Best Lesbian Romance 2014 Read Online Free Page B

When I saw Sawyer come up the stairs with that wooden crate my grandfather had painted the cobalt of a blue glass jar, my heart was tight as a knot in cherry wood.
    I told her that the things inside had belonged to my grandfather, that I kept them only because they smelled like him, like the cardamom of his favorite tortas and the loose tobacco he rolled into paper. They would mean nothing to me if it weren’t for that, I told her. It could have been anything, I said, as long as it held that same spice and earth.
    She believed me. They always believe you if you want it enough.
    And it wasn’t all a lie. Everything in that crate my grand-father gave me, and every time I took it down from the top of the closet, the whole apartment smelled like my grandmother’s pan de muerto. That’s why I never took it down unless I knew there was enough time to let that perfume slip out the open windows before Sawyer got home. The few times I spent so long fingering its contents that the scent was too heavy to dissipate, I made tortas de aceite with enough cardamom that Sawyer didn’t notice.
    Sometimes I longed to show her everything in that orange crate, to spill its contents onto our bed and give over its secrets. But I didn’t want to lose her. “Never let the boy think you are smarter than he is, m’ija,” my mother told me. “You never keep him if he thinks you’re smart.” When I met Sawyer, I thought the same went for a woman who dressed like a boy.
    My mother hated that my grandfather gave me so many books. He told me I was smart and that if I did not read enough I would get lonely. “You want to know things,” he said. He could tell by the ring of blue-black around the brown of my irises. So he brought me a book each time he came to visit. One month a book of Irish poets who sang of a land so green it broke their hearts open. Another, a dictionary, because whenever I asked my mother what a word meant she said, “You ask so many questions, you stop being pretty one day,” and told me to stir the Spanish rice. For my birthday, a hardcover about the birds of the cloud forests where he met my grandmother. Its glossy pages shined with the emerald of hummingbirds and the blue tourmaline of the quetzal ’s tail feathers.
    He had brought me books for two years when my mother told me I was getting too smart. “No boy likes you if you talk like that,” she said. “ Todas aquellas palabras.” All those words. It was two months before my thirteenth birthday, and she bleached my hair to the yellow of the masa we used for tamales.She said making me blonde would make up for all those books because my hair would keep boys from seeing those rings of midnight blue around my eyes.
    Even after my grandfather was gone, my mother kept dyeing my hair. When I moved out, I did it myself, a force of habit as strong as biting my nails or reading la Biblia before bed. I knew she was right. I needed the maize-gold of my hair to hide what my grandfather had seen. He might have loved me for it, but no boy would.
    When I moved in with Sawyer, I had to get rid of most of my grandfather’s books. I could only keep as many as I could hide. Choosing which would stay was harder than picking which doll and which two dresses to take with me when I was a little girl and my family had to evacuate for the canyon fires. It was harder than how I never opened my eyes all the way in front of Sawyer, afraid she’d see those rings of blue. She always thought it was how I flirted with her, half closing my eyes like that.
    A book about chaos theory had taught me that a butterfly flitting its wings at just the right time off the coast of my abuela ’s hometown in Guatemala could turn the tide of the Mediterranean Sea. It sounded so much like a fairy tale, that little winged creature pulling on the oceans as much as the moon, that I grew drunk off dreams of las mariposas and a million coins