A/N: Hi, guys! It's been forever since I updated this! If you want to know more about what has my attention at the moment, watch "Critical Role" on YouTube. Nerdy voice actors playing Dungeons & Dragons - it's completely amazing. I've also been putting a few things up on AO3 - find me there as earthquakegirl.

Just as a friendly reminder - please don't take anything I've written and claim it as your own. I publish here and on Tumblr as memorysdaughter, and as stated above, at AO3 as earthquakegirl. Anywhere else you see my work, please let me know.

Thanks to everyone who reads/reviews/follows/favorites/messages! You're all amazing!

Enjoy!

Skye heard laughter emanating from the café and smiled. She wasn't sure what the laughter was referencing, but she didn't care – she was back at work and the laughter was coming from her radiant girlfriend. Turning around, she saw Jemma at the small table nearest the windows. "What's so funny over there?" she asked. "I know it's not the way I stock these yoga mats."

"No, no, it's not you," Jemma managed to get out breathlessly. "It's this book I'm reading."

"What is it?" Skye put the last of the yoga mats into the display.

"Apparently it's very popular right now – it's called Last Rodeo With Love."

"Oh, God, my mom's reading that right now," Skye said, rolling her eyes. "I think her wine club – excuse me, book club – is talking about it next week."

She sat down next to Jemma. "I thought it's supposed to be a romance novel. How'd you end up with it?"

Jemma indicated the small device on the table in front of her; it had a refreshable Braille display at the bottom. "I was buying two other books and the service I use for e-books had a giveaway. Buy two, get one free, but the free one had to come from a list of special ones. It was the only one I'd heard of, so I thought I'd just take a chance."

"And?"

"It's terrible." Jemma touched the Braille display. "Although I can understand why a group of middle-aged women would want to talk about it over wine."

"On the scale of Twilight to some sort of awesome novel everyone should read, where does it fall?"

"Definitely on the Twilight end of the scale."

Kate appeared with a box of yoga DVDs. "Skye, will you figure out a way to incorporate these into the display?"

"Sure," Skye said. "Sorry, Jem – duty calls."

"It's perfectly fine. I'm just going to sit here and revel in this hysterically funny book."

"Maybe you could read some of it to me later," Skye suggested, wiggling her eyebrows despite the fact Jemma couldn't see it. "You know what they say about terrible books."

"That they should be burned as quickly as possible?"

"No, that they're better when shared."

"I don't think anyone says that."

"Well, no, not if everyone's a spoilsport like you," Skye said. She kissed Jemma on the cheek and got to her feet.

"You know, you didn't have to spend your entire day off at the shop," Skye pointed out. "It's very sweet of you to want to walk me home, though."

"I liked being there," Jemma said. "And honestly, once I got started with that book, I couldn't stop. Every single page just kept getting worse."

Skye poured the contents of a glass jar into the bag attached to her feeding pump. "Now you have to read it to me."

"Are you sure? It's really bad."

"I can't…" The phone rang. Skye sighed and reached for it. "Hello?"

"Hi, honey," her mother said.

"Hi, Mom," Skye answered. "You know, you and Dad could have a night off from calling me. I wouldn't be offended."

"But what kind of parents would we be if we didn't check in every day?"

"Normal ones?"

"I'll just take that as a compliment," Melinda said. "Now, listen, I'm calling to ask you a favor."

"Yes, I'll mow the grass when you go visit Great-Aunt Roberta next month."

"What? No, your father got Billy Koenig to do that."

"But I always mow the lawn," Skye said.

"You just got out of the hospital," Melinda pointed out. "Let Billy do it."

"Did he get fired from the co-op again?"

"What? No. He came over and offered the other day. Now, listen, I want you and Jemma to come to my book club."

"Oh. We're… uh… we're not really book club type people, Mom."

"I wasn't aware a book club needed a special kind of person."

"I just mean that your book club is next week and we haven't read the book yet."

"Oh, that's okay. It's more as a favor to me, so I can show off Jemma to the ladies. They've heard me talk about her for months now and they can't believe how wonderful she sounds."

Skye laughed. "That's incredible. Um, yeah, of course. We'll try to get there."

"It's being held at our house," Melinda said. "Next Tuesday. And if you get time, I guess you could try to read the book."

"I'll see what I can do. What is it? The Grapes of Wrath? Of Mice and Men?"

"Were those really the first two books you thought of?"

"No, they're the ones I use as a doorstop," Skye replied.

"Well, it's neither of them. It's this new romance novel – Last Rodeo With Love."

Skye started laughing again.

"Okay, so now we've got to read this book," Skye said.

"What? Your mother didn't make it sound like we had to read it," Jemma said.

Skye rolled her feeding pump next to the couch and plopped down. "I know. And that's precisely why we have to do it."

"That doesn't make much sense."

"Humor me."

Jemma sighed. "You're lucky you're cute."

"As far as you know."

Jemma snuggled up to Skye's right side, and Arthur claimed the left side. With her Braille device on her lap, Jemma started to read. "'What did busted-up pickup trucks, wild horses, and hot-tempered men have in common? Well, for starters, they were all irritating as hell in one way or another. And for another, they'd all recently fallen into Roxie Cole's life.'"

"Oh, this book is already a winner," Skye said. "I wish you could do it in a Southern accent, though. It seems like it needs a Southern accent."

"Do you want to read it then, cowgirl?"

"Sure. Only one problem with that – I don't read Braille."

"Then I guess you'll have to suffer through a British cowpoke."

"You're lucky you're cute."

"Don't I know it. 'As a long-time employee of The Silver Spur, where she spent her nights tending bar, Roxie'd seen a stampede of men trot past on their way to breaking hearts. None of them seemed to be stopping in her pastures. At thirty-three she'd given up looking for a stallion to call her own.'"

"Jesus. We're five sentences in and already I want to strangle this woman with a lasso." Skye leaned her head back. "Remind me why this is on the bestseller list?"

"Because there's insanely explicit sex in chapters five, eight, twelve, and seventeen?"

"Oh, well, it could be that."

"And those were just the ones I got to before you told me we had to start over," Jemma added.

"So let me get this straight – we're going to go to a book club meeting with a bunch of middle-aged women, all of whom I know personally and most of whom have seen me grow up, drink some terrible five-dollar Costco wine, and talk about rodeo sex?"

"I believe that's the plan, yes. Except that you can't even drink the terrible wine."

"You're right. I'll just have to put a thumbtack in my palm."

"And we haven't even gotten to the part yet where they make out on runaway horses."

"Fantastic."

By the weekend Skye was ready to throttle Roxie Cole with a cactus. The woman was whiny, self-centered, and genuinely boring. If Roxie Cole wasn't a fictional character but someone Skye had to interact with in everyday life, there would have been fisticuffs involved.

"She ends up with literally every handsome man who comes through The Silver Spur on their way to the Del Rio Rodeo," Skye pointed out to Jemma as they lay awake in Skye's bed one night. "And yet she still goes to the salon to talk to Mavis about how she's so ugly and no one wants her. Why?"

"I think this book is damaging your soul," Jemma said gently. "All you do is obsess over it and complain about it."

"Oh! And I saw that they're making a movie out of it! Where are all the movies for all the great books? This book is garbage!"

As though to punctuate her point, Skye found the paperback copy of the book she'd picked up at the Pick-N-Shop (mostly so she could do Southern accents for the characters when she and Jemma read together) and chucked it across the room.

Jemma was unfazed. It wasn't the first time it had happened.

It was, however, the first time the awkward throwing of the book resulted in one of Skye's tubes being disconnected from her port. She swore and got up to reattach the offending tube, silencing the alarms on the pump as she went by.

"Maybe I should read for a while," Jemma suggested as Skye continued to mutter and curse.

"I had a dream last night that Roxie Cole's car broke down in front of the apartment building," Skye said. "You know, the busted-up pickup truck that Red the mechanic swears he's going to fix?"

"Of course I know. We're reading the same book," Jemma said, but it was clear Skye was lost in her rant.

"And she begged me for help to fix it. And I laughed in her face, and then I stuck a bunch of fireworks in the truck and blew it up."

"That seems like an extreme gesture for a very small problem, love," Jemma said. "Also, it's not technically how fireworks work."

Skye grumbled something at the floor.

"Come back to bed," Jemma said. "We don't have to read any more tonight. We can just… go to sleep. In fact, we don't have to read any more ever. We'll just tell your mom that we got too busy doing other things to finish it. They'll probably get stuck on the chapter where the businessman from New York comes to stay on the ranch and has a large penis."

"That chapter was about seventy pages too long."

"I agree, but I can see how it might appeal to others," Jemma said. "So we don't have to finish it. I could even tell you how it ends."

Skye's head jerked up. "You finished it?"

"I was at the bookstore with you all day last week," Jemma pointed out. "It wasn't like I could do anything else."

"You finished it? Without me?"

"We weren't even reading it together last week!" Jemma cried exasperatedly. "It's a terrible book, Skye!"

"Then why does it make me so angry?"

"If I knew that, would we be sitting here arguing? No! You'd be in bed and we'd be cuddling!"

Skye shook her head, the sense in Jemma's voice finally getting through to her. "You're right. You're right. What am I doing? This is stupid."

"So just come here."

Arthur whined as though to agree with Jemma. Skye smiled and got back into bed.

"Don't think about it any longer," Jemma said firmly. "That's an order."

As though to hammer home the point, she reached out for Skye and pulled her close, kissing her gently, then wrapped her arms around Skye, holding her right where she belonged.

Book club was in full swing by the time Jemma and Skye made it to the Coulsons' house. Arthur trotted in happily, always excited to see new people. Skye and Jemma followed behind at a slightly slower pace.

"You're here!" Melinda cried happily, and she threw her arms around Skye and then around Jemma.

"We sure are," Jemma said into Melinda's shoulder.

"I think the wine drinking started a little early," Skye murmured to Jemma as Melinda bounded away.

Skye quickly introduced each member of the book club – Natasha Romanoff, Melinda's best friend and a martial arts instructor; Trish Walker, a popular radio show host; Jane Foster, a noted astrophysicist; Pepper Potts, a hardworking businesswoman; and Sif, a coworker of Natasha's who had no last name, or if she had one, Skye had never heard it. The coffee table was filled with plates of cheese cubes, crackers, cut up fruits and vegetables, little desserts, and bottles of wine. Skye took a few minutes quietly describing to Jemma what each of the snacks was while Arthur made the rounds.

Once Jemma procured snacks, they found seats and listened to the chatter surrounding Last Rodeo With Love. Jemma was horrified to realize that Skye was completely correct – Melinda and her friends had loved the book.

She carefully ate a chocolate-covered strawberry as Pepper and Trish compared each of Roxie's lovers. They were quite taken with Red, the mechanic, "the one who kept getting away" as Roxie referred to him. Neither liked Eli, the businessman from New York, despite his rather impressive… attributes. Pepper's favorite was Solomon, the mysterious traveling musician, while Trish's taste ran more to Gordon, the fast-talking street magician.

At last Melinda turned to Skye and Jemma. "Did you girls get a chance to read the book?"

"We did," Jemma said slowly. "It was…"

"Long," Skye offered.

"It seemed to fly by to me," Jane said. "So exciting! I can hardly wait to continue reading!"

Skye wrapped her hand around Jemma's. They'd finally finished the book, Jemma doing the reading so Skye could pace the floor and yell things at the ceiling while she towed her pumps back and forth. Neither had been happy about the arrangement, or how at the end, Roxie Cole drove off into the sunset – literally – looking for another town, another group of men to raze through.

"And there's a sequel," Jemma had informed Skye unhappily. "Love's Wild Stallions."

She'd been expecting it, but it still startled her when Skye threw something at the wall and let out a scream.

"Who was your favorite character?" Natasha wanted to know.

"Definitely Mavis," Skye said, referencing Roxie's sassy friend who worked at a hair salon. "Jemma?"

"Oh, I couldn't possibly pick just one," Jemma said lamely.

"Can we talk about the greater feminist message of the book?" Sif asked the group.

"Greater feminist message," Skye murmured into Jemma's ear. "Have sex with literally anything male that walks through the doors of your workplace and then go ride a horse until you respect yourself again. Jesus."

Jemma snorted into her wine.

"… very progressive of Roxie to take such an open-minded view to multiple lovers," Trish said.

"And such a wide variety of relationships," Natasha added.

At this Skye let out a noise that sounded like someone was choking a duck. She quickly turned it into a cough.

"Are you all right?" Melinda asked.

"Yeah," Skye wheezed out. "Just fine."

"It's too bad no real men are like that," Sif mused.

It was Jemma's turn to skip a breath. She found Skye's shoulder and leaned in, whispering, "If real men were like they, they'd have some serious difficulties riding the horses Roxie seems to love so much."

Skye chortled.

"Girls?" Melinda asked. "Thoughts?"

"Nope. None at all," Skye said, her voice full of mirth, and she squeezed Jemma's hand, her body shaking with silent laughter.

Phil insisted on walking them home – "It's a nice night for a stroll" was how he put it, but Skye knew he needed to get away from the book club ladies, who were chortling and nearly hysterical over their wine glasses in the living room. They were only a few blocks from the Coulsons' when he said, "So, how many guys in that book had completely ridiculous assets in the downstairs region?"

The answer was immediate, coming from both girls: "All of them."