with my mom. Sometimes I think that Supreme Court decision is more of a headache than I thought it would be when it came down.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll get there in time,” Kirsten said.

  “Why Kirsten. That almost sounded like a proposal!”

  Kirsten pulled me down into another kiss that distracted me for a moment. When I pulled away she was nothing but smiles. “I suppose this is the moment when I’d reach into my desk and pull out a ring, isn’t it?”

  My breath caught for a moment and I actually put my hand to my mouth. I guess that was sort of an involuntary reaction every girl had when she thought someone was proposing. That or I’d seen so many women react that way over the years when the question was being popped that it was a conditioned response pop culture had rammed into my head. Either way I couldn’t help but feel excited as I realized what Kirsten might be getting at.

  “Are you serious? Did you?”

  Kirsten blinked, then laughed. “No! We’re just now moving in together. If we can do that for a few months without killing each other then maybe we can figure out where to go from there.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her to let her know just what I thought of that. “Party pooper.”

  “That doesn’t mean that I’m not averse to popping the question, you know,” Kirsten said. “I just think we need to make absolutely sure that’s what we both want before we go making any big decisions like that.”

  “Right. Let’s concentrate on moving in together first, and go from there,” I said. “I expect you to be ready to go when you’re off work today. I’ll have the pickup ready to go.”

  “Ugh. I hate moving. You know that, right?”

  I winked at her. “Yeah? Well with a little luck this will be the last time you ever have to move, won’t it?”

  “That does sound nice,” Kirsten said.

  “So are we getting lunch or what?” I asked. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving!”

  “Lunch sounds good. Did you have anywhere in particular in mind?”

  And with that we were back to the normal daily routine we’d fallen into since we first got together, but it was a daily routine I never thought I’d have until I met Kirsten. Yeah, a boring routine was just fine with me considering it was something that seemed like a far off dream or fantasy once upon a time.

  We might’ve tried lying to the world and telling everyone we were just friends, but I was so very glad that we were so much more than that, and I couldn’t wait to get her moved into the house so we could well and truly start our lives together!

  Author's Note

  This is a story that incorporates more than a little of my own personal experience growing up in Small Town, USA. The sort of place where everybody is friendly with everyone else on the surface and people don’t lock their doors.

  Of course anyone who’s grown up in a small town like that knows there can be a dark side as well. It applies to anyone who’s seen as an outsider, but can be particularly difficult for LGBT people. I think that’s changing, and it’s about time, but there’s still a long way to go.

  I say all of this because this novel deals, in some small part, in some of the uglier aspects of small town life. As I wrote this it felt at times that the “villain,” as much as there is a villain in this story, felt almost cartoonish at times. The thing is everything to do with that part of the story is based entirely on incidents I experienced or witnessed. Pastor Dan might seem a little over the top to some, but his blend of love and hate will probably seem unfortunately familiar to anyone who grew up in the Bible Belt. There are a lot of perfectly wonderful small towns out there that are still trapped in the past in many ways, and making life difficult for young LGBT people is one of those ways.

  Pastor Dan might have seemed like a cartoonish villain at times, but his actions were probably the most grounded in reality of any character I’ve written in one of my stories so far.

  I’m writing this note after this story, something I’ve never felt compelled to do before, because I want to make it clear that I’m not coming down on religion or small town life. There are wonderful things about both, and this story happened to deal with one of the uglier facets of those things. An uglier facet that, unfortunately, continues to pervade both to this day.

  The good news? Things are much better today than they were when I was growing up. They’re a hell of a lot better than they were even ten years ago, and we all need to work together to keep creating a world where that’s the case.

  I hope you enjoyed this story, and I thank you for indulging me this short note.

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  Free Sample: Love Games

  Please enjoy these free sample chapters from Love Games!

  Anna and Erin were the best of the best looking for fun in their geeky game of choice, but they’ll discover there’s a thin line between love and competition!

  1: Anticipation

  “I’m coming for you.”

  I blinked at the message. Okay, so that was a little melodramatic. It also wasn’t a very good idea to telegraph attacks like that, but I figured that’s why I was ranked so high in the game while Colin was still more or less riding on my coattails. Not that I minded. He was fun to have around.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You know what. Watch your back,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes and went back to looking at dresses in the ARealms online store. Most people came here to look at new accessories for the game. A custom set of glasses that popped up a pretty heads up display so you weren’t forced to look at your phone’s screen all the time while you were concentrating on the game. Extra add ons for your phone that were supposed to improve your game.

  I didn’t care about any of that stuff. I’d risen to the top of the biggest alternate reality game in the world, at least in our region, with nothing but my phone and a pair of wired glasses. No, I was far more interested in the pretty costumes they offered for live events. Pretty costumes that were a hell of a lot more expensive than anything I could ever afford.

  Finally I flipped over to an advertisement for the Alternate Realms Gathering. It was being billed as the biggest Alternate Realms gathering in the history of history, and it was within a short driving distance from where I was. Just five hours away by car. I sighed as I thought of getting away from the drudgery of cubicle life and coding and getting out there in the wilderness.

  Out there where hopefully there would be other players at my level. Players who could actually present a challenge. Players that wouldn’t crumple the instant I unleashed one of my patented spells that kept most people in the office from even bothering to challenge me these days.

  Most people but Colin. “Damn it!”

  I sighed as my phone started beeping. A low pulsing warning with the screen turning a dull red that pulsed in time with the beeps. That meant danger was getting closer. One of the warding spells I’d set up when I got into work this morning was doing its job and keeping me safe.

  “Your boss is going to kill both of us if she finds us doing this on company time again,” I shot to Colin via the work’s IM. Not that he saw it. No, if I was getting that warning on my phone that meant he was close. Definitely not back at his cube working like a good little cog in the corporate machine.

  I stuck my tongue out at him. If we were going to do this then we were going to do this. It’s not like I could ignore the challenge. Well, I suppose I could unflag myself and then Colin would be left high and dry trying to explain what the hell he was doing over here, but that wouldn’t be any fun. Part of the thrill of the hunt was that moment when the hunter realized they were the hunted.

  I stood and looked over the edge of my cubicle. Richard looked up at me, light reflecting off of his bald head, and cocked an eyebrow. “Having fun with Colin again?”

  “Shush. You’re going to give me away!” I hissed.

  Richard rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Sheila’s going to kill you if she finds the two of you playing the game on company time again.”

  Sheila might kill me if she heard about it, but I also noted that Richard reached out and swiped at his own phone. Hit a few buttons that unflagged his character who’d most definitely been logged into the game. I smiled. Rules were rules, but nothing could overcome the addictive power of Alternate Realms.

  “Sheila wouldn’t dare fire me over something like this,” I said.

  “You really think you’re irreplaceable? I mean you do good work, but plenty of kids graduating CS who’d love to have your job,” Richard said.

  “That’s true, but how many of those are a top player in Alternate Realms? She wouldn’t have anyone to be starstruck over if she fired me.”

  Richard rolled his eyes but he also smiled. He knew I was right. I’d become something of a local legend in the department. Except for that time I’d accidentally fried everyone when I was trying to keep Colin off my back.

  Oops.

  I looked back at my screen and then I glanced at a filing cabinet next to my desk. For a moment I thought about pulling out my glasses, a pair of cheap plastic wired glasses that attached directly to my phone. I hadn’t bothered upgrading because I figured if I could get to the top with old faithful then that was all I needed. Hell, I didn’t even really need the glasses to frag my friends in the office.

  So I didn’t bother getting them out. Partly because my ego told me I didn’t need them, but mostly because if I put them on that would be an obvious tell to Sheila that we were playing Alternate Realms if she happened to look out of her office.

  The beeping on my phone was getting louder and I reached out to hit the mute button on that spell. Some spells you could mute, like if it was something I cast that notified me there was danger sneaking up on me. Other sounds, like a spell hitting me or even the dreaded death noise, happily piped out of my phone’s speakers at top volume whether or not I had headphones in so every player around me would know what was going on.

  I really hoped Colin didn’t launch an attack that would register as a hit and play a loud sound that would definitely pull Sheila out of her office. That was the one feature of the game that made it really difficult to play in an office where it wasn’t exactly frowned upon, but wasn’t exactly encouraged either.

  “He’s going to get you this time,” Richard taunted in a singsong voice from the other side of the cubicle. I tried to tune it out, but not before getting in a parting shot of my own.

  “Yeah, you’d like that wouldn’t you? Someone succeeding where you’ve failed so many times?”

  Richard let out a huff from the other side of the cube wall and I could just imagine his shoulders rising and falling indignantly. It annoyed him that he’d never been able to get the drop on me even when he was right next to me all day long. Eventually he’d stopped trying because he got tired of the death sound blasting out of his phone at all hours.

  Richard wasn’t very good at Alternate Realms.

  I popped my head over the cubicle wall again. This time I saw him. Colin. Walking towards me with a huge grin on his face. He had something up his sleeve. He always did when he was smiling like that. He also always found out that whatever he had up his sleeve usually wasn’t enough.

  I decided to test the waters. I pulled up a menu in-game on my phone and selected one of my nastier spells. A high level homing fireball that slammed into my enemies and pulverized them. At least in theory. It also created some splash damage, a lot of the spells in game had those pesky semi-realistic side effects, and so I ran the risk of pissing people off if they had their characters logged in and flagged as playing.

  Whatever. That was their problem. Not mine. They knew they were in a war zone if they kept themselves flagged near me.

  I didn’t have my glasses on so I didn’t see a crude representation of a fireball go streaking down the hallway towards Colin. On my cheap set of glasses it was just some simple LEDs that looked like one of those ancient handheld games my older brother played with when I was a toddler. I’d heard some of the newer more expensive sets could make the graphics look almost like the real thing as the alternate reality of Alternate Realms was laid over the real world.

  I couldn’t see the fireball
, but I could flip the game over to map mode on my phone. I watched as the spell tracked a path over a satellite image of my office building. The developers weren’t so skilled that they had a detailed map of the building and I’d never uploaded one, though industrious gamers had added maps of various buildings that were popular hubs for the game over the past few years.

  I held my breath and resisted the urge to cackle with glee as the spell made contact with a dot that represented Colin. Or more accurately it represented Colin’s character. The spell hit him.

  And winked out. There wasn’t even the sound of it hitting his character and causing some damage as he moved inexorably down the hall like a geeky and woefully undersized Terminator that could feel one emotion judging by the smile on his face: glee.

  “Uh-oh,” Richard said. “Sounds like someone’s big bad fireball spell just fizzled out.”

  “Shut up Richard,” I said.

  I ran over the scenario in my head. Usually a fireball or a lightning spell or something like that was enough to take Colin out. He must’ve gotten tired of getting fried before he even got to me. Obviously the jerk had gotten his skinny little mitts on some sort of anti-magic spell or device or something. And he was coming right for me.

  I plopped down on my chair with a thud that had the thing protesting. I winced. It wasn’t that I was heavy so much as the chairs and equipment they kept in this place was right next to the definition of “barebones” in the dictionary.

  Colin was coming right for me. I had maybe a minute before he was right there. He had something that was preventing my magic spells from hitting him. I sighed and opened a panel in the game. My finger hovered over my phone’s screen as I closed my eyes and prepared for the inevitable.