Falling for Jillian Ashley: A Carlsbad Village Lesbian Romance Read online

  Being here like this with Sally felt so familiar already, which was mildly alarming. Sure, they had just had sex and it was really late—it was only natural that Sally stay the night. But the thing was, Amy was realizing with the last bit of brainpower she had left before losing consciousness, that she felt Sally belonged with her in bed—any bed—falling asleep alongside her.

  Chapter 24

  When Sally awoke the next morning, the bed was empty beside her. A diffused sunlight was making its way into the room but Sally could tell by the light that it was still early. The digital clock on the nightstand confirmed it, telling her it was only 6:38 a.m.

  What time had they finally gone to sleep last night, she wondered? Or rather—technically—this morning? Definitely after two o’clock. No matter. She felt rested enough now, though she suspected she’d want a nap later on.

  Getting out of bed, she took her small travel toiletries bag out of her tote purse, freshened up in the bathroom and put on the clean underwear, black leggings and white tee which she also took out of her bag. Then she went to find Amy.

  “Hey, good morning,” she said, discovering Amy in the living room of the apartment, sitting on the floor, tapping away on her laptop which was on the coffee table.

  “Good morning!” Amy said, not sparing Sally a look. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “No. How long have you been up?” Sally sat on the couch behind Amy, her legs on either side of the woman on the floor. She leaned forward and draped her arms over Amy’s shoulders, resting her cheek against Amy’s head.

  “About an hour,” Amy replied.

  Sally blinked.

  “Jesus! Babe, that means you hardly got any sleep!”

  “I slept fine, I swear. I just knew I wanted to get back to work on this presentation.”

  Sally frowned. Almost right from the start of their first date last week, Sally had sensed that Amy was a driven person, but did she ever just relax? Fine, the presentation was important…Sally got that; but would it all go down the toilet if Amy had stayed in bed a couple of more hours and gotten some more rest?

  She mentally shrugged.

  Let Amy do Amy.

  “Well, I don’t want to disrupt you,” Sally told her. Actually, she did want to disrupt her. Amy looked incredibly cute wearing an oversized pink satin button-up pajama top and what looked like nothing but panties underneath because her lean legs were bare all the way up to her hips. And she had the most adorable pair of pink fuzzy socks on her feet. “How about I make you some coffee and then I’ll head out?”

  That finally made Amy look away from her laptop’s screen.

  “Oh my god, would you do me the super biggest favor on the planet?” she asked.

  Sally laughed.

  “Name it.”

  “Run to La Vida Mocha for me and get me an Amy’s Jet Fuel? Pleasepleaseplease?”

  “That’s a thing?”

  Seriously? The woman has a coffee drink named after her?

  “Trust me, it is. And get yourself whatever you want. You can take money from my purse.”

  Laughing, Sally said, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll get it. But let me know when you have a million bucks in your purse; then I’ll take some money from it.”

  “You’re the best,” Amy said, returning her focus back to her work.

  Amy’s place was literally a three-minute drive to La Vida Mocha. If Sally had realized that, she would have walked it. That super-gorgeous barista, Vanessa, was behind the counter when Sally arrived and it didn’t escape her notice that even though she had been a loyal Starbucks customer for years now, she couldn’t name a single barista who worked there. Yet she knew Vanessa’s name after only one coffee date in this place.

  Scanning the chalkboard menu mounted on the wall above the coffee machines as she approached the counter, Sally didn’t see what she was looking for and so it was with some trepidation that she said to Vanessa, “Um…this might sound crazy but I need an ‘Amy’s Jet Fuel?’”

  Thankfully, Vanessa was anything but flummoxed at the request.

  “Oh, is this for Amy?” she asked, already punching the order into the ordering thingamajig. “How’s she doing? She must be busy if she didn’t come herself.”

  “You know her well,” Sally replied, adding that she had left Amy tapping away on her laptop.

  “Well, I rarely see her without her laptop,” Vanessa replied. “And can I get anything for—”

  Suddenly, Vanessa’s eyes went wide above the Darth Vader face mask she was wearing.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” she began before blushing and giggling. “You’re Jillian Ashley! Even with the mask I recognize you from Amy’s show!”

  By now, Sally had resigned herself to the fact that apparently, every woman she was going to encounter from now on was A: a lesbian and B: a huge fan of Jillian Ashley books; huge enough to have watched the ultra-exclusive interview with Amy Broadnax.

  Nodding, she said, “Yep! That’s me!”

  “Your books are amazing!” Vanessa gushed. “And you’re so young! I mean this as a compliment but you write like someone much older.”

  Like, someone who’s, say, fifty-one? Oh, and a man?

  “Thanks,” Sally said. “That means a lot. I try to make sure the reader focuses more on the story and not on how my youth may affect the tone of the narrative.”

  Holy shit!

  Sally gave herself a mental pat on the back. She was getting really good at this bullshitting about being a famous author thing.

  She then made an excuse about needing to get back to Amy quickly, even though she was willing to bet money that Amy wasn’t even aware she had gone, and gave Vanessa her coffee order. When she opened her purse to pull out her wallet, Vanessa waved her off.

  “On the house, please,” Vanessa told her.

  “No!” Sally exclaimed.

  She was perfectly fine pretending to be Jillian Ashley to the occasional woman here and there who recognized her. And she was perfectly fine with autographing a fawning intern’s book or coming up with nonsense about “the tone of the narrative,” but she was not going to start accepting freebies using Jillian’s name!

  “I insist, really,” Vanessa said…insistently.

  Sally thought fast. She knew she was at risk of offending Vanessa and she didn’t want that.

  “It’s so super sweet,” she said. “But I have this hard and fast rule that I won’t trade on my celebrity.” Another idea came to her and she quickly pulled out a twenty. “Look, you agree to take this money and I’ll even autograph it for you!”

  Vanessa laughed but before she could again insist that the coffees were on the house, Sally grabbed a pen from the collection in the holder on the counter and which were provided for customers to sign their credit card receipts and started scribbling on the bill.

  “To Vanessa,” Sally recited as she wrote, “the most gorgeous barista in Carlsbad! Love, Jillian Ashley!”

  The signature was still blech but as it was only the second time she ever wrote it, Sally cut herself some slack.

  And Vanessa certainly didn’t seem to mind. Picking up the twenty-dollar bill, she stared at the inscription, her eyes telegraphing her pleasure.

  “FYI,” Vanessa said, “a jealous little woman with auburn hair may show up at your house wanting to pick a fight one day. That will be my fiancée, Megan. Ignore her.”

  “No problem,” Sally said with a laugh.

  Vanessa carefully folded the autographed bill and put it in one of the pockets of her skinny jeans.

  “Thanks for the autograph,” she said. “You made my day. I’ll get your change.”

  Sally wanted to scream.

  She knew Vanessa was going to keep that twenty-dollar bill as a prized possession. Which meant that—as odd as it was—even though Sally was now twenty dollars poorer, she still hadn’t technically paid for the coffee as the money hadn’t gone into the register. That didn’t bother her so much; she was still out twenty bucks a
nd thus could go to sleep tonight feeling like she hadn’t traded on her fake fame as a top lesfic author.

  But…if she allowed Vanessa to give her the change, Vanessa would be out even more money.

  “A tip!” she said. “Please, keep the change!”

  It was too early in the morning for all these mental gymnastics.

  Vanessa frowned.

  “Are you sure? That’s a big tip…”

  “Totally sure!” Sally said. “I’m a big tipper! You know, all those…”

  Fuck! What were they called again? Revenues…proceeds…?

  “Royalties!” she blurted out, suddenly remembering the word. She really needed her coffee. “Yep. Just such a big tipper because of that.”

  “Okay, then…well, thanks again,” Vanessa said. “You really are as nice as you seemed on the podcast.”

  “Thank you! By the way, what’s an Amy’s Jet Fuel?”

  Vanessa said, “Do you know what a dead eye is?”

  A non-functioning eye?

  “Nope.”

  “A dead eye is a cup of coffee with three shots of espresso,” Vanessa explained. “An Amy’s Jet Fuel is a cup of coffee with four shots of espresso.”

  ***

  “I am soooooo glad you like pizza!” Amy exclaimed that night at Roosevelt Pizzeria. “When I first saw you walk into La Vida Mocha on our first date I was worried you were one of those women who only ate, like, kale sandwiches or something like that.’

  Sally laughed.

  “Is that the impression I make?” she asked.

  “It’s just that you’re so tall,” Amy answered. “You have this, like, model thing going on and so I imagined you not even knowing what a pizza is.”

  “I will have you know that I am actually something of a pizza snob, thanks to Max. He knows all the best places to go in SoCal and this is one of them.”

  Sally had had a fairly low-key day after leaving Amy’s early this morning, Amy still sitting on the floor of the living room, tapping away at her laptop, her coffee with four shots of espresso—enough to reawaken an extinct dinosaur—within reach. She had gone home, showered and then made lunch plans with Lisa. During lunch, she had indulged Lisa’s fangirling for a little while, just to let Lisa get it out of her system, before finally managing to steer her best friend away from all things Jillian Ashley and onto Lisa’s favorite topic: Lisa. Then she had returned home and taken a nap—something she figured Amy would never be able to do after drinking all that espresso—woke up at around three o’clock and then just chillaxed at home, watching movies until Amy showed up for their date.

  When Amy had arrived, Sally had then had cause to re-evaluate her negative assessment of the sanity of a person who ingests four shots of espresso because as soon as Amy flitted into the condo, she had taken Sally’s hand and wordlessly led her to the bedroom. Once there, Amy pushed Sally onto the bed, hiked up Sally’s dress, pulled aside the crotch of Sally’s panties and then proceeded to eat her out to a gushing orgasm.

  “Caffeine makes me so fucking horny!” Amy had then said afterwards, slipping off her own panties and coming up to straddle Sally’s face. Sally then made sure Amy’s caffeine-induced horniness was taken care of.

  Naturally, Sally had suggested they order their dinner for delivery but Amy had smiled and said, “No, I want to go out. But while we’re out, you can think about what else you’d like to do to me later.”

  And Sally had often thought about what else she’d like to do, which, combined with the lingering effects of her recent climax, made Sally’s pussy a veritable faucet.

  “So,” Sally now said, wanting to get her mind off sex because, really, her clit’s pulsing was becoming distracting, “did you get a lot done today?”

  “I did,” Amy said, nodding. “So much done. I worked on the presentation until about one o’clock, I guess, and then I switched gears and did some prep work for the next podcast episode, which I’m super stoked about.”

  “Good for you,” Sally said. Silently, however, she was thinking that what Amy had just described hardly sounded like a day off. “So, after this big presentation on Tuesday, what’s next?”

  Amy pouted, which Sally found both odd and cute.

  “I’m being forced to take a vacation,” Amy said.

  Sally laughed.

  “Forced? You poor thing!”

  “I know, I know…” Amy began in a conciliatory tone, “First World problem.” She bit into one of the complimentary breadsticks the restaurant provided each table. “I just have a lot to do and so I don’t really feel like switching off right now. But my boss is basically holding a gun to my head, so…”

  “How long a vacation?”

  “At least a week,” Amy said, still pouting.

  Sally laughed again.

  “Oh my god, you are hopeless!” she said. “Babe, a week off will do you good. I mean, I know I’ve only known you for, like, five minutes, but I can already tell that you work too hard.”

  “I know…”

  “So, what are you going to do on your vacation?”

  Amy shrugged.

  “I was thinking of taking a trip to San Francisco. I love it there and since I can’t do any of the European traveling I had wanted to do, it’s the next best thing. Have you ever been?”

  “Oh my god, the clam chowder at Scoma’s?” Sally enthused. “I love it! My grandparents live in San Francisco and so I’ve been up there lots.”

  Their server arrived with their pizza and throughout dinner, the two women talked San Francisco: favorite restaurants, favorite things to do, various misadventures on the BART or Muni. Amy told Sally about her plans to visit her favorite art museums and also to just wander around the city, taking photos with her SLR camera.

  “SLR? That’s, like, one of those cameras that doesn’t have cellphone attached to it, right?” Sally asked.

  Amy laughed.

  “Precisely,” she said. “Photography is a hobby of mine.”

  “When are you going to leave?” Sally asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe next weekend. My boss says she won’t let me back in the office building if I put it off too long.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to see all your pictures when you get back.”

  Sally really was happy Amy was taking some time off. Well, she was happy that Amy was being forced to take some time off. The woman was a workaholic. Nonetheless, Sally was also realizing that she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to see Amy while she was up north. This new relationship of theirs was fun and exciting. And hot. Okay, it had only been a week and Sally knew she needed to keep that in mind because virtually all new relationships started off fun, exciting and hot. The trick was keeping it that way when one week eventually morphed into three and three weeks eventually morphed into two months and two months eventually became six.

  So, she knew she had to temper her expectations.

  But, Sally also knew that her and Amy just clicked. Like, incredibly well. Sally could remember in 8K-level clarity that exact moment she had first locked eyes with Amy over the internet just before the podcast interview started. And it wasn’t just that Amy was beautiful—Sally literally locked eyes with scores of beautiful women on a daily basis…That first moment she had locked eyes with Amy had been as if Sally had suddenly seen her future and in the time since then, Sally had sensed that feeling growing stronger and stronger.

  Admittedly, Amy’s need to always be doing something was a little alarming but Sally was thinking that maybe she had simply come into Amy’s life at one of those crazy-hectic times everybody goes through occasionally. Maybe, once Tuesday’s meeting had passed and Amy had her week in Frisco, Sally would discover that her new girlfriend was actually not as tightly wound as she could seem to be.

  Chapter 25

  On Tuesday afternoon, Amy was elated.

  No, scratch that.

  She was fucking elated!

  Her and Makeda were driving back to Carlsbad from San Diego in Maked
a’s Cadillac after meeting with Supervisor Edelmann and they had knocked it out of the park! The discussion with Edelmann had been a meeting of like minds and all the work Amy had done to prepare for it paid off. Edelmann had determined to be the champion for amending the San Diego County constitution to include equal rights for women, telling Amy and Makeda that if she could count on their organization to help with the lobbying, she was certain she could get enough support to make it happen.

  But Amy and Makeda wanted to do even more and as soon as they had started the drive back north, had begun strategizing on how to engineer a grassroots campaign that would harness the power of women in San Diego County as a voting bloc and really draw attention to this effort.

  “But first, you’re going on vacation,” Makeda reminded her as they approached the exits for Del Mar.

  Amy rolled her eyes but didn’t argue, knowing that battle was lost.

  “I know,” she said.

  “It will give the rest of us a chance to prove to you that we can survive without you for a little while,” Makeda joked. “Next week I don’t want to see you. Will it be a staycation or are you going somewhere?”

  “San Francisco,” Amy answered, reminding herself that she still needed to book the trip. Because she hated long drives, she wanted to fly, so there were airline tickets to purchase, along with finding and booking a hotel. Whenever she traveled to Frisco, she always preferred staying right in the downtown area so she could be near everything. Doing so also relieved her of the hassle of renting a car because she could either walk, Lyft or BART anywhere she needed to go.

  In any case, she needed to get all those travel arrangements taken care of and so she resolved that tonight she’d spend time on her Travelocity account.

  Well, she’d do that after she spent time on Sally.

  Amy didn’t know what it was—perhaps it was the relief that the meeting with Edelmann was finally over; perhaps it was the feeling of success that came with a job well done; perhaps it was the still lingering effects of her morning Jet Fuel—but ever since the meeting ended, Amy had been very much aware of being incredibly horny.