Page 51 of Ready to Score

“Oh, girl.” Charlie snorted. “I’ve got stories for days if we want to talk about sex regrets. One time in ’87, I took a bus all the way to Topeka, Kansas, to go to a lesbian orgy in a converted barn house, and I ended up sleeping with a butcher’s wife in the back of his shop instead.”

“Here we go.” Barb sighed.

Franny’s brows furrowed. “How in the hell did you manage that?”

Charlie got a faraway look in her eyes as she recalled the tale. “Well, I figured I shouldn’t show up to the party empty-handed, so I stopped at the butcher’s to see if I could get some salami or something. The gorgeous butch woman working the counter had the most muscular forearms and she was tearing into some hunk of meat or other with a big knife, and I just about fell in love right there. It all happened so quick after that, I don’t know quite how. But the next thing I know, her old man was chasing me down the street with the cleaver.”

The group was silent as they tried to process the wild-ass story they’d just heard.

“Did you ever make it to the party?” Janet finally asked.

“Oh yes.” The dreamy look was back in Charlie’s eyes. “I ended up getting passed around like a pack of cigarettes. It was incredible.”

“You… might have me beat there.” Franny laughed. “But I’ve made plenty of bad sex decisions in my time, trust me. Just none that felt this bad.”

“Well, how good was the sex?” Janet asked.

Franny’s eyes went wide. “You’d have thought she’d pulled some acrobatic shit with the way I acted. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“Now look at you.” Janet laughed along with the other ladies. “Crying over a few fingers.”

“Allll the fingers.” Franny groaned again.

“Oh yeah, that’ll definitely do it.” Charlie laughed even louder. “So, what are you going to do?”

“I mean… I was hoping y’all could help me figure it out.”

The table went completely silent for a few moments, and Franny began to lose hope.

“Do you want this girl, Francesca?” Carmella asked.

She nodded.

“And do you think she wants you back?”

That gave her pause. She did, she really, genuinely did believe so. But there was still doubt inside her. A small feeling that maybe whatever she thought Jade felt for her was all in her head. The last thing she wanted was to be wrong and end up looking like a creep.

Still, her gut didn’t feel like it was lying to her. She closed her eyes for a second, picturing Jade’s face. A floating head, almost comical, appeared in her mind. This wasn’t daydreaming; it wasn’t her imagination running away with her. She was replaying the mental snapshots she’d taken of every face Jade had ever made at her. Not a single one registered as full of hatred or disinterest. The last thing she saw before she shook her head to clear the picture was the way Jade had looked at her before she walked out of the bathroom at the club. Soft, longing, regretful.

That was what she’d cling to.

“Yes,” Franny finally answered. “I think she does.”

“Well then, in my eyes, there’s only one way to play it. You’ve just got to tell her,” Carmella said.

“What?” Franny’s voice was much louder than she meant for it to be.

“Love isn’t a game, girlie.” From the murmurs that soundedaround the table, the rest of the ladies agreed with Carmella’s statement. “You can’t win at it. There’s nothing you can do to make someone give in to it if they don’t want to. All you can do is sit down with the girl, tell her how you feel, and hope like hell that she’s ready to jump in with you.”

“That’s…” It sounded so obvious. “There’s no way that’s going to work.”

“You’ll never know if you don’t try,” Charlie said with a shrug. “Besides, Carmella is right. The girl either loves you or she doesn’t. But it’s better to find out than spend the rest of your life wondering about it. Trust me.”

Franny didn’t have much to say to that, so she said nothing. And after a while, the conversation at the table resumed, switching to something else. Franny stayed silent. Her mind was whirring. Suddenly, those in-shower thought experiments she’d done had been rendered useless. The entire script had flipped, and she had to come up with something else.

It scared her shitless, the thought that she’d just go up to Jade and, instead of confronting her about her avoidance, confess her feelings. Could she handle another rejection? Could she handle a life spent not knowing?

Her burger became unappetizing as her stomach started doing flips. The old gals were right. Totally and completely. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, whatever game she and Jade had been playing with each other needed to come to an end. For both of their sakes. Franny just hadn’t expected that she’d be the one throwing in the towel with so much time left on the clock.

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