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Lesbian Coming of Age Romance

Tennis camp was fun, but honestly, I just did it for Charlie. My forehand was shit and I couldn’t serve even if I tried, but she was there so I begged to go every summer. Those summers live in my mind in a scrapbook covered in grass stains and orange juice. These dewy memories that sit in my chest like burning coals, keeping me warm even when we’re apart. It’s unbearable really, being apart from her, always has been. But college. But life, I suppose. I just wish we could go back. 


Jo?


She’s offering me a peach, as she presses her thumb into the soft flesh, tearing it into two. The juice drips down her slender fingers, and I wonder what it would be like to lick it away. These thoughts hadn’t yet begun to strike me as odd, but they would.


Thanks. Sure thing. Our conversation turns into hums of satisfaction as we eat our peach halves, our hands sticky and our lips glistening. Everyone else is cleaning up little yellow balls on the court from all the tennis drills during the day, but somehow, we were always able to slip away. Sometimes we had a can of Sprite, which we passed back and forth, or a bag of salt and vinegar chips. Those were my favorite. Charlie liked them too, but I knew she brought them for me. I liked it best when we had fruit, like the peach. It made the kisses sweet. 


So, there we are, in our cabin that same night on the wooden floor, still in our little tennis skorts, hair tied and braided long down our backs. When she kissed me, I tried to predict her movements so our noses wouldn’t smash together, but sometimes they still did. I didn’t mind it either way.


You taste like peaches, she’d say. I started to wonder if she remembered the fruit we shared beforehand, or if she just started associating my lips with the taste of summer-ripened fruit. Was I a treat to her? Did we eat the fruit because we wanted to, or because for the rest of time we’d taste each other’s lips in every fourth of July fruit salad? 


So do you. And another string of those chaste, easy-going kisses. This was before we had the awareness that if someone found us it would be trouble. This was just what we did, what our bodies gravitated toward. We were best friends. The type of people who needed the other to exist, like twins. There was no Joanna without her Charlie, there was no fruit, no chips, no Sprite. The world would completely topple if we weren’t together, I was convinced. And then life started to happen, for semesters at a time, and I felt I might wither away. Dramatic, but true.


Remember tennis camp? I’m asking with an amused sort of smile while Charlie and I are cleaning up dishes in the sink. It’s Thanksgiving now, eight years after that peach. Charlie had just gotten back from college for break, had just escaped from the prison in California that locked her away from me for too long. Far too long.


Admittedly, it was a stupid question. Tennis camp had been our everything back then. Those creaky wooden floors where we had our first kisses, kisses that at the time didn’t mean anything more to us than a declaration of lifetime friendship, unwavering loyalty. What did they mean now?


Course, I remember. Charlie rolls up her sleeve as she goes diving for another plate, soap foaming around her wrist. Her words are warm, like her breath is on my ear, though she’s too many steps away. She has a tennis player’s forearms, which makes my mouth a little dry. She’d retained the passion for the sport, where I hadn’t picked up a tennis racket in years. I liked that she still played, it was just another reminder of those times. And seeing her in a skort wasn’t half bad, either. From what she’d told me, she was sort of a big deal already, playing college tennis so well that it shocked people. But it never shocked me, Charlie was just like that, she set her mind to something, and she would work until it was what she wanted. Usually, she wanted perfection.


I miss it, is all I can think to say, because I had no real plan when I brought it up. It was true, I’d have given anything to be eleven again, with my sticky lips on hers. I’d have given anything to fit into those cherry stained camp t-shirts, even just to pretend. I stopped drying the plate in my hand as I stared off out the window at the snow, at the darkening sky. I wondered momentarily if there was another set of girls somewhere that had ended up like us.


There had to be another set of best friends that were like us, that walked this line of intimacy, that treaded this unlabeled territory. Somewhere out in the snow, I thought maybe there was an answer. Out in the forest, under a rock, beneath the roots of a fruit tree… did they know what we were supposed to be doing? Did they know when things would become something? How do I stay grateful for tennis camp when it’s so far gone? How do I tell her I think I might be in love with her, that I can’t eat peaches anymore without crying, especially when she’s away? I can tell she’s watching me think all of this, but she doesn’t say anything. 


What she does do is press me back against my twin bed that night and push my t-shirt up to my sternum. When she kisses me, I feel like I might pass out; how had I gone so long without air? Her words are in my mouth, words I’ve become all too familiar with; you missed me, didn’t you?


It’s almost taunting, and had I not been beneath the callouses of her hands feeling where her tennis racket sat in her palm, I might have gotten angry. But I needed this, so I let the technicalities lie for the sake of having her. Like always. 


I missed you, comes out in a wet mumble as our lips curve and snag on one another, like there was always something knotting us together. We never got too far, really. That sticky feeling had lingered; maybe we’d never washed it off. When she touched me, her warmth permeated, her breath stayed. I was a painting smudged with her fingerprints, wet and aching, constantly changing because of her influence. I’d never once just been Joanna. I’d always been Charlie’s Joanna, a piece in her gallery, beneath the light of her hands, the endearment of her eyes.


I feel like dying when I’m away from you.


Those words from her mouth, against my skin, brought me somewhere close to moaning or crying. Was I pleased or shattered? She was peppering kisses over my stomach, nose slipping into my navel. All of this was so familiar, so comforting, and yet those words brought me back to myself for just a moment. I felt my stomach turn slightly, the same swaying sickness I used to feel trying to serve at tennis camp. That frustration, sour and stark, was enough to make my head fall back against the pillows and a deep exhale flow from my lungs. Why was it so hard for us both to just say what we meant—that this thing between us was more than friendship? We were closer than that, weren’t we? Friends don’t know what friends taste like. 


Lying in the dark, her hands tugging down my pajama pants, I felt goosebumps blossoming over my thighs. And then her warm lips, like a balm, warming me from the inside out. My thighs parted under her eyes as she sat up to pull her brown hair back into a ponytail, and I saw my one chance to speak. I was glad the room was mostly dark, just striped with moonlight. I didn’t want to watch her big brown eyes struggle to recognize me if that’s what they did. Could she see me as anything other than her best friend?


I’m in love with you. Like, actually. Like, marriage love. I know it’s a stupid way of saying it, but Charlie and I always got caught up in the semantics. I’d say I love you, and she’d say it back but she’d mean it how she always meant it. She’d mean it in the same way that half a peach is an I love you, or help tying your shoe. A parent can give you half of a peach. A teacher at recess can tie your shoe. It doesn’t even have to be your teacher. She meant it like we were inseparable, but not so that she would kiss me in public. This intimacy was a clause of our friendship, a stipulation because our closeness was overwhelming without something to take the edge off. Nothing more. 


The sigh that follows makes my legs prickle with goosebumps again, because I’ve heard it so many times before. I thought for sure she was about to climb off the bed and back into her sleeping bag on the floor, and that would be it. I’d have been left with new, melancholy blue thumbprints in my wet-paint thighs, and nothing else. But then I feel her fingers creep back onto my calf in the dark.


You don’t think I’m in love with you, Jo?


I swear the room is suddenly under water. I’m drowning. I can’t breathe. The colors bleed. I’m drowning. 


You don’t think I’ve been in love with you this whole time, Jo? Since tennis camp? You can’t really be that oblivious. 


I open my mouth to speak, but her hand is crawling up my thigh and I’m sitting up, and our mouths are so close that instead of speaking I kiss her. It was reflexive, a kneejerk reaction. I needed air, something to ground me. That was always her. But when I break away from the kiss, a kiss that felt profoundly different in that Charlie’s lips were parted for me, I break the surface and I’m treading water again. 


So, what are we doing? Why aren’t we together


And Charlie laughs, like she used to when I’d try to do a fucking serve and end up hitting myself in the back of my head with my racket. I sort of wanted to smack her, but I didn’t, instead I wrapped my arms around her neck and wrestled her down until she was underneath me on my bed. Our legs were all tangled up in my sheets as I straddled her lap. And she still laughed. 


What? Why’re you laughing?


We’ve been together, Jo. We always will be together. Haven’t you noticed yet?


Again, I felt like crying, staring down at her, this stupid, delicate smile on her lips. She was right, of course. All this time, it had been me and her. Joanna and Charlie. One couldn’t exist without the other. Who else would I have shared fruit with? Who else would I have sat next to in elementary school? Who else would I have kissed like this, in the dark, only a few walls away from my parents? Only her. Only us


The answer hadn’t been out there after all, buried in the earth, or locked away in some dusty cabin where we could never be eleven again. The answer had been in these moments, these moistened lips and roaming hands. It was only then that I could admit to myself that our inability to make this a fully realized thing had been half my fault. The brush strokes she left on me, I laid back and allowed. The blank parts of my canvas were not Charlie’s alone to fill. She had her hands on me, at all times, but she still couldn’t fix my serve. 


But we could be this, something simpler. We could be skin and bones and breath, tongue and teeth and hands. Nobody could stop us from being here, from doing this. I could feel the draft of the winter just outside the window, but I was so hot I could have sworn it was summer. And then I realized she was there too, when her mouth dipped to meet me, and my eyes fluttered shut with my hand tangled in her hair. The quiet only broken by my soft panting, and her mumbled musing. 


You taste like peaches. 

December 06, 2024 19:38

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13 comments

Mary Bendickson
04:18 Dec 09, 2024

Peachy keen.

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Brynn Helena
12:52 Dec 09, 2024

thanks for reading :)

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Alexis Araneta
16:54 Dec 07, 2024

Glorious, Brynn ! The imagery-filled way you described Jo and Charlie's love was so good. The peach references here! Lovely !

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Brynn Helena
18:11 Dec 07, 2024

thank you so much! :)

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Ben LeBlanc
16:29 Dec 20, 2024

Jesus loves you.

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E. B. Bullet
04:38 Dec 16, 2024

Bryan, this was GORGEOUS. Absolutely stunning in its bubbling sweetness. All the sticky, fruity imagery made me feel every bit of this story. The yearning. The warmth. The loud quiet. The sun and the snow. SO GOOD. I am in love with the way you painted this, it feels so intensely human and convoluted. The prompt allowed you to play with this in such a way that the story felt like a memory, yet still somehow delivering on the present. Very interesting! I enjoyed this so much thank you for sharing!

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Brynn Helena
13:40 Dec 16, 2024

thank you! :)

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James Scott
00:04 Dec 16, 2024

A difficult prompt but well executed, it was easy to recognise the dialogue and everything flowed into a good story!

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Brynn Helena
01:18 Dec 16, 2024

thank you! :)

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Thomas Wetzel
02:21 Dec 15, 2024

Truly beautiful story. Bravo. So real.

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Brynn Helena
03:01 Dec 15, 2024

thank you! :)

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David Sweet
00:48 Dec 15, 2024

Steamy! My favorite lines: "I was a painting smudged with her fingerprints, wet and aching, constantly changing because of her influence. I’d never once just been Joanna. I’d always been Charlie’s Joanna, a piece in her gallery, beneath the light of her hands, the endearment of her eyes." If that doesn't sound like love, nothing does!

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Brynn Helena
01:46 Dec 15, 2024

thank you so much!! :)

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