Joined: 23 Sep 2009
Posts: 78
Location: San Jose, Costa Rica
Wooowwww I'm loving this so much GG but please find some time in your life to sleep and actually live =D _________________ Mari
Mon Apr 12, 2010 10:42 am
girlwithguitar4447
Joined: 29 Jan 2010
Posts: 124
Location: Michigan
That was not a good night. I stalked around my apartment like an over protective parent wondering how long Katie’s date would last. It was not like she had given any indication she would be letting me know when the date was over, but still I waited, hoping to hear from her and trying not to let my mind dwell on what might be happening, but failing miserably in that attempt. What had they done on their date, where did they go? Did this woman like the same things Katie did, would Katie take her to that new Thai restaurant I hadn’t wanted to go to with her? Would they go to the movies and hold hands in the dark? Would they… My mind worked feverishly through every scenario I could envision for the outcome of Katie’s date. Eventually, though, my body betrayed me and I began yawning. I begrudgingly slipped on my favorite striped pajamas and, with a last longing look at my cell phone sitting on my bedside table, I slipped between the sheets. I forced myself to think about Marcus and the time we would be spending together the next day; tried focusing on all the reasons why I loved him and with that I fell asleep.
I awoke the next morning with a nervous tension running through my veins. I quickly got out of bed and headed to the kitchen to find my daily dose of coffee already brewed and warm for me. ‘Coffee pots with timers’, I thought to myself, ‘I could hug the genius who put those two things together.’ I grabbed a bagel and some cream cheese, plus my coffee cup, and headed to the table to eat my breakfast. As I nibbled on the bagel and sipped my coffee I mentally tried to visualize my day. Marcus would be coming over around noon and it was just after nine now. What to do with the three hours I had? The spring semester at the community college where I taught had just wrapped up so I didn’t have any grading or lesson plans I needed to work on. I could organize the second bedroom of my apartment which functioned for me as part guest room, part office. The clutter was beginning to take the room over and I knew it needed to be cleaned soon, but not today. The anxious energy stored inside me was making me jumpy and unfocused. As I finished my last bite of bagel and swallow of coffee I made up my mind to go for a run.
I had never been much of a runner, had always preferred exertion that involved some sort of game or competition, but today the idea of just mindlessly running sounded absolutely perfect. I went into my bedroom and pulled a pair of black spandex Capri workout pants, a sports bra, and a white tank top out of my dresser. Throwing them all on the foot of my bed I stripped off my pajamas and stood in front of the full length mirror to give a general appraisal of my body.
In all I was mostly happy with the way my body looked. Apart from some form of cosmetic surgery to give my boobs a little more fullness I couldn’t really say I had anything about my looks that I hated. My long brown hair ran mid-way down my back and I noted with pride that my muscles were becoming leaner and more defined thanks to a much stricter workout regime I had started a few months prior. My body was now slim and athletic. I briefly wondered what Katie’s, more curvy body, would look like if I were to take off… NO! I could not go there… would not go there. ‘Marcus. I am engaged to Marcus.’ I repeated it over and over and over again as I threw on my clothes and some tennis shoes I pulled out of the closet in the entry hall, and headed out for my run.
There was something very peaceful in the way I simply listened to the rhythmic sound of my feet hitting the pavement. I headed down a trail that followed the course of the river that ran through town. I had run this trail before but never had I needed the sweet release of just running as I did this morning. I felt at peace for the first time in days. A calm was settling over my mind with every step I took. By the time I got back home I had run six miles and my lungs were burning. “Must… do… run… more… often…” I gasped as I slowed to a walk outside my apartment to let my heart rate come back down. After doing a few stretches I went back inside to take a shower and get ready for my time with Marcus.
I stood there in the shower letting the hot water beat against my body until the water began to get cooler. Normally I took such quick showers so it was a little bit of a shock when the hot water was gone. I was still in my no-thinking zone my run had gotten me into but when the cold water hit my back I snapped back to reality in a flash. My hand shot out and shut the water off. Stepping out onto the rug in front of the shower I grabbed a towel and began drying my hair. A soft ringing noise drifted in from the living room through the closed door of the bathroom. “Oh crap… the phone. It would ring now.” I mumbled as I threw the towel around my body and ran out into the living room to grab the phone. “Hello.” I said somewhat breathlessly.
“Hey Jesse,” it was Marcus. “I wondered if you would be horribly mad at me if I had to run into the office for a couple hours. I promise I will be free in time to take you out for a great dinner and I’ll even let you drag me to that chick flick you wanted to see.” His voice was pleading and I knew he was stressed about having to ask me to postpone our time together. I was actually torn in what I wanted to do right then. I didn’t relish the idea of having hours on my hands; hours where my mind would be tempted to wander to seriously dangerous territory, yet I also didn’t know how to talk to Marcus without showing the guilt that was floating just beneath the surface of my fake-normal façade.
“No,” I said after thinking for a moment, “I don’t mind.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, it’s okay, really. I know you wouldn’t go in today unless you really didn’t have another option. You can tell me all about it when you take me out tonight.” Trying to throw a playful tone into my voice, “and I will make you sit through that romantic comedy. It looks cheesy but I will at least get to enjoy listening to you groan at the horrible plotline.”
He chuckled, it seemed, somewhat halfheartedly. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? You seem like something is going on.”
I almost panicked when he said that thinking somehow he knew about my kiss with Katie but then logic overtook me and I realized he was just thinking I was hurt or upset by his having to go to work. He must believe I was putting on a brave front telling him I was okay with it while truthfully I was not so okay with the situation. “Really, truly, honestly Marcus it’s fine. I have plenty of things I can do around here that I have been putting off and we can still spend tonight together. Don’t worry about me, really.” I stressed the last word. I didn’t know how I could make it any clearer to him.
“Okay then.” He still sounded hesitant, but was at least accepting what I was telling him. “I will come by and pick you up around 6:30. And Jesse…”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too Marcus.” And we hung up.
Turning around my eye was caught by the open doorway of the disaster zone known as my office. With a huge sigh I went and threw on a pair of jeans and my favorite t-shirt. I then grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter. I walked into the office and looked around, almost in complete disbelief at the mess before me. The rest of my apartment was neat, clutter free and immaculately spotless, whereas this room was… was… it was as if a tornado had ripped through my apartment and this room had collected all the debris. Along the right side as you entered the room was a bed that would normally accommodate a guest but was currently the home for a wide assortment of random objects. Stacks of books lined the far wall in front of an overfull bookcase. Leaning against the corner next to the bookcase was another, still in the box unassembled, bookcase I had purchased with the intent to give those scattered books a permanent home but had just never gotten around to putting the thing together. I wasn’t much of a handyman.
As a child my father had me help him build a new partition wall in the family room. It was my first time with a hammer in my hand. I lined up the hammer with the nail I held in my left hand just like I had been shown and swung the hammer with my right hand. Whack! I hit my left thumb. I dropped the hammer and grabbed my thumb, dancing around holding it and trying to express how much pain I was in. Pretty much every time in my life I had even so much as held a hammer I wound up repeating much of that first experience, with the exception being I had learned a few choice words to shout whilst I danced around. For that reason I tended to avoid any task that required a handy touch. I shook my head ruefully.
“Katie is the handy one.” I said aloud to no one but myself. It was true. Anytime in the last two years I had needed something put together or something put back together after I had broken it I had always called Katie.
I didn’t even stop to consider it odd that my mind had made the handy/not handy comparison between, not me and the man I was to soon marry but instead between my best friend and I. In retrospect maybe it wasn’t odd. I mean, I had known Katie about four months before I had even met Marcus. Of the two of them Katie was the constant one in my life. My relationship with Marcus hadn’t always been a smooth road and every time I came close to throwing in the towel it was Katie who reminded me that some things really are worth fighting for. I met Marcus when I had taken a contract position at a local company who brought me in to teach computer classes to their employees in an effort to have a more technologically savvy workforce. Marcus was one of my “students”. Before that class all he knew how to do was open his email and create very simple word processing documents. I knew a two week class wasn’t going to turn him into a computer genius, but what I didn’t know was that a two week class was just long enough for me to start to fall for him. He asked me out at the end of the last class. He told me he waited until then because he didn’t want it to get out that I was one of those teachers who dated their students.
From that point on my relationship with Marcus could best be described in one word as: passionate. From our first kiss at the end of our first date to the first time we made love a few weeks later it was all about passion. He literally took my breath away. I could not wait to be with him and that was something I had never felt before. It wasn’t all happy times though. When we fought, well those times were all about passion as well. I think in the time we dated we had broken up at least half a dozen times. Once we cooled down, though, we had always realized we wanted to be together despite the bad times.
Maybe the real problem with kissing Katie was that it made the passion I shared with Marcus pale in comparison. With only a kiss I knew, at the very least, that there was someone else who could make me feel what Marcus did; make me feel more than he did. That was the thought I seriously did not know what I should do, if anything, about.
Shaking my head to clear away these troubling thoughts I focused my energy on tackling the mess before me. I started at the desk sitting against the wall opposite the bed which was overrun with stacks of papers. Slowly I started filing things around and throwing other papers I didn’t need into a bin to be recycled later. After about an hour of this I was able to see the desk again, now no longer covered with paper. I picked up the odds and ends strewn about the room and put them back into their respective places. Then I realized all that was really left to do was that damn bookcase. Looking at it almost hopelessly I wished that Katie were here to put it together for me. This thought actually annoyed me. Here I was a self-sufficient, capable woman and I was afraid of putting together a bookcase? No. I was going to do it and I was going to do it by myself.
I left the office to search through the hall closet until I found the small tool kit my father had insisted on buying for me when I first moved out of my parent’s house so many years ago. I had told him then he was wasting his money; that I would never use a tool kit. Now I was glad he had not listened to me and had bought it for me despite my protests.
Carrying the tool kit back into the office I flipped the stereo on as I set the tool kit down. I needed some music to get me “in the groove”. A strong dance beat was now filling the small room and it was somehow filling me with a sense of confidence as I danced across the room to open the box containing the as yet unassembled bookcase. I pulled all the parts out of the box, including a bag full of an intimidating number of screws and strange looking fasteners. I tossed that bag down by the rest of the parts and sat down to read the instructions. I felt a wave of panic hit me when none of the directions made any sense. The directions were printed in some form of gibberish, I swear. Insert fastener B into slot J on board C. With a deep breath that set my resolve to finish this project I started talking to myself. “Okay. You know what a board is so just figure out which one of the four thousand boards laying here is supposed to be board C and you’ll be fine.”
An hour later I was anything but fine. I had managed to assemble nothing but had hit my thumb with my hammer as I was so prone to do. There were parts and tools scattered all around the room. I wanted to sit down and simply dissolve into tears but more than anything I just wanted my best friend here. I wanted to be able to laugh at my own ineptitude as she assembled the bookcase in ten minutes without so much as a sliver, let alone smashing her thumb with a hammer.
The problem was I didn’t feel I could call her. Didn’t know what we had changed in our relationship by kissing. Could we just go back to being those two inseparable friends who shared everything without it crossing that line again? I didn’t know the answer to that question; making me realize just how many questions like that I didn’t know the answer to. All I knew was that I missed Katie. I needed her. I needed her to fix this damn shelf but more than that I needed her to help fix me. There were still three hours or so before Marcus would be picking me up for dinner. Slowly I reached into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone. With a slightly trembling hand I dialed Katie’s number.
Tue Apr 13, 2010 9:25 pm
PipSqueak
Joined: 04 Jul 2008
Posts: 987
Location: S.W. England
Just found this and I love it! Thanks GG.
Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:16 pm
kenko
Joined: 12 Apr 2008
Posts: 40
Location: right where I belong
more???!!! _________________ "Out in the cold I see water frozen in their eyes.
What a sorry sight.
I am willing to believe they would pay for a smile..."
Wed Apr 14, 2010 8:41 pm
ThatGirlFierce
Joined: 17 Apr 2008
Posts: 38
Location: Florida
Fantastic.. Absolutely love this story
Wed Apr 14, 2010 10:30 pm
MysteryGirl Moderators
Joined: 02 Jun 2007
Posts: 3419
Location: I come from a land downunder
Ah, this is just getting better and better. Great addition GiGi and I can sympathize with Jesse as I'm not even allowed to TOUCH tools, just pass them to the person actually doing the work LOL. _________________ Be yourself.............everybody else is taken!
Thu Apr 15, 2010 12:01 am
MariCR
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
Posts: 78
Location: San Jose, Costa Rica
I'm loving it GG can't wait for more _________________ Mari
Thu Apr 15, 2010 6:37 am
naturelover
Joined: 19 Sep 2009
Posts: 70
Location: East Coast US
more??? I hate this hanging feeling. good work.
Wed Apr 21, 2010 1:29 am
Ceridwen
Joined: 13 Mar 2010
Posts: 6
Location: Not-so-wild West
You're a great writer--I'm totally hooked! Can't wait to read more. _________________ -- if I had the choice I'd take the voice I got
'cause it was hard to find -- Johnette Napolitano
Thu Apr 29, 2010 8:11 am
girlwithguitar4447
Joined: 29 Jan 2010
Posts: 124
Location: Michigan
The conversation on the phone with Katie was brief, to the point, tense, and very, very awkward. I explained how I had tried to put together the book shelf; she laughed, knowing how it had turned out even before I told her. That was the highlight of the talk. The rest of the time had me stuttering out why I had called and then anxiously waiting for her to say whether or not she would come over to help me. After what seemed to me to be a lengthy deliberation on her part she said she was free for the next couple hours so she would stop by. I thanked her and we hung up.
I waited in anticipation for Katie to arrive. I paced around the living room my nerves on edge. It was stupid, I kept telling myself, to let a kiss affect me this much. It was nothing; it meant nothing that was what I needed to believe. I couldn’t let it ruin my relationship with Katie. Truly I missed the casual and easy manner our conversations used to have. Now things were tense and awkward. I was determined to set things straight; to let go of the confusing feelings I had been having running through my head since the kiss. I wanted to set my life straight again, beginning with Katie.
A few minutes later there was a knock on my door and I hurried to answer it. I was resolved to show Katie how cool things were between us; to show her that I had let go of everything and was willing to get things back to the way they were two days ago. When I opened the door it was with a huge grin on my face. The smile faded in the instant my eyes took in her appearance. What had she done? Her beautiful long brown hair was now cut boyishly short. It was maybe two or three inches long and spiked out and I just stood there staring at it for the longest time.
“Hello to you too,” Katie said with a hint of annoyance. “You gonna let me in any time soon or what?”
I stepped to the side but still didn’t say anything. My eyes remained glued to her as she brushed past me. Stopping in the living room she spun around to face me again. “Seriously Jess, what the hell is your problem? I got a haircut and you’re looking like I just told you the world is ending.”
I don’t know why I was having so much trouble taking in her new look. Her hair had always been long and straight. She had never styled it much, just left it very natural looking. I had associated her with the long natural look for so long that it never occurred to me how a different style might better frame her face, or bring out her eyes in new and dramatic ways. Those were exactly the kind of things I was thinking about now. Slowly I swung the door closed and walked over towards Katie. This new style seemed to be all about attitude, something that Katie possessed in abundance, and I found myself unable to look away. The more I studied the look the more I fell in love with how much it seemed to showcase exactly who Katie was and I found myself beginning to grin.
Katie raised an eyebrow as she saw the smile spreading across my face.
“You look…” I started, then paused searching for the right words. What were the right words? She looked magnificent. Wonderful. Beautiful. Absolutely breath-taking. My resolve to forget the complicated feelings awoken by the kiss began to melt. I found myself thinking about running my hands through that short spiky hair. Thinking about Katie’s face, perfectly framed by the pixie-like style of this new cut, as she lay the weight of her body on top of me and…
“Uh… Jess?” Katie snapped me out of my fantasy.
“Oh… Sorry. You look great. You really do. I was just thinking how it seemed to highlight a lot of your personality. I love it.”
‘Yeah. That’s what I was just thinking about’, I thought to myself, ‘I wasn’t thinking about how downright sexy I find you right now. Or about how hard it is to think straight when you are in the same room with me.’
“So you do like it?” Katie sounded almost pleading, as if she was still a little unsure about her dramatic decision to have her hair shortened by 16 inches.
“It’s great Katie. It really is. What made you decide to get it cut?”
“Honestly… I don’t know. I guess I just needed a change. I needed a way to show people that even though they may think they know who I am I have changed recently in some dramatic ways.”
“Wow. You really expect your hair to say a lot about you.” I said, with a huge grin. “Most people just want their hair to look cute yet you want yours to express to the world at large the complex internal struggles and life changes you have recently had to make.” Katie laughed. It was an absolutely melodious sound. I had always loved the sound of her laugh. “Well I have to say,” I continued, “I think you may have picked the one hairstyle that could live up to all that expectation. I think people will wonder what has changed in your life. They will at the very least ask you what made you decide to chop off all your hair.” We were both laughing now and I was reveling in how it seemed once more to be natural and easy to joke around with Katie.
“Seriously though,” I said after a few moments laughter, “what will you say to people when they ask you what made you decide to cut your hair?”
“I don’t know. I guess I will play that one by ear. It probably will depend on who I am talking to. To some people I will just say I felt like a change, to other people I may say that I felt like changing my hair because, now that I’ve realized I am gay, I feel like I myself have changed and needed an outward change to reflect the inward one,” she said in a expressionless voice. Then she smiled. “Okay, so I would never say that to someone. Oh my god can you imagine what someone’s face would look like if I did say that? I almost want to say something like that just to see what people do.”
I shook my head just laughing.
“So I hear there is an impossible to assemble bookcase somewhere in this apartment?” She was smiling at me but I wondered if maybe she hadn’t changed the subject so quickly because she wasn’t sure yet how I was dealing with her telling me she was a lesbian. I wanted to reassure her that, in my mind, knowing this information didn’t change any aspect of our relationship, but I didn’t want to say, ‘hey it’s cool with me that you like the ladies’ and I didn’t have anything cooler than that to say so I just led her off to the spare bedroom/office and showed her the scattered piles of parts I had tried to turn into a bookcase.
“I tried following the directions but I swear to god they are written in like German or Yiddish or something crazy like that.”
She picked the directions up off the floor and began to skim through them. “Well… these seem like fairly straightforward instructions and I am pretty sure it’s not in Yiddish… Okay. I guess we should get started. Is there any sort of a system to how these parts are, for lack of a better word,” she said looking around the room at the scattered pieces, “organized?”
“Uhh… Well… I…” I was stammering trying to not betray that I had just dumped the pieces out of the box and spread them around haphazardly. “I think maybe you should organize them your own way. I don’t know that I can explain my system very well.”
Her eyes seemed to twinkle as a smile played across her lips. She knew I had no system just as she knew that she would be able to assemble in thirty minutes what I would not have been able to do in thirty days but she also knew she didn’t need to say that to me; her smile said it all.
We chatted as she worked. I don’t know how she was able to talk and work at the same time but it was just one more thing about her I was blown away by. We didn’t talk too deeply about any particular subject but instead chatted about work and what we wanted to do now that it was summer semester and neither of us was teaching any summer courses. An image of Katie in a bikini flashed through my mind as she talked longingly of laying out at the beach for days on end, but I quickly banished the thought from my mind.
I was right to think it would only take Katie a half hour to put together the bookcase. Before I knew it she pronounced the project done and she helped me move it against the wall and load it full of all the books that had been taking up floor space. I stood back and observed the now clean office and felt a wave of accomplishment at getting the room all organized.
“This room looks a lot better.” Katie said, looking around. “You did a great job in here. Did you do all this today?”
“Yeah, I had a couple hours to kill so I thought I should make something of them.” I tried to interject the most casual tone into my voice as I asked, “so, did you have a good time last night?”
Katie sighed and then turned towards me. “Jesse do you really want me to tell you about last night? I don’t think you do.”
I got a little offended by that. “Why wouldn’t I want to hear about it? You are my best friend and you went out on a date with someone new last night and damn it I want to hear about it!”
She tilted her head to one side as she considered my words. “I just thought it might be a little weird for you. I mean, I haven’t given you a lot of processing time and I did kind of spring it on you that I am gay and so I didn’t want to push you.”
Katie looked so vulnerable as she stood there. I realized how hard this whole situation must be for her and how much she needed to know that no matter what I would always be on her side. “Hey.” Her eyes had slid down to stare at the carpet but met mine when I spoke. “You haven’t changed in my opinion. You are still Katie. You are still my best friend and I still want to know what is going on in your life. I don’t care the gender of the person you date so long as you tell me that you are going out with someone. I want to be in the loop.”
“Even if the loop is a little fruity?” She said mischievously.
I couldn’t help the huge smile that came to my face. “Even if the loop is a little fruity. I love you no matter what.” She walked over and threw her arms around me in a tight hug. It was a quick friendly hug but it was enough to raise all my confused feelings to the surface once more.
I walked with her towards the door. I had only an hour or so before Marcus would be arriving and she mentioned she had plans as well.
“Does she have a name?” I asked. I was trying to show my support so that Katie would know it was okay to talk about her love life with me the same way I talked about mine with her.
“Lola.” Katie sheepishly replied. She didn’t seem to know what to say next.
“Okay. Lola. Well you will have to tell me more about her when we have more time to chat. Lesbian or not you still need the best friend stamp of approval you know.”
“If you say so,” was her reply. She paused just before walking out my front door. “It means a lot to me that you are being so cool about this. I will tell you sometime about the words my family threw at me when I told them. I was just so afraid you would react like them. And, the truth is, I can’t lose you. I need to have my best friend around. “
“I’m always here.”
She smiled, gave me a quick hug and then with a wave she was gone. I closed the door softly behind her. In my head I could still see her smile and hear her gorgeous laugh. I could still feel her arms wrapped tightly around me. It was in that moment, as my mind once more wandered into realms of passion where Katie had more than just her arms wrapped around my body, that I began to realize that I was starting to fall for Katie. The more that reality set in the more I felt coursing through my whole body an ever intensifying hatred for a woman I had never met. A woman named Lola.
Fri Apr 30, 2010 1:51 pm
girlwithguitar4447
Joined: 29 Jan 2010
Posts: 124
Location: Michigan
Thanks for all the encouragement everyone! Time to write seems to be hard to come by but I will make it my goal to not let too much time go by in between posts. Thanks again for reading!
Fri Apr 30, 2010 1:52 pm
MysteryGirl Moderators
Joined: 02 Jun 2007
Posts: 3419
Location: I come from a land downunder
WB Gigi. So happy to see this add up this morning, this is a great little story. Write when you can, we will be here waiting.
hugZ, MG _________________ Be yourself.............everybody else is taken!
Fri Apr 30, 2010 11:51 pm
Ceridwen
Joined: 13 Mar 2010
Posts: 6
Location: Not-so-wild West
Oh, come on, you can procrastinate everything else to write! Sleep? Who needs it? It just messes up your hair anyway. Work? You really deserve a vacation. To write.
jk -- but will be happy to read more when you get to it! _________________ -- if I had the choice I'd take the voice I got
'cause it was hard to find -- Johnette Napolitano
Sat May 01, 2010 4:57 am
girlwithguitar4447
Joined: 29 Jan 2010
Posts: 124
Location: Michigan
Ceridwen you crack me up! I am really good at procrastinating... usually though that means proscrastinating writing as well. I will try to be better at getting things written. I do have great ideas for where this story is going I just seem to have trouble carving out the time to actually write. And it should make you feel better to know I did procrastinate sleep to write that last bit. I stayed up 2 and 1/2 hours past my bedtime because I was on a roll and I didn't want to stop. Anyway, your support is wonderful to hear!
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