Lesson Learned

By Olivia Poulson

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have - to want and want - how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”

The relationship between two women becomes obsessive in this chronicle of a clandestine rollercoaster connection. Happy highs and depressing lows are just part of the journey when two opposing but complementary forces come together.

An emotional psychological account seen through the eyes of the antagonist as she is drawn into her most destructive relationship yet. She takes us on a winding journey of her life as she is confronted with her own insecurities and anxieties. From meeting a woman she feels is the love of her life to the angst of discovering she is anything but.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Olivia Poulson
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005134136

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Lesson Learned

Olivia Poulson

Copyright 2021 Olivia Poulson

Published by Olivia Poulson at Smashwords

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author

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Chapter One

Crossing Paths

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and

private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

I had never met anyone quite like her before she breezed so easily into my life. Her shameless confidence and mischievous grin broke the tedious routine of my working day big time. I knew within hours that she would be breaking my heart in the near future. The clue was the huge warning sign flashing before my eyes that I somehow managed to ignore. My own voice screamed in my head to walk away and leave well alone but my intense desires, as always, managed to overcome any sensibility I possessed and led me to the door that opened down that familiar path.

I was about to embark on a journey that was so well known to me already. I had been on this trip so many times in my life that it was becoming dangerously predictable. Still, I allowed myself to be drawn down that trail once again where only the very brave or very stupid descend. The greatest love affairs of my life had begun on that precarious pathway and had all ended hideously and untidily, ridding me of my self-esteem. Still, I felt the adrenaline rushing through me at the thought of travelling it once again, ready to take on the challenges along the way.

I knew three things about her; she was bisexual, her visa was soon to expire, and she was a Taurus born on the cusp of Gemini. Alarm bells were already ringing in my head, but I managed to disregard them in all the lust. I decided I could deal with her bisexuality. It was something I was familiar with and had even become a kind of fetish for me. I had only ever been with bisexual or bi-curious women and four relationships and several wonderfully sordid flings had still not taught me a lesson. I wasn’t so sure about the rapidly expiring visa though. However, it wasn’t necessarily a threat just yet.

Having never really been that close to someone who grew up so culturally differently to me, 12,000 miles away in New Zealand, she intrigued me with her stories of home and of her experiences travelling the world. Her enthusiasm about the things she wanted to do was endless and very infectious. I saw her as a free spirit and envied her for having the courage to take risks. I unfortunately lacked that conviction and my wish-list of the places I wanted to see and the things I wanted to accomplish had become far too long. I never had the faith in myself to believe I could do anything most of the time.

Her journalism experience captured my fascination immediately. I had wanted to see my writing in print for so many years and was in complete awe of her articles on the internet. The more I discovered about her, the stronger her allure became, captivating me so easily. I wondered whether her imagination could match mine. I thought maybe as a writer she would somehow empathise with my struggle to live in the real world. Perhaps she also had difficulty conforming to the rules that were put on us at an early age, rules that were defined by the collective perception of ‘normal’ people in a fake world.

Her birth date had excited me the most though. Born six months before me in the zodiac year to the day, she was my absolute opposite. The positions of the planets in relation to the earth at the time of our births were accurately opposing each other, give or take a few hours. As my opposing astrological sign, we each represented the antithesis of the other. We were two sides of a coin, each valid in its own right but incomplete without the other side. She was Yin, feminine and receptive, adaptable and outgoing, to my Yang, masculine and creative, secretive and intense. Two primal opposing but complimentary forces found in all things in the universe, each with qualities similar in function but opposite in execution, an example being our shared passion for writing. Hers was brief but informative whereas mine was descriptive and prolonged. All of that would have been very exceptional but we were also both born on the cusp of two sun signs which meant a deeper, more intense connection. I had never been so entranced with someone I barely knew before. From our first meeting on that dull spring day, I knew that this was going to be no ordinary adventure.

My last serious relationship had ended 14 months earlier and had stripped me of all my confidence and sense of worth. I’d spent the long months after the break-up trying to find the strength and the will to pull myself together and before I knew it, I was so used to being single that I’d forgotten what it was like to be with someone. After weeks of talking myself into braving the scary world of London’s gay bars alone, I begrudgingly forced myself to meet up with old friends and eased myself back into dating. Weaning myself away from the fickle Soho gay scene a few years earlier, I had not intended to return. I preferred getting to know someone over dinner or in a quiet booth in a bar and had never been a fan of one-night stands. Drunken gropes were sometimes enjoyable but also very seedy and unsatisfactory. However, the women I met allowed me brief moments of respite in my isolated world, slowly gaining some assurance I wouldn’t be alone forever. After only a few weeks I began to enjoy the superficiality of it all again. My confidence had started to grow, and the dark months of my hibernation seemed so far behind me. I began to see the different avenues my life could take and felt my old self finally start to emerge. I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel I had been scratching my way through.

In that light some weeks later she stood beckoning me, daring me to follow her. The excitement I felt was refreshing and surprising and something I hadn’t felt in a few years. The flirting wasn’t immediate between us, maybe a few weeks in, but once comfortable it was just how we interacted with each other. It felt very natural. It was harmless office flirting but secret office flirting. Hidden from the eyes of others, flirting with her was practically foreplay. It fed my sexual tension and fired me up to a dangerous level until it almost frustrated me. I had yet to master how to deal with that sexual frustration. I would have conversations with her while at the same time vividly imagining the two of us ripping each other’s clothes off and having sex right there on