The Girls Club

  The Girls Club

  By

  Jackie Coupe

  The Girls Club

  By Jackie Couple

  Copyright © Jackie Coupe 2007 – 2014

  All Rights Reserved.

  Kindle Edition

  Gratefully formatted by Kody Boye at boyekody@gmail.com

  This is a work of fiction.

  No inference to people living or dead is intended.

  The above named author owns the words.

  Foreplay

  For anyone who has read any of the ‘Witness’ novels or the ebook ‘Wallpaper’ this isn’t going to be a similar experience I’m afraid. As much as I love horror this is also something that’s also very close to my heart and I’m guessing if you are reading this it must mean something to you too.

  It has a little blood, a lot of women, and even more love. I wanted the book to have heart, lesbians don’t just have sex all the time, sometimes they kill each other...

  It covers gay erotica, murder, intrigue and some other sub genres I can’t remember.

  I don’t live in LA. Never have. But if I did, this is what I’d want to happen. Well the sex part anyway.

  I don’t know if I have any more books along this vein to come...

  Chapter 1

  Everyone wants to be part of something special growing up. A club. Any kind of club. We all wanted to run one, or be in the best one. For those of us that were lonely enough any would do. We all had our own ideas about what club codes should be, what the tasks of the club members were. The rules in other words. Some rules were solid and could not be broken. Some rules were there to keep others out, people who you didn’t really want in your club, or people who previously hadn’t let you be in there’s.

  As you grow up you learn about different kinds of clubs. Some of them easy to join and some of them not so easy. The ones you couldn’t join would always haunt you, your inferiority being reinforced again and again. There were ‘gangs’ who were done up hoodlums clubs, the bridge ladies who were really just ‘card playing’ clubs. The guys who had thirteen kinds of handshake depending on the date in the fiscal year. ‘Fishing’ clubs. ‘Skiing’ clubs. ‘Shitzu owners’ clubs. Anonymous clubs and public clubs and sometimes ‘exclusive’ clubs that were soooo secret many of the members never really understood what they are part of.

  At the slightest smell of an exclusive club some people turn into social monsters and the back biting begins. At other times you can run right across the face of an exclusive club and have no idea of its existence or that you were momentarily touched by its brilliance.

  Myself? I’m a well heeled young lady with morals, the ability to work hard, the need for a sense of achievement and a good grasp on what is really going on behind the painted masks of people. At times this has served me well and I have avoided some very awkward situations. There were also times though I’m sad to say when this insight has led to myself being seen as an outsider, a distant creature with no more feeling than a common mollusc.

  Ouch!

  I know.

  I’ve been in clubs. Lots. I ran a few of them too. Around about the age of 9 there was this really popular movie, lots of big rigs in it, the name escapes me but they had this tune about having a ‘big convoy‘. We were the ‘truckers’. Four of us on bicycles. What a bunch of idiots we must have looked! Front to back of the convoy, there was me, then my little sis, my friend and then her little sis. We’d go round and round the blocks singing we ‘had us a truckin’ convoy’. Drove the people on the street nuts. Some would stand on their doorsteps shaking their heads as we roared past.

  But we felt good! We felt like people were noticing us, respecting our group behaviour and appraising us with a cautious stare, we were organised children. A feared entity indeed.

  Good times. Easy times.

  A small trip further down the line of years from there, about two perhaps, the four of us entered a different phase. We were ‘Ghostbusters’. Yep. Near the street were we lived there were a few run down and busted out houses, you know the type, rotted floorboards and open rooftops, debris and the smell of plywood that has taken in water many times. Our parents despaired of letting us out because of the sodden mess we came back in. It was heaven! We would pair up. Me and my mate Jess, we evolved easily from the ‘convoy’, being the older of the girls we always went upstairs first, we were supposed to be after all the bravest of the group. The two younger girls, my sister Caitlin, (Kat), and Jess’s sister Melanie would remain on the ground level until we had declared the area ‘all clear’.

  Sometimes this was a long process. There would be about three rooms to check. There would be stolen kisses before the ‘kids’ came up. Jess and me were close. We considered ourselves as ‘sisters’. Not to get the meaning all screwed up, but because we knew how much we loved our sibs, we considered this love to be on a par. See?

  OK then.

  Jess was very dear to me, I would have invented a million clubs to keep her by my side.

  Anyway, it’s safe to say that at 11 going on 12 there were some very interesting times and some obvious differences highlighted between what I wanted and what most other people seemed to want of me.

  But we’ll get to that.

  After the ‘Ghostbusters’, which was just our fancy excuse for dragging our sibs to places to scare the shit out of them whilst keeping our secret trysts, we then had an albeit short-lived ‘My Little Pony’ club. This was Kat’s idea and since she had lived through the many ordeals of haunted houses and not grassed me to my parents for taking her places that we shouldn’t ought to have been, she got her way for once. It was about three months all told from club beginning to merciful end. About the funniest club we’d ever had and certainly the weirdest. The major problem was not being able to find time to be alone, me and Jess. The younger girls constantly needed some ‘pony’ chore carried out. Collecting mown grass was the favourite. Believe it or not that was the club that got us in the most trouble. There would be grass stains head to foot, she liked to ‘canter’ did Kat, there would be mud in the most intimate of places. Her sense of balance never too clever, her version of the pony did a lot of butt sliding.

  After the pony club was booted out by order of the boss, (me), we got back on track, the next club was invariably the last, not that we knew that then. The last club was the ‘camping club’. Me and Kat begged, pleaded, whined, moaned and sulked. We wanted a tent. There were some other big kids being allowed to sleep out and we were ready for that kind of trust. Mum and dad fended us off quite admirably for almost two months. When the summer holidays came they must have just gotten tired of our whining and seeing as there was a field within view of the house they must have thought ‘what the hell could it hurt?’.

  By then me and Jess were smokers. That was a club we had between ourselves. There was no way the younger kids were joining this one. We both liked our carotid arteries intact and processing blood.

  It was a very nice tent indeed. It would have comfortably fitted four grown-ups. We were small and the place to us was a canvas palace. The two younger girls had their ‘my little ponies’, still persistent in the fact that they were the coolest things on God’s earth. Jess and me didn’t care, we made sure we pitched the tent so the entrance faced the opposite direction of the house, this meant we could sit on the extended ground sheet, pull the drape across and be on our own. To their credit the two smaller sisters never made mention of anything untoward, if they ever saw or heard anything they never let on.

  Before your mind descends to gutter level, we didn’t have sex. We didn’t live in enlightened times and our knowledge on the subject was limited. It wasn’t talked about quite so easily as it is now. Hell. We knew what we felt but didn’t know the full extent of
how to show what we felt. Except for when we were alone we never behaved in such a way. As soon as there was no one else in the vicinity some kind of animal took over, I still think it was the strongest thing I ever felt, time hasn’t eroded the feeling of my heartbeat as Jess pinned me to the groundsheet and promised me that we were sisters for life. I won’t ever forget the night she grabbed my left breast and told me that one day we would be together all the time and we wouldn’t have to hide any more. She always was much more grown up than me.

  Still.

  What you learn as you grow up eh? Hind sight is 20/20.

  Her mum and dad divorced, then her mum started hitting the bottle a little too hard. Her dad left, took Jess and Melanie with him. To this day I don’t know where they went. To this day my heart still breaks a little when I remember knocking on her door, my heart always running a little faster than normal as it always did before the days business was through. Her mum had answered the door in an unwashed filthy night gown, she had told me that she loved her kids and her husband had no right to take them away like that. My throat tightened and my chest had felt as if someone was pressing a hand against my ribcage, pressing so hard that it was flattening my heart, it was hard to breathe.

  I was sick. Completely and utterly sick, confused and lonely. I didn’t think I could ever get to like someone in such a way again. There wouldn’t be anyone else who wanted to be as close as that. My young mind worried and gnawed like a mutt with a bone, for months I was in dire straits, waiting for some call or sign that she meant to keep her promises to me. That we were sisters forever.

  It was my first heart break. But as you can probably tell I’m still here so I obviously decided not to throw myself under a train. Although there were times…well.

  I had to close the door on it. Life, although I found it hard at first, went on.

  There were no more clubs after that. Poor Kat had also lost her best mate but Kat was nothing if not feisty, she made new friends. I didn’t. I didn’t have the emotional energy required, besides, a lot of the time my mind was elsewhere. Where was Jess? What was she doing at that moment? Did she miss me half as much as I missed her?

  I never heard any other girls talk of their friends in such a close way. No one ever mentioned ‘kissing’ their friends and about sisterhood beyond flesh and blood. What we had was obviously deemed wrong, otherwise people would talk about it all the time, because it was magic and they wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves. What was the chance of me ever finding someone like her again, someone who didn’t care if it was deemed wrong?

  That’s what I like to refer to now as my ‘crush’ phase. I went from being some kind of social outsider to being an habitual victim of unrequited love. My courage had gone right along with Jess. All through school, juniors and high school there was very little love and affection. It was always lads. And I fucking hated lads. Stinky, arrogant, bullying lads. I couldn’t stand the fact that it didn’t matter how many times you told someone to ‘fuck right the fuck off’ - they saw this as encouragement. So whilst my ‘unrequited’ phase was at its peak I seemed to attract the most male attention. I hated that even more. The fact that they thought I was playing hard to get or being down right coy. The ability to swear like a sailor aroused one particular chap further. I couldn’t understand why in those dim days when girls were shy and retiring, (supposedly), he wanted me and my foul mouth. The first of many men, hot on the trail, a case to crack.

  He followed me around my paper route for months. That’s when I learned my next big lesson. Boys were stupid. And I could have them do what I wanted. I had one lad help me with my papers. I had another lad who always scrounged me a cigarette for my dinner break. I had another lad who carried my bag round to each of my classes for me and eventually I had yet another lad who paid for the pool table when we wagged school.

  I figured this would be my revenge on the world at large for not being allowed the run of my heart. I enjoyed their friendship, the sad fact remained that always, always, they would go for broke and ruin everything by making an idiot pass. I became a little embittered by this, but I figured if they thought there was indeed a case to be cracked and a pot of gold at the end of my rainbow just let them get the fuck on with it. I didn’t have Jess but I had many knights in shining armour.

  I never slept with any of them and you know something else, one of those four young men proposed to me one day years after we had finished school. You could have knocked me over with a feather! He’d been the one I behaved most disgracefully towards.

  Of course there were other proposals but I had already learnt by that point that a man will say anything, anything, to get what he wants.

  And that’s how for a while I had clubs and how I fell out with clubs. The reasons are self-explanatory enough, Jess was my reason for being in a club, any kind of club. And she was long gone.

  I don’t hate men any more. I just don’t like them very much and last time I checked that wasn’t a crime.

  Anyway.

  I had nothing to stay in England for. I answered a ‘wanted’ ad in an online recruitment magazine to be a ‘PA’ in a Los Angeles law firm.

  My journey of self discovery had begun.

  Chapter 2

  She left England in search of high adventure. Working in an office was much the same wherever in the world you happened to be. She didn’t feel she could ever be herself whilst still on the same continent as her lost playmate.

  Upon moving to America and the dazzling city of Los Angeles, she set her mind about making a home for herself. The job was easy enough. A law firm had already accepted her application and were expecting her. A British PA was what the boss had desired. She thought the Brit lingo and accent to be very smart and since it was what most people in NY were doing she wanted in. PA bling. Could you believe it?

  Karen didn’t care. It meant she could turn her life around and the fresh start might be the punch in the guts she needed to get on with being whatever she wanted to be. Since she had never made any such attempts at home to display her true sexuality.

  If that meant meeting and greeting young eligible girls…well, she couldn’t use the excuse anymore that her family might find out, might disown her, might be disgusted with her.

  Besides.

  Just whose fucking life was it anyway?

  The flight had been one long daydream about just how things were going to be different, and not just by a little. By the time the plane landed she had pretty much worn herself out with the endless possibilities she now felt open to her. It was a nice feeling, hope, especially when it wasn’t anything you expected to feel again.

  At the airport a rep of the firm to which she had been hired, Tarkingtons, a timid young girl called Rochelle, had come to collect her and her bags.

  “Hiya”

  “Hi” Rochelle took the outstretched hand and gave it a one time shake.

  Rochelle had all the hallmarks of an office gopher, speak when spoken to, get on and do it, now, now, now!

  She hardly said three words without prompt from Karen all the way into the city. Karen just guessed she was quiet naturally. Besides, there was all this stuff to look at. Buildings that she had to crane her neck to see to the top of, contrails left behind by planes that looked like they were traced in gold as the sun westered.

  “Pretty here”

  “You bet” Rochelle agreed. Karen saw her hand had a tattoo on it, looked like a Roman numeral at the base of her thumb.

  “That’s different”

  “This? Yeah.”

  And that was it. Whatever conversational gambit she threw out got returned with words of one syllable or less.

  They pulled up outside of what looked like flats to Karen’s British eye. They were ‘apartments’ Rochelle said. Rochelle explained how all the buildings were hardly ever more than three storeys high in LA, she mentioned quakes too.

  She took her up to what would be her ‘apartment’ and after depositing the cases Karen ventured to
ask again about the tattoo, if she was going to see a lot of them she wanted to know what they meant. Everything was going to be new here but she didn’t have to behave like a complete tourist.

  “It’s my number”

  “Like your phone number?”

  “No,” she plonked down the smallest case, “My number”

  Rochelle gave her a look then that said that was the end of it.

  “Well. Thanks Rochelle” she stuck her hand out and Rochelle took it. She gave it a double pump, up down, up down.

  “Settle in and get some sleep. I’ll be back in the morning to collect you and take you to Tarkingtons”

  “See you then, thanks for the ride in”

  “You bet!” Rochelle smiled. There was a flicker of something in that smile that hearkened Karen back to days when love was just across the road and ‘judgement’ was a word she didn’t even know how to spell yet.

  Before she could ask anything else of the office gopher she was gone. Karen was almost entirely sure Rochelle was gay. Just like that. She had heard it called ‘Gaydar’ once, you just know when you come into contact with someone what their sexual preferences are and respond in kind.

  And what was that my number, shit? ‘Cattle’ got numbered. It had felt weird to the max since she got here but she would take it in her stride. It had been a long plane ride and some sleep would hopefully make things seem more sensible tomorrow. She would endeavour to find out what Rochelle really was though, it might help her in future to know what ‘American Gay Girls’ looked like.

  The apartment was a little sparse, the views from the windows reminded her she wasn’t in Kansas any more. Her heart fluttered.

  “Interesting day indeed” she said to herself as she stood on front of the glass wall that served as her window to the outside world. The view was nothing less than stunning and she might have ended up spending her whole first night just stood there, feeling the pulse and blood of this unknown city to her. Aside from the fact she was knackered. She had travelled halfway around the world to find acceptance and a new start, as an omen her first contact here seemed to be someone she could identify with.