Erin dreamt of her woman again. Of the Faye that she had known so many years ago, although it had barely been two, of their first few days as a married couple, and of how much she missed it. Of how quickly she would pay for the gene therapy that she just knew would be successful if only she could afford it; After all, nothing with 99.95% proven success rate could be a waste of any amount of money. Faye’s wife knew hardly anything about it, but she knew enough that she wanted so desperately to try it. Millions of dollars, however, was still a big price to pay for something experimental, but since no one but the rich were trying it, so the company behind it could afford to ask high.
Her uncle, Gary, was one such rich motherfucker who could have afforded it. However, her uncle Gary was in a coma and had been for at least the last 5 years. The only reason they hadn’t pulled the plug, as far as Erin was aware, was because his wife had yet to give up hope about getting her lover back once more. After all, how could a man in his late 40s randomly fall into a five year coma? Erin knew far, far better, as did Faye. But, that didn’t stop Erin’s tiny wife from bringing it up at every chance she had.
Like, at breakfast, that morning, as Faye had munched on a tiny piece of bacon; “Y’know, your uncl-” the chowing shrinkee got no further as Erin sighed around a bite of eggs between her lips.
“My uncle,” Erin groaned, after she swallowed her last bite down, “Is an old-school, Southern racist, and a homophobe on top of it. If he wakes up, he’ll take one look at me, standing there and pouring my heart out for my teeny, female lover and start screaming about Jesus and the Bible and how Sodom and whatever the other one was got burned to the ground!
Faye sighed, “But I’m not saying he would, I’m just saying --”
“And I have hope, Faye, that my uncle will eventually wake up, just like his wife.”
“But, Eerie --”
“Enough!” Erin hated having her name pronounced like the great lake, even as a nickname. Though, to be fair, it made sense as one. “I’ve gotta head to work, Faye, be safe today!” She had left Faye there, forgetting to clean up her plate and Faye’s napkin, not quite listening as her tiny wife likely shouted some more bull about her uncle Gary, and what he would and wouldn’t do if he lived or died. All of that was moot, though, and Erin knew better. Like Faye ought to have.
Erin’s drive to work was full of wondering about whether or not she would ever find a woman who could possibly satisfy her like Faye once had; Faye had known her body inside and out, for very obvious reasons, and Faye had been able to play her like a fiddle at the drop of a hat. Maybe that was because they had been friends for 4 years before they were ever girlfriends or lovers, or wives.
Not noticing that her thumb was rubbing gently over her gold and silver wedding ring, Erin switched, and began fiddling with the radio station, switching it from pop bullshit to some nice, old country music. Faye hated it, and Erin did, too. Only if she had to focus on it, though, and every country station was good, useless driving music.
As she parked along the side of the street outside of her nursing home, Erin stared at that same ring. Aloud, for the first time in a while, she murmured to herself. “If I’m gonna try this, I had better take this off…” Erin stared at it until she nearly 7 am, willing herself to obey her wife and go through with it. In the end, though, she slipped out of her car and headed inside, ring still wrapped tightly around her finger, mind in a tizzy, and nearly late for her shift.
The first hour or two of her day shift went fairly easily, like they always did. Most of her patients were still in bed, and all Erin had to do was go over the charts and whatnot to see how they’d been overnight. It was around 9 am, just before all of them started getting up, that Erin ran out into the garage attached to the house for a bottle of water from the fridge, when her world sort of… Flipped.
“Hi, there…” She murmured, staring up at a woman who looked exactly like…
“Oh, hey!” The taller, much taller, woman smiled down at her. “How are you today, Erin?” At that, Erin’s mind spun into a panic. How the fuck could this verifiable goddess know her name and yet Erin hardly recognized her. As subtly as she could, Erin slipped her hands behind her back and yanked the ring off of her finger, tucking it subtly into her pocket.
“Uhm, hi… Ugh… I’m awfully sorry, I don’t quite remember your name.”
“Oh! No worries, Gwen is a super boring name, and you looked like you were trying to kill yourself getting all the clients medicine organized when we met.” Erin hardly thought much of the sentence. She knew that Gwen laughed, and that her smile was practically hypnotic.
“Oh, right, Gwen… Uhm, Gwen, I… Not to be too entirely forward or, heh, anything, but uhm… Do you, or rather, would you, uhm…” Erin glanced around, making sure no one else was about. “I mean this in a… Well, in a more or less strictly professional manner, but I was wondering if maybe you’d like, or I mean even just be willing, to go on a date with me… Sometime?” Roughly eight inches above the Erin’s swirling mind, Gwen cocked her head to the side, blinking slowly, her short, black hair just barely swaying.
“Uhm… Well, I… Wooork at a different location. I’m really just hear to fill out some paperwork, so, I mean… It’s not like we’ll work together, and you’re pretty sexy for someone who looks like they’d hardly be able to open their cupboards… Fuck it. Yeah, sure, Erin -- I’d love to go on a date with you. Lemme grab something and I’ll get you my number, we can crank out the harder details later?” Erin nodded in reply, a smile gracing her cheeks for the first few seconds, until dread shanked her in the spleen.
While Gwen scratched her number down on a piece of blank computer paper, Erin nearly shook in her shoes. At the same time, she could feel her toes curling and her fingernails digging into her palm; If Gwen handed back the piece of paper with something like, ‘Lol eat dicks!’ written on it, she would be pretty crushed, but if Gwen wrote anything nearly resembling a phone number, Erin knew she would be over the moon.
‘401-285-0696; Gwendolyn Drieselmann <3’
The rest of Erin’s shift flew over the moon.
Gwen finished the paperwork she needed to, and Erin got lost in thinking about the first woman whose number she’d gotten since high school. None of the client’s bullshit or any amount of charting could have possibly ruined her day, and when 4 o’clock popped up on the buzzer, Erin nearly exploded through the door. She almost forgot to clock out, but by the time she hopped in her car, few things in the galaxy could have stopped her. A sharp pain stabbed her in the ass as she plopped into the seat… The wedding ring that Faye had bought her, a lifetime ago.
Guilt hit Erin in the chin like a brick shithouse. The shift that had flown by seemed thousands of times shorter than the long car ride back home, with the ring wrapped once more around her finger, and Faye waiting quietly at home. Erin was halfway home before a ray of sunshine blasted her in the eye and she clawed her sunglasses out of the overhead compartment. Eyes covered, the rest of Erin’s drive home was just as uneventfully depressing as the day before.
The first thing she said to Faye when she opened the door was, “I found someone I think I wanna fuck.”
Faye jumped up on the couch, and nearly screamed. “HOLY SHIT, ALREADY?” It wasn’t as depressed a response as Erin had expected, maybe hoped for, instead she could have sworn her wife was 15 times more excited about that information in that moment than even Erin herself had been for the the entire day. She didn’t say anything at first, instead watching as her wife scrambled down the couch and ran for her foot, before five inches of pure excitement slammed into her shin, and bounced back with a soft, “Oof!” Undeterred, Faye used the momentum to do a backwards somersault, and approach far more carefully to hug Erin’s calf. “That’s great! Erin, I’m so happy that you’re gonna get boned again!”
Erin giggled, leaning down and scooping up her lover. “Relax, short stuff! We haven’t even set up a proper date, let alone --"
“You’re so gonna get fucked!” Faye laughed, pretending to scornfully stomp her foot against Erin’s palm and frown at her wife’s maturity. “But, seriously, I’m glad, baby; I think you need this, Erin, I really, truly do. And, I’m glad you’ll be able to get it out of your system with this… What’s her name?”
Erin giggled back at her, playfully dumping her wife into her cleavage. “Wouldn’t you like to know!”