by Jordan Bell
“Perfect?”
“…driven. And not even a real red head.” Julie brought two mugs of hot chocolate to the couch and forced one into my hands. “Typical type-A personality. I bet she’s a Leo.”
“She doesn’t sound very, um…” I tried to search for the right word, but my one night hadn’t been enough education to make me not sound like a bumbling domination newb. “Obedient?”
“Right? That’s exactly what I said to Tyler. I asked him why someone like Josh would spend his time with a woman who didn’t sound particularly subbie. He said she was a great performer and very successful at most things she put her mind to. He said she didn’t seem submissive because she wasn’t, strictly speaking. She’s a switch.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“It’s ok, I swear I feel like I need flash cards sometimes when Tyler and I talk.” She blushed and quickly hid behind her mug. “From what I understand, a switch is someone who goes both ways. They enjoy both topping and bottoming, depending on the partner and scene. She bottoms for Josh. Has for a long time I guess. But Tyler doesn’t think they’ve ever been in a relationship. Just friends.”
She bottoms for him. Those words sounded so intimate and important. She was his in a way he hadn’t wanted me to be. How could I compete with that? She wasn’t just some flakey girl with pretty hair and a tiny waist. She was talented and driven and established. She was a grown up where I was still more or less a child. I ate popcorn for dinner, gorged on ten hour Doctor Who marathons, and mainlined coffee during all-nighters. She had a convertible and I had a monthly bus pass. What a joke.
I swallowed and leaned back into the cushions, white-knuckling my hot chocolate. “Has…has Tyler talked to Josh since the party?”
“Yes. A little.” Julie hesitated. “He told Tyler to mind his own business and hung up on him.”
“Does Tyler know you’re telling me all this?”
“Of course.” She smiled. “I told him that no bond was stronger than the one between girlfriends and he’d just have to live with that. He said he was telling me all this because he already knew that and his loyalty was to my bestie as much as it was to me.”
“Wow, shit, he is perfect. I think I’m kind of in love with him.”
Julie looked into her mug, the smile fading as quickly as it had appeared. “Yeah. Me too. Kind of.”
“It’s ok if you do.” I softened. “You can tell me. I want to know.”
The little space between us filled with steam and the aroma of melting dark chocolate shavings. “It’s hard to know what I’m feeling for him. About him. The things we do together are so intense - like being stripped down to the bone and rebuilt, one stitch at a time. I feel grateful and I feel love and affection for him, and then fear too and crazy worry. Like, he can’t be this perfect can he? When does he get to the heart breaking moment because it can’t keep feeling this fantastic.”
“You know,” I said and touched her wrist through her bangles. “There doesn’t have to be a heart breaking moment.”
Julie rolled her eyes. “Of course there does. You’ve known Josh your whole life and he did it in one night. I’ve known this guy for like five seconds.”
“The difference, though, is that Josh and I should never have crossed that line.”
She squinted and frowned at where my hand touched her wrist. I pulled away and slipped my fingers back in a death grip around my mug. “You don’t really believe that. Oh my god, you really believe that, don’t you?”
“I have to.” I stared into my mug and watched the dark swirls circle the last of the melting chocolate. Like a dozen tiny, sinking ships. “Or else I’ll absolutely lose my mind.”
“Kat, you need to talk to him. You need to confront him and find out why he did what he did. This is Josh we’re talking about. There has to be a reason.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk to him. I am half afraid nothing he said would make me feel better and half afraid I’d forgive him no matter what the reason. I’m not the girl he wants. I just need to deal with that.”
“Oh sweetie, I just don’t think it’s that simple. You guys have ages of history. Maybe he’s not able to switch gears that fast.”
“Or, more like he’s had someone in his life all this time that he just never told us about. God, Julie, what else hasn’t he told me? I don’t want to know.” I rested my head on my friend’s shoulder and she tightened her hold on me. “I don’t think I ever really knew him at all. And that really sucks.”
“Please consider talking to him. You need answers. You deserve answers.”
Julie’s phone went off somewhere inside the couch, causing her to scramble to find it lost in the cushions. She balanced her mug on one boney knee with one hand and clicked the screen on with the other. She read the message that had set it off, then handed it to me. It was from Tyler, naturally.
Miss you.
Once upon a month ago, Josh had sent me messages like this one. Some were merely cute ploys to exploit me for free labor. Some were random with no other purpose than to talk to me. His messages made my day, my night, my year. I had no idea back then how anxious I was to hear from him, or how much his worry meant to me.
You alive?
I made dinner. Get your ass over here.
Turn off your computer and go to bed.
Come be my inventory slave. I ordered pizza. Your favorite – garlic, Alfredo sauce, artichoke hearts, sausage, & sundried tomatoes. How do you eat this shit? It’s revolting.
Brian says call your mom. Also I want my coffee maker back you wretched little thief.
Can’t sleep. Come over.
I ran my thumb across the message. Two words that meant everything and nothing in particular all at the same time. I couldn’t remember Josh ever saying he missed me, but he had invited me over in the middle of the night so often I had my own pillow. We’d fall asleep watching late night talk shows, eating popcorn in bed, or regaling each other with the boring details of our lives. Maybe we never gave each other the chance to be missed.
Sometimes, on those strange late nights, he’d seem lonely and distant and so unlike him. At the time I thought it was because he had to come home alone again when he should have had companionship, affection, sex, just like everyone else in the world. He certainly deserved it. I knew now that when he came home late it was most likely from a party where he’d played someone’s Master. Michelle, maybe, or someone else just as lovely and experienced.
Now I wondered if his loneliness was because he had this huge secret and no matter how good he was at it or how happy it made him, he could never tell us. He couldn’t bring his playmates home like dates and for whatever reason he couldn’t find both submission and companionship in the same person. That would make anyone lonely. Instead he only had me in the hours after and I was obviously a rather poor replacement for the extraordinary physical bliss that bondage and submissive gifted those who played the game. I’d tasted that world for barely a second and I still craved it in the days and weeks later. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it was for Josh to come home to such a poor consolation prize.
Miss you.
“Gross.” I wrinkled my nose at the message and smiled despite the ache in my chest. “Does he always send you perfectly sweet, loving messages randomly on his own just because?”
“Yes. Sometimes when I am working late at the lab, he has dinner delivered from one of my favorite restaurants. Just because.” Julie wrinkled her nose back at me. “Should I be worried?”
“He’s obviously a robot. Or an alien. Something unnatural and tentacle-y beneath his human shell.” I handed the phone back to her. “You must kill it with fire before it’s too late. I’m afraid it’s the only way.”
FIVE
There was no rum.
No Captains or Sailors or the cheap chemical tasting shit I kept on hand in case patrons behaved badly. I crouched behind the bar opening cabinet after cabinet where there ought to have been enough ru
m to float in, but there was nothing. The whiskey looked low. Vodka too.
No rum. Not a drop.
It had been a long few weeks. Long and very, very lonely and it was entirely possible I’d let some of my duties slip. But in my entire career bartending for my father and then owning South River, I’d never run out of an entire line of alcohol before.
When one last check proved I wasn’t imagining things, I headed back to the storage room behind the manager’s office in search of the lost rum. It was always possible the shipment had been delayed. Or never unboxed. Certainly there was some obvious explanation other than we had just simply run out without anyone noticing.
I flicked the switch inside the door and the overhead light buzzed to life, illuminating the long, narrow room. The storage area wasn’t so large you could lose a shipment in it. It was big enough for shelves on both sides, crates stacked in the back and as high as the fire marshal allowed. Bits of crushed packing peanuts and brittle wood pieces littered the floor where the delivery guys dropped the new pallets, but there were no new pallets waiting to be unpacked. The room hadn’t been swept or straightened in a while. The shelves were a mess, labels hidden or missing entirely, nothing in a straight row. Someone had abandoned a half empty bottle of water and pile of peanut shells next to an overturned crate.
I’d clearly let a lot of things slide lately.
Each section was labeled with an old fashioned, whiskey bottle inspired chalkboard plaque. They were marked with their distributor, brand, and last inventory count. The chalkboard made it easy to adjust numbers and make notes when a vendor had changed orders unexpectedly. The signs should tell me what happened to my inventory.
The signs were one of Kat’s ideas, of course.
I’d discovered a lot of little Kat things hidden around the bar in the last few weeks. Post-it notes asking for a pony and better jukebox music hidden in my desk drawer. Old email messages. Graffiti in the girl’s bathroom I was sure was her doing no matter how many times I’d scolded her for it. When I’d discovered obscure Joy Division lyrics doodled across a table top in slanted, girlish cursive I’d felt irritated, then paralyzed with an intense longing like I’d never experienced in my life. I’d imagined dragging her over to the table in the middle of the night, bending her across it so her cheek pressed prettily to the dark lyrics, and punishing her for misbehaving. My hand on her bare skin, making her scream and beg and moan…the image had overwhelmed my better senses, wrecked my control, left me shaking and badly missing her. No girl had ever screwed with me like this. I didn’t know if I hated her for it or…or something else just as impossible.
On Halloween, trying just to get through the night without losing my mind, I’d tried to take a picture of costumed regulars celebrating over shots at the bar and discovered a string of selfies of Kat making faces into my camera phone. The last picture was of her blowing me a kiss, red lips and dimples and holding a napkin with a warning in black Sharpie.
“What’s yours is mine. p.s. Use a better password. XOXO.”
The last straw was when I found one of her t-shirts in my laundry. It was a band t-shirt, their signatures in faded ink on the back where they’d signed her. One night, after a big football game, a tipsy fan spilled buffalo wings on her. She’d tossed the shirt in my laundry and stolen one out of my closet to finish the shift.
In true Kat form, she’d never given it back, but I’d long since stopped asking for anything she made off with since it was largely a futile effort. Kat must have had dozens of my shirts in her closet from over the years. Some boxers too. And hoodies.
Despite her kleptomania, I didn’t mind. Not really. Truth be told, I even kind of liked seeing her in my clothes, lounging like a tom cat across my couch at two in the morning watching infomercials because she couldn’t sleep or didn’t want to go home.
Her shirt didn’t smell like her anymore, but I’d still stood there like an idiot trying to convince myself not to go to her apartment, push her against her front door, and kiss her for the rest of her life.
Instead I’d shoved her shirt into my closet and put it out of my mind.
But that was a mistake of course. I might as well have had her hidden in my closet instead for how much it haunted me late at night. If I had any sense, I’d have thrown it out and saved myself a lot of madness. I’d never been a masochist in my life, but I couldn’t stop punishing myself with memories of her. Couldn’t and didn’t want to if I could.
On Mondays, knowing I’d be back here counting and checking inventory logs and doing other housekeeping tasks, sometimes she’d show up with take-out and a new playlist and helped herself to helping me. She never asked for anything in return, though sometimes I’d take her upstairs afterwards and cook her dinner. She liked procrastinating her own responsibilities with mine.
Without realizing it then, Mondays became my favorite days. Mondays it was just me and Kat in this tiny room, me on the ladder counting the top shelf boxes while she made the chalkboard signs fancier than stockroom labels ought to be. She did most of the talking, naturally, the cadence of her voice coinciding with the numbers I was reading off. That was how everything was with us, guessing each other’s next move and compensating.
Damn, I missed her.
I touched one of the chalkboard signs and ran a thumb across the smudged white powder. The handwriting wasn’t hers. It hadn’t been hers for three weeks now.
Three inventory Mondays had gone by where I avoided the stock room and asked Brian or one of the waitresses to do it. The girls came kicking and screaming about how boring inventory was, and were so little help they might as well not have been there at all. They wanted to know where Kat was, when she was coming back to do this awful task. I’d remind them she wasn’t an employee, but they’d complain that it wasn’t the same without her. They demanded to know what was keeping her away.
A new man. That was the rumor. She was hip deep in a new lover and couldn’t be bothered to come up for air. It took all my power not to deny it outright and it made me crazy feeling jealous of her fake boyfriend. But I couldn’t tell them the truth. Shit. I couldn’t admit the truth to myself let alone anyone else.
I shook my head. The rum. I had to find the fucking rum. And I had to get the girl with the ridiculous pink hair out of my head. I had a bar to run. Employees to employ. And none of that was going to happen if I didn’t have any rum.
Except as I searched the shelves, I didn’t find the rum. I didn’t find anything.
Well, not nothing exactly. Each slot had boxes and crates and canisters that had once contained bottles, but they were all empty. Every last one of them, as if South River hadn’t received a shipment in weeks.
Now. Now I wanted answers.
The bar was quiet enough that I could hear Brian arguing with someone inside his office, but couldn’t make out the exact words, only that his tone was terse and slightly desperate. During the week, South River opened only in the evenings so the only two people around in the middle of the day was me and Brian, my bar manager and best friend. And Kat’s older brother.
I knocked once before pushing the office door open. Brian jumped and quickly clapped his phone shut.
“Hey,” Brian said as he tossed his cell on the desk. He rubbed his hands against his jeans, then through his hair until it stood up every which way. “I was just on the phone. What do you want? What’s wrong now?”
Despite the puff of stress evident in his hair, Brian looked good. Better than I’d seen him look in months. Clean, shaved, dressed up. The last few months had aged him, left him looking a little wild around the edges, but this was the Brian I used to know. The one who loved to look good for women.
Finally. Maybe things were starting to change for him.
I dropped into the corner of the 1970s couch, the side that wasn’t half collapsing. It was maybe the ugliest couch in the world, brown and orange and covered with a flocked woodland scene long since worn threadbare. It had belonged to Brian’s father and
wound up in the manager’s office after his death. It still smelled vaguely of 30 year old pot.
Brian paced behind his desk. Sat down. Shuffled papers pointlessly from one pile to another, all the while sneaking glances at his phone where it had clattered to a stop against a stapler. Then he stood up and paced to the credenza, fiddled with the knobs on the record player, then back to his desk. In less than 60 seconds, Brian’s agitation even left me feeling slightly paranoid and jittery.
“Wow, you look like your sister when I had to ban her from drinking espresso ever again. Everything ok?” I asked, glancing at the door as I mentioned Brian’s sister. Not by name, of course. Saying her name out loud was out of the question.
“Kat.” Brian spat her name at one of the piles of papers he’d just relocated. “My personal pain in the ass. Rachel’s called in again. Last week it was Sarah. I’ve been calling Kat for weeks to help fill in. Every time I leave a message begging her to take a shift, do you think she has the decency to call back? Shit no. Ever since she skipped out on Halloween she’s been even more irresponsible and unreliable than before. I’m so tired of chasing after her. You call her. She always comes running for you. Get her ass in here.”
Brian had always been slightly annoyed with having a little sister, like she was a new toy he hadn’t expected to be so busy and noisy and now that he had her he didn’t know how to turn her off. But before their father passed away it had been in the general, affectionate sort of way. There was a good five years between them, which was practically a life time when you’re young.
When they got older, everything she did drove him crazy. When she got her eyebrow and bellybutton pierced. When she changed her mind and took them out. When she dyed pink streaks in her hair when she turned twenty-one. He complained about her boyfriends, her clothes, her job, her degree, her age. He hated when I gave her free drinks or took her side or invited her anywhere on purpose.
