*** This series was awarded the
Most Literary/Genre Transcending
award in the
2020 Reader's Choice Awards
. Thank you to all my readers and all who voted. ***
Hello again friend, and welcome to Chapter Four of my Wheels In Motion series.
If you haven't read chapters One through Three, you are going to be very confused. Really friend, I don't want you to get a headache from the furrowed brows you'll be sporting trying to understand what's going on. So, do yourself a favor and read those first.
If you haven't read Chapters One and Two of 'Twas the Night Before... then you won't get what's going on in the first scene here, but it's not a deal breaker. More like... skipping the cheese on your cheeseburger or the vanilla ice cream with your apple pie. You can still eat it, but it won't be as good, so why would you do that?
As always, thank you to my ArmyGal33 for her beta-reading and letting me bounce ideas off her, and AwkwardMD, for her outstanding editing work. I look so much smarter with her help.
~~ Foggy Bottom, Washington, DC, May ~~
LIZ
"
So that's it, that's my story," Kat said. She picked up her margarita and gulped down the last of it, her third of the night. She caught our waitress's eye and held up her empty glass.
"I can't believe you wouldn't want to tell that story to anyone who would listen," I said, "Why does it embarrass you so much?"
"Because I hurt Megan, pretty badly, and for no other reason than my own ingrained prejudices. Thinking of myself as gay made me uncomfortable, even though I was completely in love with her and totally, one hundred percent, into her body. I let my own fear shove her away from me when I needed her support the most. I thought that me being with her gave Amanda a legitimate reason to take Cait away from me. In hindsight I see that was bullshit. Thank god she gave me a second chance. I could have deprived my daughter of the best parental-figure I could have asked for."
I rolled my empty beer glass between my hands, thinking over everything she'd told me.
"So, does that help?" she asked.
"A little? I guess? I mean, I've grown a pretty thick skin. People can be incredibly cruel or insensitive to handicapped people. I don't know that I'd let people's perceptions of me being with a woman be the thing that holds me back."
"But...?"
"It's just the... actual... nuts and bolts of it I guess? You spent your whole life until you were twenty-five, being into men, being attracted to men, sleeping with men. Then one day you jump into bed with Megan and have sex with her and then you're into women. I mean... what made you want to do that?"
"It's not like Megan was the best of a bunch of bad choices. I was desperate for
any
attention. Remember I hadn't been with a man for almost five years. The last man I've ever been with was Steve, who got me pregnant when I was twenty, then he ghosted me. I wasn't with
anyone
, for like five years after that until Megan. Secondly, I'd had that drunken three-way back in my party days with one of my boy-toys who came before Steve and some girl whose name I never knew. I was plastered and he talked me into it. It's not something I was wanting at the time, but I thought being a freak in bed to make my man happy was what I was supposed to do, so I did it."
Kat looked down for a moment, staring into her empty glass, and I impatiently asked, "And...?"
"And I never told him, or anyone else, but she rang my bell harder than any of my boy-toys ever could. I tried to forget that night out of embarrassment, but I always remembered how good she was. So, there I am, a twenty-five-year-old single mom with five years of no romantic companionship of any kind under my belt. This super cute girl ends up in my bed through the most fantastic chain of events I could imagine and then she puts the moves on me, more or less in her sleep. And, well, I just wanted someone to touch me. Anyone. So, I let her. And when she did, I liked it. I really,
really,
liked it."
"Hmmm," I mused. Wheels were spinning in my head.
"What?"
"I don't know. There's some parallels. I haven't been with anyone in... geez, almost eighteen months? And--"
"Hang on, Liz," Kat interrupted me. "I can admit now that I'm gay. Or bisexual with a seriously heavy lean towards girls--"
"You're Megan-sexual," I interjected with a grin.
"Hashtag facts, as Cait would say," she said with a grin of her own, "But, I'd been in denial for years. You said you've never been interested in girls, right? You said that you even tried to think about what it would be like to be with Addison and just came up blank, right?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. So, my opinion, for what it's worth, is that if you're contemplating making a move on Addison just because you miss your friend
and
because you're lonely because you haven't had a guy ask you out in forever, those are two separate things and it would be a
big
mistake to conflate the two. All you're going to do is hurt Addison even more in the long run, and still lose her as a friend."