Best Lesbian Romance of the Year by Radclyffe

Author:Radclyffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Best Lesbian Romance of the Year
ISBN: 9781627781022
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2015-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

LONG DRIVE

L.C. Spoering

The drive to the airport was long enough to make my legs twitch, my foot in danger of hopping off the gas pedal at random intervals, as though it might find a way, Fred Flintstone–like, to speed us up, dash along the pavement under the car so that we met our destination that much sooner.

Early morning, the sun rose off to the left of me, making my arm appear as the desert, or untouched snow, slowly turning pink and orange and gold, inching up my limb to warm the side of my face. I tilted my head into the light and hummed with the radio, against it, my own tune in contrast to the beat from the speakers. The day was finally here.

I felt as though everything had been meticulously scheduled, turned into an orchestrated event that could fall apart with one missed step: flight delayed, baggage lost. What kind of expectations could be dashed by the carelessness of the totally ignorant? I tried not to dwell on it, parked the car in the garage and tipped my head back for one final cigarette, breathing in the smoke like I was a dragon, and it was my life force.

The giddiness lay in my stomach, curled and purring like a cat. If I was in a movie, I thought, I’d pull out a photo of her now, trace the curve of her cheek with one calloused finger, admire the slightly lopsided angle of her smile. I thought of that, before leaving the house: the photo I kept of her on the refrigerator, something enough to embarrass her. The rest of the photos, though, lay on my computer, sent over a year of emails, snapshots requested and swapped, like pen pals at childhood summer camp, SWAK written in sloppy letters over the seal of the envelope.

I ground the cigarette out in the ashtray and looked at the doors of the terminal again. I remembered the days when you could meet people at the gate and the movie scenes that came out of that, of running to planes, of waiting for a person to disembark, holding a single rose. I would meet her outside the train doors, which I tried to tell myself was the next best thing. There was still a sense of romanticism in that sort of greeting—we could be Edwardian, standing in the mists of a London evening, rather than the recycled air of a twenty-first-century airport.

I was getting ridiculous. I locked the car and hurried into the airport to check the flight times. The place smelled like floor wax and French fries, and I breathed it in like a perfume. Her flight was due in fifteen minutes, and as I walked, my brain drifted, lifted like a balloon toward the ceiling, and I hummed, again, that same purring feeling in my stomach raised to my mouth, as though emotion had a sound, as if feelings could be made into a rhythm. I cast smiles at everyone I

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