Marissa couldn’t help it. She laughed in the woman’s face.

The other woman slammed her locker shut and would have stalked from the room but Marissa quickly grabbed the photograph tucked next to the mirror in her locker door and waved it at the woman.

“I’m sorry, but honest, look. This is me, on a beach in Tahiti, four years ago.”

With an exaggerated sigh, the woman looked at the photo. She gaped. “That’s you? You’re kidding.”

“It’s me. I keep it right here to remind me why I show up at this place. I read somewhere that even after you empty a fat cell it takes that sucker eighteen months to go away for good. I made my goal weight twelve months ago, so even now I know I can’t stop. Not yet.”

“How did you do it?” Obviously chagrinned, the woman said, “I’m sorry I was rude, really. I’ve worked so hard and thin people are full of ideas they’ve never had to live with. They didn’t inherit my mother’s hips. I snipe about them to hide my envy.”

Marissa’s eyes stung with sympathetic tears. “I gave up the fad diets, got serious about regular exercise and stuck with it, year in and year out. And I got some really great advice. Here.” She scrawled Helena Boxer’s phone number on the back of a business card and handed it over.

“Did you ever cry over whether a cracker would undo a week of dieting?”

“Oh, I have been there.”

They walked out of the gym together and Marissa waved a cheery good-bye, smiling so hard her face ached.

Dear Dad,

I was called a skinny bitch today. I hope you recognize me when I eventually join you. Not for a good long while, I hope, since I intend to spend at least the next six decades of my life figuring out new ways to amuse and exhaust Linda. I know you know what I mean.

Love, Marissa

P.S. Mom sends Linda and me anniversary cards. Now she’s asking where the grandchildren are.

The rock bit into her fingers but the air pumping into her lungs was sweet and powerful. With a final gasp, Marissa pulled herself over the lip of the steep incline, then clambered to her feet to survey the seemingly endless ranges of mountains. The visibility was so clear that she felt she could touch both near and distant peaks.

She tore her gaze from the profound beauty of the landscape. What a dilemma, she thought. The snowcapped Rockies or my lover’s eyes? As the luminous topaz gaze met hers she knew, the way she always knew, that she could spend all her life looking into them and never find anything to compare.

“Your turn,” she called down to Linda, thirty feet below her. “I know you can do it.”

“I love you,” came the answer, then Linda began to climb.

Publications from
Bella Books, Inc.

The best in contemporary lesbian fiction

P.O. Box 10543, Tallahassee, FL 32302
Phone: 800-729-4992
www.bellabooks.com