Layce Gardner - More Than a Kiss

More Than

A Kiss

Saxon Bennettand

Layce Gardner

This is a workof fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product ofthe authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance toactual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales isentirely coincidental.

Published bySquare Pegs Ink

Text Copyright Saxon Bennett and Layce Gardner

All rightreserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any formwithout the authors permission.

Editor: KateMichael Gibson

Katemichaelgibson.com

Jordan Falls Outa Window

Thisstory takes place in the lovely state of Oregon in acity of green, politically enlightened hipsters who love coffee,trees, and have the most amazing system of bike trails. I am describingPortland, of course. Theres music and museums and a humongous bookstore andthe ocean is nearby. It is April, the star of spring, the season of love. Verylittle of this has anything to do with the story, but I wanted to let you knowthat it is a good travel destination especially in the spring. The people inthis story like Portland and liking where you live makes for happy people. However, the people in this story are not too happy because they are still lookingfor love and their errant search for love is the point of this tale.

Disclaimer: No trees were harmed during the making of this book.

MeetJordan March. Jordan lived in the Piedmont Historic District in an old Victorian house fourstories tall that had belonged to her grandmother. Jordan was an artist atheart. Unfortunately, her heart couldn't pay the electric bill or buygroceries, so she labored as a writer and illustrator of childrens books. Shehad three childrens books available to buy on Amazon. These books had mostlygood reviews. However, her sales numbers did not reflect the mostly four andfive-star ratings. Her books kept getting edged-out by her competitors, JamieLeigh Curtis and John Lithgow. She had a tendency to get upset over that, soit was best not to mention it.

Jordanwas a sapphist. She was also lonely. She hadn't had a girlfriend for a year. And she had talked herself into thinking she liked it that way. You see,Jordan didn't know she was lonely. She thought she was in a slump. Two slumpsactually - a creative slump and a sexual slump. Jordan had a theory thatstated that creative juices and sexual juices flowed from the same fount. Ifone dried up, so did the other. She hadn't written or drawn anything decent in276 days. She hadn't been laid in 277 days. You can see how she came up withher theory.

Jordansgreatest fear was that she wasnt a great artist. That the bright flame ofartistic passion she felt burning in her breast was actually heartburn from allthe coffee she drank.

Atthe beginning of this story, Jordan was sitting in her attic studio, bent overher drawing easel with chalk smudged across her forehead and oil paintspattered on her arms. She was surrounded by paint cans, piles of raw lumberand stacks of drywall because her crumbling Victorian house was in the throesof remodeling.

Jordanwas drawing and muttering to herself about Jamie Leigh Curtis and Activiacommercials when a remote control car careened around a corner, balancing on onlytwo wheels. It flipped over twice and miraculously ended up on all fourwheels. It sped off again, hitting maximum speed within a few feet and poppeda wheelie without slowing down. It hit a bump, skyrocketed in the air,performed a slow-motion somersault and landed upright in just enough time tocrash into a wall.

Mr.Pip jumped to his feet and shrieked. He arched his back. His tail wentrigid. He bared his fangs and hissed. The little remote control car backedup, slowly turned to face Mr. Pip, and accelerated. The cat screeched andleapt onto the drawing table, knocking over a glass of iced tea.

Jordanjumped to her feet as the tea splashed all over her lap. "Dammit!" She grabbed the nearest book, a dog-eared, yellowed paperback copy of MobyDick, and threw it at the speeding car. She had not been reading MobyDick. But she had tried to read it several times over the years. She hadeven gotten so far as the Chapter Ten, A Bosom Friend, but couldn't makeit any further. Not one to give up though, Jordan kept the book on her to-readpile right next to her easel on top of the copy of Catch-22 that shecouldn't get through either.

So,Jordan threw Moby Dick at the car but only succeeded in taking outanother hunk of crumbling drywall. In the space of three seconds, the car had attackedthe cat and the cat had attacked the tea and the tea had attacked Jordan's lapand now Jordan was attacking the car.

Jordanyelled, "Edison! I'm trying to work up here!"

Sorry!"Edison yelled to Jordan. "Im trying to fix it!"

MeetEdison Burnett. Edison was short and rather plain looking, but not without her charms. As theFrench are wont to say, she had a certain je ne sais quoi. Edison triedto overshadow her plainness by dressing and behaving oddly. She was under themistaken impression that the stranger she was, the more people would love her like how people with lousy comic timing think thatthe louder they say the punch line the funnier it is.

Edisonwas Jordan's ex-lover and still-roommate. Actually, classifying her as anex-lover would be overstating the case. Edison and Jordan had only had sexonce and Jordan didn't remember much about it as they had spent the eveningsampling what was left in her grandmothers abundant wine cellar. Despite thewine and the drunken sex, Jordan and Edison remained best friends.

At this point in the story,Edison was sitting in her bedroom/laboratory, two floors below Jordan's atticstudio. She sat in a rolling office chair in the middle of the room wearing apair of sunglasses that weren't really sunglasses. They only looked like thetype of mirrored sunglasses that cops always wore in the movies. They wereactually monitor screens. Edison held a remote control in her hands and wasmoving the little joystick in tiny circles with her thumb. Edison had inventeda remote control that you could control from a distance of up to one mile. Byinstalling a teeny tiny camera on the front of the remote control car, shecould see from the car's point of view on the monitor in her sunglasses.

Edisonhad invented dozens of things. All of which were abject failures with theexception of sex toys. Edison was quite well known in lesbian circles as themother of sex toys. She thought this invention might be her best one to date. Andif she could just fix the glitch that made the camera see things in reverse left was right, right was left, and sometimes up was down and vice versa thenshe could patent her invention. Edison was ironing out the bugs on thelong-distance remote on the car. If she could master the car, then she wasgoing to up the ante and use it on a vibrator by connecting the glasses to thefiber optic network to the gadget itself. She could then market the item tolong-distance couples. That way a lesbian could sit in her hotel in Paris andmake love to her partner in Omaha.

Though,as Jordan so eloquently pointed out, "Why the hell would a lesbian inParis want to hole up in a hotel room to have weird long-distance sex through acamera when there's all those sexy French girls who are notoriouslybisexual?"

Edisonbelieved in her idea, though. She thought it was a breakthrough in the adulttoys market and one that would put her on the map right next to Steve Jobs. That is, if Steve Jobs didn't work with computers and instead worked with women'spersonal massagers shaped like the male organ.

WhileJordan was upstairs with a tea-sodden lap, Edison was frantically working theremote control and seeing things on the sunglasses monitor upside down. Shedidn't know if the car was upside down or if something had happened to thecamera in the car and it was upside down. Then again it could be anotherglitch in the glasses. She pushed the little joystick on the remote control tothe forward position. Nothing happened. Maybe the car's wheels were stuck.