by Jordan Bell
Now we were both nearly thirty with no serious relationships worth mentioning, and it was really fucking lonely out here.
“If she gets her dreams,” he said, “what do I get?”
“What is it you want, Brian? If you could have anything, I mean.”
Brian stood up and crossed the room back to the credenza. The record player wasn’t old, but the shelves of records were. His one major inheritance from his father. He ran a hand across their sleeves, picking a record out at random before sliding it back in place.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He shrugged. “Who has time to waste on things that won’t ever happen? It doesn’t matter anyway. You’re right though, we haven’t been acting much like friends lately. We should go out. Somewhere away from this fucking bar. Get very drunk. Go home with a strange girl we’ll never call again.”
“Same old dreams.” When Brian didn’t say anything, I exhaled a long, low breath. “When did we get so old?”
He shook his head. “We could have done more than this.”
“This isn’t so bad.”
Brian said nothing and shoved his cell phone into his pocket. “I’m sorry I yelled. It’s not you. My head has been…” he waved a hand in the air, searching for words. “I let things get away from me. I’ll call the distributor. I’ll restock. Don’t worry about it, Josh.”
“I know you will. We’ve both let a lot of things slide lately.” I forced a fake laugh for both our sakes. “And I swear I’m not sleeping with your sister. I’ve got enough crazy in my life.”
That seemed to be enough levity to break the tension. Brian shrugged and grinned. “Right? It would be like trying to seduce a bag of cats. I heard she’s got this new boyfriend. That’s the rumor anyway. I pity the bastard she’s managed to talk into her bedroom this time. Her landlord is getting ready to kick her out, so I’m sure she’s trying to sleep her way into a new living situation.”
The urge to defend her was almost too much and the idea that she’d let anyone but me touch her for any reason made me crazy. I ran a hand across my mouth and glanced towards her building, that heavy panic closing over his chest. Gone? Shit. The other side of the street felt too far most nights. “Cut her the check for the website.”
“But…”
“Cut it. With a five hundred dollar bonus for the web ad.”
“A bonus.” Brian’s mood threatened to swing back, but one warning look cowed him. “I…I thought she said she’d do the ad for free.”
“I don’t care.”
Evicted. She was being threatened with eviction. All I had these days were the few times I allowed himself to check on her from my bedroom window. Usually her drapes were pulled, but sometimes she’d leave them half open and I could see her moving around inside, carrying a mug of coffee from the kitchen to her desk in nothing but a t-shirt and boxer shorts. Mine, probably. Maybe. I hoped.
And if I couldn’t have those moments anymore, if she were gone entirely…
“Cut her the check. Make sure she gets it this week. And get us some goddamned rum.”
SIX
Within the first five minutes at Midtown Edge, the photog editor sent me to fetch coffee from a place four blogs away. Half an hour later he escorted me to my new desk, which was actually someone’s old dining room table painted cobalt blue. My territory measured the size of my laptop, with invading armies of newspapers and old coffee cups encroaching from all sides. There was one other unmanned laptop across from me and three young men at the other end of the table ignoring me to death.
My boss, an aging woman named Isabelle, had clearly once upon a time been totally punk rock but had sold out to her corporate master long ago and now sported terse disapproval as well as old tattoos peeking out around her pressed button down blouse. I didn’t even own a shirt with buttons, let alone an actual iron with which to press it.
Isabelle explained that I received two fifteen minute breaks and a thirty minute lunch, but the bosses appreciated employees who took them at their desk while they worked, which seemed pretty much the opposite of taking a break. And also a little bit illegal. Working for myself had always afforded me as many breaks and lunches as I wanted, in my pajamas, at any time of the day or night. This felt suffocating and weird and I had no idea how the majority of people on the planet did it every day.
Amongst my daily chores, I was expected to fetch coffee when asked, fix the copier when it jammed, and make all deadlines or die. Personal phone calls and email were strictly prohibited. While I may have been very talented in college, Isabelle explained, I should feel free to keep any creative ideas to myself because there were more important people paid a lot more money to think for the magazine. I was not, and never would be, one of those people.
My one and only serious job was to arrange the personals section and layout the ads for those pages only. That was it. All my experience, all my talent, all my schooling came down to putting little blocks of text in straight lines. A monkey could have done this job, but instead they had me, their very own blonde and pink haired monkey. Sometimes, if I was very lucky, they’d send me things to edit but I was by no means allowed to embellish or add my own spin to anything.
On the bright side, my desk faced a bank of windows that overlooked the swankier part of South River. I’d never seen my home from this high up and despite its rough edges, the old town was actually kind of beautiful from here. For the next hour I stared out those windows and wondered where I’d gone wrong with my dreams.
I wasn’t stupid. I understood that you had to work hard to get to where you wanted to be. And to buy food. I understood that most of my classmates had abandoned art almost immediately after graduation to work in insurance or wait tables or pretty much anything that paid. But I loved art. I had no dreams of showing up in galleries and hobnobbing with people willing to plunk down serious cash for something they’d hang in their hallway. What I really loved was building vector art and messing with old school printmaking tools. I loved looking at a business, figuring out what its heart looked like, then making it into something that could be seen and touched and held in the palm of your hand. I loved translating an abstract concept into something consumable and understandable and believable and colorful. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do anything else, I just didn’t want to do anything else. And I hated giving up that dream to fall in line.
What I was beginning to understand when my landlord threatened eviction last week, when Josh made me lust after him then took his friendship and love and walked out of my life, when my dreams didn’t pay enough to feed me…what I was beginning to understand was that most people didn’t get what they want most of the time.
We got what scraps we could get our hands on and pretended to be grateful. Pretended it was what we always wanted in the first place.
This job, the people working busily like bees in their cubes around me and my tiny, insignificant place in it made me feel like an epic failure. Brian would crow when he discovered how he’d been right all along. When he heard I’d given up to do what he’d been telling me to do all along…I’d rather gouge out my own eyeballs with a spork than tell him about this job.
My desk mate appeared an hour later and I knew as soon as the doors opened that I was destined to be stuck beside her. She stood five foot nothing in a yellow and pink paisley sun dress, her arms full of yellow daisies and a bright, polished smile. She looked like she’d just stepped out of the pages of a 1950s vacuum ad. I slunk down in my seat and tried to hide behind my laptop as she approached.
“Good morning everyone!” she called, earning her a couple of murmured hullos. She surveyed our table briefly, nose crinkling at the disarray that had been left there, then without hesitating grabbed an empty coffee cup and dropped her daisies into it. “Oh, wow, you must be the new personals girl.”
I peeked up slowly. She positively radiated excitement, which made me want to crawl under the table and hide. I nodded and h
alf expected her to swallow me whole with her big, white smile.
“I’m Gwen. Katrina right? We’re neighbors! I hope you like flowers. My boyfriend gets them for me all the time. He’s really very sweet. I edit. I’m an editor.” She laughed and swatted the air playfully before sweeping into her chair. “I’m just really good with grammar. How’s your first day?”
“Kat. It’s just Kat. And I’m still here so...”
“Of course you are.” She laughed and shrugged and opened her laptop without once turning down the kilowatts. “We’re really friendly here. You’ll really like it I bet.”
A glance at the others at our table hiding behind their monitors told me that was stretching the truth a bit. Until Gwen showed up, the guys at the other end of the table hadn’t so much as looked my way.
The Asian guy who kept swearing about some interview he had to go do now rolled his eyes every time Gwen shone her baby blues across the mess. It was the only time her smile looked strained.
After the fourth distracted sweeping glance, she closed her laptop lid and stood up.
“Maybe I’ll just pick up a little.”
“Maybe you should,” Asian guy said into his iPhone.
“You know how I work best when I’m organized.”
“I know how you do.” He winked.
She blushed and sighed and swept all the trash into a nearby can and carefully restacked all the newspapers. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, in date order. I didn’t know what possessed me to help, but something about the three guys at the end of the table goading her into being their little smiling maid service unnerved me. I helped her pick up even though she rearranged everything I arranged. She chatted while she worked, and despite her mild OCD ADHD, she didn’t bug me as much as I thought she would.
“My boyfriend, Max, he’s really great. We’ve been together for eight months. Eight months! We’re going to dinner tonight. He likes nice places. Maybe that new place downtown? I hear they have an entire menu dedicated to organic food.”
“Also,” she continued without breathing,” they support a local art collective. I like art, not the weirder modern things made out of trash and whatever. I like art that’s romantic. What about you?”
“Love it.” I dropped back into my seat and marveled at how much bigger our work space felt once the pizza boxes were gone. “The cubists still kind of escape me, but I’m willing to try out just about anything.”
“No, silly, I mean do you have a boyfriend?”
Death. Death and torture and hell fire. That was what I imagined raining down on top of Gwen’s very shiny blonde head. But I managed to keep my cool and not launch myself across the table to end her.
“I haven’t bought one of those yet, but I’m shopping for a nice customizable model. Maybe in blue.”
Asian guy snorted behind his phone, but Gwen sort of blinked at me. “I don’t really understand what you mean.”
“I mean no, I’m not dating anyone presently.”
She shook her head and I swore she actually meant it when she said, “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah well,” I shrugged. “How else can I prove my feminine independence but through casual, meaningless, hook-ups?”
Gwen turned a million shades of red. Asian guy and Guy with the Goatee looked up from their work. I ignored them both.
“I’m sure someone will snatch you up, Kat. You’re pretty enough even if your sarcasm is a tiny bit,” she pinched her forefinger and thumb together and squinted, “…strong.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way Gwen, but you sort of seem more Home & Gardens than edgy alternative lifestyle. You know that Midtown Edge has a column about sex, right?”
She blushed again. “I told you, I’m good with grammar. Written grammar, anyway. I have an eye for catching mistakes and fixing people to make them sound a lot smarter than they actually are.”
“Hey,” Asian guy said, looking a little hurt. “You’re my editor.”
Gwen wagged a finger at him. “No one wants to know how the bread is made, Marc, they just want to know that it tastes delicious.”
Asian guy, Marc, opened his mouth to retort but found nothing to put her in her place. This made Goatee guy guffaw and despite myself, I laughed too.
Maybe it wasn’t so bad, working with a team. That was definitely something I hadn’t had before. Sure, I had been able to work at my coffee table in my pajamas at two in the morning, but I always had to do that alone. There was no lively banter, no inside jokes, no weird but interesting personalities. I had to go looking for those things at South River Bar, and now that I didn’t have that…well maybe it wasn’t so bad, working for a soul sucking corporate machine if I got to have people like this within spitball distance every day.
Silver linings girl here, reporting for duty.
In the next few hours I heard more about To-Die-For-Max-Sheridan than I knew about any of my exes. I learned that Marc had a pretty powerful addiction to his iPhone and Goatee guy’s real name was Randy and he wrote a column about the alternative music scene. Just one more scene I didn’t even know existed in my own city. How had my world gotten so small?
The personal ads came in by email. At first I didn’t read them, just formatted and arranged them on the page. There was a stack of almost two hundred waiting for me. Most of them were for jobs, used furniture, events. I liked the missed connections ads. There was something endlessly hopeful about them. Not surprisingly, they were Gwen’s favorite part of the whole magazine.
But there were other ads too that went into the adult section of the personals. Men looking for women, women looking for men, women looking for women, men looking for men, and then a lot of acronyms I had to Google to understand.
BBW - Big Beautiful Woman. I liked this, but I wondered what constituted big. I wore size 14 on a good day, 16 when it wasn’t a good day. Was I BBW?
I adored the ads from men who were looking for this in a woman, but it was the women’s ads proclaiming themselves proudly as this thing we weren’t supposed to be if we wanted to be loved that really got to me. Who were these women who recognized who they were and then had the strength to step out and say I’m fantastic, baby. Like it or Leave it, that’s up to you.
RTS - Real Time Sex. What the hell did that mean? Was there such a thing as not real time sex? I imagined the writer of the ad was actually a time traveler and that he was looking for another time travel to spend the night with. I bet it got lonely having sex in the past or the future but never the present.
NSA - No Strings Attached. BHM - Bald Headed Man. FS - Financially Secure. P - Petite. HWP - Height Weight Proportional. I took back every snorting roll of my eyes I’d ever given personal ads and dating websites. Here was the fool-proof way to order up your perfect date. No guess work. No disappointment. There seemed to be an acronym for every eventuality, every character trait. I could avoid heartache with an NSA. I could weed out the unattractive with a VGL - Very Good Looking.
I could order up my very own erotic romance novel. FS B&D.
B&D. Finally an acronym I knew.
Everyone started packing it in around four when the late day sun had disappeared behind the Giovanni tower across town, turning our bright office into a dark little dungeon. That was when I saw it. My last ad for the day.
I am new, she said, and am looking to be mentored so that one day I can commit - and submit - to a Dom of my own. I will only meet someone in public with a friend nearby, and I won’t go anywhere alone with you until I’m comfortable. I’m skittish, but curious. If you think you can work with that, email me.
I stared at the ad for, I don’t know how long. Long enough for most of the room to clear out. Long enough that I only barely heard Gwen’s cheerful goodbye as she swept out of the room to meet Max-Who-is-Perfect.
I had to clasp my own hands to keep them from shaking and not for a million dollars could I look away.
I am new.
I knew this girl. She was me. I was her. We’d passed a hundred
times on the street looking normal, or next to normal, while beneath the surface we thought about what it might feel like to have our hair pulled.
I am curious.
For three weeks I’d forbidden myself from thinking about the night of the party. I’d successfully kept myself from rehashing the details, daydreaming through the memories. Every thought bent towards forgetting Josh and erasing what I’d done with him. My brain knew better than to unlock that trapdoor and fall through. I’d go mad with wanting and I couldn’t bear to go through the heartbreak over and over again. No good could come of it.
But this strange and familiar girl had turned a key and all at once I flushed with memory and pleasure. I felt it in my bones, fingers first, wrapped around leather wrist cuffs and clawing at cotton sheets. I felt it in my toes, curling during orgasm, then in my trembling knees, stomach, chest, throat. I felt Josh’s fingers in my hair, wrapping and twisting blonde and pink strands into his fist, felt him pulling back, harder, harder, harder, until it hurt so much I could think again. He’d pulled my hair until I finally felt in control of myself.
When he’d tied me up, adored me, protected me, bound me to him, I’d gone somewhere else. I’d fallen down the rabbit hole into space where I could touch stardust and taste moonlight. I’d loved Josh endlessly in that place and I’d been absolutely sure he loved me too.
I’d felt safe there. Blissful. I hadn’t wanted to come back to earth. I’d wanted to feel endless forever.
When he’d grabbed my hair and pulled it hard and back so that he was all I could see and all I could feel was the pain he inflicted, somehow that pain had normalized me. It had made me feel grounded and in control, which made no sense, but there it was.
I wanted to feel that again. Endless and out of control. Strong and in control. Over and over again.
