In mock horror, Sara said, "No way! I can see it now, he comes home and you try to steal my boyfriend!"

They both burst into laughter, and simultaneously said, "Bloody unlikely!"

Clump, clump, clump. They heard steps on the back porch, and Sara leaned back to look out the window behind her. The door opened, and in came Tim and Kevin, faces ruddy from biking.

The brown haired woman stood, crossed her arms, and tapped her foot on the floor. "About time you two showed up. We’ve been slaving away!"

Tim gave her a long look starting at her feet and slowly traveling up her shapely figure. In his best drag queen voice, he said, "Well, hey, honey, a fella’s got to get a little exercise at times." He ran his hand through his red hair as Kevin nudged him out of the way to shut the back door.

The handsome blonde-haired man rolled his eyes. "Don’t give him a moment’s notice. We got halfway around Como Lake and ended up freezing our butts off on a bench watching the Canada geese packing up to fly south for the winter."

Tim pinched Kevin on the butt and made him jump. "Shhhh, boyfriend. Don’t tell these ungrateful girls all our little secrets." Turning to Sara and Jaylynn, he said, "We’ll just go get out of these terribly unattractive biking shorts and be down directly. The supreme chef and his unerringly tasteful lover will be right back to dazzle you with our fabulous concoctions." He swished over to the swinging door, smacked it open, and disappeared.

Both women burst into laughter.

Kevin rolled his eyes again. "He’s been like this all morning—in fact, he’s been insufferable ever since last week when he found out he got into chef school."

Jaylynn composed herself and said, "We’ll put him in charge of something like the salad. That’ll keep him busy chopping and shredding and dicing and arranging and crying over onions."

"Fine with me. All right. I’ll be back in a few minutes." He turned, then stopped. "Say, where’s Tall, Dark and Deadly?"

Jaylynn’s face split with a grin. "She went to pick up Luella."

"Luella’s coming over? Yes!" He made a pumping motion with his arm. "That’s just great." He headed out of the kitchen, leaving the swinging door whapping back and forth behind him.

Sara looked at Jaylynn. "Why do these guys like Luella so much?"

Jaylynn shrugged. "I don’t know. Well, actually, everybody loves Luella. Maybe gay guys are the only ones who are confident enough to gush about it. Maybe it’s because she’s so accepting. She truly sees the good in everyone, even thoroughly rotten people. And she has such a way of bringing out the best in the people she knows."

Sara stepped over and put an arm across her friend’s shoulders. "Just like you, Jay. That’s an accurate description of you."

The blonde blushed. "Oh, get outta here."

"It’s true. As usual, I’m right." Sara smiled at her blushing friend. "Now, let’s open the tomato paste and sauté some tomatoes. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us."

* * *

Dez pulled right up in front of the neat, two-story stucco house, not bothering to go around back. Sure enough, she saw the curtains in the front porch open, and a silver head peeked through for just an instant. Dez counted to five, then the door opened, and Luella emerged, turned and locked the door, and came down the walk carrying a hefty-sized black leather handbag and a bright smile on her face.

Luella Williams was 75 years young, going on 16, but at the most, she looked 60. An elegant black woman, she had silver hair swept up on either side of her head and held in place with fine silver combs. She and her sister Vanita were all that was left of their generation, but Vanita had a thriving brood of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Ever since Luella’s husband and two sons had died in a tragic house fire in the Sixties, she had taken her nieces and nephews under her wing as well as a lot of other misfits and odd ducks. Dez thought that she herself was one of the latter.

Dez got out of the truck and met Luella at the passenger door. The deep, mahogany colored eyes sought her out. "So, Desiree, what’s shakin’?"

"Not much." She gave the older woman her arm and helped her up into the Ford truck.

"I swear," Luella said, as she settled into the seat, "this truck keeps growing taller every time I’m not looking."

Dez grabbed the retractable seatbelt, and handed it to the silver-haired woman, then slammed the door and went around to get in the driver’s side. She put it in drive and started off down Como Boulevard.

Luella reached across the cab and patted Dez on the arm. "Please tell me I haven’t missed anything good."

"Nope. Not unless you count using some sort of all purpose utility knife to saw metal in half."

"Hmm. Doesn’t sound particularly appetizing…no, not at all. Whose idea was that?"

"You should just ask. Okay?" With a devilish look in her eye, Dez zipped around the block and headed back to the other house. "Why don’t you see if they’ll let you make the metal rod dessert? Just ask about that, okay?"

Luella gave her a strange look, then turned her eyes back to the road.

* * *

It was a madhouse in the kitchen. Luella was camped out at the kitchen table between Tim and Kevin, all three shelling walnuts and talking in excited tones. Every few words were punctuated with a solid thwack as Kevin cracked the walnuts on a cutting board. Tim and Luella picked out the meats and dropped them into a bowl. Periodically Luella collected up the shards of shells and tossed them into a brown paper bag on the floor.

Jaylynn and Sara stood next to the stove arguing about whether to lace the pot of lasagna sauce with chili powder. The blonde was in favor of jazzing it up, while Sara was concerned that it would be too strong.

Dez stood off to the side, a cookbook on the counter in front of her. She was searching for a good recipe for walnut cake. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the group and listened to the squabbles and conversations.

She knew she wasn’t in a dream, but sometimes things felt a little unreal. She wondered how she got so lucky to be associated with these people. They were a bit unusual—and yet, they seemed completely normal, too. They appeared to accept her and like her just fine, exactly as she was, and it had been that way immediately upon meeting all of them. That puzzled her. She had built the relationship with Luella over time, revealing a little bit of herself every so often until now the older woman knew her better than anyone on the planet, perhaps even Jaylynn. The trust to do that had taken a great deal of time, a number of years. Luella had never been pushy, though. As a matter of fact, she was so warm and patient that Dez had always felt comfortable with the slow pace of their friendship.

Jaylynn was a whole other story. She was like a whirlwind of movement and emotions, yet she was also gentle and serene. Whip-smart and at the same time, still a little naïve. Passionate, self-assured, curious, and funny. Dez had never met anyone like her before.

Paradox. That’s the word that came to Dez’s mind to describe her young partner. How could she have developed so much personality at such a young age? Jaylynn turned 25 in August, and in some ways, Dez thought the blonde bundle of energy was older and wiser than she, at the ripe old age of nearly 30. No matter how she thought about it, the tall woman couldn’t quite get her mind around her own good fortune. How had she been so lucky to have the laughing blonde like her so much—maybe even love her?

Over the din of the voices, the stove fan, and the kitchen radio, which was currently playing Sara MacLachlan’s song, "Your Love is Better Than Ice Cream," Dez heard Luella holler, "Hey Jaylynn! We’re done with these nuts now. You want us to start in on the steel rod dessert?"

Both Sara and Jaylynn paused in their good-natured bickering and simultaneously said, "What?"

Luella’s white teeth flashed, and she looked positively mischievous. Tim and Kevin, sitting on either side of her, glanced over at the girls and back to the older woman. Tim said, "Never heard of such a thing. What are the ingredients?"

Luella gazed at the two roommates, pausing for a couple seconds. "Well? You going to enlighten us?"

Jaylynn turned around and squinted at Dez, obviously suppressing a grin. "You must be carrying tales again, Miss Big Mouth Cop."

Dez held her hands out to either side of her, palms up. "Just thought you might like to share your cutlery technique with Tim, especially now that he’s in chef training."

"Look," Tim said in a dry voice, "if you’re going to make Ginsu knife jokes, you can forget about it. I’m partial to Chicago Cutlery."

Jaylynn spun around to meet the brown-haired woman’s amused eyes. Sara said, "Obviously we’re going to be mocked, Jay. We should just ignore them."

Kevin waved a hand. "Wait a minute! I never did any mocking. What is this special dessert?"

So Sara and Jaylynn got out the Aikuchi All-Purpose Utility Knife and explained all of its fine features as Dez checked the cupboards for brown sugar. She opened the doors to all four cupboards and left them open, fumbling around inside until she found a bag containing no more than two tablespoons of dried up brown crystals. She tossed the bag toward the kitchen garbage and added brown sugar to her ever-expanding grocery list. She was glad she had thought to case the cupboards ahead of time, and even so, she was still not sure whether she would end up having to make two trips to the store as they discovered more items they needed.

She wondered how Tim, Kevin, Sara, and Jaylynn could live together without killing one another. Their kitchen cupboards were in a shambles, and since none of them were over five feet eight inches tall, they obviously never used the top shelves, which were stuffed full of mismatched Tupperware pieces, old pie tins, and a multitude of plastic butter tubs. Pretty much everything on the top shelves seemed to have been pitched up there just before the door was quickly closed. She moved some items, rearranged the cereal, and nested all of the plastic-ware together. If she lived here, the kitchen alone would drive her crazy. The thought struck her that she practically did live there. She hadn’t slept in her own bed at the apartment more than once or twice in the last couple weeks. Her tiny three-room place was now serving as nothing more than a glorified closet to which she went only when she had to get clean clothes or Luella needed help with something.

She and Jaylynn had not discussed being apart nights since a couple weeks earlier when the tall cop decided to go home after Third Watch. Jaylynn was supposed to get up very early for a one-day Saturday writing class she was taking. Dez told her she should be rested and insisted on sleeping at her own place so that they wouldn’t stay up all night talking and making love. So the tall woman had gone home, turned on all the lights in her tiny apartment, and sat on the couch. Picking up her acoustic guitar, she played a few chords, lost interest, and set the golden colored instrument back on the stand. She couldn’t help it. She felt restless and inexplicably lonely.

She lasted all of twenty minutes. Just when she was ready to give up and go get in the truck to drive over and confess her weakness, the phone rang, and it was Jaylynn telling her she missed her too much and to please come over right away. Pride intact, the dark-haired woman threw some clean clothes in a duffel bag and arrived, breathless, at the house on the boulevard in less than ten minutes.

Since then, it had been a given that they would sleep nights together, even if they didn’t ride together that day or if their schedules were off in some way. Jaylynn gave her keys to both doors, and that was that.

But now, in a few hours, Bill would arrive, and there would then be six twenty-somethings living in the three-story house. Kevin and Tim were comfortable in the sizable third level attic. Dez and Jaylynn were managing just fine in Sara’s old room. But Bill and Sara were going to be quite cramped in the remaining bedroom on the second floor. No one had addressed this issue, and Dez wondered how to go about bringing it up. Maybe she should talk to Jaylynn about moving into her apartment above Luella’s place—but then again, that was awfully small, too. Maybe they should get their own place. But then I’d have to leave Luella . . . I don’t want to do that.