The Boyfriend

by Abigail Barnette

  That was the life I could have been living. If I’d never gone to college, if I’d never met Neil. Both of those things were so unlikely to have happened to anyone. Why had they happened to me?

  There was a strange sort of survivor’s guilt that came with a rapid ascent to wealth. Anyone who had ever struggled with poverty, only to find themselves rocketing to an elevated status must have dealt with the same thing. My conscience was always in the back of my mind demanding to know what I’d done to deserve my good fortune. Why was I given such an easy life? For a long time now, I’d reveled in the fact that I could help my family and spoil them with gifts and trips. But that was just my family. I could do so much more.

  On the flight back to New York, I scrolled through my phone, searching for ideas for how I could help, but most charities I knew of focused on health issues, not general community improvement. I sighed and headed to a news site. Beneath the infuriating news about our government—which I skipped, because I didn’t feel like having a rage aneurysm mid-flight—was a small picture of Jimmy Carter in a hard hat and goggles, wielding a hammer.

  Of course! Habitat For Humanity. That was an organization I could support. They helped exactly the same people that I wanted to help. The working poor, the working class, people like my mom and I had been all those years ago. People who had to put tarps on their roofs and rationed their heat in the winter because it was going to escape their poorly insulated homes, anyway. People who worked hard and deserved basic things like shelter.

  And food. My mind raced. There were food banks in the U.P.... How much money did they need to keep servicing their communities? How could I help? How much money would help?

  By the time we’d landed, I’d written two checks. One for five-hundred thousand dollars to Habitat For Humanity. The other for a million dollars to the Keweenaw Food Pantry. It was a lot of money. And I realized I should wait to mail them until I knew whether or not it would devastate the organizations with taxes or something. That was something I’d have to learn about, too.

  Because this was what I was going to do with my life. Writing a book? That was a side project now. My singular, driving goal, my life’s purpose had finally become clear at age thirty.

  My job was to leave the world better off than I’d found it.

  Chapter Twelve

  April showers brought May flowers, but those weren’t the blooms that had been occupying most of my time, lately. Mom had made the mistake of consulting Neil for his expertise with all things floral, and I’d often found myself the tie-breaker when they clashed.

  “Neil says orchids, but mom really wants Stargazer Lilies,” I said, weighing two glossy photographs of possible table arrangements in my hands, as though the action would give me some idea of which would be best.

  “It’s your mother’s wedding,” El-Mudad reminded me, his mouth paused above the rim of his coffee mug as he leaned one-handed against the counter. “Maybe she should pick?”

  “I know that. We’re going with the Star Gazers. I’m just trying to figure out what I can find wrong with orchids so I can make it sound like we picked the lilies through logic and careful consideration,” I mused.

  Neil was in the city for the weekend to go to the opera with Rudy. Opera was not my thing at all so I wouldn’t have gone with them, anyway. But it was nice to have company while he was off doing his boring Neil stuff. Polyamory had a big advantage in that way; if someone wanted to fly solo for an outing, nobody had to feel abandoned or left behind.

  “I will never understand his thing with flowers,” El-Mudad said fondly. “They’re plants. They grow in the dirt, and then someone cuts their genitals off and arranges them in a jar.”

  “When you put it that way, it sounds so romantic,” I joked.

  We stood in the kitchen, waiting for our quiche to finish baking. Our housekeeper, Julia, didn’t work on weekends, but she left breakfast dishes we could easily finish cooking for ourselves. Olivia had gone into the city with Neil so she could meet up with Valerie for a girl’s day out, leaving El-Mudad and I to indulged in some rare walk-around-practically-naked time. I wore a short, black silk chemise beneath a sheer, floral-printed black robe, and he was perfectly happy to wander around in his tight black briefs. Which I was one-hundred percent, absolutely okay with. He had the body of a goddamn Olympic swimmer.

  He set down his mug and came to stand beside me as I stared at the photos on the counter. He put his hand over the back of my neck and gently played with some wisps of hair that had escaped my high, messy bun.

  “Why don’t we stop worrying about the flowers for now? Breakfast is almost ready, and we have a whole Saturday to ourselves,” he murmured, lowering his lips to my skin. “We could make Neil another surprise video.”

  I giggled at the thought. The last one had gone over very, very well with him.

  “Did you want to go out to the Pavillon?” I asked. “It might be a fun day to play around in the machine room. You haven’t used the Sybian yet, and I hear it gives amazing prostate orgasms.”

  “And what are you going to do?” he asked, grinding his pelvis against my backside.

  I considered. “I could use a good pounding from the fucking machine. Maybe you could cuff me and force me to orgasm while you watched?” I clapped my hands excitedly. “Or, I could cuff you and make you stay on the Sybian.”

  “And here I’d imagined a relaxing day,” he quipped and nibbled my earlobe.

  I took the photos and stacked them together, tapping them on the counter to even their edges before I put them down. “When is this stupid thing going to be done baking?”

  “Should I distract you from your hunger while you wait?” He cupped my breast over my silk nightgown and rubbed his thumb across my nipple. His other hand crept up my thigh, dragging the fabric as his fingers inched higher. I sighed happily and lolled my head back on his shoulder.

  And that’s when I heard the kitchen door open.

  And my mother gasp loudly.

  “Sophie Anne!”

  El-Mudad had jumped away from me the moment we’d heard her barge in, but there was no way to spin how we’d been standing and what we were wearing as entirely innocent. All the blood in my body ran to my face and neck. El-Mudad wisely stepped around the corner of the island to hide his raging erection.

  “How could you?” she demanded, not of me, but of him. “You are Neil’s friend, and you’d treat him this way behind his back?”

  She turned her hurting rage to me. “And you! I knew something was going on! I knew it, and you lied to me. You lied to me!”

  I tried to remain calm, but tears sprang to my eyes. “I didn’t lie. You thought I was cheating on Neil. I’m not.”

  “That’s sure not what the hell it looked like!” she shouted. “Why? You’ve got a husband who loves you, who gives you everything you could possibly want, and then you go and do this?”

  “She isn’t cheating on Neil,” El-Mudad spoke up. “He knows about us. Because he’s in this relationship, too.”

  Mom blanched.

  “Please, don’t be mad,” I whispered, my throat raw with painful panic. I didn’t want my mom to reject me over this.

  “I don’t understand.” She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her temple. “What are you saying to me right now?”

  “Neil and El-Mudad and I are in love.” Words had never felt so insufficient, so helpless in my life. “That’s why he’s living here. We’re in a relationship together. We have been for a while.”

  “The three of you?” she sputtered. “All three of you? Together?”

  “All three of us,” El-Mudad confirmed.

  “Sophie, I can deal with a lot of stuff,” Mom said, her voice raspy. “You marrying a man older than I am. You admitting to running away to Tokyo. Being bisexual—“

  “Oh you had to deal with that, did you?” I snapped. “You had to deal with the fact that I don’t like only dick?”

  “Sophie Anne!”

  “D
on’t!” I shouted. “Don’t you dare sit there and act like who I am is some sort of ordeal for you. It’s not. It has nothing to do with you. But if it bothers you so fucking much, I don’t know why you wouldn’t be happy that I’m with two men. That will be like, double the help in pretending my sexuality doesn’t exist!”

  “Don’t you dare deflect this like I’m some...homophobe!” Mom exclaimed in rage.

  I almost told her that she wasn’t a homophobe, she was a biphobe, just to see her get even more furious.

  “This isn’t a constructive discussion,” El-Mudad said, calm but firm. “Perhaps you should both take a moment apart, collect yourselves, and calm down a little—“

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!” Mom and I both shrieked at him in unison, and he took a step back.

  I turned to Mom, raising my hands and dropping them in exasperation. “I love El-Mudad. Neil loves him. We’re happy together, and we’ve waited a really long time to commit to each other like this. I’m not going to let you shame us for wanting to live together like everyone else!”

  “You are not acting like everyone else!” She argued. “I don’t know one person, not one, who lives with two other romantic partners. And you’re telling me I should just accept it?”

  “You should,” El-Mudad said, his tone still even. “You should be happy that two people love your daughter and wish only for her happiness. And if you love Neil, you should be happy that he has the same.”

  “Don’t tell me how I should feel!” Mom directed her anger back at him. “They were a happily married couple before you barged in.”

  “Don’t talk to him like that!” I practically screamed. “This isn’t your life! It’s mine! And if you can’t be happy that I’m loved by two men who respect me, who listen to me, who want to protect me...I don’t know why the hell you’d want less for me than that when it was more than I could ever have hoped for!”

  Silence hung between us. For a long moment, all I could hear was the frantic pounding of my heart in my ears.

  “I think I need to go,” Mom said finally, quieter than before.

  “That may be a good idea,” El-Mudad ventured again. “Later, when the shock has worn off—“

  “No, I mean I need to leave. Tony and I need to move out ahead of schedule.”

  She could have slapped me. She should have, rather than say something so cruel.

  “Don’t do that,” I pleaded. “Not over something this small.”

  “It’s not small,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “You’re an adult. You can live your life however you please. But I don’t have to support it. I believe that marriage is between two people, and this? This goes against what God intended.”

  “Oh yeah? Did God intend for you to go out to bars with aunt Marie and leave me at home alone all night when I was fourteen? Did God tell you to fuck random dudes and not come home until the next morning?” That was intensely unfair of me. I’d run off so many of my mom’s potential romantic partners over the years, and here I was, basically calling her a slut now. But I didn’t care. I hurt. I wanted to hurt her back. “Did God intend for you to have a baby out of wedlock?”

  Her eyes went wide and her mouth opened as though she would say something else. She didn’t. She turned toward for the door.

  And because I was terrible, because I was an awful, hateful daughter, I called after her, “Why don’t you talk to Tony about it? Because he’s known for a long time.”

  She hesitated just a moment but didn’t look back at me. She stormed out and slammed the door behind her.

  I stood, staring in disbelief at the swaying Roman shades. My pulse pounded in my ears. My body went numb.

  “Sophie?” El-Mudad asked cautiously.

  “Yeah. I’m all right,” I said, my voice hollow. I both believed and doubted that statement. My chest ached and my eyes watered, but more than anything I felt...tired. And relieved. The worst thing that could have possibly happened had already happened. It was over. And it had gone as badly as the worst possible thing could have.

  He came to stand beside me and put his hand on my arm. “I don’t think you are. And if you are, I’m worried for you.”

  “You don’t have to worry.” I shook myself out of my trance. My sadness crushed me, but not in a way I could explain, tempered as it was with the inevitability of the whole thing. “Let’s get the quiche out before it burns.”

  His brow crumpled in concern, and with a grimace of resolve, he kissed my cheek before going to the oven.

  “Be careful. You’re half-naked,” I reminded him. Because I’d certainly forgotten how I was dressed at the moment. I’d just stood there in my underwear and had a huge fight with my mother. “You know...I am tired of people walking in on me having sex and vice versa.”

  “You’re the only person I know who has this problem,” El-Mudad said with a quiet laugh, as though he wasn’t sure if my mood would allow a bit of humor.

  “I need to learn to knock. Mom needs to learn to knock.” I finally understood Neil’s frustration. “You know, if she had just minded her own business, if she hadn’t just barged in, this wouldn’t even have been an issue.”

  “Eventually, it would have been,” he said, sliding on an oven mitt. “I think you assumed that we could hide forever.”

  I shook my head. “No. I didn’t. I knew eventually someone was going to find out. I knew my mom was going to find out, for sure. She already suspected something. But I can’t understand why she would think that of me. I’ve never once been tempted to cheat on Neil. Anything we’ve done outside our marriage has always been mutually consensual.” I paused. “Not that you’re outside our marriage, El-Mudad. You know that.”

  “I do.” He still sounded sad. I couldn’t blame him; there was no way all three of us could be married. He would always be left out in an official capacity.

  It struck me then, observing him set our breakfast on a trivet on the island, swearing under his breath a little, that certificate or not, I thought of him as my husband now as much as Neil was. We’d been living together for just four months, but El-Mudad already felt less like a boyfriend and more like a permanent fixture, ‘til death may we part.

  Maybe that was why I wasn’t as upset over Mom’s rejection as I seemingly should have been. I knew she would come around. I’d believed her when she’d told me over and over again throughout my childhood that there was nothing I could do to lose her love. It stung me deeply that she wasn’t as accepting of my sexuality as I’d thought she was, and that she would probably never be okay with our relationship with El-Mudad. But I knew for sure that my mother would never stop loving me. There was no risk for me at all in the situation, other than lifelong awkwardness. I would gladly accept that for him.

  “At the risk of ruining Neil’s weekend, I think we should call him,” El-Mudad said quietly.

  “You’re right.” I sighed. “The one night he gets out to spend time with Rudy in months, and I have to cause drama.”

  “Sophie, you didn’t start this. Your mother did.” His voice rose a little. He was usually so calm and reasonable in crisis situations. Except for our giant blow up over Valerie a few months earlier, he’d been totally chill. He corrected himself quickly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t criticize her.”

  “Criticize away,” I said, sweeping my arm in an invitation. “Neil is going to. He’s going to freak out as you’ve never seen before.”

  “All the more reason for me to remain neutral and silent on that subject. My main concern is you. That was heated.” He took a knife from the drawer and sliced into the quiche. I went to get plates.

  “Yeah, it got heated, but no more so than some other fights we’ve had.” I couldn’t think of any at that moment, but I was sure it had happened. “You should have heard the fights we had over me dating Neil.”

  “I can imagine. To be entirely truthful, if my twenty-four-year-old daughter had started dating a forty-eight-year-old man, I would not be supportive of that,” he s
aid, retrieving a pie server.

  “Oh, she has never been supportive.” It was better to clear that up right away, to hopefully give him a better picture of what we were dealing with. “She has no problem making it known that she’s not a huge fan, though she’s grudgingly come to accept things. This? Probably not going to be something she comes around on.”

  “You don’t seem bothered by that,” El-Mudad said, pushing a plate of food toward me.

  I went to the refrigerator and got the feta cheese crumbles. The spinach and sundried tomatoes in the quiche would be amazing with it. “I have a chronic illness, a kid to help raise, a husband who’s still in recovery from drug and alcohol addictions, new relationships to forge with my long-lost half-sisters and now my stepdaughters...I’ve got a lot of shit going on. I guess I’m just too busy to be concerned about what my mom thinks about my love life.”

  The corners of his mouth lifted in a slight smile. “Your stepdaughters?”

  I froze and stammered, “I-if that’s okay?”

  He put his arms around me and drew me in close to kiss me, long and slow. When he pulled back, his dark eyes practically glittered above his peaceful smile. “I’m so happy for my daughters, that they will have you in their lives.”

  And that was it. That was the thing that broke me.

  “Oh no, Sophie, I didn’t—“ he said as I began to weep so hard my shoulders shook.

  I waved my hand to cut him off. “It’s fine. It’s fine, I’m just...I didn’t realize...”

  He held me close, tucking my head against his chest and stroking my back. “You don’t have to think of yourself that way right now. I was just pleased that you did. I would never want you to feel that I was forcing motherhood on you. I know you don’t want children—“

  “It’s not that. I swear, it’s not that.”

  I wiped tears from my eyes. “I don’t mind being a stepmom. You love your girls. They’re a part of you. What made me cry was the thought that...you think they’re going to benefit from having me in their lives?”

  “I think anyone who has you in their life benefits from knowing you,” He said. “Don’t doubt that.”