Falling for Jillian Ashley: A Carlsbad Village Lesbian Romance

“Oh my god, you are hopeless!” she said. “Babe, a week off will do you good. I mean, I know I’ve only known you for, like, five minutes, but I can already tell that you work too hard.”

“I know…”

“So, what are you going to do on your vacation?”

Amy shrugged.

“I was thinking of taking a trip to San Francisco. I love it there and since I can’t do any of the European traveling I had wanted to do, it’s the next best thing. Have you ever been?”

“Oh my god, the clam chowder at Scoma’s?” Sally enthused. “I love it! My grandparents live in San Francisco and so I’ve been up there lots.”

Their server arrived with their pizza and throughout dinner, the two women talked San Francisco: favorite restaurants, favorite things to do, various misadventures on the BART or Muni. Amy told Sally about her plans to visit her favorite art museums and also to just wander around the city, taking photos with her SLR camera.

“SLR? That’s, like, one of those cameras that doesn’t have cellphone attached to it, right?” Sally asked.

Amy laughed.

“Precisely,” she said. “Photography is a hobby of mine.”

“When are you going to leave?” Sally asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe next weekend. My boss says she won’t let me back in the office building if I put it off too long.”

“Well, I can’t wait to see all your pictures when you get back.”

Sally really was happy Amy was taking some time off. Well, she was happy that Amy was being forced to take some time off. The woman was a workaholic. Nonetheless, Sally was also realizing that she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to see Amy while she was up north. This new relationship of theirs was fun and exciting. And hot. Okay, it had only been a week and Sally knew she needed to keep that in mind because virtually all new relationships started off fun, exciting and hot. The trick was keeping it that way when one week eventually morphed into three and three weeks eventually morphed into two months and two months eventually became six.

So, she knew she had to temper her expectations.

But, Sally also knew that her and Amy just clicked. Like, incredibly well. Sally could remember in 8K-level clarity that exact moment she had first locked eyes with Amy over the internet just before the podcast interview started. And it wasn’t just that Amy was beautiful—Sally literally locked eyes with scores of beautiful women on a daily basis…That first moment she had locked eyes with Amy had been as if Sally had suddenly seen her future and in the time since then, Sally had sensed that feeling growing stronger and stronger.

Admittedly, Amy’s need to always be doing something was a little alarming but Sally was thinking that maybe she had simply come into Amy’s life at one of those crazy-hectic times everybody goes through occasionally. Maybe, once Tuesday’s meeting had passed and Amy had her week in Frisco, Sally would discover that her new girlfriend was actually not as tightly wound as she could seem to be.

Chapter 25

On Tuesday afternoon, Amy was elated.

No, scratch that.

She was fucking elated!

Her and Makeda were driving back to Carlsbad from San Diego in Maked

a’s Cadillac after meeting with Supervisor Edelmann and they had knocked it out of the park! The discussion with Edelmann had been a meeting of like minds and all the work Amy had done to prepare for it paid off. Edelmann had determined to be the champion for amending the San Diego County constitution to include equal rights for women, telling Amy and Makeda that if she could count on their organization to help with the lobbying, she was certain she could get enough support to make it happen.

But Amy and Makeda wanted to do even more and as soon as they had started the drive back north, had begun strategizing on how to engineer a grassroots campaign that would harness the power of women in San Diego County as a voting bloc and really draw attention to this effort.

“But first, you’re going on vacation,” Makeda reminded her as they approached the exits for Del Mar.

Amy rolled her eyes but didn’t argue, knowing that battle was lost.

“I know,” she said.

“It will give the rest of us a chance to prove to you that we can survive without you for a little while,” Makeda joked. “Next week I don’t want to see you. Will it be a staycation or are you going somewhere?”

“San Francisco,” Amy answered, reminding herself that she still needed to book the trip. Because she hated long drives, she wanted to fly, so there were airline tickets to purchase, along with finding and booking a hotel. Whenever she traveled to Frisco, she always preferred staying right in the downtown area so she could be near everything. Doing so also relieved her of the hassle of renting a car because she could either walk, Lyft or BART anywhere she needed to go.

In any case, she needed to get all those travel arrangements taken care of and so she resolved that tonight she’d spend time on her Travelocity account.