Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women Read Online Free PDF

formed a running group. I did not discover any more dead bodies on these group runs, but I did discover Becky. Since she was married with two young kids and a baby, I was not too concerned that I found her sexy. Though I had thrown away the printed proof of my attraction to women, I ran behind Becky, watching her muscles move beneath her tight skin. I found reasons to touch her curly, blond hair. I lay awake at night thinking of ways I could amuse or impress her. I convinced myself that a crush was allowable, though it did make sex with Wes even less bearable.
    One February night at dusk, I was at the track, counting out steps for my J-run to the high jump. Having been told that I would coach this event during track season, I had watched a couple of videos and a practice at the local college. Though I felt uncomfortable practicing this event on the wide-open track, I needed to be able to do what I would soon instruct others to do.
    After I cleared the lowest height a few times, clapping and cheering startled me. I sat up on the blue landing cushion and saw her. Tall, lithe Becky. She had a way of finding me.
    Though she wore jeans, I coaxed her to the blacktop before the high jump. I showed her how to run the J formation and marked off her steps with a little rock. She ran through the marks but stopped before the bar. Again and again, I showed her how to throw her body over the bar.
    She told me, “This is outside my comfort zone.”
    My sweat drying in the coolness of the approaching evening, I felt charged—like I did on the mesa with Grace. Becky didn’t jump that night.
    I was off duty that Friday. The two of us went to a bar—a cheesy bar where two guys who brought their own pool sticks tried to pick us up. We were there because it was across the street from the campus. We both wanted to drink. I ripped the cardboard coaster into pieces as I confessed my attraction to her. She told me she wanted me too, but she was a mother. We had made the J-run together. Before she took me to my dorm, she parked her car by the stables—not far from the throne where I had seen the dead man. We kissed. I thought nothing could make me stop kissing Becky. I kissed her with a three-year hunger, and she opened. So soft, so lovely. So illicit.
    Our affair blazed. We reached for each other whenever we could. Made love in my apartment between classes, on the wrestling mat late at night, in the woods mid-run, and in the headmaster’s bathroom during a spring faculty party. Her back against the door. My hands pushing up her blue dress. Her mouth on my neck. My fingers in her warmth. One night, we drove to the new soccer complex. I lay on top of her in the back seat of her minivan. Police lights discovered us. We sat up. The policeman asked us where our boyfriends were. Had they run off into the woods? He would not believe that no men had been with us. That we could be there in the back seat together. Alone.

    Wes found a blond, curly hair on our sheet. A CD player was plugged into the wall next to the bed. Shaking, he asked. I told. Everything. I asked him to leave me. He was gone within the week. The dean of faculty asked me if our small apartment contributed to our separation. Just the small space I had tried to exist in since puberty, I thought.

    I adopted Zora from the pound after Wes moved out. Becky and her daughter helped me pick out a medium-size female with about three breeds in her. She has tweed-looking fur covered with big black spots on her back to match her black head and her right hind leg. The employees were calling her Beatrice, so the first thing I did was upgrade her name to Zora. When the volunteer rubbed Zora’s belly, he showed me a woman-symbol tattoo beneath her fur. I thought she was a feminist miracle dog, but he explained veterinarians often make this tattoo to eliminate the guessing game of whether or not pets have been fixed. Since she’d already been spayed, I got to take her that day.

    I was in love with