Falling for Jillian Ashley: A Carlsbad Village Lesbian Romance

“Hey, good morning,” she said, discovering Amy in the living room of the apartment, sitting on the floor, tapping away on her laptop which was on the coffee table.

“Good morning!” Amy said, not sparing Sally a look. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No. How long have you been up?” Sally sat on the couch behind Amy, her legs on either side of the woman on the floor. She leaned forward and draped her arms over Amy’s shoulders, resting her cheek against Amy’s head.

“About an hour,” Amy replied.

Sally blinked.

“Jesus! Babe, that means you hardly got any sleep!”

“I slept fine, I swear. I just knew I wanted to get back to work on this presentation.”

Sally frowned. Almost right from the start of their first date last week, Sally had sensed that Amy was a driven person, but did she ever just relax? Fine, the presentation was important…Sally got that; but would it all go down the toilet if Amy had stayed in bed a couple of more hours and gotten some more rest?

She mentally shrugged.

Let Amy do Amy.

“Well, I don’t want to disrupt you,” Sally told her. Actually, she did want to disrupt her. Amy looked incredibly cute wearing an oversized pink satin button-up pajama top and what looked like nothing but panties underneath because her lean legs were bare all the way up to her hips. And she had the most adorable pair of pink fuzzy socks on her feet. “How about I make you some coffee and then I’ll head out?”

That finally made Amy look away from her laptop’s screen.

“Oh my god, would you do me the super biggest favor on the planet?” she asked.

Sally laughed.

“Name it.”

“Run to La Vida Mocha for me and get me an Amy’s Jet Fuel? Pleasepleaseplease?”

“That’s a thing?”

Seriously? The woman has a coffee drink named after her?

“Trust me, it is. And get yourself whatever you want. You can take money from my purse.”

Laughing, Sally said, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll get it. But let me know when you have a million bucks in your purse; then I’ll take some money from it.”

“You’re the best,” Amy said, returning her focus back to her work.

Amy’s place was literally a three-minute drive to La Vida Mocha. If Sally had realized that, she would have walked it. That super-gorgeous barista, Vanessa, was behind the counter when Sally arrived and it didn’t escape her notice that even though she had been a loyal Starbucks customer for years now, she couldn’t name a single barista who worked there. Yet she knew Vanessa’s name after only one coffee date in this place.

Scanning the chalkboard menu mounted on the wall above the coffee machines as she approached the counter, Sally didn’t see what she was looking for and so it was with some trepidation that she said to Vanessa, “Um…this might sound crazy but I need an ‘Amy’s Jet Fuel?’”

Thankfully, Vanessa was anything but flummoxed at the request.

“Oh, is this for Amy?” she asked, already punching the order into the ordering thingamajig. “How’s she doing? She must be busy if she didn’t come herself.”

“You know her well,” Sally replied, adding that she had left Amy tapping away on her laptop.

“Well, I rarely see her without her laptop,” Vanessa replied. “And can I get anything for—”

Suddenly, Vanessa’s eyes went wide above the Darth Vader face mask she was wearing.

“Hey, wait a minute,” she began before blushing and giggling. “You’re Jillian Ashley! Even with the mask I recognize you from Amy’s show!”

By now, Sally had resigned herself to the fact that apparently, every woman she was going to encounter from now on was A: a lesbian and B: a huge fan of Jillian Ashley books; huge enough to have watched the ultra-exclusive interview with Amy Broadnax.