More Than a Kiss

More Than

A Kiss

Saxon Bennett
and

Layce Gardner

This is a work
of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of
the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is
entirely coincidental.

Published by
Square Pegs Ink

Text Copyright ©
Saxon Bennett and Layce Gardner

All right
reserved.  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form
without the authors’ permission.

Editor:  Kate
Michael Gibson

Katemichaelgibson.com

Jordan Falls Out
a Window

This
story takes place in the lovely state of Oregon in a
city of green, politically enlightened hipsters who love coffee,
trees, and have the most amazing system of bike trails.  I am describing
Portland, of course.  There’s music and museums and a humongous bookstore and
the ocean is nearby.  It is April, the star of spring, the season of love. Very
little of this has anything to do with the story, but I wanted to let you know
that it is a good travel destination especially in the spring.  The people in
this 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 looking
for love and their errant search for love is the point of this tale.

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

Meet
Jordan March
. 
Jordan lived in the Piedmont Historic District in an old Victorian house four
stories tall that had belonged to her grandmother.  Jordan was an artist at
heart.  Unfortunately, her heart couldn't pay the electric bill or buy
groceries, so she labored as a writer and illustrator of children’s books.  She
had three children’s books available to buy on Amazon.  These books had mostly
good reviews.  However, her sales numbers did not reflect the mostly four and
five-star ratings.  Her books kept getting edged-out by her competitors, Jamie
Leigh Curtis and John Lithgow.  She had a tendency to get upset over that, so
it was best not to mention it.

Jordan
was 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 slumps
actually - a creative slump and a sexual slump.  Jordan had a theory that
stated that creative juices and sexual juices flowed from the same fount.  If
one dried up, so did the other.  She hadn't written or drawn anything decent in
276 days.  She hadn't been laid in 277 days.  You can see how she came up with
her theory.

Jordan’s
greatest fear was that she wasn’t a great artist.  That the bright flame of
artistic passion she felt burning in her breast was actually heartburn from all
the coffee she drank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry!"
Edison yelled to Jordan.  "I’m trying to fix it!"

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

Edison
was Jordan's ex-lover and still-roommate.  Actually, classifying her as an
ex-lover would be overstating the case.  Edison and Jordan had only had sex
once and Jordan didn't remember much about it as they had spent the evening
sampling what was left in her grandmother’s abundant wine cellar.  Despite the
wine 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 attic
studio.  She sat in a rolling office chair in the middle of the room wearing a
pair of sunglasses that weren't really sunglasses.  They only looked like the
type of mirrored sunglasses that cops always wore in the movies.  They were
actually monitor screens.  Edison held a remote control in her hands and was
moving the little joystick in tiny circles with her thumb.  Edison had invented
a remote control that you could control from a distance of up to one mile.  By
installing a teeny tiny camera on the front of the remote control car, she
could see from the car's point of view on the monitor in her sunglasses.

Edison
had invented dozens of things.  All of which were abject failures with the
exception of sex toys.  Edison was quite well known in lesbian circles as the
mother of sex toys.  She thought this invention might be her best one to date.  And
if 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 – then
she could patent her invention.  Edison was ironing out the bugs on the
long-distance remote on the car.  If she could master the car, then she was
going to up the ante and use it on a vibrator by connecting the glasses to the
fiber optic network to the gadget itself.  She could then market the item to
long-distance couples.  That way a lesbian could sit in her hotel in Paris and
make love to her partner in Omaha.

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

Edison
believed in her idea, though.  She thought it was a breakthrough in the adult
toys 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's
personal massagers shaped like the male organ.

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

Edison
jumped when she saw the face of Mr. Pip in a gigantic close-up in her glasses. 
She yelped.  His face appeared gargantuan this close-up.  It was like sitting
in the front row of a 3-D movie.  Mr. Pip bared his teeth and hissed, spraying
feline spittle all over the camera.  A giant cat paw swiped at her.  Edison
screamed, toppled over backwards in her chair and the remote control skidded
across the wooden floor and under the bed.  The force of the throw wedged it
between the bedpost and the wall with the joystick stuck in the 'Go' position.

Meanwhile,
upstairs in the studio attic, Jordan was mopping up the tea spill with a crusty
paint rag when she heard a loud crash from downstairs that rattled the paint
cans and shook the already crumbling plaster.

"I'm
okay!" Edison yelled.

The
little car was turned upside down on the carpet, its wheels spinning crazily. 
Mr. Pip crouched in his attack position, eyeing the car from the safety of
beneath the drawing table.

Jordan
was angry enough to kick Edison in the butt.  But since she couldn't kick her
friend, she did the next best thing.  She threw down the rag, marched across
the room and kicked the little car.  It flew across the room, smashed into the
wall, bounced, rolled over twice and landed on all four wheels.  The wheels
spun for a second, then dug into the carpet and the car popped a wheelie and
took off.

That
wouldn't have been so bad except the car was aimed right at Mr. Pip.  Mr. Pip's
eyes widened in horror and he turned tail and ran.

The
car gained on him.

Mr.
Pip ran in a circle and jumped over the table.

The
car went under the table.

Mr.
Pip jumped over the sofa.

The
car went under the sofa.

Jordan
ran across the room to head the car off.

The
car caught up to Mr. Pip and ran over his tail.  Mr. Pip howled.

"Run,
Mr. Pip, run!" Jordan yelled.

Mr.
Pip screeched, dug his claws into the carpet and sprung forward.

The
car followed.

Jordan
jumped in front of the car.  It crashed into her leg.  She yelped in pain,
grabbed her shin and hopped on one leg in a circle.

Mr.
Pip jumped up on the drawing table safely out of reach of the car.  The car
rammed into the table's legs.  Mr. Pip squalled and jumped, shredding Jordan's
artwork with his claws.  Confetti flew in every direction.

"Edison! 
I'm going to kill you!" Jordan screamed.

A
streak of gray fur that was Mr. Pip ran by Jordan with the car in hot pursuit.

"My
joystick is stuck!" Edison yelled back.  "I'm not responsible!"

Jordan
chased the car in circles around the room, cussing with each breath.  Every
time she almost caught the car, it would either change direction or disappear
under the sofa.

Like
in an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, Jordan chased the car; the car chased Mr. Pip;
the car chased Jordan; Jordan chased Mr. Pip; and Mr. Pip got confused and
chased his tail.

Edison
ran in circles in her bedroom.  She was seeing what the car camera saw:  Cat
butt; Jordan butt, shredded paper flying, more cat butt, under the sofa, over
the rug, Jordan's foot; cat face.  She worked frantically to un-stick the
joystick as she spun herself in circles chasing the car in her monitor.  Then
she got dizzy and toppled face-first onto her bed.

Back
in the attic studio, the melee continued until Jordan officially put an end to
it.  She hadn't played soccer on her high school team for three years for
nothing.  She brought her leg back and as the car raced by, and let loose with
a kick that Mia Hamm would have admired.

The
car sailed out the open window.

Goal! 
Jordan celebrated with fists pumping the air and a dance that involved several
exaggerated pelvic thrusts.

She
stopped dancing when she heard a whirring noise behind her.  She turned around
and the car bashed into her toes.

How
could that be?  She had kicked the car out the window.  Hadn’t she?  If it
wasn't the car she kicked, then what was it?

"Mr.
Pip!" she screamed.  She ran to the open window and leaned out.  "Mr.
Pip!"

"Meow!"

Jordan
looked up.  Mr. Pip was dangling from a tree branch right outside the window. 
He looked like that inspirational poster from the 1970's.  The one with the
kitten hanging from a tree limb with the caption "Hang in there,
baby."

Jordan
cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, "Hang in there, baby!  I
mean, hang in there Mr. Pip!  I'll be right there!"

Edison
ran into the studio to find Jordan leaning out the window and talking to Mr.
Pip.  Jordan reached out the window, stretched her arm as far as she could, but
her fingertips were about a foot too shy.

Edison
took off her sunglasses.  She blinked her eyes and shook her head and the
dizziness subsided.  "What're you doing?" she asked.

Jordan
leaned further out the window.  "Mr. Pip is dangling from the tree
branch.  He's going to fall if I don't grab him first."

“How’d
he get out there?  Why is he out there?” Edison said.

“I
kicked him.  It was an accident,” Jordan said defensively.  “This is all your
fault.”

“It’s
my fault you kicked the cat out the window?”