Best Lesbian Romance 2014 Read Online Free PDF Page A

of water. It had to come with me.
    A small paperback, a French children’s book about a boy who loved a rose so much it lit all the stars for him, more than earned the sliver of space it took up in the orange crate. The corners of a picture guide to the wildflowers of North America were still soft from my grandfather’s thumbs, so I kept it. I held on to a hardcover of Neruda’s poems if only for the line, “I do not love you as if you were salt-rose or topaz.”
    Books would not have been such a secret for most women.They would have slid them onto the same shelves with their lovers’, letting the spines mix until they could not have remembered whose began as whose if not for the names written onto the flyleaves. But I never forgot my mother telling me, “Never let the boy think you are smart.” Sawyer loved me for my push-up bras and rosewater perfume, my cayenne-colored lipstick and all that yellow hair I made endless with hot rollers each morning. It didn’t matter that by the time we’d been together for three years, she knew I dyed it.
    I loved Sawyer for her saffron-colored hair, always just long enough to get in her eyes. I loved her for how the weight of the Leatherman on her belt pulled her jeans just enough to show a band of bare skin at the small of her back. I loved that her tongue always tasted like saltwater.
    I loved these things about her the way she loved those things about me, so it was not fair to let her know I was curious and smart like my grandfather had told me. It would have changed too much. It would have made her doubt the way I laughed when she traced a finger along the scalloped lace of my bra, or how, after I ironed her shirts, I liked leaving a blush of lipstick on those clean, starched collars. All of that was true. All of it was as much me as the secrets inside that orange crate. But Sawyer might not have believed it. My mother might have been right about all my words.
    Sawyer had loved me that way for seven years when I came home and found her with my grandfather’s books. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving. She’d taken down the Christmas decorations from the high shelf of the closet and had found my orange crate behind the boxes.
    â€œI wanted to surprise you,” she said. She bit her lip, a little guilty. “Thought I could get all the lights up before you came home.”
    I blushed to see that the books were in a different order than when I had last put them back in the crate. Sawyer had gone through them.
    She caught me staring. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to go looking where you didn’t want me to.”
    â€œI don’t care,” I said. “They’re just books. I never read them.”
    â€œThen why’s your handwriting in them?”
    I knelt on the floor to put them all back in the right order, but Sawyer took my face in her hands. I felt the familiar grain of her calluses on my cheeks, the pads of her fingers worn rougher since the first time she touched me years earlier.
    â€œYou’re smart,” she said, her mouth close enough to mine that I could feel its heat on my lips. “I see it.”
    I loved my lipstick and my rosewater as much as todas aquellas palabras, and I loved Sawyer more than any of it. I wanted both. I wanted my body to be soft under hers, not so full of words that I was as hard to hold in her arms as water.
    But she held me a little harder, her calluses like the finest sandpaper. I imagined each of her fingertips on my tongue, rough and sweet as the husks of the lychee nuts we bought from the farmer’s market on Sunday mornings. Thinking of how much the fruit inside smelled like violets on our sheets made me close my eyes. A tear fell from my lash line.
    Sawyer kissed it when it was halfway down my cheek. “What else are you hiding?” she asked.
    I opened my eyes and let her look at me. I did not squint to keep from her those rings around