I'm lucky to have a girlfriend with benefits.

As a fairly feminine female, sometimes I think of being committed to another woman as like being with your best girlfriend, with benefits. L'Ailee and I are both PMS-ing, and we both get horny when we're PMS-ing, so we both really wanted to spend the morning in bed. It was cool! Right now there are little blue paper wrappers all over the place because we found entire "limited edition" bags of those yummy little vanilla Tootsie Roll Midgees at Target, and she had a craving, and I figured the least I could do was help keep a few (dozen) away from her. :-)

She's laughed at me all day. Actually, we've laughed at each other. This afternoon, Yahoo had problems loading, and after all the problems we'd recently gotten fixed with our internet connection, I was just about to cry. "Oh, goddamnit," I muttered. I really was misting over, and then I refreshed the page, and it loaded up. "Oh, thank the Gods!" I exclaimed.

"So I don't have to hide the knives?" L'Ailee inquired.

"Hush. Do you know how bad I missed having an internet connection last week? Do you know how bad it would've sucked?" I knocked on wood. Just to make her really laugh, I started addressing the screen: "Oh, my darling internet, you worried me! I beg of you, don't break my heart that way again! We were separated for so long, and I was afraid I'd lost you again, my love!" Then I made kissing noises.

"I hope you act that way with me when you get back from Florida," she said. (I'm going to Orlando to celebrate Samhain with my first coven.)

We're still amazed at shopping for mundane things like laundry soap and catbox litter sometimes. When your relationship's long-distance like ours was, you get so every time you see each other, it's "special". Now we're wives who see each other with morning rats' nests of hair and morning dark undereye circles to rival a panda's (more on those later) and all our bad habits. We're still sometimes like, "We're actually doing *dishes* together!" At Target today, we just kept giggling and whispering and showing each other stuff. I bought way too many T-shirts because the colors were so pretty; she gave the stuff I looked at frank and honest appraisals like, well, a girlfriend.

She laughed loudest when I saw an issue of Glamour and saw that the pretty cover girl with shoulder-length hair was Natalie Portman, who shaved her head for a movie role back in May. My voice sounded especially Florida Cracker-y, too. So other people in line heard when I leaned in and said, "Natalie's been takin' her preeee-natal vitamins to look like that. Like, industrial-strength ones." (For the benefit of you men, prenatal vitamins will make a non-pregnant woman's hair grow like a patch of kudzu. L'Ailee and I keep 'em around the house for occasions when she needs some hair on her head or the hairdresser fucked up my bangs.)

She rolled her eyes at me. "Natalie got some extensions that probably came out immediately after that picture was taken," she replied in a tone that added "you dumbass" without her actually saying it.

"I was being sarcastic, you know."
"You were not. I know your sarcastic."

The very young, very dykey-looking cashier wondered what we were talking about; we explained.

She then looked at L'Ailee like she was breakfast, leaned in, and said, "You look way better that way than she does. If other women looked that good with their heads shaved, all the salons would close down."

"Thank you," L'Ailee replied softly, eyes down, trying not to laugh.

The cashier noticed the ring. "Oh. You're married?"

"Yeah, to me," I said a bit too decisively, looking right at her.

"Massachusetts, huh? Lucky!" We were real nice to her for the rest of the transaction.

L'Ailee turned to me in the van-cab that took us and our purchases home and said, "See? You're lucky to have me; the cashier at Target said so."
"Don't you bring up that little homewrecker."
"Oh, she's only a homewrecker if I let her wreck our home, which I would not. But it is very nice to know that I have options..."
"So do I; I'm positive that stockboy was looking at my ass."
And then we just exploded into laughter, and looked into each other's eyes, and said very little the rest of the way home.