Scissor Link by Georgette Kaplan (good books to read for adults .TXT) 📕

The screensaver blinked back to her desktop. She’d jiggled the touchpad. Janet blinked, pumped her eyes shut then open, trying to come to and remember what she’d been intending. Yes. She went to the address bar, typed in Wendy Cedar, and pressed Enter. Her Gmail account disappeared into a Google search. There were few results, at least for a person, but one was a Facebook account. Janet clicked on it. It hadn’t been updated since 2013, at least not publicly, but there were a number of pictures.

Wendy looked very different than she did at the office.

It wasn’t boudoir photography or anything like that. The pictures didn’t frame her or pose her; they were just casual snapshots, probably taken by a friend. She wasn’t even dressed immodestly. She wore a white half shirt, exposing only a smidgen of taut, firm belly. Printed on the front were two lines: ‘Fem in the Streets, Butch in the Sheets.’ The fabric was white, the text black, and the cups of her bra were just evident behind the obscuring letters. An undercurrent of black underlying the words that drew in the eye. Demanded it.

She wore an olive-drab army jacket over it, one elbow worn thin, a lining of plaid just visible on the sides between shirt and jacket. Her pants were hip-hugging jeans, holes in the knees yawning open so wide they could’ve been cut with a straight razor. A red belt holding them up.

But it was her hair that really caught Janet’s eyes. The way it was tousled, disheveled, falling in shaggy, perfect locks to her shoulders, down the front of her face in erratic patterns, barely missing her eyes. In half the pictures, she seemed to be lazily corralling it out of the way. In one set, she pushed it back out of her eyes, only to drag her hands back through it, down over her forehead. Her hair bustled out in a crazy mane after that, one strand slinking down to catch at the corner of her wet lips, a sweet scar just waiting to be healed…

She had hair like she’d just been fucked. Not bedhead, but bedroom hair. Unconsciously, Janet reached behind her glasses and combed her fingers through the fringe of her own hair. Would Wendy’s hair feel like that? Soft and smooth? It looked that way. Layer after layer of midnight black, soft as a summer night, and under it that face. Her eyes. The challenging smile of those lips.

But the eyes. Everything else was a bit challenging, a bit butch, don’t fuck with me, but the eyes were soft and alluring, a gentle warmth in them. There was one of her looking at another woman—a friend? A girlfriend? There was an insouciant smirk on her lips, a raised chin like a boxer inviting a jab, but the eyes sent a more complicated message. The eyes asked…the eyes almost pleaded…

The look Janet had always imagined a woman giving her before she slipped the blindfold over her eyes.

Janet shut the laptop. Jesus. Wendy was her employee now. Maybe not in 2013, but that woman—soft butch Wendy Cedar, she might not even exist as far as Janet was concerned. She had Worker Bee Wendy Cedar. Good Employee Wendy Cedar.

‘You’ve misunderstood our relationship’ Wendy Cedar.

Janet went to the wine rack. It had to be late enough in the day to drink by now.

A glass of port helped her come up with the problem in writing to Roberta. Janet was trying to tell her how she felt, but she couldn’t summon it up. The prospect of Roberta leaving her was foolish, and she responded to the foolishness, tried to tell her how foolish it was, but aside from that—when it came to Janet—how she felt was like the ocean at night. Too deep and black to be penetrated.

She turned the TV back on. The Blu-ray player had a few videos in its memory. They’d put their wedding video on there. Janet couldn’t remember ever watching it.

She watched it now like a hawk, an avid viewer of her own past melodrama. She tried to see signs of artifice in herself—it would be so easy to hide under all the pageantry, the white dress, the traditions. But she couldn’t find any. Whatever had happened, it had crept in between then and now. It had been patient.

Because she’d been happy then. She didn’t know what she was now.

Dear Roberta,

I don’t want to be alone.

She called Bobbi. She’d never intended to send a letter, not really. She’d just wanted to get her thoughts together. All it had done, though, was show her that her thoughts were as ‘together’ as they’d ever get.

Roberta picked up on the first ring. She supposed that was the courtesy a few decades of marriage got you. “Janet,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like it had on the tape.

No point in putting pleasantries before something unpleasant. “Are you coming back?”

Roberta didn’t answer. She waited. Janet waited. She could feel Roberta trying to be diplomatic, trying to explain.

Oh Bobbi,I’ve been trying to do that all day, and you’re only starting now?

Finally, there was her voice again, small and stagnant in all the quiet she’d brought. “I’ve met someone.”

Janet tried to say something, just something automatic and thoughtless. “Oh” or “I see” or “I understand.” One of those lies that came in so brutally useful. But none presented themselves. She couldn’t even pretend anymore.

Roberta continued. It took her less time than it had to speak in the first place. “She makes me feel the way I used to feel.”

Janet resisted the urge to ask how that was. She hung up. Like it’d all been some obscene harassment. Roberta didn’t call her back.

Janet tried to think if there was anything else to say and there wasn’t. Even the prenup was ironclad. All that’d been left after the separation was deciding if they wanted to keep trying or not.

She guessed Roberta had finally gotten to make