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Author’s Note: This work, my first, would not be possible without the assistance and comments of Carey Thomas, the author of a wonderful set of lesbian romances with characters who interweave among her stories. Her work is published at Literotica.com. She reviewed drafts of certain parts of this book, and I have included, with her permission and changed names, a number of her characters. This part makes references to her “A Ghost of a Chance.” Insofar as my work deserves credit, it is thanks to her encouragement to take up writing myself.
This is the first part of a multi-part story. The first five parts are the initial book. I am adding parts as things develop with these characters.
Suzanne: Meeting Kerry
Annie Baxter was not a morning person so I took no offense when her response to my waking her with a nudge was a petulant “WHAT?” I had just pulled into a rest stop along I-80 east of our homes in the Bay Area. “Get me a coffee and I’ll be good,” she added apologetically.
She was my longest and best friend, and we were driving to New York for the first time. She was going to business school at Columbia and I was beginning at its law school. We’d grown up in Mill Valley, a northern suburb of San Francisco, and she was a Berkeley grad. I’d gone to Stanford.
My name is Suzanne Nelson. I am of average height with long dark-brown hair and a bit on the thin side and were you to ask me to tell you something particular about myself it would be that I was a pretty decent runner, good enough to run on Stanford’s women’s cross-country and track teams but nowhere good enough to think of seeking a pro contract. I was also realistic and confident enough to avoid the eating disorders that too many of my classmates fought through.
My mother did charitable work, and my father was a lawyer, a partner in one of Silicon Valley’s preferred law firms, and that—and perhaps a desire to delay when I had to get a real job—led me to apply to law school. While I did not get into Harvard or Yale, I picked Columbia over Stanford so I could have an adventure in New York, across the country from where I’d lived my entire first twenty-two years. And there were unspoken reasons I did not want to remain in California.
Hence my getting coffee for Annie early on August 16, 2016, at a rest stop on I-80 about 50 miles east of San Francisco.
Why were we driving? And what were we to do with a car in Manhattan? Well, it was easier for Annie and me to bring our stuff and, as to the particulars, my Aunt Mary lived near Sarah Lawrence in Yonkers and offered her driveway as a place to park my hand-me-down tan Camry. Since Yonkers is just north of the City, it would be easy to take the train to get it for occasional weekend trips. Neither of us had been to New York. The car would help us explore.
I did not tell my parents where I would park. They thought it was at a friend-of-a-teammate’s house, but I am getting ahead of myself. Back to the drive.
Annie and I used a system to take turns driving, but by the third day even we ran out of things to talk about and we lingered in our own worlds, listening to random music and podcasts. This changed when we were about halfway across New Jersey. Then the excitement rebuilt.
I drove the final stretch into Manhattan and to West 87th Street. We were suddenly actually in a place I’d seen a million times on TV and in movies. Corny I know, but undeniable. And the Park was right there.
As I double-parked in front of number 17, an attractive woman, mid-fifties, wearing khaki shorts and a pink polo shirt, about my height but not as slim, with mid-length dark hair, rose from the stoop, waited for us, and gave me a tight hug when I reached the sidewalk.
This was my Aunt Mary. I had not seen her in almost six years. I’d texted her when we were about an hour outside the City. She had the keys for our apartment, a furnished two-bedroom in a brownstone. Annie and I had lucked out in finding the place, through my Aunt’s efforts. The three of us brought our stuff upstairs and I took the train and subway back after I went with Aunt Mary to drop the car off at her place while Annie organized our things. Pizza and beer for our first dinner.
Now, a bit over a week later, Annie and I were moved in and I was sitting in the back row of a large semi-circular classroom at Columbia Law staring at the neck and left ear of the woman sitting in front of me. It was my third day of school.
I knew that one of the things you want to do when you start law school is get into a study group. It’s an informal group of four or five classmates who go over course material and prepare for exams together. I knew no one. There seemed to be networks of Ivy League and Little Ivy League and Seven Sister students but I did not recognize anyone from Stanford. The brunette I was staring at and who was making it hard for me to focus also looked to be friendless, and her Columbia denizli escort backpack was too new to have seen any duty in college. I figured it was a recent acquisition and that she was not among the undergrad Ivy Leaguers.
As she stood when class was over I reached over the long desk that separated us, hoping she had not been taken. She turned and her initial surprise turned into a smile as she said, “Hi.”
“Can I have a word?” My god that was too formal. I sounded like the principal. After she said “sure” we met at the aisle and found a quiet spot in the hallway, away from the din of all the other conversations that echoed through the low-ceilinged hall.
“Are you in a study group?”
“Sorry?”
“A study group. You looked like me, another lost soul who didn’t know anyone else here and you look smart so I thought I’d ask.”
“I look sharp?” she replied, “You mean like from the cover of Vogue?” running her hands down her front to display her T-shirt and faded jeans, and she smiled and I knew I needed to be in her group. And she gave me a mock slap when I replied, “Well, maybe T-Shirt Illustrated.” Turning serious she said, “not yet but I don’t live on campus so I don’t know if I can find one that works.”
“I’m Suzanne Nelson, I’m from California, and I don’t live on campus either.”
“Kerry Neally. Looks like we’re in the same group. But when I said off-campus I meant I live at home in the suburbs with my Mom and commute into school each morning.”
She seemed embarrassed, especially when she added, “my Mom insists that I use this lame Columbia backpack.”
“At least you have a Mom that cares,” I said quietly without thinking but recovered with “I’m sure we could work something out. Lunch?”
Kerry: Meeting Suzanne
I noticed her at orientation and now I was sitting across from her having a burger and fries at a coffee shop on Amsterdam Avenue, a few blocks north of the law school, itself a relatively modern building at Amsterdam and 116th, to the eastern edge of the Columbia campus. She had a cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake, which was strange because she looked like she never ate anything but salad. It would be a while before I confessed to her that I sat where I did in class to be near her; there was something about her that caused me to want to be near her.
Over lunch, I gave her my mini-bio. Grew up in Tuckahoe, just north of the City—at this she interrupted and said her Aunt lives just north of the City and we discovered that her Aunt lived a couple of miles from me—and still live in the house with my Mom. My Dad died when I was sixteen, and my Mom never remarried. I am an only child but have plenty of cousins in the area. I went to Fordham in the Bronx, and I did well enough to get into Columbia Law. No boyfriend since I broke up with Steven when I was a senior at Fordham; he was a junior who returned to a high-school friend over the Christmas break. And not many boyfriends before that. I said I planned to take the train in every morning since it took less than an hour and I could stay with my Mom and save a ton of money.
Much as I felt comfortable with her that first day, I was not comfortable enough, or brave enough, to fill in many of the details. Those details, which she’d come to learn over time, were as follows. My parents met in Brooklyn before it was “Brooklyn” and moved to the suburbs when they married. Both were alcoholics. Booze killed my Dad in 2010. I was a junior in high school. He simply wasted away and then was gone. My Mom never recovered. She was still young and very pretty but I don’t think she once went out for dinner with another man nor did she develop relationships with other women, never even going out shopping or to dinner. Instead, she devoted herself to me, her only child, to keeping off the booze, and to her job at a small bank in White Plains, the business center about 30 miles north of midtown. Her last drink was a gin-and-tonic she nursed in the hours after everyone but I had gone on the day of her husband’s funeral. She just stopped.
My Dad, Michael, worked for an insurance company in the City. My parents did well enough that we had a four-bedroom colonial on a hill just above the train station. I walked to my Catholic grammar school in my uniform and took the train each day to my Catholic high school in the Bronx, also in my uniform. I was one of the top three or four students in high school, working on the Yearbook and in the drama club and participated in the outreach programs the school sponsored for low-income kids in the neighborhood.
I was named for the County in southwest Ireland where my parents spent part of their honeymoon and, as I said, I am an only child.
Exploring my college options, I did not want to be too far from my Mom and I did not want to be in a large university. I enrolled at Fordham University. It’s a Jesuit college in the Bronx, and I took gaziantep escort the train to the Fordham stop each morning. I was a Political Science major, not sure of what I planned on doing after graduation so like a lot of people I decided to go to law school.
Socially, not a lot was going on. It did not help that I commuted and I only had a few friends with whom I’d eat, especially in the nearby Italian neighborhood, and study and go to parties. Over time I sort of drifted away from my high school friends.
On the romance front, not much to report either. In college, I went out with a few guys and I met my first steady boyfriend early in senior year. Steven was one year behind me in school. He lived on campus and we started hanging out together in early October. He was from Chicago, and I liked him quite a bit and so did my Mom after I brought him to my uncle’s house for Thanksgiving.
I was so very happy with him and I lost my virginity in his dorm room on the Friday before Christmas break. He was more experienced than I was—who wouldn’t be?—and he was gentle and kind and I was in love.
Now I had had plenty of hot-and-heavy sessions with other boys before Steven, always “Steven,” in high school and college, but never felt the desire to do anything more than kiss and fondle any of them. I very much desired to do more with Steven who, as I say, was a kind and gentle lover. And, as I say, I was in love.
He, though, apparently was not. On a Friday night in early February, I had planned on staying with him. He got up to go to the bathroom after we’d made love. His phone vibrated and I saw it was “Erica.” It was after 11. When he came back I said, “you just got a call from Erica.” He stopped. “Why the fuck were you looking at my phone?” I’d never heard him curse before and I felt like I’d been slapped. “It’s after 11. Your phone vibrated and I saw who was calling. I just wanted to tell you in case it’s important” “Sorry,” he said, which led me to ask, “Who is Erica, calling after 11?” I mean I wouldn’t have asked except for the way he reacted.
Steven sat next to me, wearing only a towel and me naked below the sheet. “Okay. Erica was…is a friend from high school. I saw her last Summer and we got to know one another a bit, before I met you”—now I was staring at him and reaching for my bra and panties—”and I ran into her in town during the break when I was hanging with my friends and we kind of got together after Christmas.” He took a breath. “And I went out with her for New Year’s and we were both a little drunk and I slept with her. And then I slept with her again when we were both sober.” Silence as I waited, putting on my bra.
“She goes to Penn and I told her that I’d take the train down to see her. I assume that’s what she’s calling about. I never mentioned you.” He got up and tightened the towel and I put my panties on under the sheet. At least he had the decency to turn when I put on my shirt and jeans and shoes.
Smart and clever and hurt as I was, all I could say as I headed to the door after grabbing my bag from the floor was, “I always knew I wasn’t your first and now I know I won’t be your last” and then I was gone, catching the final train of the day—now early Saturday morning—home and promptly waking my Mom, us sharing a hot chocolate as I cried. She let me cry, said she was there for me, and tucked me into bed. She never pushed me about Steven and if he was mentioned again, it was only in passing.
Steven was puppy-eyed for a while when I saw him on campus but after a few weeks, I had pretty much erased him as anyone but just another student and spent more time with my other friends for my final semester. And, as I say, my Mom did not dwell on it. Plus, I was moving on more generally. I had done well on the LSATs and my college grades were good. Although I did not get into Harvard or Yale, Columbia was a yes, which was perfect. Great school and I could commute in under an hour. I could stay with my Mom.
So August 31 was the third day in which I took the 8:13 to the Harlem station and the bus to Amsterdam and 120th and the first day in which I was sitting in a coffee shop on Amsterdam having lunch with Suzanne Nelson. I immediately called her Suze. She seemed to like that; no one else called her that.
Suze: Meeting Mary
Kerry and I got three other first-years to join our study group. Mike and Bill went to Penn together, and Marie was a Vassar grad. We met them chatting in the hall after Legal Method on Thursday and agreed to an every-other-week schedule to start, alternating between Mike’s and Marie’s dorm rooms after class on Wednesdays. We all had the same course load and schedule and figured we could up the frequency as we got deeper into the term.
Kerry and I took to having our brown-bag lunches together each day and we sat next to one another in each of our classes. Between classes, we quietly prepared for seks hikayeleri the next one in the library or outside on a campus bench. After each day’s final class, I’d head down to my Apartment on 87th, usually taking the bus but walking when the weather was nice, and she’d hop the bus to 125th for her twenty-minute train ride home.
At the same time, Annie and I tried to get the car every two or three weeks, and we’d head up north through farmland surprisingly close to the City and reminiscent of drives back home. For her part, Annie was loving business school, not least because classmates seemed to find her California disposition and blondeness alluring. More importantly, she was challenged yet comfortable with the class material. We often walked or took the bus to school—about a mile-and-a-half—together.
We both knew, though, that we were changing. It was not just that I had thrown myself into my work. More, it was that I was throwing myself into my friendship with Kerry. Annie knew more about me in some respects than I think I knew myself and never then and never since did she give me a hint of jealousy that Kerry was replacing her as my best friend and I don’t think Annie ever felt the slightest tinge of jealousy, which was another reason I loved her so much.
By mid-October, I felt comfortable enough with Kerry to talk a bit more about Mary, my Aunt. Kerry knew about Aunt Mary because she knew that that’s where I parked my car. She and my father were my paternal grandparents’ only children. My grandpa was a lawyer too and my grandma was a housewife. They also lived in Mill Valley, in a large house. It was far too big for the four of them, but my father’s birth had been difficult, and my grandma never got the big family she wanted. There was a lot of empty space in that house. My father’s parents died in a car accident shortly after I was born, and that old, big house was sold. Growing up, my father sometimes took a detour to drive past it, slowing a bit without saying anything. When he spoke about them at all, it was to say, “They are in a better place.”
When my father was in high school, so I was told when I was in high school, my Aunt moved to New York. I didn’t know my father had a sister until then. She was, again I was told, a “free spirit” who had turned that spirit into paying jobs as a journalist and short-story writer, with bylines in Time and other magazines and several short stories in The New Yorker.
So, I knew of her existence but I am ashamed to say that I made no effort to contact her. Here was my father’s only sibling, the only living member of his family, and for all intents and purposes he was an only child. And I never thought to ask about her or to find out what her phone number was. Or anything.
Then I met her at Thanksgiving in 2010, a couple of years after I learned of her, and had my first talk with her at lunch in town the next day, which turned into the most wonderful meal I ever had, for a few years at least. And when I told her how horrible I felt for how I treated her—or didn’t treat her—she waved it off, saying, “Think of it as having suddenly discovered a long-lost relative. Living in New York.” And I laughed with her. “I don’t have loads of money, though, so don’t expect to suddenly learn that you’ve inherited a boatload of cash. Plus, I have two boys.”
That stopped me cold. I have cousins on my father’s side? There were plenty on my mother’s since she had two brothers and two sisters and they were all married and had kids and we’d see them at Christmas and on birthdays and we always had fun together. But, as I said, my father was like an only child. We were the poster family for a happy Catholic extended family in Marin County. And my Aunt Mary was the black sheep, hidden away in New York.
I saw that she did not wear a wedding band and when she noticed she told me that she was gay and had been living with her Betty for nearly ten years. Betty, a psychologist, was married—in those days a woman could only marry a man—and had two boys before her amicable divorce. The kids had been largely raised by Betty and my Aunt with, as I say, amicable visits from their dad, Gerard.
All of this is background of course. Once I got over the initial shock of learning at the lunch that there was a gay woman in my own family, I felt like I had known Aunt Mary forever. She was very careful to avoid any suggestion that anything that my mother or father did to her or to me was wrong, dismissing it as “That’s just who they are.” She added, “sometimes my brother, your father, has his head up his ass. The only regret I have is that I’m only meeting you now.”
From that point on we spoke regularly. My folks did not like it, but they tolerated it. I soon was in college for god’s sake. When I decided to go to New York for law school, it was in part with the guidance of Aunt Mary. I would never quite be alone, and that helped with my nervousness.
And there she was as I pulled up outside my new home on 87th Street. This was only the third time I had seen this woman, but I had long since felt that I had always known her. Now I could see her every few weeks when Annie and I took the subway and then the train to Bronxville, the stop less than a mile from her home.