Inner Secrets

by Suzie Carr

  “And for you?” the waitress asked, tapping her order pad with the tip of her pen.

  “I’ll take a cup of tea.”

  She stopped tapping. “No food?”

  We both shook our heads, then busied ourselves with watching her walk away.

  Ryan fiddled with his napkin, adjusting it on his lap.

  “So how are you?” I asked. “Really.”

  “I’m doing really well.” He nodded, affirming his answer. “Really, really well.”

  I leaned in. “I’m happy to hear that, you have no idea. I have to confess. I went on your Facebook page. I wanted to see how you were getting along. I noticed your photography fan page.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty incredible.”

  “So, you did it. You started it.”

  He beamed. “My only regret is I didn’t start it sooner. I thought it would be difficult, you know. But, it wasn’t at all. As soon as I signed the LLC paperwork, I got to talking about it and before long the phone started ringing.”

  I reached out and squeezed his hands. “I’m really happy for you. You deserve that and so much more.”

  He pulled his hands away and folded them in his lap. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  More awkward silence filled the hollow space hovering across the table. “So,” I said grasping at straws now. “How about the Ravens, huh? Did you see that game the other night?”

  “I was at it, actually.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You must have gotten soaked. It was horrible outside.”

  “No, actually.” He scratched at his neck, which suddenly sprouted a series of red blotches. “I was watching it from a suite at the stadium.”

  “Wow. Some big client schmoozing you already?”

  “My girlfriend’s family purchases the suite each season.” He gulped and scratched again.

  “You have a girlfriend?” I smiled through the jealous pang.

  “Yeah, and her dad’s a big Raven’s fan.”

  “Wow, those seats must have cost a pretty penny?”

  “He’s the chief cardiologist at St. Agnes Hospital.”

  His destiny caught up to him, and I sat back against the booth feeling no bigger than an electron in the universe. “Are you guys serious?”

  He cradled me in sincerity, poised to comfort me. “Yeah, we’re getting more serious. She’s actually living with me now.”

  I tensed. My stomach ached like I’d just been clobbered with a medicine ball. “Wow. That was quick, huh?”

  “I met her about two months ago. Just after… well, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said, searching the restaurant for our waitress who I desperately wanted to return with our coffee and tea. I didn’t want to hear anymore.

  “She’s special. I think you’d really like her.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure I would.” I wanted to throw up.

  “What about you?” He urged me to talk now.

  I didn’t want to be the loser without love giving up on our marriage for nothing. “Yes,” I said, tossing the white lie out on the table like a stick of dynamite. “She’s very special, too.”

  He leaned in this time with no trace of bitterness or sarcasm. “Tell me about her.”

  “Well, she’s pretty. And, she’s funny.” I was on a roll. “Oh, and she plays the piano like Beethoven. And, she likes to run, so she’s whipping my butt into shape. We’re actually running a 10K at the beginning of the year.”

  Ryan’s smile faded. He slinked back slightly. “Wow.” His jaw twitched the way it always did when he was upset. “I wasn’t expecting that to hurt still.”

  “I’m sorry, did that—”

  “—Where did you meet her?” He asked, his fingers now trembling.

  “Just out.”

  “Where like at a bar? Or work or something like that?” He turned white and the shine in his eyes paled to a foggy wash.

  “My roommate set us up.” I should’ve just shut up.

  His chin quivered. “Are you in love with her?” He couldn’t even look me in the eye.

  I pulled back on the lie. “No. She’s just someone to date.”

  He scanned the table, pulling his lips in tight, then pointed his angry eyes at me. “Does she know what you did to me?” His voice traveled across the restaurant.

  Our waitress popped her head up from behind the waitress station. “Well, does she? I mean, how do you go about that kind of conversation? Do you confess to her, or do you lie about it and blame me as the asshole who cheated on you?”

  “I thought we were moving on here, past all of this.”

  Hurt popped up on his face all over again. I had opened up wounds that if I had just kept my mouth shut, could’ve healed without a scar.

  “I thought so, too. I thought I had forgiven you. But, I can’t.” He scoffed and stood up. “You don’t deserve to be happy. You threw away your chance at happiness.” He tossed a twenty down on the table. “I really hope for this girl’s sake that you’ve grown up. Otherwise, God help her.”

  I sat frozen with no comeback. Not until he passed through the door and disappeared down the street was I able to blink.

  ~

  Not even an hour after Ryan left me like a piece of garbage in the booth at Java Hut, PJ texted me. “Are you okay?”

  I tossed my cell on my bed and rolled over to a fresh batch of tears.

  My cell buzzed a second time. “Can we chat? Please?”

  Fuck my life and everything it had become. I called her. “Hey,” was all I could manage to say.

  “Hey,” her voice rolled out gentle like a wave lapping up against shore. “Ryan called Rachel after he left the Java Hut. How are you?”

  I covered my cell with the blanket and sniffed. Then, “Before you start in on me asking me all sorts of questions about my mysterious girlfriend, don’t bother. I made her up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m deranged. What can I say? He was carrying on about his new girl and I just thought he’d feel better knowing I was living out my gay life. Let’s not talk about it. It was stupid.”

  “Seriously, sweetie, everything okay on your end?”

  “It was awkward. But I dealt with it best I could.”

  “He found your box the first day he went back home, but he couldn’t call you then. So, he waited. He felt ready. So, he asked for our advice. He wasn’t sure how much to tell you about her. I advised him to tell you everything because I thought maybe you’d feel better knowing he was getting by all right. I guess you weren’t ready to hear he’d moved on any more than he was, huh?”

  “It shouldn’t upset me.” I went over to my dresser and pulled out my journal. “But it did.”

  “Do you wish you never opened Pandora’s Box?”

  She always had to make a bigger deal out of everything than it was. She overanalyzed my life to the point I couldn’t stand to think about it after a while. I didn’t realize how much I hated this about her until that very moment. “At times.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  Here it came, the parade of pointed questions set up to dig deep and expose the roots, the rocks, the crevices. “Shoot.”

  “Do you think you made a mistake about being gay?”

  “What the fuck kind of question is that? Of course I’m gay.” I ran a hand through my hair, giving it a good tug to release some of the pressure in my head.

  “It’s normal for a girl to be attracted to another girl. That doesn’t make her gay. I just want you to know that whether you end up with a guy or a girl doesn’t matter to me. What matters is you’re happy.”

  My mind clouded. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Was the world tilted? Was it right side up? Was I wrong side down? “Of course I’m gay.”

  “Again, I’m not judging. I just wanted to pose the question and make sure you’re on the right track.”

  Ms. Fucking Lesbian of the Year analyzing me like she had any right. “Trust me. I’m on the right track.”

&nbs
p; “Okay, that’s great. Listen, what do you say we lighten up the conversation and talk about something else? So where are you going to eat for Thanksgiving?”

  “I’m going to eat with Ralph and his kids.” This was a total lie. I’d probably eat a turkey sandwich from the deli alone in my room. Maybe I’d get wild and open some cranberry sauce, too.

  “Well, in case that falls through, you can come eat with us. Just call me if so?”

  “Will do.”

  I hung up and flung my phone on the bed.

  Not gay. God, she was so annoying. Just because I hadn’t hooked up with someone since Isabella didn’t automatically cut me off from the lesbian world. She could be so ridiculous.

  So what if I had no desire to be with anyone, yet. Well, anyone available, that was. Maybe I fawned over Lucy because she wasn’t available. It was safe that way. I didn’t have to fully commit. I could admire from afar, from a distance that couldn’t burn me.

  I stewed over this for an hour or so. I hated that PJ could set off doubts in me. I mean, even if I wanted to, where would I go to hook up with someone? It’s not like I had a stream of lesbian friends to call up and invite out for girls’ night. I could go back to Club X solo, but then I’d be a creep. Who goes clubbing on her own? Look what happened last time I did that.

  I had no desire to hook up with just anyone. I wanted to fall in love. I wanted to snuggle and sip lattes with someone, hold her hand, walk in a park, and kiss her longingly under a tree as we picnicked under the wide undercarriage of an old maple. I wanted to run my fingers through her soft hair and enjoy the growth of a smile blossom on her face and the look of love spread from her to me. I wanted to make love to a woman, not fuck her. Did this make me not gay; the fact that I didn’t long to suck on random nipples and get off on just any vagina?

  I pulled out my laptop and just for the sheer curiosity of it all, I ventured onto a few sites that promised the perfect match. I landed on one and created a profile with a fake name, Jolie. Then, I opened up a photo of me standing in front of the Washington Monument. I edited it in Photoshop, adding an artistic brush filter to it to blur the real me, but still kept it interesting. I plopped that in as my photo. Next, I pumped up my profile with concoctions of me being a ghost writer and owning a row home in Federal Hill. I also embellished that I played classical piano. As long as I was just screwing around, why be boring?

  I felt like I was building an online pizza order. I’d like long hair, wavy, extra thick eyelashes, and blue eyes please. Oh and hold the smokers and druggies.

  Long streams of women appeared looking more like toothpaste models than real women. I wondered what was wrong with them that these beautiful hotties couldn’t find a date just walking down the street flaunting their goods. This made me realize that I was flawed, too. I’d be the last person I’d want to fall in love with—a girl with secrets about her cheating past who was now desperate to prove her gayness by tramping herself online like a hooker.

  I didn’t deserve great love. I deserved a fuck.

  I combed through endless possibilities and noticed an option to play games. Well, I thought this was cool. So, I entered an online waiting room as Jolie, and then someone named Sara invited me to play Scrabble.

  Turned out Sara was hyper about Scrabble. I couldn’t think fast enough. She grew annoyed when I’d take more than five minutes to create a big payout word. So, she left me in the middle of a game, left me brooding alone in the corner of a virtual hall like a loser at a middle school dance. I ventured back into the waiting room and decided to pluck someone up myself. She was quick to relay that she sucked, but needed to improve her vocabulary. So, I offered her to lay down the first word. Before long, she was racking up ten letter words like she was queen of the English language, ruler of the online world.

  We started our fifth game, and then, that’s when the game of Scrabble changed forever.

  She had laid down a word and I laid another one down right away, exposing her letter S. I opted to build a word from two letters up. This proved to be a monumental shift because, with clean access to her letter S, she spelled “samesexfun.”

  I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, our online Scrabble board exploded into an orgy of one risqué word after the other. By the time we ran out of letters, I was flushed and wet. So, yes, the very gay me took it to a new level when prompted, one I was certain PJ had never experienced in all of her gay days. She asked if I had a webcam. I reached out and touched the danger zone telling her yes. She asked me if I wanted to see her. I responded with a smile. For those brief seconds before she flashed on screen, I swam in a dark sea of swirling currents that pulled me every which way, tugging at inner pockets I’d never known to exist. Intrigued, and free to explore, I braced for all possibility. And, then, she appeared straddling a weight bench, fingering herself, offering me a seductive teasing stare. I sat on my soft down comforter and sizzled under her hot spell, panting, melting off whatever dignity remained.

  I watched her get off on herself. My heart raced. My blood pumped. I twitched and bucked. I orgasmed. And when the girl was done, she told me she’d be right back there the next night if I wanted to indulge in another game of Scrabble.

  Perhaps this was my fate, to live a virtual life filled with horny women hiding from their real selves just like me.

  Ryan would certainly agree, for sure.

  Chapter Ten

  LUCY

  I started to resent Adam more. Of course, reading Hope’s take on how I catered to his ideals and dreams opened my eyes. I mean, I knew this was true on some level, but the fact that she observed it, too, exploited it into something tangible and disconcerting.

  He dreamt of isolating us from the world. I dreamt of digging deeper into society and shaping students into outstanding team members who would one day go out into the real world and make something of themselves and make the world a better place. I couldn’t do this from a log cabin surrounded by wild foxes and pine trees.

  When Adam first started talking crazy about moving to the mountains and living our days alone sequestered from the chaos of suburbia, I romanticized along with him for the sake of bringing us closer with a goal we could both wrap our minds around. I imagined creating a beautiful safe haven with country curtains and knotty pine walls and a forest of trees and winding, rocky paths leading to our very own river acres away. We talked about waking up at our leisure, walking the Saint Bernard puppies we would adopt, then coming back and cooking healthy breakfasts. Then he would break out a couple of scenes while I recorded a podcast or a webinar or whatever the online venue would be for me to teach college kids from a distance.

  This all sounded great in theory; until I met Hope.

  Now, I craved to be around her instead of him. With her, I could talk about how the color of the living room made me feel cozy, how peppermint tea sprung me to life, how I loathed everything that had to do with reality television and she got me, even if she didn’t agree. Every time. She didn’t nod, and fail to look up at me. Not once. She never ignored me or pushed me aside and told me later when more important things like writing a chapter were complete. No. Hope understood the magic of living in the here and now. She never failed to catch my eye and dig into the moment with me, even if it opened up some doors she didn’t want opened. For example, a few nights after I played piano for her, I knocked on her bedroom door. She made me wait a few too many seconds before she allowed me to enter. She sat on her bed with her closed laptop on her side, face flushed, eyes glossed over, and hands trembling.

  “What are you up to?” I asked her.

  She couldn’t look at me. She stammered, lost for words. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Of course I do.” I sat down beside her.

  “I was just searching online for ideas on dating.” She planted her eyes on her closed laptop. “One minute I’m fine with being single. The next I freak out about it.”

  I twisted my mouth, not sure what to offer. “Just enjoy
the freedom while you have it.”

  “Sometimes freedom is overwhelming.”

  Afraid to ask, I did anyway. “Who is this girl giving you a problem? Is it the one from the blind date?” I wanted her to fess up that the girl was a bust so we could talk openly about it.

  “It’s not her. It’s actually no one. I’m just in a funk.”

  I scooted my legs up closer to her. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I’m an open book. Ask away.”

  I smiled at the irony. “Did you always know you were gay?”

  She folded her legs under. “I’ve never been sexually attracted to a man. Not even my ex.”

  I wanted to know her better without having to snoop. “Why did you marry him, then?”

  “Because I loved him. I loved everything he stood for, everything he did, and the way he treated people. I loved the way he would open his heart to anyone who needed it. He’s just a really great guy who got the short end of the deal when he unknowingly married a closeted lesbian.”

  I wanted to know what revved her heart, what turned her on, and what kind of girl excited her. “How did you finally know that it wasn’t just a curiosity thing?”

  “My crushes were always on girls.” She readjusted her legs so one now crossed the other. Her dangling foot bounced up and down in a speedy beat. “I never once fantasized about a guy.”

  I loved the way her jaw clenched when she ruffled. I loved even more that I could ruffle her. “But, do you think that could be just because it was a taboo? Maybe the fact that Ryan didn’t know fueled the fire more so?” I needed to understand if what I was feeling was just a taboo thing.

  “Not a chance.” Her voice flattened.

  “So did you ever have sex with a woman, I mean, even though you were married?”

  “Yes.” She snapped away chopping off further access to this moment. “I don’t really feel like talking about Ryan right now, though. What I need to do is find me some more dates. Want to help?”

  “We can go back to searching online.”

  Hope cracked up at this. “I don’t think so.”