Chapter 27

The Uber dropped Darlene off first, then took Gloria home. She used the front door and hurried straight into the bathroom, relieved nobody saw her. They had explored their common interest to the point of exhaustion, but there was so much more, things Gloria couldn’t have imagined or expected to feel. She stripped off the dirty softball clothes she’d been forced to put back on and looked at the red marks where her balled fists had driven fingernails into her palms. Why had Darlene shared her secret?

Darlene’s virginity had been stolen from her the way Gloria feared hers would be, and that made her cry. Darlene noticed and asked, but not even the girl who had been raped by her second foster father could know Gloria’s secret. Thankfully, Darlene had stopped trying, but the way she held Gloria, stroking her hair and running her fingernails up and down Gloria’s forearm, seemed to say the redhead knew the truth.

Gloria stepped onto the toilet lid so she could see her butt in the mirror, twisted, and poked the deep-purple spot on her right butt cheek. Darlene’s words, “Seems like leaving a mark like that is something someone serious about you would do,” made Gloria smile. What if the redhead was serious about her?

They had stared into each other’s eyes many times while they talked, kissed, and pleasured each other, but that last time, when Darlene said goodbye and got out of the car in front of her trailer, that was when Gloria truly saw it.

A spark of static electricity jumped from the tip of Darlene’s nose to the mirror, and then her breath misted the glass. She stared at the fractured blue rings and down into the black holes at their centers. The beautiful blonde girl’s smile and tears flashed through her mind. Pain and suffering connected them, which was fine; Darlene knew how to handle those feelings, but—She shook her head, backed away from the image, and fell. The beanbag chair ruptured, vomiting its Styrofoam guts onto the stained carpet. Is this what love feels like?

Their paths had crossed under false pretenses and gone in an unintended and unimaginable direction. She touched the purple mark on her inner thigh, thinking about how Gloria had gone down on her. The girl did it like she’d die if she didn’t make Darlene cum, then Gloria watched in amazement when it happened. Before bliss waned, Gloria covered her with the silky-softness of her body and kissed Darlene’s wet cheeks. That was when Darlene realized the orgasm had brought her to tears; it had broken her. For the first time in her life, she experienced something besides pleasure or pain. They kissed, and she sucked the salty moisture from Gloria’s lips. It wasn’t bitter the way all her other tears had always been.

The day had been spent in her room, catching up on dictation and doing other mindless activities designed to keep Candy’s brain busy. She still looked at her phone often, wishing it would ring. Sally told her to be patient the first two times Candy called, and the third time, Sally said, “I’ll be there later. Stop calling me.”

Truthfully, it was Cindy’s name that Candy wanted to see light up on her phone. Sally told her to stay away from Cindy, but what was the harm in talking on the phone? The sound of Cindy’s voice, hearing the girl say she was fine, would go a long way in taking the edge off Candy’s anxiety. The message she sent with Evan should have at least generated a text. Candy huffed and stared at the monitor, praying it would wake up and show Sally’s car coming up the driveway.

Gloria came out of the shower, bent over, dangling her hair, collected it in a towel, and rubbed vigorously. She stood quickly, flinging the tangled mess over her head. During the brief bout of blurred vision, Gloria thought of the first time Darlene kissed her at the ballpark. That was the day the older girl wrote a phone number on her arm and left her standing there with Jayda and Alex. It had shocked Gloria, so she didn’t think about how it felt, but now, after hours of making out with the redhead, Gloria was giving it a lot of thought. She had always heard that kissing another girl was like kissing yourself. The first time she tried it, Jayda had convinced Gloria that it was an experiment to see if it was like kissing yourself. The truth was, Jayda was horny and wanted a friend with benefits. Still, the forbidden nature of it and the novelty had been exciting. Though, Gloria hadn’t thought it was like kissing herself. Then it happened with Deana. The taboo of sisters kissing intensified the fearful excitement, and their love made it different from what the softball sisters had. Still, it didn’t fulfill Gloria’s expectations.