Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Mona, I think they’re … they’re all lesbians !”

This was not precisely the conversation Pearl wanted to be a part of while standing in the sun, shooing flies from her face, waiting for a horse so they could start their scheduled trail ride. Truth be told, she hadn’t want to be part of most conversations that had transpired since the long weekend had started, not about lipstick or Richard Nixon or Elton John or the mimeograph machine their office manager kept threatening to buy. And yet, this conversation had, in only a few words, jumped right to the top of that least-wanted list.

Mona turned to Tammy and rolled her eyes. “They’re just working girls,” Mona said, with the authoritative queen-bee air that had gotten them all out here in the first place. “Not every working girl is a lesbian.”

“I think ‘working girl’ means something else,” Sheryl noted.

“No it doesn’t.” Mona smacked her gum. “I mean, okay, but it also means what it means. They’re girls, and they’re working. Like us.”

Pearl supposed it wasn’t worth pointing out that none of them, here to celebrate Mona’s thirtieth birthday, were technically girls anymore, nor were they actually working at the moment. Every August, the owner of JMP Industries, Inc., one John Michael Patterson the third, magnanimously gave his employees Fridays off, mostly so he could save the cost of cooling the building for a few days. One of those Fridays had coincided with Mona’s birthday, and Mona had demanded the rest of the secretarial pool to join her in celebrating it.

But why a dude ranch? Pearl had thought at first it was some sort of joke. She’d stared at the typed memo being passed around the office, thinking maybe a “dude ranch” was a euphemism for some kind of vaguely western-themed spa, or a place to wear jeans and meet single men. The latter wouldn’t have made Pearl any more comfortable, but it would have been more in line with Mona’s perfectly manicured nails and impressively tall high heels.

The Double L Ranch, though, was exactly what Pearl had thought a dude ranch would be. Proudly woman-owned and woman-run, it boasted being the only ranch of its kind in the northeast, which was probably the reason Mona had chosen it, and not out of some sense of feminist solidarity. As children, Pearl and her older brothers had watched Bonanza together, crowded around the television in their Jersey City apartment, enjoying the wild world of the Wild West piped to them in all its black-and-white wonder. For her, though, the show’s Nevada setting might as well have been as far away as the Moon. Hell, it still might — Pearl had never been west of the Mississippi, and the Double L, a few hours’ drive north into upstate New York, didn’t even come close to that famous boundary.

“All right,” called a woman’s voice, “who’s never been on a horse before?”

Pearl was raising her hand even before she turned to see who was speaking. When she did, she immediately regretted calling any attention to herself, because the speaker was looking at her, and oh, the last thing Pearl wanted in any part of her life was someone that attractive looking at her. Pearl was what her mother had called “pretty but plain,” when she bothered calling her daughter at all. So Pearl had decided early on that the best way to get through life was to make sure the actual pretty girls didn’t see her. It had mostly worked. Even Mona didn’t really see her, not really . If Pearl hadn’t been part of the group invitation, Mona would likely never have thought to include her. That didn’t bother Pearl. In fact, it suited her just fine.

Except that now this cowgirl was looking straight at her, holding the reins of a giant brown horse and smiling. Maybe the cowgirl was asking who hadn’t ridden before so she knew not to put that person on a giant brown horse. It made sense. Maybe she wasn’t even properly a cowgirl. What did they call people who worked at dude ranches, anyway? Was there a word for it? She had the boots but not the hat, and she had worn-out jeans that hugged her muscular thighs. She looked solid , was the word Pearl kept thinking about her. Like anybody who tried to push her around would be sorry.

“Hey there,” said the cowgirl, grinning in a way that showed off the dark freckles that dotted her light brown cheeks. Her close curls caught the sunlight and framed her face like a halo. “What’s your name?”

Oh no, why was this suddenly such a difficult question? “Pearl,” managed Pearl, with no small effort.

The cowgirl grinned. “Well, Pearl, I’m going to have you on Gentle Giant here today.” She patted the neck of that giant horse, who really seemed closer to the size of an elephant, the more Pearl looked at him. “That’s the two things he is: gentle, and giant. Don’t let the size scare you. He’s the sweetest mount we got.”

Pearl wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with this information, especially since part of it was getting lost in the effort of looking the cowgirl in the eye. “Okay,” Pearl said, because she wasn’t sure what the proper response was to information like that. Was she blushing? Oh, God, she hoped she wasn’t blushing. Maybe she could chalk it up to the summer heat and its effect on her pale cheeks. Maybe that was a reason.

Gentle Giant was such a formidable mount that the cowgirl had to lead both him and Pearl over to a wooden crate. Once Pearl was standing on it, the cowgirl tapped Pearl’s left leg. “You’re going to put this one right there in the stirrup,” she said, “and then push yourself up hard as you can and swing your other leg all the way over. Got it?”

Pearl nodded. Two steps. That was easy. She could do that.

She learned how wrong she was the second she tried to swing her right leg over. She had never been a particularly athletic girl at any point in her life, and six years of sitting at a typewriter and coming home to an empty apartment hadn’t done anything to change that. What had seemed at first like an easy gesture turned out to need muscles she hadn’t expected to call into action. By the time she realized that, it was too late. She lost her momentum and fell back the way she’d come up — though with her left foot now firmly tucked into the saddle, she realized with a cry of fear she wasn’t going to be able to catch herself.

Except she didn’t have to. Instead, she felt two strong hands on her body — one supporting her left hip, the other up under her right thigh. “I gotcha,” said the cowgirl, whose lips were somehow shockingly close to Pearl’s ear, something Pearl would have been more alarmed by if she weren’t currently being alarmed in general. How had the cowgirl moved that fast? “Upsy-daisy!” With a shove, the cowgirl tossed Pearl’s leg over for her, and pitched the rest of Pearl upright after it. In a matter of seconds, Pearl had gone from plummeting to her doom to being up and snug in the saddle of the largest horse imaginable. She towered over everyone else around her. She’d ridden city buses smaller than this horse.

At last, Pearl remembered her manners. “Thank you,” she mumbled, hating the way the shake and squeak in her voice made her sound so young. Well into her twenties, she still got mistaken for a high-schooler. She couldn’t imagine how childish she looked now, with a giant horse for comparison.

“Glad to help a lady out,” the cowgirl said with a wink that could have melted chocolate. She grabbed for the strap to tighten the stirrup, a motion that meant she had to touch Pearl’s denim-covered lower leg. A lot. “How does that fit feel, baby? Too long, too short, just right?”

Pearl had no idea what a good fit was supposed to feel like. “It’s fine.”

The cowgirl nodded and went to make a similar adjustment on the other side. Then she took the rope connected to the horse’s mouthpiece and draped it over the hard bump at the front of the saddle. “You drive a car?” she asked, and Pearl nodded. “Well, driving a horse isn’t too different. Reins to the left to go left, to the right to go right, and instead of pushing down on the brake, you pull back to stop. Any questions?”

Pearl shook her head as though she had anything but questions in her mind, like how did I get myself into this? and why can’t I stop blushing? and I want you to keep touching me . Okay, the last one wasn’t a question, but still.

“Great.” Grinning, the cowgirl gave Gentle Giant a pat on his neck, then looked back to Pearl. “Let me finish getting your friends all settled, and we’ll get started. And remember, the most important thing is to relax and have fun. Gentle Giant knows where he’s going. You need anything, just shout for me, okay? I’m Jackknife. But you can call me Jack.”

Oh no, even her name was cool. Pearl nodded with far more confidence than she felt about the matter, especially around someone who seemed to have named herself after a bladed weapon. Jack smiled and walked off, over to where Mona, on a small black horse, seemed to be having the worst time getting her stirrups just right, given the number of times the other ranchhands had fussed with them already.

Because that was Jack’s job. She worked at a dude ranch, which meant she had to do things like adjust saddles and keep the guests from falling off of horses. It was probably literally in her job description. She was doing her job well to keep them all safe and happy during this experience they had paid for, and Pearl was allowed to be grateful for that. All other thoughts that Pearl might be having were to be studiously and steadfastly ignored. Just like they’d been every other day of her life.

~*~

Pearl wanted to say she hadn’t always been like this, but she had. God had given mice more courage. She’d always mostly just done what she’d been told, which was how she’d wound up married at eighteen and divorced at twenty to a man who’d said when he’d handed her the papers he couldn’t handle the thought of living his whole life with someone who had no spark. That was Pearl, the girl with no spark. Plain but pretty. A whole lot of nothing.

At least having one failed marriage that was somewhat objectively her own fault made other people more or less leave Pearl be about trying again. It was only in the last year or so that her older female relatives had started making noise about the eligible bachelors they knew who wouldn’t mind a “nice, quiet girl.” Of course, most of those eligible bachelors turned out to be widowers with young children, looking for a nice, quiet nanny they could sleep with and didn’t have to pay. Pearl was running out of polite ways to say no, thank you, she wasn’t ready just yet, and maybe never.

At twenty-six, she wasn’t the oldest girl in the secretarial pool, but she was one of the ones who’d been there the longest. It was a job girls tended to keep only until they got married, and so much the better if they could use it to catch the eye of one of the established company men and speed their quitting right along. More than a few former typists were now the Mrs. So-and-So of JMP Industries employees, who looked sadly on their former co-workers every time they visited the office, making sure to hold themselves in ways that showed off the bright diamonds on their left hands.

Pearl didn’t begrudge any of them for it. She just hoped that they were happy. Thinking about doing the same thing herself made her want to scream.

She almost hadn’t even agreed to join the visit to the dude ranch, except that her mother had wanted her to come along down the Shore for that same weekend with a few other families, some of whom had eligible bachelors who might be looking for a girl like Pearl, and Pearl had found herself blurting out, I have a trip with my work friends. Which, of course, had prompted an entire battery of questions from her mother about what was the trip and who was going, such that by the time Pearl had finished describing the outing, there was no way she would’ve been able to back out.

That was how Pearl had found herself somewhere in the wilds of New York State, dressed in an uncomfortably tight new pair of jeans, sitting astride the biggest horse that had ever existed. Had dinosaurs been that large? She was willing to bet they had not.

Despite her misgivings about the size of her mount, the trail ride was actually quite nice. Not long after they’d left the corral, tromping along in a nose-to-tail line of horses, the trail had turned into a piney forest area. With the midday sun peeking through the high canopy of leaves, everything around them was muted and vibrant green. Pearl found quickly that Gentle Giant’s reins were mostly a formality — he didn’t put a single hoof out of line as he plodded along behind the others, bringing up the rear, quiet and obedient.

When she thought of him that way, Pearl felt an overwhelming wave of affection toward him. She put a hand on the side of his neck and gave him what she hoped was a comforting little pat. “You’re a good horse,” she told him quietly. “You’re a very nice and good horse. And you’re doing just fine.”

“I’m sure he appreciates the compliment.”

Pearl whipped her head to the side as Jack trotted up next to her on a pretty chestnut. Pearl had thought she’d been the end of the line. Her tongue tied up into knots again. “Oh, uh, I–” she stammered, trying to figure out if she needed to apologize for speaking to a horse.

Jack laughed. She had a wide, pretty mouth, one that made her smile light up her entire face. “You can talk to him, baby! Heaven knows I talk to Cinnamon here all the time.” Jack gave her mount a little scritch near the horse’s mane. “She’s a great listener. Gives terrible advice, though. Never listen to a horse.”

Despite herself, Pearl brought a hand to her mouth to cover her giggle, only to pull a face as she realized immediately that it smelled of horse. Could it have been more obvious that she didn’t belong here? “Thanks.” Pearl wrapped the reins even tighter around the back of her other hand — not, of course, that Gentle Giant looked like he was in need of any guidance, but she wanted Jack to know that she’d been listening to the instructions.

“This your first time out here in the sticks?”

Pearl nodded. “It’s pretty,” she added, just in case Jack thought she might be judging the place poorly for its not having sidewalks and subways. She cared a lot what Jack thought about her. She always cared what people thought about her, but she was realizing that was true about Jack in particular. That meant the proper thing to do was for Pearl to figure out a way that she didn’t have to talk enough to spoil the illusion. “So, how long have you been riding horses?”

“Six, maybe seven,” Jack said thoughtfully, and Pearl was startled when she finished the sentence, “years ago now.”

“Oh, so…” Pearl frowned as she looked at Jack, who seemed like such a natural in the saddle. “So you didn’t grow up doing this?”

Jack laughed and shook her head. “Nah, believe it or not, I’m a city girl. I was born in Detroit, got bounced around a lot growing up. Foster kid stuff. Never even been on a ranch until I was hitchhiking and saw a place with ‘HELP WANTED’ painted by the fence. I hopped out, walked the mile up to the main house, and said I’d learn whatever they wanted to teach me. Learned enough that eventually I wound up here.”

To Pearl, everything that Jack had just described was bizarre to the point of incomprehension. Even the simple act of hitchhiking was outside the realm of things Pearl would ever consider doing. “Wow,” Pearl said. “That sounds … that’s really brave.”

“Real stupid is what it was, sometimes,” Jack said, grinning. “But I lived, so, you know what, yeah, let’s call it brave.” She stood up in her saddle a little, eyeing the progress of the group in front of them before settling down again and turning her attention back to Pearl. “So what about you? What’s someone like you do for a living?”

Compared to all this, Pearl’s job felt incredibly small. “I’m in the secretarial pool,” she said to Jack, who shook her head like she didn’t know the term. “Oh, um, I type things. When somebody needs them typed. For a company,” she added, realizing how odd her job description might have sounded without that context. “Letters and legal documents, mostly. Sometimes filling out forms.”

Jack nodded. “Sounds important. You good at it?”

How did one measure being good at being a typist? There were metrics like words typed per minute and accuracy, but Pearl got the sense that Jack wasn’t asking about those. “I guess.” Pearl shrugged. “I mean, I guess I am. I’ve been there long enough that I know most things. And sometimes there’s organizing and filing to do. I’ve filled in for the receptionist a few times too. But that’s … it’s a lot of talking to people. I’m not too good at talking to people.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asked. She reached her arm up and bent back a low-hanging branch so they could both pass safely under. “You’re good at talking to me.”

That was just Jack being polite, Pearl was pretty sure. Someone who was good at talking to people wouldn’t have soaked the reins through in the sweat from their palms. “Well, um. You’re nicer than the people on the phone.”

“See, that must be because they’re talking on the phone. They don’t get to see you. They saw that pretty face of yours, there’d be no way they’d be anything but nice.” Jack gave her a sly little wink that made Pearl squirm in her saddle.

Before Pearl had to figure out how to respond to something like that, there was a shout from farther up the trail. Both of them turned to see that Sheryl’s horse had decided that it wanted to take an alternate route and had wandered off down a side path toward the creek. Jack clicked her tongue and kicked her heels into Cinnamon’s sides, and the two of them took off together in unison, like they were partners in a dance.

That’s what it was. Riding a horse was like dancing. She’d heard some of the girls talking earlier about how they’d heard it was like sex, which seemed the more obvious comparison, and which had had them all giggling at the naughty suggestion. For all Pearl knew, it was — just not like any sex she’d ever had. This was far more graceful and gentle. She had to focus on keeping her body upright as Gentle Giant swayed softly beneath her, letting her hips rock a little in time with his steps. It reminded her of the ballet classes at the JCC her parents had enrolled her in as a child, the ones that had been supposed to teach her grace and poise. Instead, she’d made a misstep and toppled over during a performance, and when she’d heard the audience’s laughter, mild though it had been, she’d run off backstage and thrown up all over her costume. That had been the end of her illustrious dancing career.

So really, no matter how badly she did at horseback riding, as long as she didn’t vomit on herself at any point, she was going to declare victory.

Of course, she’d made that bargain with herself before a freckled heartthrob had decided that Pearl was worth talking to. That just meant a whole new set of opportunities for humiliation. Dejected, Pearl slouched a little in her saddle before she realized that was making her knees bend funny, so she straightened up again. Gentle Giant probably never noticed the difference in her posture.

It didn’t matter, though, because, as Pearl had so correctly noted earlier, this was Jack’s job. They’d finish the trail ride, and they’d put the horses away, and that would be it. Maybe they’d see one another a couple more times over the weekend, but that was it. It wasn’t even worth thinking about too hard. Best for Pearl to put it all out of her mind.

~*~

What the hell was she doing? Pearl had no idea. All she knew was that it was a sultry night, and she was out in it.

She should have been back in the bunkhouse common room where Mona and the rest were doing shots and trading gossip. She wasn’t just saying this out of some kind of obligation to dance with them that had brought her — the guests had been told that this was a working ranch surrounded by wilderness, and that they needed to stay in the designated guest areas and not go wandering off, especially at night.

Pearl didn’t want to wander off. She just … no, she wasn’t quite ready to be honest with herself yet about what she was doing here, on the other side of the EMPLOYEES ONLY PAST THIS POINT gate, already rehearsing her excuses in her mind: It was so dark she hadn’t seen the sign; she thought this was the way to the parking lot; she dropped an earring by the corral earlier and wanted to see if she could find it without bothering anyone. She hadn’t decided yet on which one sounded the most plausible. Probably none of them. She hated this.

“Hey,” said a soft voice, and Pearl’s heart leapt in her chest for a moment — only to settle when she realized that the speaker wasn’t Jack. Instead, she was an older woman with a blonde ponytail and a red kerchief around her neck. A cigarette glowed softly between her fingers. “Can I help you?”

All of Pearl’s excuses tumbled out of her head. “I, um.” Maybe the earring one would work? All she had to do was remember how to speak. Surely she could do that. She grabbed at the skirt of her dress and started fidgeting the fabric between her fingers.

Instead of being mad at her for trespassing, though, the woman smiled. “You the curly bird Jack was talking about earlier?”

Pearl’s hand flew up to her hair, the mess of dark, wild curls that ran in her family and somehow managed to look good on everyone but Pearl herself. She’d never quiet figured out what to do with it all, and so she’d mostly settled toward doing very little, which she wasn’t a good solution either, but at least it was less effort. “Um.” Wow, Pearl was sounding like a real winner tonight. She swallowed hard.

That just made the woman chuckle. “Yeah, you are.” She gave Pearl a once-over so hard it was almost physical, the way she dragged her eyes down to Pearl’s feet and back again. “I’m Fiddle.”

Pearl, who was a lifelong expert at having a name that was also a thing, still balked at the idea anyone would name their newborn daughter that. “Fiddle,” she echoed without meaning to, unable to keep the skepticism out of her voice.

Fiddle laughed even louder this time, exhaling smoke as she did. “Think of it as a nom de guerre ,” she said, even though Pearl didn’t know nearly enough French to understand what that meant. “We all have them here. Sort of a way to be who you are here that’s not what it says on your driver’s license. Or maybe just to keep nosy guests from prying into what they shouldn’t.”

By nosy guests, did Fiddle mean Pearl? Somehow she didn’t think so. After all, Pearl had just wandered into the wrong part of the ranch, which was a completely normal and explicable thing to do; she’d hadn’t gone prying into anybody’s personal anything. “So, um, do you play the fiddle?” asked Pearl, who’d had exactly three violin lessons in her youth before the teacher had suggest her parents explore other avenues for their daughter’s enrichment.

“Nope,” said Fiddle, shaking her head. “But I’m known for my fingering.” Pearl had no idea what that meant, so she just smiled and nodded, which made Fiddle laugh again and hold out the cigarette toward Pearl. “You smoke?”

“Oh, no, I … no.” Pearl had never smoked, and even if she had, she wasn’t sure about just being handed a lit, half-smoked cigarette from a stranger who did not play the musical instrument she’d named herself after. “But thank you,” she added a moment later, because her mother had always taught her to be polite.

“You need help getting back to your friends?”

Pearl opened her mouth to say that, no, she was fine, she knew exactly where she was, she was just about to go back the way she’d come and give up whatever silly wanderings she was trying to do. Instead, she found herself saying, “They’re not my friends.”

“Oh?” Fiddle raised an eyebrow.

“They’re–” Pearl sighed. “They’re my coworkers.”

Fiddle shrugged. “Coworkers could be your friends.”

Could be, and should be, if years of office life had taught Pearl anything. It was the should of it that made Pearl feel like a failure that they weren’t. “They just invited me along because they were inviting the whole office, or at least our part of the office, and I think they thought it’d be mean to leave me out. I don’t really know them. I mean, I do , we work together, and I spend more time around them than I do around anyone else, which sounds so sad, but … you know, I bet they haven’t even noticed I’m gone.” She looked down at the ground, embarrassed that all that had come out of her at such a rush, and to a complete stranger, too.

For a moment, Fiddle looked at her again, as though scanning Pearl for something Pearl couldn’t see or understand. Then Fiddle pinched the glowing red end off her cigarette and ground it out beneath her boot before sticking the rest in her pocket. “Come on,” she said, nodding not in the direction of the guest facilities.

Pearl should probably have asked a number of questions right then. Instead she pressed her lips together and nodded, and when Fiddle started walking, Pearl fell right in line.

The whole of the guest side of the Double L was decorated in slightly over-the-top western chic, all wood and rustic finishings to give a real frontier feel to the place, Pearl supposed, or at least what the guests expected a real frontier to feel like. The employee area was the genuine version of the aesthetic everywhere else was trying to imitate. Instead of having cute twine lassos glued to the edges of bulletin boards, there were real ropes here, coiled and tossed over posts, ready to be put to real use. Horseshoes weren’t tacked up like cute decorations, but were in piles like they were waiting for use. The colorful, brand-new cowboy boots that decorated the reception area were nowhere to be seen, replaced instead with battered pairs that looked like they’d had the life worked out of them. This was the reality behind the artifice of the place.

And Pearl did not fit in here, in her soft blue A-line dress and sandals. That had been what she’d packed to look nice on the drive back; she had no excuse for why she’d pulled it out tonight. She especially felt overdressed next to Fiddle, whose work clothes looked soft and comfortable, but also dirty like laundering wouldn’t help, like they’d gotten filthy so many times that they just lived like this now, in a gentle brown haze. That was sort of what the entire place felt like, like someone could take a power hose to it and still not be able to get out all the dirt. Pearl was surprised to find she didn’t mean that thought in a bad way.

As they got to the door of building that looked not unlike the guest bunkhouse where Pearl was supposed to be right now, except this place didn’t need cute cowboy decor to be what it was. Her hand on the doorknob, Fiddle paused and looked at Pearl. “You want to leave at any time, you let me know. I’ll walk you back, no problem.”

“Okay,” Pearl said, suddenly anxious about what exactly she’d gotten herself into.

Grinning, Fiddle opened the door onto a room of light and sound. There were maybe two dozen women in the room, maybe even a couple more than that, lounging around and laughing together. A soft cloud of cigarette smoke wafted through the room, though with none of the menthol edge Pearl tended to associate with lady smokers. A Patsy Cline record spun on a nearby turntable, sending her pretty voice warbling out through the speakers. This clearly was the Double L’s employee version of what was happening back in the guest bunkhouse: coworkers unwinding together, enjoying one another’s company.

What Pearl’s mind snagged on, though, was how they were touching . The first couple Pearl saw, her mind almost slid right off, so sure she was that she was looking at a girlfriend sitting in her boyfriend’s lap. A split second later, though, she realized that despite the short hair and masculine attire, that boyfriend wasn’t a boy. Nor, in fact, were any of the people in the room, no matter what first appearances might have suggested. And yet that didn’t stop a single one of them from stretching her legs across another woman’s lap, putting her arm around another woman’s shoulders, pulling another woman in for a kiss–

Holy cow. Tammy had been right. They were all lesbians.

“Jackknife!” hollered Fiddle, with a volume that Pearl had not expected could come out of her — or, really, any woman. “One of your fillies slipped out the gate! I had to round her up for you!”

“Oh, Jesus,” said a voice from the corner of the room, and Pearl had never been so glad in her life to recognize a speaker. She turned her head to confirm that it was indeed Jack, who had stripped down from her work clothes so that she was only wearing a white undershirt and jeans, with her flannel tied around her waist. The galaxy of dark freckles that decorated her cheeks stretched down her neck and across her bare shoulders and arms. She wasn’t even wearing a bra! Pearl could see the dark circles of her nipples clearly through the thin cotton fabric. As Jack walked closer, she mock-bared her teeth at Fiddle, then turned all sunshine and smiles at Pearl. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Pearl said back. She wished so badly that her dress had pockets; she suddenly didn’t know what to do with her hands. Especially now that she was amongst a bunch of lesbians. Did that mean Fiddle was a lesbian? Oh, God, did that mean Jack was too?

No, Pearl couldn’t have that thought right now, because the idea of Jack kissing a girl was going to make her even more unable to deal with the situation than she was already, and she wasn’t doing great, given how she couldn’t keep her eyes from going back to Jack’s nipples. Oh, God, they were hard . They were two little dark points tenting out the too-sheer fabric of her undershirt, and they were going to be listed as the cause of death on Pearl’s death certificate. Was she blushing? She was certain she was blushing now.

“Hey, Jack!” hollered someone from the crowd. “Where’d you get that, and are you going to share?”

“You ladies be nice,” Jack warned them. “Everybody, this is Pearl; Pearl, this is … well, it’s everybody. Don’t mind them. They were all raised by wolves.”

The women in the room laughed — and then, startlingly, joined together in a ragged group howl. Pearl looked at Jack, but Jack just rolled her eyes and took Pearl by the arm. “Come on,” she said, tugging Pearl over to a dilapidated sofa. The woman who’d been lounging there got up without even having to be asked, giving Jack a wink — and another little howl — as she vacated the seat. “You want something to drink?”

“Oh, no, I … I don’t drink.” Pearl felt her cheeks getting hot again. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke — they were going to kick her out at any moment now for not being cool enough to be here.

Jack chuckled at that. “So you don’t drink drink, but you still drink, right? As in, you consume liquids? Water, soda, maybe a little sweet tea left over from dinner?”

Pearl exhaled a little with relief. “Oh. Um. Water?”

“One water, coming right up,” Jack said as she walked away. “Don’t go anywhere.”

It was at this point, left to her own thoughts for the first half-second since she and Fiddle had arrived at the door, that Pearl let herself fully realize just how much she was in a room full of lesbians. She was in a room full of lesbians. It was a room, and it was full of lesbians. There were lesbians, and there were more than one of them, and they were in a room, and she was in it too. She had been brought into the room of lesbians. It was a lesbian room, and she was now in it. Lesbians. Room. Her. Her brain kept hopping over it like a skip on a record. Someone (a lesbian) had known about a room (this room) of people (also lesbians) and had decided that Pearl (a lesbian?) belonged here too.

Did that mean Pearl was a lesbian now? She was pretty sure she hadn’t been before. After all, lesbians were … they were … well, they were something , to be sure. And whatever that something was, it wasn’t what Pearl was. How could she be a lesbian? She’d had sex with a man, more than once, in the service of being married to him. She’d never even kissed a girl. Surely you needed to have kissed a girl to be a lesbian. There was probably a rule about it somewhere.

Oh, God, she was in a room of lesbians. A lesbian room. Everyone here was a lesbian, and they were all looking at her like she was a lesbian too, and she was going to have to figure out a way to tell them that, no, sorry, she didn’t count. There had been a terrible mistake. She wasn’t a lesbian. She wasn’t really anything at all.

But before she could figure out how to put these thoughts toward words, Jack returned with a glass of water. “Here you go,” she said, handing it to Pearl as she sat down on the couch. “Got to stay hydrated.”

Pearl had never had more delicious water in her life, though that was probably because her throat and mouth were desert-dry, and not because of anything about the water itself. She drained half the glass in what felt like a single swallow. “I’m, um,” Pearl stammered out, once she had enough saliva to speak again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to — I know I shouldn’t be here–“

“Hey, hey. It’s okay, baby.” Jack gave her that amazing smile, the one that made Pearl’s heart feel like it had been wrapped in tinfoil and tossed into a warm oven. “You’re welcome here. We got room, see? Had this whole big couch just waiting for you to come sit on it.”

Pearl didn’t know about that , especially not the big part, given how close Jack was sitting to her. Jack had her freckled, bare arm along the back of the sofa, just close enough to touch if Pearl leaned back into it. She didn’t, and she also didn’t look at Jack’s nipples. She didn’t look at the soft, dark patch of hair peeking out from Jack’s underarm. She didn’t look at the two women holding hands in the beanbag chairs just across the room from them. She didn’t look at the way Fiddle had grabbed the hand of another woman and spun her into a little two-step, laughing as they danced badly across a small patch of floor. She looked at her water. Water was safe.

Jack settled back against the couch cushions with a knowing little sigh. “It was like that for me, too. My first time being around sisters like us. I swear I didn’t unknot the whole night through, I was so scared the police were about to bust through the door and haul my black ass off to jail for looking at a girl.”

Pearl found her brain had hooked real hard on the words like us . She really needed to speak up, if only to make it clear that she wasn’t upset or anything like that, but they had it all wrong. She couldn’t be a lesbian. If they knew the truth about her, they wouldn’t let her be.

With a little laugh, Jack reached up and took a lock of Pearl’s hair in her fingers, tugging it and letting go so that it bounced back up like a spring. “Curly Pearl,” Jack said, like that was something Pearl hadn’t been called a million times in her youth, by her brothers and her bullies, until she hated it to the point of tears. Except there was something about the way Jack said it that made Pearl’s pulse hammer for completely different reasons. “Can I have you do something for me, baby?”

Baby . She liked the way Jack called her that too. Pearl nodded.

Jack settled just a touch closer, then patted the seat next to her. “You come sit here. Lean in. Make yourself comfortable. There’s no snakes here; nothing’s going to bite you.”

Pearl wasn’t sure how she was going to convince her anxious hindbrain to accept that, but she was going to try. With a heroic effort, she moved so her hip was right up against Jack’s thigh. Okay, now the next step. She took a deep, steadying breath, then began to lean back, fitting herself right in the space made in the angle between Jack’s arm and her body. Pearl felt impossibly awkward, like an uncooked noodle tossed into a pot of otherwise regular spaghetti. It helped a little as Jack curled her fingers around Pearl’s far shoulder, coaxing her into place. Jack’s body was so warm against hers. She smelled good, even if it was a little bad-good — sweat and horse and dirt and other things that Pearl should have recoiled from. Instead, she found herself having to fight the urge to bury her face right in Jack’s bare neck and just take a deep breath.

“There she is,” Jack said against Pearl’s hair, with almost the same tone she might have used to soothe a skittish horse. “Isn’t that better?”

Before Pearl could answer, a chair parked itself in front of them, and a split second later, a woman sat down backwards in it, legs straddling the back. She had her long black hair done up in a pair of braids, one over each shoulder. “Hey, Jack, you going to introduce us to your new lady friend?” she asked in lilting Midwestern tones.

Pearl didn’t even get a chance to ask who us was; a second later, a heavyset woman with close-cropped silver hair plopped down on the floor right next to the woman in the chair, grinning and drumming her fingers on the neck of a beer bottle. “This here’s Reckless and Jellybean,” Jack said, as casually as she’d told Pearl the names of the horses. “They were the ones who showed me around when I first got here.”

Reckless, the one in the chair, grinned and mimed tipping her hat to Pearl, who wondered how on earth someone wound up with a name like that. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Pearl.”

Oh, that made Pearl’s stomach feel funny. She hadn’t been a Miss in years, not since becoming a Mrs. — which people still called her, right before saying her ex-husband’s last name that she’d never gotten around to getting rid of. Her mother said not to bother, that she’d just have to change it again when she got remarried eventually. Her mother said a lot of things.

Jellybean gave a friendly little wave. “Where do you live?”

“New Jersey,” Pearl said.

“Oh, where?” Jellybean asked, perking up. “I grew up in New Brunswick.”

“Jersey City.”

“Means we’re practically neighbors!” Jellybean said with a laugh, which Pearl supposed was true, provided one’s definition of a neighbor included anyone within an hour’s driving distance. “Though I haven’t been back since my dad passed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Pearl, because it seemed polite.

Jellybean blew a raspberry. “Don’t be. The world does not miss him.”

Reckless reached down and punched Jellybean’s shoulder playfully. “Yeah, your only regret about the old bastard is you didn’t show up in time to be his cause of death.”

“This is true!” Jellybean said, punching back at Reckless’ thigh. “I should’ve waltzed through the door on his deathbed and said, hello, Father, it is I, your dyke daughter, come down the mountain from breaking horses and eating pussy to see you one last time! And then if that hadn’t done him in, I could’ve offered to find a cute nurse and demonstrate.”

This was all scandalizing Pearl something fierce; she could feel the way it was making her cheeks burn. She couldn’t imagine saying words like that even in front of trusted friends, much less her parents . But the three ranchhands just laughed like it was the funniest business they’d ever heard. What would it be like to care that little about what other people thought about you? Pearl might as well have spent her time wondering what it was like to live on Jupiter.

“JB here’s been around the longest of all of us,” Jack explained, brushing her fingers lightly up and down Pearl’s shoulder as she nodded in Jellybean’s direction. “Except, of course, Lefty.”

“Who’s Lefty?” Pearl asked.

“Lefty’s one of the Double L,” Reckless explained. “You know, in the ranch name. The other’s Lariat, but she passed two years ago.”

Jellybean lited her beer bottle, and the other two nodded their respects. “A true rare and beautiful specimen of lesbiankind,” Jellybean declared her, “and the love of Lefty’s life. They founded this place together back in … ’43, I think it was? I showed up a couple years later, after I got out of the service. I was looking for somewhere to go, and I caught wind of this female-run place — which, in ranch parlance, pretty much means only one thing.”

“So, they were–” Pearl found herself needing to take a sip of her water before continuing. “I mean, you’re all …?”

“Muff-divers and sodomites? Yes.” Reckless grinned and gave Pearl a wink. “Well, okay, maybe not all . We get straight girls in here from time to time, doing seasonal work, in-between other gigs. But they don’t tend to stay. Or they don’t tend to stay straight, take your pick.”

Pearl was not yet ready to ponder the mechanics of how that might work, so she settled back against Jack’s arm and let the other women talk shop. It was nice to just be here, to be quiet — and yet, Pearl didn’t feel as invisible as she usually did. By now, in most conversations, she would’ve faded into the background, until everyone speaking just flat forgot she was there. That wasn’t how these women treated her, though. They’d be talking about something or other amongst themselves, and then one would take a break to give Pearl the context of who or what they were talking about. It kept her in the loop without making her feel pressured to participate. That was nice.

Honestly, that was Pearl’s reaction to all of this: that it was nice . She felt like she’d dropped a set of armor she hadn’t even really known she’d been wearing. She could laugh when someone said something funny and not worry like she might be laughing too much, or too loudly, or at the wrong times.

And Jack was … well, Jack was hard to think about directly, like the sun was hard to look at straight on. Pearl was afraid she’d burn herself out if she let her mind linger too long on just how good it felt to be sitting next to Jack, tucked under Jack’s arm like Pearl was something nice too. Her ex-husband had sometimes draped his arm around her shoulders like that, but it had always felt just a little stifling, maybe the slightest bit hostile. Jack wasn’t angry or possessive about it. She was just putting her arm around a girl she liked.

That, too, was hard to think about, not just that girls could like other girls, but that Pearl could be the object of those affections. She’d known she was interested in other girls in improper ways, sure, but those were the kind of broken, shameful thoughts that she had gotten good at ignoring and hating herself for. She’d never in her wildest dreams expected that someone might like her back . Much less someone like Jack, whose arms were warm and strong, who smelled like hard work and sunlight, who held Pearl like she wasn’t afraid of anything. 

Of course, maybe she was just being friendly. Maybe this was how lesbians were friendly to one another, or at least to other people they thought were lesbians. Pearl was still certain she didn’t count. Almost certain. Anyway.

As the evening went on, someone put a cold bottle of beer in Jack’s hand. Pearl had meant what she’d said when she’d said she didn’t drink, but that didn’t mean that she never drank, so much as that she didn’t do it as a habit. So when Jack saw her looking and offered her the bottle, Pearl took it. She took a sip and wrinkled up her nose — it was dark beer, and strong, stronger than her brothers or her ex-husband drank. But it was good and cold, so she took another sip before handing it back.

Jack grinned as she did, then put the mouth of the bottle right up against her own mouth, running her tongue once around the rim before taking a drink. Pearl’s eyes went a little wide as she realized Jack was deliberately licking the places Pearl’s lips had been. Was that still just friendly? She had no idea anymore. She was too busy thinking about Jack’s tongue.

That was about the time a far door to the room opened, one Pearl hadn’t noticed before, and Pearl’s jaw about hit the floor.

Into the room walked a woman who … well, there were no two ways about it, really, she was ugly. She had mannish features and a near-buzzed haircut that made them even more so, all on a square, stocky frame. In fact, Pearl might have thought her a man, had she not gotten a good view of the woman’s soft, sagging breasts, because of how the woman was naked from the waist up. Yet that was not the most shocking part of her attire, because while she was still clothed in a pair of jeans from the waist down, those jeans had a shiny sort of black leather harness wrapped over them, strapping around her thighs and butt. And there, right from the middle of all those straps, protruded a giant blue cock.

It wasn’t real, of course. Or, well, it was real, but it wasn’t real real. It wasn’t flesh real. This woman had not been born with a bright blue penis that somehow had the capacity to manifest through her clothes. The realness was not fleshiness. It stuck straight out from her body, shiny and smooth. It was obscene and startling. Pearl became aware that her breathing had gone shallow and ragged. She couldn’t look away.

It helped that the way the woman was moving around made it clear she didn’t want anyone to look away. She grinned as she strode bowlegged around the room, rubbing her hand up and down her amazing blue appendage like it was indeed part of her body. The other women clapped and hooted. She had the word STUD tattooed in a cursive font across her chest. “Bull’s here,” said Reckless with a sly grin.

Oh, God, was that — Pearl didn’t know if that was the name of the woman or the dildo. Maybe both. Her hands gripped around her water glass so tight, she had to will her fingers to relax before she shattered it.

“You going for a ride, Reck?” asked Jellybean, poking Reckless’ knee.

“Thinking about it,” Reckless said, sticking the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she watched whichever one of them was Bull parade around the room. “You?”

“Pass tonight.” Jellybean leaned her head to one side, cracking her neck. “Back’s been giving me trouble. I’ll just watch.”

It wasn’t that their words weren’t making sense to Pearl — they were , and she was doing her best to unmake that sense, because she didn’t know how to make sense of that sense. Her stomach was tight around the water and few sips of Jack’s beer. She shrunk back a little into Jack’s arm as she watched the person Bull laugh as an apple-cheeked younger woman leaned forward to give the dildo Bull a kiss right on its tip.

Jack tightened her arm around Pearl’s shoulder in a way that was more comforting than possessive. Pearl moved in closer, leaning her head so it touched the side of Jack’s. “How’re you doing down there?” Jack asked.

Pearl shrugged a little. “It’s…” She squirmed, suddenly feeling exposed as hell in her little dress, which left her legs bare from her mid-thigh down. “Um.”

“We can leave, if you want,” Jack said, no judgment in her voice. There was nothing patronizing to her tone, no sense of resignation; it was a flat offer, as Pearl wanted. “Or we can hang around a little bit and you can watch. How’s that sound?”

Pearl wanted her nod to be casual, like this was a normal way for her to spend an evening. Instead she felt herself nodding eagerly, almost frantically, before she stopped herself. Yeah, she wanted to see.

Sex for Pearl had never been particularly … well, interesting? Was that the word? Sure, she was going to go with that. There had been parts about it she’d liked, like being naked and the kissing and the overall excuse for closeness. But the way everyone else talked about it, it was like they were describing some incredible five-course restaurant meal, and she was looking down at her plate of warmed-over brisket. She’d resigned herself to not seeing in it the same thing everyone else saw.

Yet somehow a woman and/or blue plastic phallus named Bull had left her spinning like she’d just stepped off a carnival ride. Bull was still absolutely ugly, there were no two ways about it. Pearl could only imagine the things her mother and aunts would have said about Bull, anything from quiet snickers to outright sneers. None of that was explaining why Pearl felt her parts between her legs throbbing. She pressed her thighs together tightly to see if that would help, but really, it just made the ache deeper and more desperate.

Then Bull looked at her, caught Pearl’s eye dead on in an unmistakable lock. “Oh, somebody’s real pretty,” Bull said with an open leer. Her voice was not what Pearl would have expected — high and almost musical, not a mannish voice at all. Bull strutted forward with a grin, running her hand obscenely up and down the blue cock sticking straight out in front of her. “You want to touch it, pretty thing?”

Pearl looked immediately to Jack, as though there might be some right or wrong answer here. Jack just smiled and ruffled her hair a little. “Whatever you want, baby.”

So the ball was back in Pearl’s court. Well, on the one hand, she absolutely might die of shame and embarrassment and everything else if she were to touch that strange appendage in front of other people, or even at all. But on the other, Pearl had started wondering what on earth it felt like, and that wonder wasn’t going away. It looked solid enough, yet it jiggled a little every time Bull let it bounce free. Was it soft? Did it feel like the real thing? Would anyone here get mad at her if they knew she knew what the real thing felt like?

While her mind was making itself up, though, her hand was moving on its own. With fingers that trembled more than she wanted them to, Pearl lifted her hand and gingerly stretched it over toward the tip of the blue dildo. The second her fingertips made contact, she recoiled, skittish. “It don’t bite,” Bull promised, and the others laughed.

Teeth weren’t what Pearl had been worried about. She took a deep breath and tried again, this time willing her hand to stay where she put it. It was cooler than actual skin, even a little cooler than the room itself. It felt strange, rubbery — which, she realized, wasn’t actually that strange, as it probably was rubber. As her fingers stroked the surface, she felt just how smooth it was all the way down to the base, where it locked into the leather harness through a thick metal ring. It wasn’t too much for length, but it was thick , wide enough to make Pearl’s eyebrows lift a little. She caught herself licking her lips as she mapped its shape with her fingers. More than that, she found herself wishing she didn’t feel like she needed to stop there. Maybe Bull was no beauty, but there was something about her that made Pearl want very badly to touch all of her.

“How about it?” Bull grinned down at Pearl. “You want to do a little Bull riding tonight, honey?”

Pearl’s cheeks flushed scarlet, and fortunately, Jack stepped in. “You got plenty of other riders,” Jack said, kicking playfully at Bull’s calves with her boots. “Don’t scare the baby lesbian.”

“Boo,” said Bull, wiggling her eyebrows. But she took the hint and strutted off — and strutted was the word for it, moving almost like a rooster visiting all the hens. It was part comedy and part actual sexual provocation. Pearl had never seen anything like it.

“You still good?” asked Jack, her voice low enough to be for Pearl’s ears only.

Pearl took a deep breath, held it for a second, and nodded. She was good. She was completely at sea and overwhelmed, but she was good.

Jack hugged her close and pressed a little kiss into Pearl’s hair. “There you go. You’re starting to get the hang of it.”

“I’m not,” Pearl said, then stammered a little when she realized that was a strange response to what Jack had just said. “I mean, I’m not, um, a lesbian. I’m not.”

“That right?” Jack didn’t sound particularly convinced.

“I was married.”

“So?”

“To a man,” Pearl clarified, just in case that wasn’t the usual around here.

Jack just laughed at that. “Baby, you think you’re the only one here who has? Goldrush over there, with the yellow bandana, still is, legally speaking. He stops by every so often, brings their kids. It’s real cute.”

Pearl hadn’t expected that reaction. She fidgeted a little with the hem of her dress. “But, I mean, I’ve never … shouldn’t a lesbian have kissed a girl before?”

The touch of Jack’s fingers against Pearl’s chin was so soft and delicate, Pearl barely had time to register what was happening before Jack’s lips were on hers. At first, it was just a gentle pressure of dry lips together, as chaste as friends might be. Then Jack’s tongue was somehow in Pearl’s mouth, and Pearl was making noises she hadn’t known she could. There were little moans slipping out of her throat, caught inside Jack’s mouth as they kissed. That ache between her legs was becoming more of a throb, a needy sensation that was getting harder to ignore by the moment.

Jack reached over and took Pearl’s hand in hers, holding it there for a moment as sweet as lovers on a date might. Then she took Pearl’s palm and placed it over one of those pretty dark nipples, with only the fabric of Jack’s undershirt between skin and skin. Pearl gasped as she realized what she was touching, but Jack just grinned. “You can touch me, baby,” Jack promised with a murmur. “It feels good. You make me feel real good.”

What was Pearl supposed to do in the face of that , except keep going? She rubbed her fingertip a little over the sensitive skin there. Maybe she was pressing a little too hard against Jack, but it was the only way Pearl could keep herself from trembling. “Like this?” Pearl asked, her breathing as shaky as her hands were.

Jack nodded. “Put your hand up my shirt now, if you want to feel me for real.”

Pearl wanted it. She wanted it so much. She fumbled a little with Jack’s undershirt until she found its hem. At the first touch against Jack’s side, Pearl jerked her hand away, same as she had with the blue Bull. But just as before, she willed herself to be brave. Jack’s skin was smooth and soft as Pearl ran her hand up Jack’s side, all the way up to her breast. There, she traced the smooth curve of soft flesh until her fingertips met the pebbly texture of skin surrounding Jack’s nipple. Pearl’s own nipples were small and somewhat unremarkable, much like the rest of Pearl herself. It was something, then, feel how thick and erect Jack’s were.

Jack grinned as she settled herself back against the couch cushions. “You like those?” she teased.

Pearl nodded. She did. A lot. Okay, maybe she was a lesbian. At least a little bit.

“Good.” Jack’s fingers brushed up and down Pearl’s bicep. Pearl wondered if Jack was going to do the same to her soon, to feel up Pearl’s breasts, but Jack’s hands stayed at a polite distance from any of Pearl’s more tender spots. Pearl wondered for a moment if that meant Jack didn’t want to touch her, before she realized that, no, Jack was exercising patience. She was letting Pearl decide the speed of this ride. Wherever Pearl went, that’s where Jack would follow.

They continued kissing and softly touching like this for several minutes, and might have kept up like that all night, had there not been a rousing cheer from the rest of the women in the room. Oh, right — the rest of the women in the room. Kissing Jack had made Pearl all but forget that they weren’t alone. Oh, God, had she just touched a woman’s breast and other people had seen? Was that cheer for them ?

Thankfully, the answer to the latter question was no . However, Pearl wasn’t sure she was on much firmer ground with what it actually was about. When she turned her head, she saw that the middle of the room had mostly cleared out, until there was nothing left there but a single, sturdy chair. In that chair sat Bull, her blue erection jutting up from her lap. And in front of her stood the woman Jack had identified as Goldrush, completely naked and grinning.

Oh, this was — oh . When Bull had talked about a ride, she hadn’t meant behind closed doors. She’d meant a ride .

The hooting and cheering from the rest of the room rose as Goldrush stepped up. She was a curvy woman, with the soft breasts and belly that told of the tale of the kids Jack had mentioned. She had long dirty blonde hair that she was drawing back into a ponytail now. Bull looked up at her with a smirk. “Been a while,” Bull teased. “Thought you got tired of my cock.”

Goldrush rolled her eyes. “Just tired of you, not your cock,” she said, giving Bull a friendly little shove in the shoulder. “At least it knows when to shut up.” Goldrush walked forward until her legs were straddling Bull’s hip, with the head of the blue dildo pointing right up between her thighs. Goldrush grabbed the back of the chair for leverage as she lowered herself none too gently down onto Bull’s dildo. “Fucking hell,” she swore as she settled it inside of her. Inside of her.

“You like that?” Bull grabbed Goldrush’s hips and yanked her close, making Goldrush yelp with pleasure and surprise. “Come on. Get some of that big daddy dick.” Using her seat for leverage, Bull started bouncing Goldrush on her cock.

Pearl did not know anything to make about the scene in front of her, except that watching was making her unbelievably wet. Her underwear were soaked through already, she could tell, and if this kept up, she’d probably soon have a stain on the back of her dress to match. Her hand, still cupped around Jack’s breast, gripped there unconsciously as she watched the two women in front of her move their bodies together. Bull continued to use the word daddy in ways that Pearl was sure it had never been intended, while Goldrush lifted and settled her hips with such force, Pearl worried for the continued health and well-being of the chair.

Jack hummed a little chuckle against Pearl’s ear. “You’ve never seen two women fuck before, have you?”

Pearl shook her head. She’d barely seen anyone fuck before, at least that she wasn’t participating in. As teenagers, her brothers had kept a few porno mags stashed in various spots around their room, and curiosity had compelled Pearl to steal more than a few peeks. They and the whispered rumors of her school friends had comprised the entirety of Pearl’s sex education, before and after marriage.

Not that she hadn’t daydreamed sometimes of women together, but her speculation on that matter had always been a lot, she supposed, softer . More like the centerfolds in the skin mags, lipstick done to perfection, stretched out on beds with gauzy curtains, maybe caressing one another gently until … well, until something happened. Something dewy and quiet, maybe with a lot of sighing. She’d never imagined it might involve working up a sweat.

“That look like fun?” Jack asked, nuzzling Pearl with her lips as she spoke. “You the kind of girl who likes a Bull ride?”

Was she? Pearl hesitated. She felt like she should like that, given how the lesbians in the room were reacting, and how she was apparently a lesbian now too. But honestly, that part had never been the part of sex that had appealed to her. It had been the perfunctory part, the obligation, the moment that signaled that it would all soon be over.

After a moment, Jack chuckled. “Or do you want to be the bull?”

It was like a bolt of lightning had ripped through the roof and cracked right into Pearl’s brain. Her eyes snapped wide. At no point in her entire life had she known that was even a possibility, and thinking about it was now making it hard to breathe.

This reaction had apparently not gone unnoticed by Jack. “Oh, so that’s what my baby likes.” She put her hand on the bare skin of Pearl’s thigh, just below the hem of her dress. “You want a big fat cock all the pretty girls can bounce on?”

Did she? Pearl didn’t know. She watched, transfixed as Goldrush took herself for a ride, wondering for the first time what that all would look like from Bull’s angle — breasts jiggling right in her face, bare legs on either side of her thighs, arms reaching around her to grip the back of the chair they sat in. Pearl literally didn’t know if she wanted that, because she had not lived in a world where that was an option until about twenty seconds ago. She would have to consider it, which seemed easy enough, as she now didn’t know if she’d ever think about anything else again.

As Pearl sat watching with rapt attention, Jack’s hand slid over the hand of Pearl’s that was still cupped around Jack’s breast. With their fingers stacked, Jack encouraged Pearl to keep playing with her nipple. Pearl was torn — she wanted to look at the beautiful landscape that was Jack’s body, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the athletic scene in the middle of the room. Goodness, that was a well-made chair.

After several very intense moments of this, Goldrush leaned back and shouted a string of obscenities before collapsing against Bull’s body. Bull wrapped her arms around Goldrush and stroked her bare back roughly. She said something to Goldrush so quiet that Pearl couldn’t make it out, but it made Goldrush laugh. She planted a quick but fierce kiss on Bull’s lips before lifting herself off. The insides of her thighs were wet and slick. She staggered a couple steps before she fell down on a nearby beanbag chair, still laughing. With her legs wide, Pearl and everyone could see right between her thighs, how pink and damp everything was there.

Someone Pearl didn’t know handed Bull what looked like a baby wipe, which Bull proceeded to use to clean the blue dildo. When she was done, she tossed the wipe to the side and gave her cock a smack. It jiggled a few times before settling back upright at its obscene angle. “All right, who’s next?” she said with a challenging smirk.

“Come on,” Jack said, patting at Pearl’s side like she wanted Pearl to get up.

Pearl felt all the blood leave her body. “No, no, I–” Her eyes darted to the nearest exit. Hadn’t Fiddle said she’d get Pearl out of there if she needed? Pearl’s eyes darted around, looking for her. Hadn’t Jack also said earlier that Pearl shouldn’t be harassed like this? Why was she doing it now?

“Oh, no, baby, don’t worry. It’s not your time in the hot seat yet.” Jack kissed her cheek and stood, then offered her hand to Pearl to help her up from the couch. “I need a spotter.”

Feeling dread in the pit of her stomach, Pearl nonetheless took Jack’s hand and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. “Don’t make me…”

Jack squeezed Pearl’s hands in hers. “Nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want. Nobody. I just figured you might be able to lend me a hand. Get you a nice view. You can keep all your clothes on while you do it. Sound fair?”

Well, okay. If staying dressed was part of the deal, it couldn’t be that bad. Pearl nodded.

Their lesbian audience cheered and wolf-whistled as Jack walked over toward Bull, Pearl following shakily along behind her. The feeling of being the center of attention was something Pearl associated more with schoolyard bullies than she did with anything nice. Still, she couldn’t deny the appeal of a much more supportive atmosphere now. “Oh shit, Jack’s here to show us how it’s all done!” shouted someone, to general laughter and acclaim. Okay, so they weren’t expecting Pearl to get on. That was comforting.

Bull looked up at Jack with a look that Pearl could only describe as challenging. It was different from how she’d looked at Goldrush, or even at Pearl. Despite the height difference, those two were seeing eye to eye. “You want me to go easy on you, so you can show off for your girl?” Bull taunted, giving her dick a slap.

Jack just laughed and put her hands on Pearl’s shoulders. “This look like a girl who’d be impressed by easy?”

Yes, Pearl figured she looked exactly like the kind of girl who’d be impressed by easy. She was fairly certain that she was so much of a marshmallow here among these actual trail-hardened ranchhands that the difference could be seen from space. For heaven’s sake, Jack had impressed Pearl just by not wearing a bra. The bar was unfathomably low.

Yet Bull cackled at Jack’s comment. “Oh, is that right?” Bull said, looking past Jack to Pearl. “You give me a minute to destroy your girlfriend’s pussy here, then your daddy’s going to take real good care of you. I’ll treat you right.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Jack told Pearl. “She’s a mean old dyke.”

“Damn right.” Bull reached over enough to give Jack’s ass a sharp smack, making Pearl think of the way she’d seen some of the other ranchhands goading horses back to into the stables after the trail ride.

Jack looked at Pearl and smiled, cupping Pearl’s cheek in her hand. “You just watch, baby,” Jack said sweetly, her voice low enough that no one else in the room would have heard. “You can look at whatever you want and touch whatever you want, okay? If you want to do it, it’s all good. I want you to.”

Pearl wasn’t sure she believed the instruction, but she understood it. She caught her lips together between her teeth and nodded.

That was when Jack leaned in for another kiss, this one without any initial modesty. Jack went open-mouthed for Pearl, who found herself responding in kind, throwing her arms around Jack’s neck for stability as she did. The hoots from the other women made their approval clear, a kind of approval Pearl literally could not have imagined two hours ago. She was not only kissing a girl, she was getting away with it, and more than getting away with it, she was being encouraged to do so. Somehow, in here, all the rules had been reversed, and this was right.

Jack reached up and took Pearl’s hands in her own, then guided them down to the hem of her undershirt. “I want you to strip me.”

“Okay.” Pearl nodded. She wasn’t sure about her ability to perform in all arenas here, but she could at least do that. She took Jack’s shirt in her hands and peeled it up over her body, over her strong arms and short-shorn head, until Jack was as topless as Bull was. Pearl wasn’t sure what to do with the shirt, but before she could do something normal like ask , an urge overtook her. She found herself lifting that shirt to her face and taking a deep breath. The sweaty scent was disgusting and ambrosial all at once.

Jack barked a laugh of surprise at that, locking her fingers together behind her own neck. “Jesus, you’re going to be the death of me, you know that?”

Pearl did not know that. She had honestly been braced for disapproval, which is why if she’d been thinking right, she never would have done anything weird like smell a shirt, because who did that? She did, apparently.

“Don’t stop now,” Bull said, stamping her boot almost like a real bull might.

Right, if she really … if this really was going to happen, then other clothes needed to come off. Pearl looked at Jack, who nodded. Drawing in a deep breath, Pearl went for Jack’s belt. There was no fancy buckle there, or anything else Pearl associated with cowboys, just a plain metal fastener. Pearl undid it, feeling her palms start to sweat. Next, she went for the fly of Jack’s jeans, undoing one button after another all the way down. 

When that was finished, she hooked her fingers inside of the waistband of Jack’s jeans — and, for good measure, the waistband of Jack’s underwear. The elastic there felt like the wide band of men’s underwear, not the thin, lacy things Pearl was used to women wearing. She held her breath for a second, then pulled down. Down everything went, down to the tops of Jack’s boots, which Pearl realized then she should probably have taken off first. Well, too late for that now. She held down each of the boots in turn, encouraging Jack to lift her foot from them. When those were taken care of, she helped Jack step out of her pants and underwear, then, for good measure, peeled off Jack’s socks. There, now Jack was naked.

Oh, Jack was naked. Somehow Pearl’s brain had not jumped ahead to that as the logical conclusion of being asked to undress someone. Jack was naked and standing over her, and Pearl was half-hunched down on the floor in a short dress, trying to figure out a graceful way to recover from this position. Fortunately, Jack extended a hand and pulled Pearl to her feet, just as she had from the couch. Except now Jack was naked, and Pearl truly hoped Jack had meant it when she’d said Pearl could look at whatever she wanted, because Pearl sure was looking.

What precisely was it about Jack that was so appealing? Pearl couldn’t say. She did know that Jack wasn’t supposed to be appealing, not in the ways women were supposed to be. Women were supposed to be smooth and powdered creatures of curves and soft angles. Jack was squarely built and muscular, not nearly the thick figure Bull cut, but another decade or two of ranch work might have her looking not far off. The thought made Pearl a little weak in her knees

Pearl expected that Jack would turn and assume the same position Goldrush had, face to face with Bull. Instead, Jack held up her hands, palms flat and fingers slightly splayed. Pearl imitated the gesture, pressing their palms together. She let Jack interlace their fingers. Jack gave a little tug, and Pearl stumbled forward, startled by the pressure. Jack shook her head. “You’ve got to hold me.”

Pearl nodded and squared her feet, bending her knees a little. This time, when Jack tugged, Pearl was ready — and, she supposed, that meant they all were. Jack took a step back until she was straddling Bull’s hips. Looking Pearl dead in the eye and grinning, she lowered herself onto Bull’s dick.

Bull laughed and smacked Jack’s bare ass. “She’s really trying to impress you,” Bull said to Pearl, wiggling her eyebrows.

“Shut the fuck up,” Jack said, though the words mostly came out as a single moan as she sunk down inch by inch. Up close, it was even clearer how thick Bull’s cock was, how much of an effort it was to take it all the way in. Pearl wasn’t just there for show; Jack was holding on tight, depending on Pearl for leverage as her powerful thighs let her down slowly.

“Yeah, she wants to show you what a good fuck she is,” Bull continued to tease. “How’s she doing? You like what you see?”

Wide-eyed, almost unable to breathe, Pearl nodded. She could just see between Jack’s brown thighs how the blue dildo was disappearing inside of her, up into her… Well, Pearl found she didn’t even have the right words for what was happening. All the ones she knew — blossom, hoo-hah, the somewhat nebulous “down there” — seemed less than up to the task at hand. Maybe Pearl had a blossom between her legs, but Jack didn’t. Jack had something far tougher and more dangerous. Jack had something that could go Bull-riding. Pearl wanted to know more about it.

Jack exhaled loudly as she settled, having gone as deep as she could go. “Give me a minute, you old bitch,” she growled under her breath at Bull, who smirked yet surprisingly stayed perfectly still in response. Jack made a little whining sound and bit her lower lip as she shifted her hips into place.

“You know,” Bull said, addressing Pearl again while Jack got comfortable, “this isn’t even my biggest boy. You really want to get stuffed sometime, I can do you bigger.”

Oh, that — sure, Pearl supposed that made sense, that Bull could have more than one. And if she could have more than one, why not have some be different? Different sizes, different colors. A flesh-real one couldn’t do that. She wondered if Bull had other harnesses, too. Different ones for different occasions. Different fits. Different effects. Different ways of making a girl wet.

She was focusing on that to keep from the detail of bigger . Jack was clearly having trouble enough already getting all of this one inside of her. The thought of bigger was making Pearl a little lightheaded in ways she couldn’t quite follow. What would bigger look like? What would it feel like?

Bull caressed Jack’s hip, but she kept her eyes on Pearl as she talked. “You like that view, huh? Like seeing your girlfriend panting with my fat cock in her cunt?”

A cunt, yes, that was probably what Jack had there, not a gentle and misleading euphemism. Jack had a cunt, and right now it was getting filled, just the way she clearly liked it.

“Play with her tits a little,” Bull instructed Pearl. “Get her nice and slick. She’s going to need it.”

Now how was Pearl supposed to do that? Both of her hands were occupied, and with the way Jack was gripping her for balance, it didn’t feel like she should let go just yet. But there was something else. The height was a bit awkward, but Pearl could make it work. She hunkered down a little and licked her lips, then opened her mouth and bravely took Jack’s knobby little nipple in her mouth.

“Oh, Jesus, yes,” Jack gasped, squeezing Pearl’s hands almost tight enough to hurt. She leaned back against Bull, baring more of her body for the ease of contact. “Fuck, fuck me, yes.”

Apparently Pearl was doing something right, so she decided to keep it up. She closed her lips around Jack’s nipple, suckling a little bit in a way that made Jack squirm. Pearl had never imagined someone’s breasts could be so sensitive. She couldn’t help wondering what other parts of Jack were just as sensitive, especially when touched by Pearl’s mouth. She wanted to find out.

After a minute, Jack began to move, not just squirming and settling, but actually move. With her long legs braced on either side of the chair, Jack slowly began to lift herself up over Bull’s lap, sliding Bull’s cock out of her as she did. Before it could get all the way, though, she reversed direction and began to sink again. This close up, Pearl could hear the wet skin-on-rubber noises the contact made. She couldn’t quite keep her mouth on Jack’s nipple with the way Jack was moving now, so Pearl stood upright again, giving Jack the leverage she needed to keep going.

Holding tight to Pearl’s hands, Jack went for a ride. It made Pearl think of the way Jack had ridden Cinnamon, except that now Jack’s thighs weren’t straddling the leather of a saddle, but the denim of Bull’s lap. This was the sex that horseback riding made people think of. In the warm room, sweat beaded on Jack’s body, making her freckled brown skin glow. Jack laughed breathily, glancing back over her shoulder. “That all you got?” she goaded Bull.

Bull responded by grabbing Jack’s hips and pulling her hard back down, a motion that made Jack’s eyes all but roll back in her head. “Little bitches don’t get to tease me,” Bull said, her grin wide and clearly dangerous. “You want this ride, Butter Knife? You better earn it.”

“Limp-dicked girly little cow — oh, fuck !” Jack’s attempts at insulting Bull were cut off as Bull yanked Jack’s body back down again, this time as Bull lifted her own hips to meet the thrust. Jack was gripping Pearl’s hands now for dear life. When she could focus again, she looked up at Pearl, her eyes soft and half-lidded. Pearl might have thought her drunk if she hadn’t seen Jack walk clear-eyed to where she was right now. Her loose, slightly liquid state was the result of no substance more intoxicating than Bull’s cock.

During a few of the more adventurous lovemaking sessions early in their marriage, Pearl had found herself, by request, in positions similar to these. They had seemed to her at best an interesting change of pace, at worst something to be endured, and either way nothing to seek out. She wondered if it would be different with Bull underneath her, or Jack, or someone else here. Somewhere she felt like … maybe like something more than an accessory. Something other than a warm hole to be used when convenient. Something that mattered.

She mattered now. She was, in fact, vital to this entire operation, for if she weren’t there, Jack would have fallen over. As it was, Jack leaned close and laughed as she bounced her hips on Bull’s dick. “You having fun?” she asked Pearl, licking her lips.

Having fun was another concept Pearl didn’t really associate with sex, so she was surprised to find herself nodding. She felt like she should say something, but she didn’t know if she knew enough words to say that she could still taste Jack of her lips. So Pearl kept quiet.

Bull, however, expressed no such restraint. “Finally you decide to get that ass working for me, lazybones.” She swatted Jack’s behind with a satisfying smack, and when Jack turned back to glare at her, Bull just laughed some more. “Don’t play. You know you love getting some daddy dick.”

“More like grand daddy dick, you old dyke,” Jack shot back, which made their audience ooh with mock-scandalized tones. That was right — they still had all eyes in the room on them. It was strangely easy to forget, given how arresting the sight in front of her was.

Bull looked over Jack’s shoulder again at Pearl, clicking her tongue in the way she might get a horse’s attention. “Give her a little help, will you?”

Pearl froze like the proverbial headlight-stunned deer. “Help?” Wasn’t she doing that already?

Bull lifted one of her hands and wiggled her fingers, then reached around Jack’s body, right down to the thatch of curly hair below her belly button, just before the pink folds of her … her cunt opened up wide. “She likes having her little pussy rubbed while I fuck her,” Bull said, giving a brief demonstration with her stocky fingers, dipping down into the wetness of Jack’s lower lips in a way that made Jack moan. “She likes having it eaten while I fuck her too, but that may be a little more than you’re up for tonight. That’s okay, though. You can give a girl a hand, though, can’t you?”

Okay, yes. Pearl could do that. But to do it, she’d have to get close. She stepped up between Jack’s spread legs, until Jack let go of Pearl’s hands and gripped her shoulders instead. Pearl let her hands wander down Jack’s body, down the soft folds of her belly, down into that thatch of curls — and then below, to where dry skin gave way to slick wetness. She gasped a little as she realized her fingers were rubbing over Jack’s little rosebud, or whatever it was that Jack had there that wasn’t one of the gauzy euphemisms Pearl had been trained to think of women as having instead of real body parts.

Jack gasped too, though for a different reason. “You’re doing so good, baby, you’re doing so good.” She pressed her face forward until she could nuzzle it right between the rises of Pearl’s somewhat lackluster bosom. Jack didn’t seem to mind their size, though, especially not as she found Pearl’s nipple and rubbed her lips across it. Even through the fabric of her dress and bra, the contact was shocking enough to make Pearl squeak. Jack just grinned and did it again, this time opening her lips so she could graze the little bump with the hard edges of her teeth. “You’ve got such pretty little titties. I bet I could do this long enough to make you scream.”

Pearl wasn’t taking that bet. She continued rubbing Jack between her legs, imagining that she was touching herself that same way. Not that Pearl had much practice on that front either — it was another of those things nice girls didn’t do, apparently. It was just that the longer she stood here, touching Jack’s cunt with her hand, the less Pearl felt like a nice girl at all.

“I’d let you fuck me too, like this,” Jack said, half-panting against Pearl’s chest as Pearl fingered her. “God, I bet you’d be good at it. Pretty little thing with a big hard dick? I bet you could do me right, every night.”

Pearl had never wanted anything more in her life. She wanted to feel Jack — to really feel her, skin to skin, sweaty and laughing and bouncing as she looked down at Pearl like Pearl was the only thing that mattered in the world. She worked her fingers harder against Jack’s folds, slipping back enough that she could feel the place where Bull’s dildo slipped in and out of Jack’s body. Pearl wondered if she could stick her fingers in there too — not now, obviously, it was occupied, but later. She wanted to know if Jack was as warm and welcoming inside as she was out. She wanted to be the only reason Jack was gasping and moaning like this.

Bull reached around Jack’s body again, this time to grab at one of Jack’s nipples, which she handled roughly between her thumb and forefinger. “Fuck!” Jack cried, reaching for Pearl and kissing her hard. Pearl didn’t know what else to do, so she kept kissing and kept rubbing as Jack bounced harder, taking Bull for all she was worth. It was a rough, athletic pace, one that couldn’t last long. Jack clung hard to Pearl and pressed her hips down one last time. Her body started to shake, and it was all Pearl could do to hold her and keep moving her fingers as Jack came hard right on Bull’s dick, trembling and shouting with pleasure.

And then, strangely, it was over. The tension of the moment broke as Jack leaned back against Bull and laughed, then turned her head to give Bull an almost gentle peck on her lips. “See?” said Bull. “Your daddy treats you right.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jack said, getting a hand in Bull’s face to push her away. “If you’re my daddy, then I’m an orphan.” She made a small grunting sound, then leaned forward to grab Pearl. “Okay, baby, hold me up, because I don’t know what my legs are doing right now.”

Pearl grabbed Jack’s arms for balance, keeping her steady while Jack rose up enough to remove the blue dildo from inside of her. It was soaking wet now, dripping with … with so many fluids that Pearl had never thought much about. Jack got her bare feet back flat on the floor, feeling about as wobbly as Pearl had when she’d first dismounted from Gentle Giant. Sometimes a ride just took it out of a girl.

With a little sigh, Jack brushed Pearl’s hair back from her face and leaned in to kiss her, this time much more tenderly. It was a kiss not of “true love,” or whatever that was supposed to be, but a grinning kiss of affection and gratitude. Jack was happy that Pearl had been there, that kiss said. Even now that it was all over, she still wanted to touch Pearl and hold her. Even when she didn’t need her anymore, necessarily, Jack still wanted Pearl.

It was at that moment the thin thread Pearl hadn’t even known she’d been holding on by snapped.

To Pearl’s incredible embarrassment, she burst into tears — not just little polite tears, but choking, soul-deep sobs. She pitched her body forward against Jack’s. She needed to stop this right now. It was mortifying. It was inexplicable. Why was she crying? She had no reason to be crying. She had just witnessed the sexiest thing she had ever seen in her life, and she’d even gotten to be a part of it, so what was there to cry about?

Except that was exactly what there was to cry about. It was over and it was never going to happen again. All of this fun, all of the play, it all belonged to something that she couldn’t have. She was a tourist here, same as she was at the dude ranch proper. It was make-believe for a little while, and then she’d go back to her real life.

Pearl didn’t want to go back to her real life. The more she thought about walking back to the guest house and climbing alone into her bunk, the harder she sobbed. The idea of going back to work on Monday made her almost hyperventilate. She tried to say she was sorry, that there was no reason she should be behaving like this, but she couldn’t speak. She could barely breathe. She was making a sorrowful little keening noise, and she couldn’t stop, and it was absolutely the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to her in her life. God, they must all hate her now. They must all hate her so much, coming in here and behaving like this, ruining their party, ruining everything with her lack of spark and her terrible manners and her … just her everything.

“Oh, hell,” Bull said, which was laughably mild compared to the filthy things that had come out of her mouth earlier. She snapped her fingers. “Blanket!”

Not five seconds later, a blanket was being draped around her shoulders, a big thick horse blanket that felt almost as heavy as Pearl herself did. That was another thing that was wrong with Pearl, she didn’t know horses. Everybody here knew horses, but Pearl had to be put on their easiest horse because she didn’t know anything. No wonder she didn’t belong here. She had failed at horses, just like she’d failed at violin lessons and dance classes and marriage and being a good daughter and having friends and having a spark and everything .

The world spun a little then, and it took a second for Pearl to realize that, no, the world had stayed where it was and she had spun. She was horizontal now, but not on the floor. She was wrapped up in that heavy blanket, being held in a pair of heavy arms. Bull’s arms. Pearl hadn’t been carried like that since she’d been a child. “Where’s Lefty now?”

“In her room, I think,” answered a voice Pearl didn’t know, or maybe she just couldn’t hear clearly over how loud she was crying. She was still crying. What on earth was wrong with her?

“Get her up,” Bull said. “Tell her she’s needed.”

Oh no, Pearl had messed up so much that they were taking her to the owner now. They were going to get the owner to kick her out of the ranch and tell her never to come back. She’d have to hitchhike, or worse, call someone. She was going to have to explain to her coworkers why she wasn’t with them on the drive home — assuming, of course, that they even noticed she was gone. Pearl didn’t know which option was more humiliating.

She felt a hand brush back her hair from her tear-streaked face. “It’s okay, baby,” said Jack, even though it clearly wasn’t. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

Pearl tried to tell her it wasn’t, because it had never been okay in the first place. Nothing had ever been okay, and at best it was now not-okay in a new and different direction. For a moment she’d been stupid enough to believe otherwise. She was stupid and she deserved this for being stupid.

“You got her?” asked Jack.

“I got her.” Bull’s arms drew Pearl to her chest as though Pearl weighed nothing, which Pearl knew was objectively untrue, given how many diet magazines her mother left lying conspicuously around whenever she visited. Oh no, Pearl was even getting tears and snot all over Bull’s shoulder. She was disgusting. Bull was surely disgusted with her, and was going to drop her any minute now, and Pearl would deserve that too.

Instead, Bull held her tight as turned toward the door and started walking.

~*~

The room they entered was dark, except for a single reading light above an armchair. Pearl was deposited tenderly on a loveseat across from the armchair, still all wrapped up in that blanket. She didn’t have the energy to make herself more presentable, so she leaned miserably back against the cushions. Crying made her head hurt. It made her everything hurt.

After a quiet moment, Pearl realized the armchair wasn’t empty. Instead, there was a little old man sitting square in the middle of it — no, a little old woman, Pearl realized, despite her short, wispy haircut and flannel shirt. Pearl knew almost immediately that she was looking at one of the illustrious Double L’s herself, Lefty.

Lefty looked right back at her. She looked small in that large chair, dwarfed by the puffy comforter covering her legs. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, and she peered at Pearl through them for a long moment, long enough that Pearl started to worry that she herself was doing something wrong. Had she been brought here to put forth some kind of explanation, maybe some introduction? Was something supposed to be happening that Pearl wasn’t smart enough to initiate? Was she just embarrassing herself all over again.

Then Lefty dog-eared the page she was on, closed her book, leaned forward, and asked Pearl with almost grandmotherly pleasantness, “Do you know what a facsimile machine is?”

Pearl stared at her for a moment, caught completely off-guard by the question. “Um, yes,” she managed. She sounded terrible. “Yes, I … a fax machine, yes.”

“Yes.” Lefty nodded. She folded her hands atop the book; they were bare except for a plain gold band on her left hand. “Good. They said you came with the office women. I had hoped it would mean you might know how to use a facsimile machine.”

Why were they even talking about this? Pearl turned around to see behind her, but Jack was in shadow by the door, far enough away that Pearl couldn’t quite make out her expression. This night was not getting any more normal.

“I have been told we need a facsimile machine,” Lefty continued, “as our distance out here makes it difficult for paperwork to get to us in a timely fashion. That as long as we have telephone wire service, we could use it for a facsimile machine.”

That did match with what Pearl knew about fax machines, yes. She’d had no small experience with them during her time filling in for their receptionists’ sick days. They weren’t complicated machines, but they could be finicky. At least Pearl had never committed the cardinal sin of loading the document the wrong way. Knowing that was at least fifty percent of knowing how to fax something.

Lefty resettled the blanket around her legs a little, tucking herself in despite the warmth of the evening. “I don’t know anything about facsimile machines or telephone wires, or anything about businesses and ledgers. I know horses, and I know land. I can find girls who know horses and land. But sometimes it’s harder to find girls who know businesses and ledgers and facsimile machines. Managing those was always Larry’s job.”

“Your … your partner, Lariat, right?” Pearl said softly, so glad she’d been paying attention earlier in the evening. “I heard about — I’m sorry for your loss.” Was that an appropriate thing to say? Pearl hoped so.

The smile that curved Lefty’s wrinkled lips was fond. “You remind me of her. Doesn’t she remind you of her?”

“She does,” Bull agreed from behind Pearl. Pearl hadn’t even realized she’d stayed after dropping Pearl off. She hadn’t known Bull would care enough to hang around. She hadn’t figured anyone would. “Same kind of sweet thing.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Lefty agreed, nodding. Absently, the fingers of her right hand brushed her ring. “Sweet. Ever so sweet. We met on the Coney Island boardwalk. She slipped out on a double date her parents had put her on, in her white sundress and pink-painted nails, and asked if she could share my cigarette. And right then I knew, that was going to be the girl I married.”

Oh no, Pearl was crying again. She hated this. She wanted to rip out her eyes to make it stop. She settled for wiping her cheeks with the blanket she’d been wrapped in, hoping that it was enough in need of a wash already that a little more wouldn’t hurt. She was crying now for everything that didn’t get to happen, for all the love stories that ended too soon or didn’t even get to start at all. Why was she doing this? She was so good usually at keeping everything under control. She hadn’t shed more than a few tears at her grandparents’ funerals. She hadn’t even cried when her ex-husband had told her he’d wanted a divorce from his terrible, sparkless failure of a wife. Why was she crying now?

“What’s wrong?” asked Lefty, who sounded like she already knew.

What wasn’t wrong? Everything was wrong. Pearl’s entire life was wrong. Her life was a pair of shoes she’d been told would fit if she just tried hard enough, so she’d walked around in them for years and years and still they never had, and then she’d just gotten a glimpse here of a pair that actually fit her feet, and now she was going to have to go back to the others knowing that there was something better out there, something she didn’t get to keep.

A pair of hands settled on Pearl’s shoulders — Jack’s, strong and warm. Pearl leaned her head to the side, pressing her cheek against the backs of Jack’s knuckles. “So, um.” Jack cleared her throat. “Maybe we could talk about–“

Lefty shook her head. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“There’s not?” moaned Pearl, who was embarrassed about what a sad whimpering sound those words made. She was so pathetic it wasn’t even worth talking about. What a disaster.

“I don’t think so,” Lefty said, looking straight ahead. Her cataracted eyes somehow managed to make Pearl feel more keenly seen than she’d ever felt before. “I think the talking’s done. The sweet one here just has to tell me whether or not I should purchase a facsimile machine.”

Why was she asking Pearl ? Just because Pearl knew how to use one — knew, in fact, how to do many of the tasks of keeping an office running — didn’t mean she was an expert on whether or not the Double L could stand to buy one. Sure, it would probably help their business, especially as far out from regular mail delivery as they were. Pearl could imagine the ways it could aid in the day-to-day running of the ranch. From what she knew, the machines themselves weren’t difficult to maintain, or even to set up in the first place. All they needed was someone around who knew how to…

Pearl’s eyes went wide. She stared slack-jawed at Lefty, who just laughed in return. “I think the girl’s got it,” she said, clapping her wrinkled hands together as Jack’s grip on Pearl’s shoulders became possessively tight.

~*~

“That dude ranch?” Mona leaned over the little desk as Pearl cleared out her personal items. They all fit in a shoebox. It was strange to think of having been here six years, and being able to erase herself so easily. Next week there’d be a new girl in her place who’d have no idea about who’d been there before. “How did you know they were hiring?”

“I was talking to some of the employees,” Pearl said, figuring it was close enough to truth to count. “They mentioned they needed an office manager.” That was all the explanation that Pearl had prepared, which she’d told her employer when she’d put in her two-week notice. She hadn’t made a mention of it to anyone else, in order to avoid the fuss of goodbye parties and other awkward insincere send-offs. Pearl hadn’t even expected anyone to find her packing up after five on a Friday, except that Mona’s ride had gotten a flat and was going to be a little late getting there.

“Huh.” The tone of Mona’s voice could have meant anything from polite disinterest to jealousy that she hadn’t been the one to find out about the position. There was no way for Pearl to tell her that Mona might not be a good fit for the job. “And you sure you want to go live all the way out there? I don’t know, you don’t seem like a dude ranch person.”

There was also no way for Pearl to tell Mona that Mona had no idea what a dude ranch person was really like. “I think I could be.” Pearl smiled as she stood and smoothed out her tight pencil skirt over her pantyhose. This might be the last day of her life she wore either of those to work.

She didn’t look back as she walked out of the building. Nothing of her belonged to that place. She wondered if anyone would much notice that she’d gone. Well, at least Mona could tell them it had been a happy departure, to keep the gossips at bay. And if they wanted to talk about her in her absence, so what? She’d never hear them all the way up in New York.

Pearl tried not to jump for joy as she stepped off the bus and saw the pickup truck parked outside her apartment building, the one with the Double L’s logo stenciled on the side. She could see it already had some familiar cartons stashed in the bed. She willed herself to keep her steps steady as she crossed the street, hugging her box of things to her chest like it could keep her heart from leaping out. She strolled up to the front door of her building just as Reckless was coming down the stairs with a box in her meaty arms. “This all of it?” Reckless asked.

“Everything there, that was it,” Pearl told her. The few fragile or heirloom things she’d accumulated over the years, she’d left with her mother, probably to go to her brothers’ wives someday. She’d given most of her work wear and kitchen supplies away to the Salvation Army. She’d never had much in the way of books or trinkets. That left her with a life that could fit in just a couple boxes and two suitcases. “When are we going?”

“Ready when you are,” Reckless said with a wink, taking the box from Pearl’s arms and stacking it on top of the one she was carrying. “She’s upstairs getting the last of it. Go get changed. If we get going soon, dinner’ll still be warm when we get there.”

Pearl nodded and scurried up the stairs, her heart pounding like her footfalls as she raced to her fourth-floor walkup. The reason she’d never hesitated about her decision, not for a moment, was standing there in her doorway, holding the handle of a suitcase and grinning. Pearl flew up the last few steps and threw herself into Jack’s arms so hard she lifted herself off the ground.

“Hey, hey, baby,” Jack said, kissing her hair and wrapping her arms around Pearl’s waist. “You miss me?”

The three months it had taken to get everything sorted for the move had been the longest of Pearl’s life. Every night she’d fallen asleep thinking of the sound of Jack’s voice, the scent of her skin. “I missed you so much,” Pearl said, shaking as she held Jack tight. It was real, it was all actually real.

“Me too.” Jack gave her one last squeeze and stepped back, then handed Pearl the suitcase. “Okay, go get your jeans on. Unless you feel like riding all the way in that.”

Pearl did not. “Won’t be half a second.” She unzipped the suitcase and pulled out a pair of blue jeans and a soft flannel shirt, both proud parts of her new wardrobe. As quickly as she could, she slipped out of her work clothes and peeled off her hose. She left it all folded on the corner of the bare mattress. Whoever came to live there next could do what they wanted with them. They belonged to a life Pearl had outgrown.

She pulled on a pair of tennis shoes — Jack had promised they’d go boot-shopping together later — and drew her hair back in a ponytail. There, she was ready. Maybe if Mona could see her now, she’d reconsider just how much of a dude ranch person Pearl was. Or maybe not yet. Maybe there was still even further for Pearl to go. She’d have to find out when she got there.

Before Pearl could pick up the suitcase, Jack stopped her and held out a little gold-foil paper box. “What’s this?” asked Pearl.

Jack wiggled it a little, enticing her to take it. “Little welcoming gift from all of us. Go on, open it.”

Pearl did, and was startled to see that it was jewelry — a necklace, more specifically. A thin gold chain held up the word Baby , carved in cursive. 

“Bull’s idea, actually,” Jack said, with a sheepish little shrug, giving credit where credit was due. “She thought it’d look pretty on you.”

Pearl hardly knew what to say. “For me?”

“It’s not for you, it is you.” Jack laughed and stuck her hands in her pockets. “New life, new name. That’s how it works. Unless you want to pick something else–“

Pearl — no, Baby, that’s who she was now — shook her head. “I love it,” she promised, handing Jack the clasp and turning her back. She’d been Jack’s Baby from the start; now she could be everyone else’s too. “Will you put it on for me?”

As soon as the metal of the pendant started to warm to the heat of her body, she knew in her bones that this was right: her decision to leave, her new name, Jack, the Double L, everything. Jack’s hands brushed the back of her neck, warm and strong. She was placing herself into those hands with no fear. After all, catching her was the first thing they’d done. 

Ten minutes later, a white pickup truck with the logo of the only dude ranch in the Atlantic Northeast was heading north on I-95. They wouldn’t be there until after dark, but no matter how late they got in, dinner would be waiting, and everyone else waiting up with it. In the center of the cab, the newest member of the Double L’s all-female staff closed her eyes and rested her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder. Her fingertips traced the letters of her new name as she settled in for the drive that would take her to a life that would, at last, fit.