Charley and Claire
Copyright© 2022 by tendertouch
Foreword
First, I’d like to thank editor7 and my other editor, who prefers to remain anonymous, for their help getting this right. Any mistakes that remain are mine and mine alone. Please help me to eradicate them by alerting me to any you find.
If you’ve read any of Oyster50’s Smart Girls stories, some of this will look familiar, but it’s definitely not the same. Those stories, particularly Dana, were part of the inspiration for this one, but I wanted to take it in a decidedly different direction.
The other part of the inspiration is the normalization of same-sex relationships that’s happening these days. A Gallup poll recently put the rate of LGBT “Gen Z” adults (born between 1997 and 2003) at greater than 20% nationwide. This story is set in an area with an even larger gay population than the national average. In the area where the story is set, same-sex marriages, while not as common as opposite sex marriages, are unremarkable, which is remarkable in and of itself to me.
Note about the caution code: a rape, with no details, occurs in the third paragraph of Chapter 3. It’s not graphic, but if you’d prefer skipping it, go ahead. I tried to remove any description of it, but it didn’t look right, so I just pared the description back as far as I felt I could.