Lesbian Assassins Stocking Stuffer Read online

  Lesbian Assassins Stocking Stuffer

  Audrey Faye

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Lesbian Assassins Stocking Stuffer

  Thank You

  Copyright © 2015 Audrey Faye

  www.audreyfayewrites.com

  To those of us who

  somehow didn’t manage

  to be born in Iceland.

  (If you don’t understand

  this dedication, come play

  with us on Facebook!)

  Lennotsville looked like a Christmas globe had exploded right over downtown. The small, quaint shops had been decked out in holiday gear for weeks, but that wasn’t why half the town was mobbing the streets.

  The weather dude had been wrong. Dire warnings of overnight sleet had fallen as snow instead. Four inches of it.

  Which meant the morning of Christmas Eve had turned a little giddy, even if you were a semi-retired hermit crab. I grinned over at Lelo—she’d woken me up at the crack of dawn, bouncing on the end of my bed. We eaten enough breakfast for six people, wrapped a whole bunch of things I hadn’t known existed, and now we were out delivering presents to people we wouldn’t see tonight. I had a ridiculous number of parcels in my bag. “My eyes can’t take much more of this.”

  She laughed. “It is a little brighter than usual.”

  For all kinds of reasons. Mrs. Beauchamp had made tie-dye silk scarves for everyone in town—and bamboozled at least half of us into wearing them. I was pretty sure Lelo was still dressed in head-to-toe black under hers, but you couldn’t tell. Her scarf was big enough to double as a sail.

  “I posted the Christmas medley to YouTube.” Lelo reached into her bag and lobbed a chocolate orange to one of Allie’s students.

  I grimaced. The holiday video had been Micheline’s brainchild, but she’d had no problem convincing everyone else to hop on her bandwagon. It was loaded with goofy kitsch, cameos by half our road crew, and lyrics that had made my eyes bleed.

  It would probably have eleventy billion views by dinnertime.

  It would never catch Gasoline Hearts, though. That one was still going strong, even though the sound was crap and I was mostly a sexy red blur. “Okay, but you’re banned from replying to comments for at least the next forty-eight hours.” Time off was mandatory, especially for dominatrix tour managers.

  The kid grinned, still tossing chocolate oranges. “Zelda’s on that.”

  Zelda was our band’s resident electronics whiz. And a Wiccan, so her holiday had rolled through a few days ago. “We’re letting Zelda talk to fans?”

  Lelo laughed. “It’s Christmas—what can go wrong?”

  I groaned. Zelda had the vocabulary of a sailor and the social skills of a WWE wrestler. “If she breaks anything, you have to clean it up.” The only one worse than Zelda on social media was me.

  “Duh.” The kid shrugged and rescued her silk scarf as it attempted to slither free and go play in the snow. “I gave her scripts. They’re all nice and polite and holiday themed.”

  “And you think she’s going to use them?” I waved at Mrs. Beauchamp, handing out gaudily wrapped boxes on the other side of the street.

  “Yup. I’m holding four dozen coconut macaroons hostage.”

  That might actually work. I snuck a surreptitious glance at my companion. Three months of tour had changed my life—but they had also rewritten hers. People were still astonished to discover my manager was a ninety-pound stick, but she had done a bang-up job on the website, t-shirts, and social media frenzy, and then booked us on the kind of tour that most indie bands would have sold their souls for.

  Then she’d grinned, waved her magic wand, and granted us all two weeks off for the holidays.

  It had been a whirlwind. A crazy, happy, ghost-busting one. Johnny’s wraith occasionally showed up on a stool in the back corner of some bar, but ignoring him was getting easier every day. He didn’t matter. You don’t have to vanquish all the ghosts to be happy—you just have to serenade them.

  “Here come the lovebirds,” said Lelo brightly, pulling my attention back to Christmas present.

  I studied the two sauntering toward us, arm in arm, and felt something in the nether regions of my chest begin to goop up. “You guys look happy.” They did—deliriously so.

  “Sex and cheesecake,” said Rosie, grinning.

  I eyed my partner—or rather, my ex-partner. “You need to be sharing one of those things.”

  Carly laughed. “Find your own person to have sex with.”

  That wasn’t the one I wanted. I might be wearing slinky red dresses these days, but I had the sex life of a nun and I planned to keep it that way. Even if I had to duct tape Lelo and Micheline to the top of the van to make it happen.

  I did not need a matchmaker, dammit.

  The two in front of me definitely didn’t need one. Carly’s eyes were joy on full wattage. She danced around in a circle and finished with a kiss on Rosie’s cheek. “I got my Christmas present early.”

  The kid looked at me and grinned. We knew what had been tucked away in Spike’s bar—Rosie had been working on them for weeks. Two really hot, really souped up, really girly motorcycles.

  One more way for the woman with the gasoline heart to bust loose a little.

  Not that Carly had been having much trouble finding those. She was teaching self-defense to a group of really fierce pre-teen girls, and to the ladies of the garden club—apparently Mrs. Beauchamp was deadly with a weighted purse. And helping to make a handful of online forums the most secure websites on the planet.

  But mostly she’d just been wise enough to put down her knives and wait to see what showed up to be picked up instead.

  Lelo shook her jingle-bell antlers at Carly. “Where did you ride to?”

  My ex-partner suddenly looked cautious. “Pembroke.”

  I could feel my eyebrows raising. That was the college campus in the next town over.

  Carly was looking intently at some spot on my right shoulder. “I signed up for the culinary program.”

  Lelo stared. “You’re going to learn to cook?”

  The kid’s dubiousness was well justified, but I could feel something else snapping in the air here. Something more important than four inches of snow had just landed.

  “Sushi, mostly.” Carly was trying to smile, but not quite making it. “It’s what I was going to do. Before.”

  Before seven frat boys had shredded her life.

  The kid stared at her for a long moment—and then looked over at me and shrugged. “I guess we should have gotten her big knives for Christmas.”

  This time, Carly’s smile made it all the way up. “I already have a few.”

  “Yeah.” Rosie rolled her eyes. “Don’t bounce too hard on our guest room mattress, or you might find out where she’s hidden most of them.”

  “There was all that space under the bed. And you wouldn’t let me keep them in the kitchen.”

  “Some of them are six feet long,” said the sexy gypsy wryly.

  Two smart women, neatly covering up the evidence of Carly’s wide-open moment. Making it seem like no big deal. Letting one ex-assassin step into whatever skin she chose.

  We had picked our friends very well.

  The kid tossed another chocolate orange, which had Carly and Rosie eyeing her bag hopefully. “What time for breakfast tomorrow?”

  We were invading their place. After stockings. Lelo had made me a giant flannel one, which had made me feel about six years old, in the best possible way.

  Rosie wrapped an arm around Carly’s shoulder as they turned to go, and grinned at the kid in black. “You’ll never make it past 4am.�
�

  Lelo snickered. “We are so interrupting Christmas morning sex.”

  Carly raised an eyebrow. “Wanna bet?”

  I laughed, and kept quiet. The kid might be dumb enough to take that bet—I wasn’t. I try not to make the same mistakes twice.

  -o0o-

  Most Christmas Eves of my adult life, I had perched in a hazy jazz bar in some town or another and sang to the jaded, the lonely, and the newly in love—everyone else stays home on the night before Christmas morning.

  I looked around Lelo’s tiny, cozy living room, shocked to discover that I was suddenly one of those people.

  “Jane.” Carly was curled up in Rosie’s lap, and it had only taken a couple glasses of spiked eggnog to get her there. “You’re going to sing for us, right?”

  “Nope.” I grinned and toasted Lelo. “I’m officially on vacation.” After three months of frenzy, I’d totally, completely earned it.

  The kid raised her mug in good cheer. “Did you tell your muse that?”

  It hadn’t been the tour schedule that had kept me up until all hours of the night, mainlining coffee, noodling away on the old, battered Taylor guitar I’d scored in an Oklahoma pawn shop, and scribbling lyrics on random hotel notepads in the dark.

  Fortunately Lelo had a talent for deciphering my scrawl. She’d salvaged a whole lot of song lines in the last three months. Some of them had been crap and gone right back in the garbage can, but she’d redeemed some gems, too.

  “Are we opening presents tonight?” Carly’s question was probably supposed to sound a whole lot more casual than it did.

  “Heathen.” Rosie set down her eggnog. “That’s what tomorrow is for. Besides, you already got your bike.”

  My ex-partner eyed the pile of gaily wrapped parcels under the tree. “I don’t think we’re done yet.”

  I was fairly embarrassed at how many of those I was responsible for. I’d done disturbingly well for a hermit crab with an allergy to shopping. Micheline had helped me pick out Rosie’s gift, right before she hopped on a plane to go skiing with Rowena. In Switzerland—I was pretty sure the Alps were never going to be the same again. And I’d found Carly’s present without any help at all. But those could wait until morning. The two cuddling in the chair were already happiness overflowing.

  It was Lelo’s wistful eyes I couldn’t resist.

  I set down my mug and tried for casual tones of my own. “I’ve got one for my roommate that could happen tonight.” I was definitely eggnogged enough to do the deed. I reached for my trusty, battered Taylor, sitting in the corner.

  The kid’s eyes brightened—and then flared. “Oh.”

  One hushed, whispered word. And it told me everything I needed to know about why this song had needed to happen.

  These lyrics Lelo hadn’t rescued from the garbage can. They’d never made it onto paper—there was just no way to keep stuff hidden from the nosiest tour manager in the universe when you were camping out in a bus. They had stayed firmly inside my crab shell, well wrapped in flannel.

  I smiled at the sixteen-year-old who had somehow become family. “It’s called Little Sister.”

  Her gulp was loud enough to be heard at street level. “You wrote me a song.”

  My muse was totally willing to write songs about the guy who delivered our pizza, but I was smart enough not to say that. And I wasn’t going to get the words out if her eyes got any closer to overflowing. So I wrapped my fingers around the instrument that had become my favorite appendage and strummed the opening chords. The words that mattered were already written. And even though they’d been channeled through three months of noise and creaking mornings and bus fumes, they smelled of none of that.

  Or maybe they did.

  I kicked into the opening verse about families that were chosen and the shiny, persistent souls that insisted on doing the choosing. The silence in the room was deafening. I kept my eyes on my fingers—the damn song had five verses.

  By the third one, the room wasn’t silent any more. I could hear Carly’s tapping and Rosie’s quiet, sniffly humming. One day, I was going to convince her to sing backup. But from the kid, not a sound.

  I didn’t look up until I rounded the corner into the last chorus—and what I saw on Lelo’s face had my throat closing to a whisper.

  I choked the words out anyhow. Because they mattered. And because I meant every word.

  It takes a young heart,

  A strong heart,

  A good heart,

  To believe.

  -o0o-

  It was the dead of night and I was creeping out into Lelo’s living room. I felt entirely silly—and justified. I’d been awake for a whole hour already.

  My phone had been full of texts this morning, and slightly drunk songs, and pictures of a lot of folks in their pajamas. The people of my new tribe. Dispersed over several continents on this day, because the Lesbian Assassins had a rule about making time for family and friends, and mornings to sleep in wherever you called home.

  I had even managed to reply to a few before I’d stumbled out of my warm, cozy bed.

  I laughed quietly and shook my head, and then steered straight for the oversized flannel stocking that had been calling me like some siren floozy. I’d heard Lelo stuffing it full before I’d gone to bed—and somehow managed not to peek when I’d snuck out a bit later to fill hers.

  I’d only look. Or so I promised myself as I snuck closer, trying not to accidentally ring any jingle bells or crinkle any tinsel. Given the current decor in the living room, that was no mean feat.

  My stocking was jammed full, every last inch of it, with several handfuls of things trying to escape out the top. I reached carefully for the stuff that seemed most likely to tumble. Inked words, backed with paper. Three months ago, I wouldn’t have known what they were, but Micheline had a temporary tattoo fetish, and it had become fairly contagious.

  I held up the tattoos one at a time, squinting at them in the candlelight. Bad Ass and Sexy, in swooping, twirly letters. Touch my Flannel and Die. I snorted—clearly Santa had some helpers who knew me fairly well. The last one was in small script, and I had to carry it over to the lights on the tree to make the words out. If You Can Read This, Know That I Have Friends With Really Big Knives.

  The snicker squirted out before I caught it. I sat down by the tree, a bunch of tattoos in my hands, and let the foolish happiness of Christmas morning roll into my heart. And then I reached into my stocking again.

  “I can’t believe you beat me out of bed.” The kid stood at the end of the small hallway back to the bedrooms, a patently fake scowl on her face.

  I held up a pair of brand-new fuzzy chicken slippers. “My feet were cold.”

  She grinned. “Santa had to look freaking everywhere for those.”

  I bet. My last pair had been manufactured in about 1964. I waved my tattoos in the air. “Get yours. I want to see if you have the ones that say I’m Not Old Enough to Be in This Bar.”

  She giggled, clearly already high on Christmas fumes, and pounced on a stocking that looked older than she was. “It weighs a freaking ton—what’s in here?”

  Love. “Bricks. Coal. Big-ass rocks.”

  “Not.” She’d already popped open the tube that contained a sketch Cass had begged off some street artist in New Orleans. The one had that had been done from the photo of Lelo asleep with her BOSS hat on her head and a teddy bear under one arm.

  There’s really no privacy on a bus.

  “I’m going to kill whoever took this.”

  I looked over at her, cuddling the sketch to her chest. “Spike said he’d frame it for you.” He’d also laughed for a solid ten minutes, but I wasn’t dumb enough to mention that part.

  “I have a frame.” She slid the sketch gently back inside its tube. And glanced over at me, eyes shining. “Your turn.”

  I didn’t know there were rules to this thing. “I started first, so it’s still your turn.” She hadn’t found her fuzzy chicken slippers yet. />
  When she did, I thought she might laugh for a week. Which is at least as long as it took me to shop for them. Santa does not make life easy on his elves.

  I pulled out more things, all designed to tug on my heartstrings, my laughter, or both. A two-inch-tall guitar that sang You Are My Sunshine if you strummed it. A coffee mug—a really big, spill-proof travel one in day-glo green with my name stamped on the side. I hoped Santa brought ones for the rest of my band too—they were terrible coffee thieves, every last one of them.

  The padded red bra just made me snicker helplessly. And then I pulled out the sexy pin-up-girl deck of cards.

  The kid looked up from her huge pile of loot, and flashed me a grin full of mischief. “Use them when we play poker. I figured they’d distract Rowena and Rosie.”

  If Santa could help me win at poker, miracles were happening a lot more places than 34th Street.

  I don’t know how long we sat there, steeped in the magic of surprise and pleasure and small pleasures. I did know that next year, there would be a Christmas song. My muse was already half-drunk on the possibilities, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t 5am yet.

  “Come on.”

  I returned from whatever reality I’d gone off to, greeted by the sight of the kid wrapped up in her jacket and monster scarf and wearing the elf earmuffs that had been in her stocking. She picked up a basket big enough to hold a small family and smelling of Christmas sin, and grinned. “Come on, let’s go wake up Carly and Rosie.”

  We were so going to be interrupting Christmas morning sex. I shook my head wryly and followed her down the hall to get my boots.

  If there were cinnamon buns in that basket, we’d probably be forgiven.

  -o0o-

  I stepped forward gingerly, hands out in front of my face. “You’re trying to give me a concussion for Christmas, right?”

  Carly snickered at my left shoulder and guided me gently to the right. “The eggnog will take care of that part.”