Page 24

That was her car payment and her normal electric bill taken care of this month! Or, put another way, more money for shoe shopping.

Okay, she decided, Max could live.

She turned to head back to the living room and gasped. Lisa was standing right next to her.

“Jesus, you scared me!” she hissed, smacking Lisa’s arm.

“Why did you never tell me?” Lisa asked, still smiling like an idiot and looking at Sally with the same look people have when they spot their favorite movie star walking down the street.

Sally knew she needed to set the record straight but just as she was about to open her mouth to do so, she realized what a mistake that would be. Lisa was perhaps the most indiscreet person Sally knew. In fact, as much as Sally loved Lisa to bits, she also knew that telling her best friend any sensitive information was the same as taking out an ad on TV during the Super Bowl. If Sally now told Lisa the truth about what she and Max were doing, it would spread through the Lesbianverse like a dry-brush fire and not only would Max’s writing career be finished but lesbians here in Carlsbad might actually throw rotten fruit at Sally whenever she went outside.

She needed to keep the truth from Lisa.

“Um…because you have a big mouth and would have told everyone,” she stated, walking past her and back into the living room.

“But I’m your best friend!” Lisa whined.

“My best friend who has a big mouth and would have told everyone,” Sally reiterated.

“So all those times we were reading Jillian Ashley books together…”

Fuck!

Sally thought quickly.

“I was just pretending because obviously I had read them already because obviously I wrote them. Have you eaten?” she asked, wanting to change the topic. “Because I’m starving and was about to order something.”

“Ooh, let me do it for you!” Lisa exclaimed. “What kind of best friend to Jillian Ashley would I be if I didn’t buy her dinner?”

Sally sighed and plopped down on the sofa. Lena finally made an appearance from wherever she had been hiding in apparent effort to determine what all the fuss was about. Evidently, the cat deemed the ruckus not worthy of her time because after glaring at the two women, she went back from whence she came.

Sally allowed Lisa to buy Jillian Ashley a pizza and while they waited for it to be delivered had to explain to her friend when it was she decided to start writing lesfic, where she got her ideas from and how it feels having so many fans. It was basically Amy’s interview all over again, but Lisa was acting as if countless lesbians hadn’t already heard these answers now; that Sally was giving her an exclusive peek into the mind of the great lesfic author.

“How did you come up with Jillian Ashley as a pen name, though?” Lisa eventually asked.

That one threw Sally and she felt a momentary panic. She couldn’t use Max’s story of how he came up with the name, her own mother being named Leslie and her own sister being named Camille.

“I, uh, just randomly picked some names off a baby-naming website.”

“Oh, I see!” Lisa said, still in awe, as if Sally had just imparted to her the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle.

“So, have you made a lot of money off the books?” Lisa asked.

Five-hundred dollars.

“Um…I mean, yeah, sure,” Sally said, thinking of the image of Max’s sales charts from the other day.

“Are you going to, like, buy a Porsche or a beach house or something?”

“Jesus, Lisa! Next you’ll be expecting me to purchase a private plane!”

“What else is there to do with money, Sally?”

“Oh, I don’t know…Pay off the mortgage on this place. Invest it. Save for retirement.” Assuming there would be

more than five-hundred dollars coming, of course. And the only way to ensure that was to keep the ruse going.

Sighing, Sally sat back and wondered how many more of these ridiculous questions she was going to have to answer tonight.