by Penny Aimes
“I’d offer you breakfast,” she said as she emerged, “but I really have to get in the shower and get to work.” She was wiping water off her face with a towel.
“Of course,” he said easily. His grip of one-night stand etiquette was pretty solid. “Can I get your number before I go? Or will I see you again at Frankie’s? I want to see if Saturday night is all you made it out to be.” She’d been quick to get out of bed, and he hoped she wasn’t regretting him. He didn’t regret her.
“You’ll definitely see me there,” she said, beaming, which was a relief. It wasn’t quite a date, but he had something in mind to lock that down. “But sure, got your phone?”
He caught an Uber back to Jason’s house as the sun was rising and tried to sort his head out during the ride. He didn’t start his new position until Monday, but in the meantime, he needed to meet with the contractor at his house, and the CEO of his new firm was inviting him to dinner...this suit absolutely needed to be dry cleaned, as well.
But first—he popped open his newest contact.
Dennis: How do you feel about presents?
April: what kind of presents?
Dennis: Mysterious ones.
April: mystified i guess
seriously tho you definitely dont need to do that
The April is typing dots began to dance, but stopped dead when he sent:
What if I wanted to?
And then began again:
April: that would be really sweet and would make me feel very special
and embarrassed!
Dennis: Isn’t that a good thing?
She ought to feel special; she was a bona fide miracle. And embarrassed could be...very fun. There was another long pause before she sent:
April: yes Sir
Dennis grinned in the back of his Uber and began to look for a boutique in Austin with delivery. Time to let her see what he was capable of with a little time to prepare.
April
April tried to keep the goofy smile off her face at work. At work, she was one bland, industrious cube in a whole floor of bland, industrious cubes. At work, the game was put away and all the dizzying heights and crushing lows of her kinky microcosm were forgotten, and she was thirty-two, not sixteen for the second time. That was the rule.
It was a hard rule to keep up when someone kept texting her:
Dennis: I was supposed to move into this house a week ago.
It was accompanied by a photo of a kitchen with no backsplash, no cabinets and no top to the island.
April: wow thats half of a very nice kitchen
A brown face in a headscarf appeared over the wall of her cube—although not very far above it—just as she did. Fatima looked as tired as April felt, but probably not for the same reason. Probably. At eight months pregnant that window had presumably closed. Fatima was normally a tiny Pakistani woman; she currently looked like a tiny Pakistani woman who had swallowed a basketball whole. “Ready for lunch?”
April’s eyes panned over her triple-pane monitor setup and the spreadsheets that were no closer to being reconciled than they were when she opened them this morning. “Absolutely,” she said. Maybe lunch would reboot her brain.
“Who are you texting?” Fatima asked in the elevator.
“Nobody.” She shoved the phone away in her purse.
“Big plans for the weekend?” her friend teased. When April’s eyes widened, Fatima chuckled and said, “Going to slay some dragons?”
Right. She’d made the mistake once of mentioning at work that she occasionally played a role-playing game with friends from a support group and now that was her “thing” in the office. She’d gotten a birthday card with Legolas on it.
Absolutely no one in the office, not even Fatima, seemed to suspect April had a sex life whatsoever, let alone one that involved its own kind of role-playing. Sometimes that felt safe. Sometimes it stung. People seemed to assume she was straight—they teased her about Orlando Bloom, not Liv Tyler—but mostly they assumed she was kind of a eunuch.
“I’m not sure what I’m doing yet,” she said, as they walked to the cafe down the block with the good pastries. The May sunshine felt good; at least there were no more jokes about her name.
“Do you want to go to that nail salon again? That was fun.”
April glanced down at her nails. “Yeah, maybe. These are lifting a bit.” The rainbow-swathed queer-friendly salon was her biggest (visible) indulgence in life. Some women bought shoes. April paid a lot for Japanese gel nail extensions. People wondered how she could type.
(Occasionally women at Frankie’s wondered how a pansexual woman could function with nails like that, but that’s why God made tongues and dildoes, right?)
She shook off that train of thought and tried to focus on what Fatima was saying about the new CTO. Fatima maintained databases for their company, working on the fourth floor on the opposite side of the net from the analysis and modeling April did on the tenth, and she had been a part of his interview. Apparently, he’d been extremely handsome. “And intense! Girl, if I weren’t already pregnant, I would’ve been by the time that interview was over.”
April snorted and looked down at her soup; apparently it was her fate to be awash in hormones today, either hers or Fatima’s. “Now don’t you tell anyone I said that,” Fatima said with mock seriousness. “HR’s gonna have a field day with that kind of talk.”
“You know you can trust me,” April said. She meant it. She and Fatima shared more than lunch two or three times a week. They shared facial hair woes—Fatima had told her about an electrology clinic in Dallas that had eradicated Fatima’s wispy moustache and chin whiskers in two eight-hour visits. They had celebrated together when April’s name change was final, and when her divorce was, too; when Fatima’s oldest got into A&M and when her pregnancy test came back unexpectedly, impossibly positive. They didn’t share everything—there was no one who shared everything in April’s carefully compartmentalized life—but they shared a lot.
Her phone buzzed again. She had a package at her apartment, a mysterious present. She looked up from the notification and bit her lip.
“I’m—seeing somebody,” she said abruptly, and instantly regretted it; regretted saying anything, and regretted saying that, especially. “I mean. We went on one date.” Yes. A “date.” “But. Um.”
She looked back at her soup, and peeked up to see Fatima’s face, which looked thunderstruck. But in a good way. “Girl. Why did you wait until we had ten minutes left to get back? You have to tell me everything about—him? Is it a him?” Of course; Fatima, unlike everyone else at work, knew about her ex-wife.
“It’s a him.” She felt a smile pulling on the sides of her face. “Very much a him.” Her face flamed and she decided that was probably enough honesty for one day.
“You have to tell me. Everything.”
Well, that wasn’t going to happen. Fatima was broad-minded, the only person at work she would discuss a date with at all, but there were limits to how much she was willing to discuss with anyone. She’d rather be a eunuch than the office pervert. She’d just have to choose her words carefully.
Dennis
“So did you go to that place I told you about?” Jason asked.
Dennis looked up from his laptop. “What, Frankie’s?”
“No, man, the barbershop.” His oldest friend and temporary housemate rolled his eyes.
“Shit, like I’d let you find me a barbershop. I’m sure you know the best place to get a fade ’round here.” Not only was Jason white, but he had shaved his head since his forehead started growing at twenty-two.
“Yes, Frankie’s. You check it out? I got there around ten like I said I would, and I didn’t see you.”
“I got your text,” he acknowledged. He got it eventually, in the Uber in the morning.
“While you were out tr
olling the sex shop parking lots?”
Absent: “You are nasty and a bad friend.” Dennis clicked through his emails and confirmed April’s package had been delivered. Excellent.
“You are—” Jason sighed and dropped into an armchair that had clearly been relegated to this guest room for being offensively ugly “—being squirrelly.”
“I went,” Dennis said. “I met someone.”
“Before I got there?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck, I knew I’d regret telling you about my spot. So I guess you liked it?”
“I was overdressed,” he said, closing the laptop.
“Yeah, it’s not like the place you took me in Seattle. A little more working-class, I guess. No fancy NDAs or membership fees.”
Hmm. He’d chalked it up to the Austin heat versus the Seattle freeze. Was it about money? He wondered if he’d spent too much on April now, if she’d be uncomfortable. Well. It was done.
“But obviously that didn’t stand in the way. I guess an Armani suit rarely does.” Jason smirked.
Jason had just as much money as Dennis. More, probably; they weren’t in the habit of comparing checkbooks, but Jason had leaned in on start-up life instead of running away. They’d grown up together in the more tattered kind of suburb; dangling from the bottom rung of the middle class, where people hang on as tight as they can to keep from dropping into WIC checks and government cheese. But for whatever reason, Jason had grown up to have the bigger chip on his shoulder about money. The mismatched, leftover furniture of the guest room told the story; his wardrobe colored it in.
He was the tech start-up stereotype who wore hoodies to investor meetings and preferred Cap’n Crunch to sushi. Which was silly, because everyone could afford sushi these days.
“Are you insinuating I hooked up with a gold digger?” Dennis said, raising an eyebrow.
“I have no idea who you hooked up with, you cagey fuck. Do you want to tell me anything or just leave me twisting here?” He softened. “I mean, good for you. I’m just surprised. You’ve been a little gun-shy about kink since your breakup.”
“Now I don’t think I’m going to tell you shit.” But Jason knew him better than that; he waited.
“She said she was a regular there. April.”
“Ohhh, April. Okay. Huh.”
“What?”
“I just didn’t know that’s what you were looking for.”
Dennis gave him what Paddington’s Aunt Lucy would call a Hard Stare. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing! Nothing. She just...she’s very friendly with new doms who come around. You’re easing yourself back into things, that’s great. Good for you, man.”
The words landed in Dennis’s stomach like a kick. “I liked her. I like her a lot.”
Jason rolled his eyes. “Everybody likes her. She’s very sweet. She helps schedule events and makes sure the demonstrators have a bottle of water. I’m just saying, you didn’t get to meet many people yet. This is not the time or place to be Mr. Serial Monogamy. Play the field a little. There’re some girls I can introduce you to. They’ve been asking me if I had a straight brother for a long time.”
“You can introduce me to them on Saturday.” A beat. “I’ll be the one at the bar with April.” He appreciated Jason looking out for him, but he knew he wanted to see where things with April were going. First person he met or not, there was too much potential there to not see it through. See where it led.
Jason sighed deeply. “All right. Fine. I’m going to go work,” by which he meant code in the basement. Jason only used about 15% of his three-story house, even with Dennis occupying a guest room, and he spent about 25% of his time as CEO doing his employees’ work and the rest avoiding meetings. He paused a beat, then asked, in an offhand manner that did not at all fool his oldest friend: “Did you call any of those therapists on the list I gave you?”
“I don’t need therapy,” Dennis said flatly. He didn’t want to have this conversation again.
“Dennis...” Jason just looked at him. “You’ve been through some shit the last couple years, man. I saw your apartment in Seattle when I came to get you, remember? You were in a bad place.”
“I was feeling sorry for myself,” Dennis said brusquely. “I don’t need someone to tell me to feel better about what happened with Sonia, I need to not fuck up like that again. Feeling bad when you make mistakes is a good and normal mechanism.”
“Yeah, all right,” muttered Jason. He paused at the door. “I’m gonna order Instacart, anything you want?”
“Yes.” He waited until Jason met his eyes. “Literally anything but Code Red and Hot Pockets, you monster. Your refrigerator is a nightmare.”
April
April’s apartment building had a posh office on the ground floor that was manned by the rental company, from nine in the morning to five. Since her work hours ran from 8:30 to 5:30, she was pretty much never able to interact with the front desk staff, although she did enjoy the fancy free coffee machine.
Most of the time it wasn’t a problem; most packages fit in one of the self-service lockers. But she hadn’t gotten a message about that this time, so she slipped out of work slightly early to make sure she got it. She brought home her laptop and promised her conscience she would get in some work before bed.
A front desk staffer hunted in the mailroom a moment and returned with a package. “Here you go. April French, right?” He sounded either stoned or mildly concussed.
“Yes,” she said, feeling a little concussed herself. It was way too big for a locker.
“Yeah, like, a courier dropped it off earlier.” No wonder he’d been able to get it to her so quickly.
“Thank you,” she murmured, and headed for the elevator.
“Have a nice night, sir.”
She whirled back in shock and disbelief, looking for a sneer on his face, but he seemed spacey as ever and unaware anything had happened. She got on the elevator without saying anything and studied herself in the reflective door. She searched for a reason it was her fault, although she knew that was pointless and cruel.
Makeup perfect: eyes, lips, and foundation. Wearing a dress, sober enough for the office but still bright and cheerful. Everything just right. She didn’t pass, she knew, but surely it was clear to anyone what she was going for. And it didn’t make a difference. Her reflection squinted its eyes at her, holding back humiliating, infuriating tears.
Maybe he said...something else. Or he was just...on autopilot, she tried to argue with herself.
That’s...not really any better.
She looked down at her present and decided to focus on that, pushing the injury to one side. She hurried back to her apartment, dumped the rest of the mail onto a little table by the door and set the box on her bed. It was square, and wide. She opened it up and found several other boxes. The largest appeared to be a dress box.
“No fucking way,” she breathed. It was a PVC dress, about two notches more fetish-y than anything she’d ever worn even to Frankie’s, black with pink piping around the skirt and along the zipper on the side. Ornamental buckles crossed over the zipper and at the throat. She held it up against herself—her size, more or less, although incredibly short, maybe even more so than it was intended to be because of her height. It was a sleeveless skater-style dress, draped from the shoulders then flared in the skirt. There was an opening in the front that would probably be obscene if her bust was any bigger. Overall, it would minimize her shoulders and emphasize her waist. She hadn’t lost any weight on hormones, but she did like how it had moved around, and the dress would play into all her strong suits.
She laid it down and dived back into the box. Stay-up stockings, black with thin pink seams up the back. No bra, but a pair of pink hip hugger panties in silk. Pink and black round-toed pumps with a buckle on the top and a kitten heel. And finally, black leather
cuffs with buckles and stainless-steel D-rings.
She exhaled and reached for her phone.
April: oh my GOD this is TOO MUCH
Dennis: You got the package. Do you like it? Does everything fit?
The panties are optional.
April: of course i like it thats not the point
i didnt try it on yet how did you know my sizes??
Dennis: Either I guessed or I looked in your closet before I left.
April: i cant tell if thats sweet or creepy but i want to say sweet because i want to keep these
Dennis: If you need a different size for anything we have two days.
That’s why I had it delivered.
April: I cant believe this
why would you do this?
Dennis: What if I just wanted to see you in it since the moment I made that outfit up?
Well, what if he did?
He was typing again:
Dennis: I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. But I would love to walk in the door to Frankie’s Saturday and see you in that. Will you do that for me?
its too much money, she typed, and then hesitated. He knew exactly how much money it was, didn’t he? Was it her business? She cleared the message and wavered. Her eyes flickered back to the previous message.
Dennis: What if I just wanted to see you in it since the moment I made that outfit up?
Then...that would mean she was more than just the welcome wagon, more than just a convenient body. It would mean he wanted her. Her specifically. Her in all her...her-ness.
yes, she typed. And then before she could chicken out, she added Sir.
There was a long beat with no response, and then:
Dennis: Good girl.
The words felt like a hug, like strong arms shielding her from the world.
