Weathering the Storm by Dalia Craig

Title: Weathering the Storm
Author: Dalia Craig
Publisher: loveyoudivine
Length: short story
Buy the book: Publisher

Blurb:

Graphic designer Laura Fenwick has spent weeks secretly watching and lusting after the sexy femme who works as a receptionist in the glass-fronted office right across the corridor from her. She spends her days looking for an opportunity to meet the woman of her dreams and her nights dreaming of all the things they might do together.

Freya Johansen thinks butch, Laura, too hot for words. She wants to get to know her on a very personal level but Laura seems so aloof and Freya doesn’t know how to break the ice.

When the two women are forced to seek shelter from a storm, their sexual chemistry takes them on a journey of discovery.

Review:

Once upon a time, I liked lesbian short stories.

I remember those carefree days fondly, when stories introduced complicated, jagged heroines with complicated, jagged haircuts and presented the reader (me) with a vision of a new paradigm for love and gender and relationships. Followed by muff-diving.

Which brings me to “Weathering the Storm,” by Dalia Craig.

A chance meeting between two tenants of an office building does indeed lead to a steamy night of passion. Laura, a butch graphic designer in her forties, has had her eye on the receptionist across the hall for quite some time, but newly burned in romance, she’s more than a little wary. But when a storm keeps the two women late at work, Laura finds herself bold enough to ask Freya, the office goddess, out for dinner. And I think we all know where things go from there.

The thing about stories, for me, and short ones in particular, is that there’s a certain economy of language necessary to fit in the full panorama of even the most minute slice of life.

Consider the opening paragraph of this story:

Rain beat relentlessly against the window and a rumble of thunder reverberated in the distance. I hesitated in the lobby of the building where I leased a small office, debating
my next move. The prospect of staying in town for however long it took the storm to pass
thrilled me nearly as much as an hour-long drive home along a highway which always
flooded during heavy rain. I scanned the sky for the inevitable streak of lightning that would
make the decision for me.

Now, that’s a lot of words being used to convey one solitary image: someone waiting out a storm in a lobby. And given that that’s the author’s introduction to her reader, it doesn’t pack anything like a punch, for me. It’s a thicket of syntax branches that obscure what I really want to be looking at: the protagonist standing alone in front of a window, pondering a storm and wondering however will she pass the time. And it’s a shame, because the set-up is simple but clever, and a lot of the imagery here could’ve been put to good purpose in establishing a hot and steamy mood.

I said could’ve.

Craig’s strength as a writer, I think, lies in worldbuilding, something that’s far too often neglected in erotica; she has a power of description that makes lays out whole towns at the reader’s feet. Not just buildings, but intimate Italian bistros or decorative open squares, or a shuttered florist’s shop. And it’s an act of creation that seems effortless in her text.

So why is the rest of the story so hard to read?

There were a couple of things I noticed right off the bat. Laura, the protagonist, is odd and unpleasant. She constantly second-guesses herself to the point where as a reader, you put your head in your hands. Um, Laura? Freya’s riding your fingers in a corner of the piazza. I think she might want to go home with you! If you’re too busy with your internal monologue about will she/won’t she, she’s likely going to wise up and call a cab. And the other protagonist, Freya, is a cut-out character who basically serves as dinner on the hoof, and gives Laura a reason to wibble and dribble.

Speaking of which, the sex: passably hot. The aforementioned scene where Laura’s got Freya in the palm of her hand out in public, was hot–but was cut very unfortunately short by the untimely arrival of other people and potential discovery. Total coitus literatus interruptus and not cool. But then when they got back to Freya’s place for the main event? It was like Laura (and by extension, Craig) had shot her wad back in the piazza, and even I was ready to turn in for the night in my ratty pajamas with a hot water bottle. And it was two in the afternoon!

Overall, a fairly forgettable story, but with some glimmers of hope for future endeavors by the same author.