by Penny Aimes
Another Wednesday at Frankie’s, and this time he knew enough to change into jeans and a polo, although he couldn’t look at himself in a mirror without thinking these are my dom jeans and snickering. Frankie’s was about as low-key as last week; no DJ, just piped in music, but this time more people were dancing. April wasn’t there. Some drinks were.
Her friend Caroline was. She asked him to dance and he couldn’t think of a reason why not, so he did. She was fun. Young, giggly, warm and curvy. Not especially interesting to talk to, he considered, but through the filter of inebriation that wasn’t a problem. She suggested they do some shots then head over to a dance club on Red River. Jason was down and so, he decided, was he. Why not? Why the fuck not?
His phone was ringing. He glanced at the screen, then hastened to pick up.
“April?”
She wasn’t saying anything. Caroline nudged him, said his name, shoved the shot glass at him.
“Is something wrong?” He didn’t know why he jumped to that, but he was worried, suddenly. “April?” She’d hung up.
Caroline made a face and downed his shot for him, before wandering off. He barely noticed. He was still staring at his phone as a text came through, assuring him the call was an accident.
I don’t believe that, he thought, in the slow, swimmy way of the profoundly drunk. No, he didn’t believe that at all. April had called him but then she had decided not to talk to him. He didn’t want that. He wanted her to call him when she had something to say. He wanted her to call him when she had nothing to say so he could hear her breathing.
He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to drink with Caroline Burris or go anywhere else. He didn’t want to meet anyone else.
Very slowly, in the haze of Jack and Coke, he came to a conclusion.
He realized Jason was staring at him, and Dennis grabbed his friend and pulled him away from the crowd. Jason came along, his eyes on the clouds forming on his friend’s face.
“You know how you basically warned me off from April?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Well, it didn’t work, and I’m in love with her.”
Jason blew out a breath. “Yeah, sure, of course. Makes sense. Sounds like you.”
“I’m going to have to up my game for her. And you’re going to help me.”
Jason rolled his eyes, but said, “Come with me.”
They moved through the crowd to some of the rooms in the back that were locked during the week, and somehow Jason had keys. He opened the door to a smallish office with a desk and a couple of chairs and some filing cabinets jammed in it carelessly. Rather than sit behind the desk he perched on it and gestured Dennis into one of the chairs.
“Why do you have a key to this office?” Dennis asked.
“Because it’s my office,” Jason said curtly. Dennis considered the curtness to be uncalled for, since there was no reason to expect Jason had an office here. “Look, what are you talking about, you’re in love with April French?”
“I’m in love with her.”
“You’re not, you met her a week ago.”
“You can fall in love in a week,” he argued back immediately. He’d fallen in love faster before.
“Absolutely not.”
“I wouldn’t say I loved someone after a week, but I could be in love with them.”
“What is wrong with you?” Jason demanded.
“I feel like this is just semantics,” Dennis muttered. He felt like there had to be a way to just reach past the words and pour the certainty he felt into Jason’s head, but he couldn’t find it.
Jason sighed deeply and tilted his head backwards to stare at the ceiling. “Why do you think you’re in love with her?”
He stopped for a moment to consider this. He didn’t think; he knew. He knew because of the great inchoate no in his chest when he realized she was hurting; he knew because he was restraining himself from going to her right now. He knew because his house would never be finished without her in it.
“Ever since Sonia,” he said slowly, “I’ve been scared to have a woman in my life. Really in my life. But I can see it with her. I want it.”
“So suddenly you’re not scared,” Jason said, pivoting back forward to look at him.
“No, dude, I’m scared as balls! I’m so fucking scared I’m going to fuck this up. But I...refuse, man. I fucking refuse to fuck it up. I refuse to give up on her.”
“You refuse,” Jason repeated.
Dennis made eye contact. “I refuse.”
Jason took a deep breath, and for a golden moment, Dennis thought he was going to help. They were ride or die for each other, had been for twenty years. Surely Jason could see that this was the next adventure, the next thing.
“You’re drunk,” Jason said. Dennis was drunk, but he could hear every layer of weariness and disgust in his friend’s voice. He could hear himself tell Jason he and Sonia were experimenting with kink, and Jason asking if they had a safeword, and himself saying hey man, it’s not like that. We love each other. He could hear the U-Haul pulling up outside his condo in Capitol Hill to drag his heartbroken ass out of Seattle, and had he been drunk then? Yes, he thought he had been.
“So it’s like that,” he heard himself say.
“Yeah,” said Jason, in that same tone of voice. “I guess so. Let’s talk about this later.”
It was an awkward breakfast in the Beaumont homestead. He left that same day for a trip to New Haven; the company was privately held, and O’Reilly wanted to introduce him to all the shareholders. He also got to meet the heads of the consulting teams, who worked with clients and relied on Operations and Technology to support them.
The trip itself was fine, a grip-and-grin nothing, but he’d grimly observed Leo Graham’s chummy status with all of them. A white room; a very white room.
Over the weekend he had his first check-in with April, and it was...fine. Fine wasn’t what he wanted. She was what he wanted. More was what he wanted.
June
Step one, once he was back in Austin, was lunch with Caroline. He asked her to meet him at the diner down the street from his office, and he was a little anxious about how she’d take the invitation, although he’d been as clear as he could. He was relieved when she showed up in a jogging suit and sneakers. He thought she might not have ordered the cheesesteak fries on a date, either.
“It’s a cheat day,” she said earnestly. “Well. It can be.”
Dennis laughed. “I’m sure you earned it.” He had no room to judge; he’d ordered a Reuben that was practically sending death threats to his arteries.
“I have to watch my figure ’cause, y’know, other people watch it, too. I’m a hostess at a restaurant,” she explained. “I’m also on OnlyFans if you want the link.”
“I think your figure could take some fries and be all the better for it,” he said mildly, and she rolled her eyes.
“Oh, like you care. You’re all about April, right?”
“Yes. I know this might be a little awkward...” Even if April wasn’t in the picture, he couldn’t see himself with Caroline. She was ten years younger than him, and when they talked, sometimes he felt every minute of that decade.
She shook her head. “Nah, I’m the one who grilled you about being good enough for her. I’m down to help. What do you need?”
“I want to dress her up,” he explained. “I want to give her money every week to buy clothes, to start with. But the specifics are the hard part. How much is too much?”
“No such thing,” she said immediately.
“For April.” Patiently. “Not for you.”
“Hm. Yeah... I’m not actually sure how much money she makes?” Caroline said, frowning in concentration. “But it can’t be less than I do, and I can spend a hundred dollars without thinking about it. Two fifty would make sense maybe.”<
br />
“Hm.”
“So you should do five hundred,” she continued, stabbing into her fries. “It should feel extravagant but not sinful. Use a prepaid card. April wouldn’t do anything too wild with a real one, but she’d think you were being reckless. And cash feels icky, very Pretty Woman.”
“What do you think about this idea?” he asked. Point blank.
“I think if she turns it down you should call me,” she said. “But for real? I think it’s really sweet. I don’t think anyone’s ever done anything like this for her before. Not just the money, but like...thinking this hard about it. April’s played with a lot of shit doms.”
His expression must have slipped, because she covered her mouth quickly. “Shit, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I mean—it doesn’t make me like her less. I’m...sorry to hear it, for her sake.” Those felt like safe things to say. They sounded better than asking for names and addresses.
He didn’t want to hurt anybody. He just wanted to go door-to-door and ask them what was wrong with them. Maybe shake them a little.
“I guess...maybe it’s better to say that she tends to be approached by doms trying to build their confidence. And like, sometimes that’s for a good reason and she kicks them to the curb and sometimes they just need a little time and then, like...they move on. But for whatever reason nobody really sticks.”
And now she doesn’t even want to try, he realized. So step one—I show her I’m not going anywhere. Because I’m not.
After work, he made his way down to Jason’s dank basement lair. “Hey. I had lunch with Caroline today.”
Jason flicked him an appraising look, just for an instant. “Yeah? How was that?”
“It was good.” He paused. “She told me a lot of the doms April’s played with before have been trying to build up their confidence before moving on to other people.”
Jason nodded. “I don’t know her that well but speaking as someone who sees a lot of what goes on at the club, yeah, sounds about right.”
“That sucks,” he said. Jason nodded again. He waited a little longer and then put it on the table. “Is that why you wanted me to stay away from her?”
Jason didn’t look away from the screen. “Yep.”
He flinched. “You think I’m like that?”
Jason sighed and pushed away from the desk to look at him straight on. “Like what? Like someone who would fall into the arms of the first person to show him a little genuine vulnerability alongside the sub games? Like someone who might not be ready to get into a long-term relationship right away? I know you, man, and I know the last thing you want to do right now is hurt anybody. And I looked at the two of you together and I thought, here’s a real good chance for these two people to fuck each other up.”
“I know I’ve fucked up a lot of stuff lately,” Dennis grated out. The more it sank in, the more crushed he felt. Jason was protecting her from him. “I don’t want to fuck this up. That’s why I wanted your help, man. You’ve been doing this a lot longer than me.”
Jason shook his head, then met his eyes again. “You still refuse to give up?”
He nodded. “I refuse.”
Jason flicked his attention back to the computer just long enough to close things out. “All right. Let’s talk strategy, then.”
Relief shot through him. “Yeah? You’re in.”
His friend threw up his hands. “What else can I do? I’m ride or die, man. You know that.”
He spent some time catching Jason up on events so far. “So this is how I see it,” he concluded. “First, I have to be a better dom. What happened with Sonia can’t happen again. Ever.”
Jason nodded. “You ever think about mentoring?”
“Dom mentoring?” Dennis raised an eyebrow at that. “How does that work?”
“It’s a pretty normal thing in the scene actually,” said Jason, and Dennis was reminded again that his friend had been sneaking into kink clubs since he was sixteen. “I can try to find someone for you. I know a lot of the doms at Frankie’s.”
“Shit,” Dennis said. “If I had done that when I first got plugged into the scene with Sonia...” It was such a private thing, though. “I’ll think about it, okay?”
Jason nodded, eyes shadowing as he turned inward and made mental notes. Dennis was deeply familiar with his friend’s expressions after twenty years, and this was Jason in problem-solving mode. “Okay. Yeah, okay, what else?”
“All right. Be a better dom, check. But more specifically, I have to be her dom, and that means learning what I don’t know about being trans. I don’t want her to ever have to explain to me why what I just said puts her at risk or insults her again.”
Jason gave him a Look. “That’s an ambitious goal, Den.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know I’m not going to be perfect, but I need to be smarter. I need to at least know what the fuck I’m talking about. There are ways to get educated about this stuff. You think PFLAG would work for this?”
“...huh.” In high school Dennis and Jason had attended PFLAG together. Eventually Jason’s mom had started coming, too, but for a while it was just the two of them. “That’s...smart, but at the same time, it’s kind of weird to go spy on a support group, man.”
“No, I know that,” said Dennis. “But I figure I can talk to some people and figure out where to go from there.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jason said. “There’s one more thing, though. And this is non-negotiable for me. If you’re going to put yourself through self-improvement boot camp for a girl you just met—which is ridiculous, by the way, this is ridiculous—then you need to go to therapy.”
“Oh, fuck you, you’re always trying to get me to go to therapy.”
“Yeah, because: you need therapy.”
“I’m fine.” Not this shit again.
“What happened with Sonia traumatized you, Dennis. You’re not fine.”
“I am fine. I am not traumatized. I am not the victim when it comes to me and Sonia, Jason. I’m the bad guy.” He tried to use his tone to convey that this subject was closed, but Jason was annoyingly immune to his dom voice.
“Dennis, what I’m about to tell you may come as a shock, but in therapy? They don’t like to talk about bad guys.”
That, Dennis thought, was exactly the problem. Sometimes there was a bad guy. He didn’t need excuses; he didn’t need to love himself more. He already thought he was pretty cool. But he couldn’t allow himself to hurt someone again. Period.
That said...
He was not at all convinced he needed therapy, but on the other hand, he was convinced he needed his best friend on his side in this. If it would make Jason feel like Dennis was handling his shit, that this campaign for April’s heart was a good idea, it wouldn’t hurt to try. He smiled wearily. “Okay. It’s a deal. Thanks, brother.”
Jason ducked his head and pivoted back to his laptop. But he called after Dennis as he ascended the stairs: “Just don’t fuck this up!”
His new therapist was a kink-friendly older woman recommended by Jason’s own shrink. She was expensive, and—although he was reluctant to admit it—she was good.
She set aside a couple of hours for the first session, to “get the full download.” He told her about Sonia and braced for her to tell him it wasn’t his fault. Or maybe to tell him he was an incurable misogynist and throw him out.
Instead she laid down her pen, looked at him over her glasses, and said, “Wow. You fucked up big. What did you learn from that?” in a voice of calm compassion.
For a long moment he didn’t know what to say. “That’s not what I expected you to say,” he said, with a touch of a chuckle in his voice.
“It strikes me as the only thing that matters, don’t you think?” she said simply. “Making amends and doing better next time. What else is there?”
“Did you not already know that?”
He swallowed. “I learned I can hurt people even if I love them. Maybe sometimes because I love them. I don’t want that.”
In response to her gentle follow-up questions, he revisited the terror and guilt; the sick helplessness of a situation that could not be fixed, could only be walked away from. The pit that had opened up in his life, and how it seemed to be centered in their condo, in the space they had shared. As he described the slow collapse of his confidence, of the aching void a walk-in closet could become, he lived through it again, with Cordelia at his elbow taking notes and asking gentle questions that flipped things upside down. The second time through it seemed smaller; like something he could live with.
They moved on to talking about April. Cordelia did not think his plan was ridiculous. “If, in the end, she still doesn’t want to be with you, what’s the worst-case scenario? You’re a better dominant, you’re more informed about transgender people and transphobia, and you went to therapy. What a waste of time that would be, huh? If you don’t think you’re ready for a relationship, become ready. If this ends up not being the relationship, another one will come.”
She also didn’t disapprove of his idea to buy April clothes, although she resolutely refused to speculate on how it would go. “You’ll find out soon enough, won’t you?” she said. “Your job and your role require you to anticipate things—live in the future. That’s allowed you to be very good at what you do. But it can also create a lot of anxiety. Human beings were made to live life in the present, one second at a time. What if you just tried to do that for now?”
One second at a time, life gradually carried him forward. The city code enforcers weighed his architect in the balance and found him wanting yet again. The summer rains not only finished off the clay pipes but also revealed a hitherto-undiagnosed problem with the roof. The flooding forced them to tear up the flooring that had just been laid and for days fans and dehumidifiers ran at full blast. Reggie swore that despite everything, he would get Dennis into the house by July. He also diffidently invited Dennis to a Juneteenth cookout.
