Chapter 1

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 529.

The Straight Girl

Andi Cooper had one hard and fast rule that she had never broken. No straight girls! But when Gill Radley moved into the next-door unit and began flirting with her, Andi discovered that a cute smile, some home-cooking and a pair of soft lips can really play havoc with a woman's principles. Then she sees something that convinces her she was right about straight girls all along - but was she? Does she believe the evidence of her own eyes or can Gill convince her that things are not always as they seem.

“Enough already!”

Anthea ‘Andi' Cooper ran her fingers distractedly through her hair and wearily closed the online spread-sheet she had been working on for the past two hours. If the way her short, blonde ‘do' was standing on end was any indication, it was a gesture she must have repeated more than once during that time. For a second or so she debated laying her head down on her office desk and getting a few hours sleep in what was left of the night. Lord knows it would save her the drive time come tomorrow morning.

“Get a grip!” she admonished herself as she hauled her aching body upright and reached for the light switch. “If you spend anymore time in that chair it's going to become a permanent growth on your butt.”

It wasn't as if she had far to go. Her tax consultancy business was tucked into the back end of an ugly concrete strip mall in Citrus Heights, a somewhat nondescript suburb north of the Californian state capital of Sacramento. At this hour its streets were relatively free of their usual stop-start traffic snarls and her five year old Chevy pickup made all the red lights on the ten minute drive. Home was a one bedroom, ground floor unit in a block of ten and on nights like this Andi blessed her decision to locate her living and business premises as close as possible.

Andi let herself in the front door and kicked aside the buildup of pizza leaflets and other assorted garbage that was regularly dropped thru the mail slot, despite the fading ‘No Junk Mail' sticker. Two leftover slices of cheese and pepperoni pizza sitting forlornly next to a quart of milk in an otherwise empty fridge indicated that she occasionally made use of those unsolicited leaflets. She didn't even bother to turn on the kitchen light, instead propped herself up against the open fridge door and wolfed the food cold, following it up with several swallows of milk direct from the jug. It was tempting to just fall straight into bed as was but a tentative sniff of an arm pit rerouted her tired feet towards the shower stall, clothes scattering haphazardly in her wake.

“Oh man, that feels good.”

Andi groaned as she stood under the stream of warm water and began to soap herself down. Kneading her knotted shoulder muscles she reflected gratefully that at age forty seven she still weighed pretty much the same as she always had, despite her irregular eating habits. Those 140lbs stacked on her 5'6' frame meant she was neither thin nor heavy, just average and her small breasts were still rounded and firm. Probably more good luck and genetics than good management Andi thought. Her mom was in her early seventies and still cut a svelte figure on the greens of the golf course attached to the retirement complex in Florida where she had lived for the past decade. She had noticed that hers was the age when a lot of women without an intimate partner began to let go and become soft and flabby. It wasn't hard to follow their reasoning – why spend your spare time sweating in the gym and starving on the latest fad diet, when at the end of the day there was no one else to admire all that sacrifice? Unless of course you were still out there looking. Andi shuddered at the thought. It had been four years since her split with Lana and the subject was still so painful she rarely let her mind travel in that direction. But every now and then, especially when she was tired, it was hard to keep the memories at bay. A bit like after you have had a tooth pulled, she mused; the object that caused the pain is gone but you just can't stop your tongue from probing the empty space to see if it still hurts.

Back then, to everyone else and especially to Andi herself, it seemed like she had had it all; a solid relationship of over six years and a nice house on the outskirts of San Jose. Between the two of them they had made a decent living. Her tax consultancy business was beginning to get off the ground and Lana was working as a theatre nurse in a local hospital.

“Damn it all to hell.” Andi whispered as she arched her neck and let the hot water run over her head and face. After all this time why did she still let it get to her? Everything she had thought of as a given had dissolved as quickly as ice melting in the July sun. She closed her eyes and once again, as if on the flickering screen of an old home movie, she saw Lana - still in her PJ's on her day off - laughing and teasing and trying to entice her into playing hooky from work.

“Come on Andi babe, don't be such a stick in the mud, stay home with me today. I'll make it worth your while.”

Here Lana leans toward the camera, winking and flirting. Her sultry expression hints at a day spent in carnal delights. It would have been so simple, Andi reflected, to have made a few calls and cancelled a couple of appointments. Just for once she could have let go of the rigid structure that governed her life and taken a few hours out to revitalize a floundering relationship. But she hadn't, had she? Nope, she'd brushed Lana off irritably with a few terse remarks about one of them having to be the adult, and why did it always have to be her?

Andi shifted in the shower, resting her head on the tiled wall, unable to stop the images that played across the inside of her closed eyelids. Now she watched her own feet walking up the cracked paving of the front walk. She'd come home early, a surprise to make up for the morning's disappointment.

“No, no, stop!” She no longer knew if she was exhorting her old self of four years ago not to enter the house, or whether her cries were directed at her current self, to stop the torture these recollections inflicted. It didn't matter did it? The results were always the same. She would still open the bedroom door to find Lana in their bed fucking some stranger, her head thrown back in ecstasy, and Andi would still stand crying in the shower stall until the water ran cold.