Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain: A lesbian romance (Rosemont Duology Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Books by Eliza Andrews

  Dedication

  Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain

  A lesbian romance novel

  by Eliza Andrews

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  ©2017 Eliza Andrews, all rights reserved, worldwide. No part of this book may be reproduced, uploaded to the Internet, or copied without author permission.

  The author respectfully requests that you please support artistic expression and help promote anti-piracy efforts by purchasing a copy of this book only at author-authorized outlets. If you are viewing this book without having paid for it, you are pirating this creative work.

  Piracy is stealing.

  Cover credit:

  Thanks to the wonderful photographers at Unsplash.com for providing their hard work and amazing photos for free, without the need of licensing or attribution. Your work is appreciated.

  Other books by Eliza Andrews:

  To Have Loved & Lost: A new adult lesbian romance

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M7YF05A

  Paradise: A (short) lesbian romance

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07212Z4GD

  FREE SHORT STORY:

  http://authorelizaandrews.com/readersclub

  Learn more about Eliza:

  http://authorelizaandrews.com

  To anyone who’s ever been through a mid-life crisis.

  You’ll be fine.

  You can’t outrun your past. If you try, it will chase after you in a silver DeLorean.

  The last thing Anika Singh wants is to go home to Ohio, but when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, what choice does she really have? She’ll go home if she has to, but she won’t stay long. Because all Marcine, Ohio, has for Anika is bad memories — memories of being an outcast, even within her own family, and memories of a perfect love that was soured by betrayal.

  Jenny’s betrayal. Anika’s high school sweetheart-turned-ex-wife. Anika hopes she won’t run into Jenny… Or maybe she hopes she will run into her. It’s hard to say.

  Then there’s Amy, a dark-haired beauty Anika meets on the flight to Cleveland, who happens to be in Marcine for a friend’s wedding. Nothing serious can happen with Amy; she’s only going to be in town for a week. Which means that falling for her would be stupid, especially given the fact that Jenny might be available again.

  But Anika is famous for doing stupid things.

  A story flavored with curry and cornbread, family drama, and a whole lot of f-bombs, Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain will have you laughing, crying, and grimacing as Anika gets chased around by a silver DeLorean and attempts to answer the age-old question: Can you ever really go home again?

  This lesbian romance is rated R for

  A lot of really bad language

  Sexual content

  Adult situations

  “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

  — Albert Einstein, Letter to Besso’s Family (March 1955)

  “The middle of life has these cul-de-sac days. In your twenties you think, Surely I am going somewhere, and later — as in now — you think, Nope.”

  — Leslie Daniels, Cleaning Nabokov's House

  Chapter 1: I fucking hate airports.

  Monday

  Mom has cancer.

  The thought irritates me, nags at my brain the same way a mosquito that gets trapped in your room at night and circles and buzzes and dives and bites and basically won’t leave you the fuck alone.

  Mom has cancer mom has cancer mom has cancer mom has cancer mom has —

  Shut. Up.

  It’s bone cancer, by the way. Osteosarcoma. In her left hip bone. I looked it up a couple of weeks ago, right after my dad called me, voice trembling, to deliver the news. I’m not saying I believe every single word on the Internet, because, hey, it’s the fucking Internet, the same miracle that gave us fake news and videos of people getting their dogs high and September 11th conspiracy theories, but the medical sites seem reliable enough. Which sucks, actually, because they all agree that osteosarcoma, at Stage IIB, which is what Mom has, isn’t good. It’s not a death sentence, not yet, but it’s definitely not fucking good, either.

  I know it’s a strange thing to wonder, but you know what I keep thinking? Why her hips? Why those things? My momma’s always been thick and strong, and she squeezed four babies out of those hips. They’re the things she propped us on when we were little, holding us in place with one hand while she flipped bacon with the other, the things that double as door-openers and drawer-closers and the thing she’d pop to the side and put a hand on when someone got in trouble with her.

  The only thing bigger than my mother’s hips is her mouth, and as I slouch down grouchily in the blue plastic airport seat with my bad, British attempt at coffee, I have this image of her mouth getting even bigger to compensate for the chunk of hip they’re going to chop off in her surgery next week. I imagine her mouth expanding, stretching on her face, full lips all warping out of fucking control, getting so big her chin and neck practically disappear, and then she says something, and her voice has gotten louder, stronger than ever, and what she says to me is,

  “Anika! Get over here! Right fucking now!”

  Well, okay, so she wouldn’t say “fucking.” She always complains that I say it too much. Which is probably true. But Anika-get-over-here-right-now, that’s her favorite thing to say. I thought “Get Over Here Right Now” was my middle name when I was a kid. And getting cancer, it’s like the ultimate way to say it, right? It’s like her way of sending me a NastyGram all the way from Ohio to tell me, Girl, get over here. Come home. Right this instant.

  I sigh, take a sip of my coffee.

  Ohio.

  The place is a fucking rubber band. No matter how far I manage to pull away, it always snaps me back into place eventually.

  I take another sip of coffee.

  Fucking Costa. The British don’t understand anything about coffee. I could get better coffee f
or half a Euro out of a vending machine in Switzerland than I can in all of fucking England. But I drink it anyway. It’s caffeine, and I need the caffeine, because I don’t even have to guess about what kind of day it’s going to be. It’s going to be a long, shitty fucking day. The rain drizzling down on the Manchester Airport tarmac says it, the monitor above me flashing DELAYED says it, the coffee says it.

  And the cancer says it. Well, not the bone cancer so much as the words “chemotherapy” and “followed by surgery” and “possibly metastasized” that come with it.

  I’m sitting there, thinking all this, in what is basically the airport waiting room — a bunch of uncomfortable blue vinyl seats facing a bank of departure monitors like we’re all at the fucking DMV waiting for our numbers to be called — when a girl walks by, meets my eye, gives me a small smile.

  I try to smile back, but I’m sure it comes across more like a grimace. I recognize the girl from my flight over here from Basel; she sat a few rows ahead of me on the plane. She’d smiled when I walked past her boarding the plane, too, like she knew me. But I didn’t smile back that time; I was busy maneuvering my gym bag ahead of me, stooping to avoid whacking my head, trying not to let my big, awkward fucking body embarrass me more than it already naturally does. When she’d smiled at me on the plane, honestly my first thought was, “Is she laughing at me?” But then I’d realized no, just because a pretty woman smiles at you doesn’t mean she’s laughing at you.

  Now I watch her go as she weaves through the crowd towards the escalator. She looks like she’s about my age, maybe — late thirties? Early forties? — but it’s hard to tell because she’s got this fancy business suit on, the kind that’s designed to make older women look younger and younger women look older, and plus she’s short and her hair’s cut to where it’s short in the back, a little longer in the front. My first thought when I see the haircut is “Jane Lane,” who, if you have no idea who the fuck that is, was a character on this late-90s MTV cartoon called Daria. (My sister Dutch discovered Daria reruns on late-night cable and we used to watch it in high school sometimes. Google it.)

  Anyway, that’s what I think when I see the woman from the Basel-Manchester flight again — Jane Lane from Daria. Jane Lane, but Tinkerbell-sized and smiley and probably a hell of a lot less surly.

  I lose Jane Lane in the crowd when she disappears up the escalator and into the food court above. There’s some kind of bar on the upper level, and the faint scent of a meat-and-potatoes-and-tomatoes English breakfast wafts down to me. On the tables closest to the escalator, I see half-empty pints of beer.

  Brits. It’s not even ten in the fucking morning, and they’re already on their second pint.

  This guy wanders over to me — young, doofy, wearing an ’80s-style, orangish vest over a button-down shirt, hands shoved into the pockets of his tight-rolled jeans.

  His name is Marty McFly, and by the way, he’s a figment of my fucking imagination.

  Remember him? Back to the Future? Actor Michael J. Fox as Guitar Hero Marty, the high school loser who gets dragged along by his elderly mad scientist bestie through space and time in a silver DeLorean with batwing car doors? Marty saving his parents through time traveling back to 1955? Biff the bully? Dorky George McFly? Pretty girl Lorraine? Please tell me you know who I’m talking about. Not knowing Daria… that I can understand. But surely anyone under the age of seventy-five who didn’t grow up on a fucking television-free hippie commune knows Back to the Future. If you don’t, you need to stop what you’re doing and go watch all the Back to the Future movies with a quickness. Right now.

  I’ll wait.

  Anyway, back in the Manchester airport, (imaginary) Marty McFly sits down next to me, slumps into his seat, hands still in his pockets. I glance over at him, look him up and down, remember how short the shrimp actually is. Sitting next to me like this, we could almost pass him off as my ten-year-old son.

  If he was real, that is. And if I were as white as he is, or he was as Blasian as I am.

  He nods in the direction of the escalator. “Smell remind you of anything?”

  “I don’t want to talk about my childhood, McFly,” I say (but I don’t say it out-loud because he’s only in my imagination and I’m weird but not fucking delusional).

  He inhales deeply. Keeps talking like I never said anything. “Smells almost like home, doesn’t it? Like Mom’s kitchen?”

  “I told you. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I don’t tell him why I don’t want to talk about it, but he already knows why. I don’t want to start crying like a big fat baby right here in the airport waiting room.

  He points up at the monitor in front of us. “Flight’s still delayed.”

  “I can see that.”

  He jerks a thumb towards the escalator. “May as well get some ‘brekkie.’ And you know… the English usually do ale better than coffee.”

  “It’s not even noon. You’re suggesting I drink before my flight?”

  “It’ll make the day go faster.”

  I groan. “Nothing will make this day go any fucking faster.”

  He makes a face like he’s offended. “Who’s the expert in time travel?”

  I eye him. “And if I go upstairs for breakfast… You’re going to take me back in time again, aren’t you? Whether I like it or not?”

  Marty McFly stands up, gives me a shit-eating grin. “Maybe. What’s wrong with a few childhood memories? What’s wrong with going back to your mother’s kitchen for a few minutes?” He extends a hand.

  I sigh, but then I grasp the hand he offers anyway, almost tugging him into me as I haul myself to my feet. I shake my half empty coffee cup, drop it in the trashcan — excuse me, rubbish bin — next to the escalator.

  “Lead on, McFly.”

  Chapter 2: Back to the Future.

  Back to the fucking future (or past — I never understood that stupid title. I mean, why would you say “back to the future” when most of the time they were going into the past?):

  Set the flux capacitor back-in-time clock on the DeLorean for seventh grade, and the location to the kitchen table inside the brick ranch at the corner of Maple and Greene Streets in Marcine, Ohio.

  Ready? Here we go.

  Momma slides still-crackling bacon and fried potatoes onto my plate out of the cast iron skillet she holds with a scorched oven mitt dotted with little pink flowers. I push my bacon and potatoes to the side, reach for the bowl of scrambled eggs.

  “More eggs?” she says skeptically when I pile them onto my plate. Her tongue clucks against the roof of her mouth. “Lord, child. How you stay so skinny, eating like that?”

  I shrug my shoulders, because how the hell would I know? All I know is that I’m hungry, all the time hungry, and even though I already had one big pile of eggs and one helping of bacon, I know I’ll be trying to sneak snacks by the time Social Studies hits if I don’t put a little more food in my stomach.

  “She eats like a pig,” quips my sister Dutch. Her name’s not actually “Dutch,” it’s “Dechen,” but I had trouble saying that when I was little, so she’s been Dutch since I was two.

  I make a face at my sister that my mother can’t see, opening my mouth wide so she has a good view of my mouthful of half-chewed scrambled eggs and bacon.

  “Disgusting pig,” Dutch amends.

  “Dutch,” Mom snaps, and she doesn’t need to say anything else, just gives Dutch that look that’s warning enough, the look that says You say something else like that, you goan get popped.

  Dutch waits til our mother looks away, mouths “pig” at me one last time as if I needed a final reminder of her opinion of me. I answer with a mighty eye roll like a good younger sister and turn back to my plate.

  Truthfully, I can’t stand to look at Dutch. At fourteen, two years older than me, she’s everything I’d like to be but am not. She’s pretty, for starters, and she does it without even trying. Her hair isn’t as kinky and frizzy as mine, and it cascades over her s
houlders in thick, artful waves, perfectly framing her round, tawny face and high cheekbones.

  She tells me my hair could be like hers if I’d only try a little harder, or let her mess with it, but I know the truth: In the DNA Power Ball Lottery, Dutch won long and lanky and elegant; I won Godzilla.

  Even if she wasn’t the oldest of us four kids, Dutch would be in charge anyway. She’s got that unique power to command that only the pretty girls have, an over-confidence that’s both snide and irresistible simultaneously, that repels at the same time you just can’t fucking help but admire it.

  “PJ! Gerry!” Momma calls, booming my younger brothers’ names through the kitchen loudly enough to make my ears ring. “Y’all get in here and eat!”

  Y’all get in here and eat. They are the words that bind my rainbow family together. In dal bhat and cornbread, we were the same; in all other ways, different.

  Dutch shoots me another look, and this time it’s the conspiratorial kind that siblings share over the antics of their parents, and I answer with a carefully muffled chuckle. Mom’s ten minutes-to-eight yell for our brothers to Y’all get in here and eat is as predictable and consistent as the eggs and bacon and fried potatoes themselves.

  My two younger brothers meander into the kitchen like child zombies, bleary-eyed and bickering with each other in indecipherable whines and groans. PJ — Pathik Junior — is a round, brown butterball, and even though he’s only ten, you can tell he’s already destined to be short like my father but thick like my mother. Of all of us, his features are the blackest — flat nose, round eyes, black hair stuck to his scalp in thick curls, and yet despite this, he is the one who most desperately wants to be Nepalese. He’s got the double triangles of the Nepalese flag on his bedroom wall, a cheap little Buddha statue surrounded by sticks of incense stuck into bowls of rice sitting on his dresser. It’s like he thinks he’s going to accessorize his way out of his blackness and into his Nepalese heritage.