Charley and Claire
Copyright© 2022 by tendertouch
Foreword
Romantic Story: Foreword - At twenty-nine Charley has found her little slice of heaven in the beautiful, if somewhat damp, Pacific Northwest. She's out of the closet, has a job she loves, and has neighbors who love — and feed — her. Then her neighbors' granddaughter shows up and upends her calm and predictable life. Please read the forward for information about the caution tag.
Caution: This Romantic Story contains strong sexual content, including Fa/ft Romantic Lesbian First Massage Masturbation Oral Sex Caution Geeks
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.
If you’re completely allergic to male/male affection then skip the kiss between the two guys at their wedding in the last chapter. They were good friends for my main characters, though, so I thought they deserved that little bit of screen time.
Pronunciation guide:
Sequim - skwim
Blyn - blin
Elwha - ell wah (so the sound from the front of wash)
Sol Duc - sole duck
A number of the river names have single o’s in them. They’re long — the sound of the interjection ‘oh’. So:
Skokomish - skoh koh mish
Dosewallips - doh see wall lips
Quilcene - quill seen
Juan de Fuca - Wahn de Fewkuh
Tahoma - The H in this word is pronounced with a sound that isn’t part of the English language, so it’s heard differently by different English speakers. Think of it as an H with a hard stop. Some people predominantly hear a normal, English H, so tuh HOH muh. Some predominantly hear the hard stop, so tuh KOH muh. There’s a Mount Tahoma (pronounced with the normal H) high school in Tacoma (which is based on the hard stop version of the same word.)