by Penny Aimes
“I have to match that energy. I have to be a good partner, I have to educate myself. And I have to show him that I can.” She let out a long shuddering breath. “Making these kind of shitty decisions is the opposite of that.”
Her therapist tapped the pen idly on his notebook.
“Well...counter point. When you thought you were making good decisions, you were stuck in a job you hated because you were afraid you couldn’t find a better one, and you were lying to a man you cared about because you were afraid to be honest with him. Given that, maybe it’s time for some bad decisions.”
She gaped. It was a direct hit, below the waterline, and she had absolutely no idea what to say to it.
“I’m not telling you to do anything specific. And I’m not telling you not to think about...all that other stuff. It’s not bad to get educated. It’s not bad to learn how to be there for another person or to understand their struggles. I’m just asking...what if you let yourself get mad? What if you just did what you wanted? What if you accepted that Dennis thought you were good enough for him from the start, and all your ‘good’ decisions only ever got in the way?”
“I could get hurt,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t you understand that?”
“I do,” he said. “But—do you play sports?” She shook her head. “There’s a difference between being injured and being hurt. An injury puts you at risk. An injury can end your career. But hurt...lots of things hurt. Getting hurt is the price of admission for some things. And we both know, now, that you’ve got a hell of a tolerance for pain.”
“For physical things, sure,” she says. “But I hate hard conversations. I hate disclosing. I hate sitting there telling people how I feel and opening up and waiting for them to come back and punch me right where I’m the most vulnerable or peace out on me.”
“And then you lost your temper and you did just that,” he said. “How’s it going?”
Good question.
“Maybe,” he said delicately, “getting better starts with extending trust. To the ones who’ve earned it.”
When she got home, she called Fatima and asked if she could come by after work. Her stomach churned with dread, and her first order of business was to apologize for the last visit, but the older woman waved it away. “Forget it. Never happened. Honey, how are you doing?”
“I’m okay.” She poured the tea she had made for both of them, shaky with adrenaline. She’d been prepared for Fatima to be icy or angry or anything but kind. “I’ve gone on a few interviews... Nothing so far, but it wasn’t as horrible as I imagined. I’ve got enough savings to make it past the holidays, and I’m hoping hiring picks up after that.”
Fatima nodded, took a sip and looked at her sidelong. “So...is it all over with Dennis?”
April shrugged. “I really don’t know,” she said quietly. “I haven’t given up.”
Fatima raised an eyebrow. “So this means you still haven’t—” When April blushed and shook her head, Fatima clucked her tongue. “And you like this? This withholding?”
“Denial,” April said. “Or really, control. Orgasm control, because it doesn’t always mean saying no.” And added under her breath, “Even if it feels like it.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Fatima says. “I’m not letting this man talk to Samir, ever.”
April laughed hollowly. “No, I do like it. I like feeling like someone else is in charge and it’s...pretty intense, as far as control goes. And when...if...he does let me, it’s going to be...” She wiggled on her stool. “Unbelievable. I might die.”
“I’ll send flowers,” Fatima said dryly.
“I know I should give up, but I don’t want to yet,” she confessed. “And I’m trying to do this thing right now where I do whatever I want for a while. I feel like I’m ruining my life, but my therapist is actually supporting it.”
Fatima frowned at her. “Well, what have you done so far?”
“Quit my job. Yelled at you. Yelled at my friend Caroline for always scooping up dominants. Ate a lot of pasta.”
She snorted. “See, this is what I thought. You running wild is a lot less than a lot of people on their best day.”
“Well, that’s hurtful.”
She laughed. “I’m sorry, then. But you really are a sweet girl deep down. A kinky girl, but a sweet one.” April tried to decide how she felt about that. She thought maybe it was a pretty okay way to be. Fatima touched April’s arm. “Have you talked to him lately?”
“I really shouldn’t,” April said.
“What shouldn’t? Aren’t you that notorious bad girl April French?”
Dennis
Dennis had ended up joining the trivia team created by the other Black tech workers he’d met at Reggie’s. They called themselves the Carltons, a name he privately thought was even worse than Blerds, but it had been decided on long before he came along. He’d missed the last several trivia nights, being on the East Coast, and although he had very little enthusiasm for it, he’d decided to go to this one. Friendships died if you didn’t put the work in, and this little coterie had been hard to find.
It was a good time, actually. It was a pub quiz format, relaxed and convivial and well-lubricated, and he was a competitive person. It was nice to win. It was nice to hang out with the guys, too. He’d never talked to them about April—he’d thought about introducing them, during that brief weekend of victory, and wondered how it would go, but it had never gotten that far—and so it didn’t come up. For several hours he didn’t think about her at all.
When he got home around ten in the evening and pulled out his phone—you obviously weren’t allowed to look at it during the competition—that reprieve came to an end.
April: I’m sorry I lied, Dennis
I don’t have a good reason
I did it because I felt like we were always doomed so what if I just put it off a while
And the more time passed the harder it was to take back
I really did think you’d found out by the time you came to Dallas
She’d sent it a few hours ago. He could imagine how anxious she’d been waiting for him to respond to that, and now, thanks to the wonderful gift of technology, she knew he’d read it. He found he didn’t have the heart to leave her dangling, and choosing his words carefully he typed:
Dennis: I know. I know all that.
But the question is, what are you sorry for?
Her response came almost immediately.
April: I’m sorry that I was scared to tell the truth
Dennis: You don’t have to be sorry for that.
April: I’m sorry I didn’t have faith in you
Dennis: Thank you, but that’s not it either.
April: Can’t you just tell me what I should be sorry for?
I’m sorry for a lot of things so it’s probably on the list
Dennis: I wish I could make it easy for you.
You deserve for things to be easy.
But
He hesitated a long time, deliberating over his wording. He needed to get this right. He needed—
But I need to know you understand this.
April: I get that
And I think maybe I do
But I’ll let you know when I get there, okay?
Dennis: Okay.
He felt an ache in his chest, the same one that he’d carried for months after Sonia left. It never seemed far away these days. He wanted more than anything to cure it by going to her and wrapping her in his arms and forgetting everything.
If he did that, though, what would change? If he did that, how long until they were back here?
April: Not to change the subject, but did you get the newsletter about the Oshiros coming back?
It’ll be right before Thanksgiving
I know you had wanted to learn more about Shibari after last
summer
Dennis: I did see it.
And I do want to learn more.
But it said this is a workshop for couples.
And I don’t have anyone to tie up and show off right now.
April: You should take Caroline
He glared at the phone.
Dennis: Don’t do that.
April: I’m not doing ‘that’
I know I do ‘that’ sometimes but I’m really not
I promise I won’t be psychically screaming Jolene at both of you the whole time
I just don’t want you to miss the event and she’s a big ol rope bunny
Besides I trust her
I trust both of you
Dennis: I’ll think about it.
April: I miss you Dennis
He typed, I miss you too doll. Then he carefully backspaced over the last four letters and typed April; hesitated again, and didn’t send it at all.
He put his phone away. After a minute, he took it into the bedroom and left it there before returning to the couch. He didn’t trust himself with it. If they kept texting like this, he would be in her apartment by midnight.
No sooner had he sat down with a book—the new Obama memoir—than his phone began to ring. He embarrassed himself half-jogging back to the bedroom, but it wasn’t April. He dropped onto the bed. “Hey, Mom.”
“So excited to hear from your mother. I see how it is.” He clicked the phone to speaker and let the vibrant tones of Angelique Cash-Martin fill up his room. “Who did you think I was, that you were so disappointed?”
He was going to have to be careful. His mom didn’t believe in psychic phenomena, but she was the only one in the family, because Angelique could apparently read your mind off the back of your skull, fine print and all.
“Nobody, Mom. What’s going on?”
“Just wanted to check if you’d bought your tickets for Thanksgiving yet.”
“I am an adult, Mom. I’ve been making my own travel arrangement for more than a decade now.”
“You get those tickets yet?”
“...no, Mom.” God damn it.
“Well you better buy them before the price goes up.” She knew perfectly well he could afford to fly the same day if he needed to; he could hire a private plane to Illinois if he really wanted to. But she’d already moved on to what family members were coming, which family members were in disgrace and not invited, which family members were possibly too busy (and thus courting disgrace), and all the other hot gossip from an Illinois town of three hundred and fifty people.
Dennis loved his mother; but to be in a room with her, or even on the phone, was to experience a flood of energy that swept along lesser mortals in her wake. When he was younger that had been something he fought, sometimes, but right now he was working on letting go and it felt nice to let all the her of her roll over him.
It wasn’t like talking to Graham, because he did care what she had to say. He just...bobbed on the surface and tried to keep up, contributing the occasional, “She what?” and “I bet you had something to say about that,” and “Phew. It couldn’t be me.”
“Hey, Mom,” he said after a while, when the flood receded. “You got HBO, right?”
“You know I don’t miss Westworld,” she said.
“I saw something on there the other day—you remember that documentary you liked, The Black List? Same guy made one about transgender folks, The Trans List. Pretty interesting stuff.”
“Mm-hm,” said his mother. Silence reigned.
“What’s up?” he asked, when it was too much. She always won these.
“Just thinking about when you brought Jason home and asked me what I thought about Will & Grace.”
He exhaled. Damn it.
“I told you then, Dennis. You are mine, and I love you. If you aren’t what I expected, I love who you are, not the you I imagined. And I will love whoever you love, as long as they are worthy of you. You remember that?”
“I remember,” he sighed. “I’m not transgender,” he added hurriedly.
“I know that,” she scoffed. “You couldn’t wait to get that first chin hair.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“You go ahead and buy those tickets. And get one for your friend.” Damn her!
“It’s not...she probably won’t be coming,” he said, wearily. She always won.
“Well you just buy it, anyway. You can afford it,” she said. He did not tell her that’s not how plane tickets worked anymore.
He let silence back in, for a long time. And then he said, “Mom? What do you do if you love someone who doesn’t love themself?”
She was quiet, herself, for a moment. “Well, you can’t make anybody love anybody. Not you, not themselves.”
“No,” he agreed.
“You can make a place for them that’s safe,” she said. “A place they can always come back to and see how love is supposed to work. But they’ve got to decide to come back. And sometimes that means they have to change, and not everyone is ready to do that.”
“I’m not...good, at waiting,” he said. “I mean, I can be patient. But just waiting and hoping isn’t my style.”
“Kiddo, you were born two weeks early, you don’t have to tell me,” she said. “All you can do is keep busy. Make that place for them even if they’ll never fill it. If they don’t, somebody else will come along. Somebody ready for all that love.”
He shut his eyes. “You’re a pretty good mom.”
“I know it,” she said. He could see her in his mind’s eye, preening foolishly to make a joke out of it.
“I’m gonna go,” he said. “Still got some stuff I haven’t unpacked.”
He didn’t actually go then, because the next thing that happened was, they talked for twenty minutes about the fickleness of contractors and the upstairs bathroom of the house in Illinois. But eventually Dennis got off the phone and unpacked the boxes in the playroom.
April
April left another interview, finally feeling like she might be turning a corner.
She’d had her bad interviews; the one that wanted software skills she didn’t have and the one where she’d registered the split second of disgust when the interviewer clocked her. She’d had her good interviews that never got a follow-up, or the ones where she’d been edged out by an internal applicant.
But today she’d gone on a second interview, and it had been great. The interviewer—an earnest and bearded young man—had called her Miss French and looked her in the eye while he did it.
More than that. He had asked her how to untangle a particularly snarled data set, and she’d launched confidently into her bag of tricks. She even hopped up to scribble on a whiteboard. She realized when she finished, breathless, that she’d forgotten her voice control and was speaking two octaves lower than she usually aimed for.
She’d flushed, and her cheeks had burned even harder when the interviewer asked her, “And why wouldn’t you just use the text-to-columns feature in Excel?”
“Because... I didn’t know about it. I’m, I’m pretty much self-taught.” The interviewer had nodded, and made a small note on his pad, and her heart had sunk into her Louboutin heels. But then something incredible happened.
“Well, your answer definitely shows the right kind of mind for cracking these puzzles, and a pretty good grip on the formulas available. Have you ever thought about going for an Excel Mastery certification? We have a program under our training umbrella.”
And the rest of the interview seemed to take place on a different footing, as if they were just sorting out details. As if they were trying to land her.
“To tell the truth, Miss French, I’m trying to build a new sort of team for our organization, a specialist operations team that would just deal with these kinds of problems. If this worked out, how would you feel about mana
ging a team of people like yourself in a year or two?”
She was speechless for a moment, and then found a very important question. “Would there be development work?”
He looked puzzled. “I’m afraid not, is that something you’re interested in? We outsource all our development and their product owners and teams handle most of it.”
The job sounded...not perfect, but the ideal version of what it was. She knew she could do it. She wouldn’t say she was looking forward to it, but she could do it. She felt like they would call her back soon and it would be good news. She could use some good news.
But first she had to go meet with Jason Beaumont, who had called this weekend and inserted himself into her schedule. She couldn’t possibly imagine what he wanted, except maybe to yell at her for breaking Dennis’s heart. Maybe something to do with the upcoming workshop? That felt like wishful thinking, though.
At least he couldn’t yell at her too much in public. She ducked into the little coffee shop; she’d seen this place but never been inside. The wall-sized mural collaging Italian tourist photos was cute enough, if obviously prefab from the coffee brand. Jason already had a table and was spinning his empty coffee mug from hand to hand, one knee bouncing.
He waited, not particularly graciously, while she got herself a hot chocolate that the November weather barely justified and joined him. She didn’t know where this was going, so she waited for him to speak; he was waiting for her, too, then realized it and started abruptly.
“So what do you know about me and Frankie’s?”
She cocked her head. “I know you’re an investor...”
“I own it,” he said flatly.
“You own it,” she said, mostly just for something to say while she wrapped her mind around that.
“I invested in a bar and over time, after a while, I bought the other investors out. Changed the name. It’s my bar.”
She wrinkled her brow. “Why doesn’t anyone else know?”
“I don’t want them to? I hired Vic to run it because I don’t know shit about running a bar. All I do is shovel money down the hole periodically. Why does anyone need to know?” He went to drink from his mug, realized it was empty already and put it down petulantly.
