by Sionna Fox
Did she realize how much of the same she’d done for him? He could do the hard things, could be the carrot or the stick, because she took care of the little shit that would otherwise pile up until the house was filled with dust bunnies the size of tumble weeds and he really did live on takeout and frozen meals. He may have been older and more experienced than she was, but he’d still needed her. He’d defined himself in relation to her from the moment he’d brought her up to that hotel room for their first scene. He’d taken it for granted because it was what she said she wanted.
He leaned his elbows on his desk, flipping the illustrated pages of his favorite childhood book. He didn’t want to be the stick. The formality, the rules and the punishments, that had been her. She’d asked for a strong hand, clear boundaries, codified rules because she had needed an outlet for her anxiety about the future. Now, she was at a crossroads again. Of course she would call him when she was overwhelmed by the choices ahead of her.
But he didn’t want to be her stick any more than she wanted to be his underappreciated housekeeper. He wanted to take care of her, read her bedtime stories, support her. He didn’t want to be her cruel master doling out punishment for perceived slights and breaking rules that didn’t matter to either of them because he wanted to let her play out her fantasy of dominance and submission.
She’d asked for the rules, the tasks, right down to the dress code. He had a feeling she was the only person in her masters or doctoral program to regularly show up for lectures in heels and a pencil skirt, lacy, silky scraps of lingerie hidden underneath. Seeing her dressed like a pin-up every day had been exciting at first, before it had just become the way she dressed, more background noise in their days. Seeing her now at the shop, in leggings and oversized sweaters, sitting on one foot with her hair rumpled, no makeup while she interrupted her furious typing to pore over her notes was as satisfying because it was her.
He should probably have been getting a resume together, in the event they realized that promoting Alice was more cost-effective than keeping him around, but he couldn’t think straight. He’d worked there for years. It was safe, solid, dependable. The travel was only occasional, and he had decent benefits. He’d been regularly promoted since he’d been there and managed a team of competent people he trusted. All of whom could do his job.
God, he’d been bored out of his mind. When he’d had Kate to come home to, the boredom had been worth it, knowing that his job provided her a sense of security while she socked away her meager stipend. Without her…there’d been no point, no reason to work for ten minutes, surf the internet for twenty, off and on for eight hours a day. No reason for conference calls and meetings that could have been settled in an email. No reason to stay.
Ian avoided change, craved stability as much as Kate had, though their reasons had been different. He’d been risk-averse his whole life, choosing the path of safety and responsibility at every turn, from his high school extra-curriculars, to his computer science degree, to staying at the same company for so long because he had a comfortable salary and decent health insurance.
He’d wanted the dream of a job where he could clock in, clock out, and not think about it until he clocked back in again. It turned out that dream kind of sucked when he was only doing it for himself.
He picked up his phone.
Ian: I was put on leave today. But I think…I realized I hate my job.
Three dots flashed for several minutes.
Evie: So you finally caught up. Good. Take the leave, quit when they ask you to come back, take the severance, and figure out what you want to do. You have, what, six months built into your contract? Plus what you’ve been hoarding all these years. You’ve probably got enough to keep you afloat for eighteen months at your current rate of expenses, right?
The problem with having one of your dearest and oldest friends also be someone who craved financial security and had a dragon hoard of her own was how easy it was for her to give him advice about spending it. Granted, Evie had long ago given Sarah the seed money to start her company and had more than once injected additional cash into the business to keep it afloat.
Ian: Easy for you to say.
Evie: What do you want, Ian? What do you want your life to look like? Do you want to be the guy who wears a suit and tie and goes to sales meetings every day for the rest of his life? How long has it been since you actually built something with your brain and your hands?
He paused. Trying to remember the last time he’d been directly involved in building out a project. But they had scores of people overseas who wrote the stuff line by line. Jeff went to their facilities on a regular basis. Ian had turned into a sales guy, making sure the end users were happy and got the extensions and options they needed.
Ian: I have no idea. I’ve helped Kate run some scripts to compile data, but that’s the closest I’ve come in years, probably.
Evie: And did you enjoy helping her?
Ian: Obviously. But it was her.
Evie: Maybe. Maybe you get involved in data science. I’m sure some research group or nonprofit needs someone to make their numbers work.
He didn’t text back, but that was always the way with Evie. Conversations got picked up and dropped, and neither of them were offended.
He did have a sizable fuck-off fund, even without the guaranteed severance package. He could quit tomorrow and he’d be fine for a while.
But he couldn’t make any decisions until he figured out this thing with Kate. He could go back. He could be her safe, secure, dependable landing place, if that’s what she wanted, if that’s what it took. He could do it for her.
* * *
Kate woke up as the sun was going down, hungry and disoriented. She’d slept most of the day. While the rational part of her brain said she must have needed it, the rest of her was pissed at how much time she’d lost to feeling sorry about Ian. Deadlines and meetings and piles of papers to grade danced in her vision. She didn’t have time for this.
But she missed him, whether she liked it or not. She wanted to know this new person he’d become in her absence. Or the person he’d always been and she hadn’t cared to know. She’d been so wrapped up in the idea of what he should be, a fantasy built from books and movies. She’d never seen him as a whole person. He had played his role, and played it well, and when she was tired of it, instead of talking about it, she’d run away.
She hadn’t wanted to be responsible for her own feelings, so she’d put it on him. She was a child in need of a bedtime story, not an adult woman anyone should trust their heart with. She’d already spent the last two days hurting him by leaning on him in ways she had no business doing anymore. Because what came after her dissertation was finished and defended was a great big blur of choices and what-ifs, and she couldn’t deal.
He should have hung up on her. But he was still trying to take care of her, to be the man he thought she needed. God, she was an asshole. Evie was right that she owed him an explanation, but she really owed him apologies.
He’d never tried to force her into the mold of a textbook-perfect submissive; he was too busy trying to be the perfect Dom. For her. Always for her. And of course they had both made mistakes, but she’d been so spoiled and selfish and stupid. She didn’t deserve him.
She shuffled to the corner store for a sandwich and box of Benadryl to put her back to sleep. She slogged through a few more pages of work, but didn’t make it far before she sent a text.
Kate: I’ll have dinner with you.
His reply was almost immediate.
Ian: Great. Tomorrow?
Kate: Tomorrow.
She gave up on work, took a Benadryl, and watched something stupid on her laptop until it kicked in.
She worked most of the next day, anticipation souring her appetite and making the numbers and tables swim on the screen in front of her. She guzzled coffee to kick out the cobwebs left from medicating herself to sleep, but it didn’t do much except make her twitchy. When restlessness took
over, she went on a long walk around the neighborhood, looping into one of the parks and following a path around the pond. There were a small handful of late-afternoon runners, but she was otherwise undisturbed.
She had thought she would never set foot in Ian’s house again. She’d lived there for over four years—her lease had been up fairly early into the relationship and moving in had been the next giddy step in having him be in complete control of her—but she’d always felt like a guest. The space belonged to him. Not because he’d bought it or paid the mortgage, but because they’d never combined households. She didn’t have anything but shitty thrift-store furniture to bring to the relationship, and she’d been happy to leave it on the curb when she moved out of her grad student apartment.
She’d liked his house the way it was. She’d never even suggested rearranging the furniture. It had been comforting then, to be surrounded by Ian, his stuff, his style, his presence in the house large even when he wasn’t at home.
When she moved out, she’d packed her clothes and the few odds and ends she’d brought with her. Most of the clothes had ended up donated, her wardrobe not appropriate for the job she was doing or the climate she was doing it in. The things she’d forgotten about she’d mostly told him to get rid of. She didn’t need them where she was.
Her feet carried her finally to the T station, then down the meandering streets to his house. She could have caught a bus that would have taken her slightly closer to his address, but keeping herself moving was better than having her stomach roil sitting on the bus.
Every step she took from the T stop felt weird. She wasn’t supposed to come back here. She should have stayed away. Or she should never have left.
She mounted the steps and paused at the door. She had never knocked or rung the bell. Before she lived there, Ian had always taken her home with him; she had never been invited over and had to wait on the porch. She stood for a minute, disoriented, with her hand half-raised to the door.
Ian opened it before she could knock. “I heard you come up the steps.” He backed out of the way to allow her the space to enter. “Come in.”
She shook herself and stepped over the threshold.
It was odd seeing Ian in jeans and a hoodie on a weekday. He’d always overdressed for work and had never been the kind of guy to immediately swap out of his work clothes when he got home. She’d followed his lead when she lived there, but now she spent most of her life in fleece-lined leggings and the least amount of bra possible under her thrift-store sweaters and T-shirts. She’d have to dress appropriately again when the semester started, but for the moment, she chose comfort.
He leaned toward her like he was going to kiss her cheek but changed his mind at the last second. “There are a few options to choose from for dinner.”
She stood, staring at the carpet, her feet glued to the spot. “Okay.” It would be easier once his attention was split between her and the meal. She remembered all too well what had happened the last time they were alone in the same room with no distractions.
She felt pressure at her elbow. He was trying to steer her out of the entry and into the kitchen. The impulse to lean into the touch warred with the one to flee. She froze when her feet crossed over the boundary of hardwood to tile. She’d spent so much time in that room. Everything looked just as she’d left it, as if no time at all had passed.
Ian pushed her to the counter, and she sank onto the stool he pulled out for her. He crossed to the other side, putting the wide granite surface between them, and leaned on his palms, watching her.
“I’m sorry. It…It’s stranger than I thought it would be to be here.”
“I know.”
She looked up at him finally. He was as besieged by bittersweet memories as she was. All of her self-righteous anger that Ian had taken her for granted was crumbling away and leaving behind the pain of her own mistakes and how much she had missed him.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve been doing one of those meal-kit delivery things; you can pick which one you want.”
It wasn’t fair that even the contents of his fridge could swamp her in nostalgia for all the silly arguments they’d had about what to eat for dinner. Was this always what happened when two people had lived together; all the trivial things haunted them forever?
She couldn’t answer. If she stayed here weighing their dinner options, squabbling about who was going to make the final decision, she might as well move back in.
“Maybe we should say what we need to say first.”
Ian studied the countertop. “Right.” He came around the corner and took the stool next to her. She’d been afraid he would suggest moving the conversation to the living room. She had too many fond memories of that couch to survive this conversation from there.
“Who goes first?” She slid her hands under her thighs so she wouldn’t reach out to touch him.
He rested his elbows on the counter, scruffy chin in his hands. He hadn’t bothered to shave that day. “I suppose I started it.”
“You did show up where I was working.”
“I know. That was inappropriate of me. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” She waited for him to speak again. “What did you think you were going to say to me that day?” It already seemed like ages ago that he’d come into the shop, glared daggers at poor Owen, and begged her to talk to him.
“I’d been asking myself for a year what I had done wrong, how I had failed so badly that you believed your only option was to walk away.”
“You could have asked me any time in the last year.”
“You wouldn’t have told me if I did. You barely responded to even practical messages. You would have hated me.”
“Probably. It would be so much less confusing if I could hate you, though. Maybe for both of us.”
“You’re confused now?” The glimmer of hope in his face made her scowl. “That makes two of us,” he sighed. “So are you going to enlighten me? If I had called you and asked you to explain six months ago, what would you have said?”
She would have given him the same rote answer she gave everyone else. “That we wanted different things. That we had grown apart, and I wasn’t in love with you anymore.”
“So you felt the same as you did when you told me you were leaving.”
“Yeah, well. No one was around to challenge that idea.”
“What did you want, Kate, that was so different that you thought I wouldn’t understand?” He was trying so hard, eyebrows scrunched together, waiting for something that would help him make sense of it.
“I was bored. I didn’t want to do this so formally anymore. I was living for the nights I could put on jeans and get margaritas with Jolene and dreading coming home at the end of them. I didn’t think there was any other way to be with you, and that’s not what I wanted anymore.”
“You never said anything.”
“You never asked.”
“I am so sorry.” His face fell, then, as if he had finally accepted that it was really, irrevocably over.
“Me too.”
They had both broken their fundamental promise to each other, to speak up when something wasn’t working, when something was wrong. To communicate their needs and desires honestly and openly at all times. They had both broken that trust.
“You said you didn’t think there was any other way to be with me. Is that still what you think?” There was the slightest hint of hope underneath the regret in his voice.
“I don’t know. It was easier for me to think we were simply incompatible. It wasn’t my fault that way. Or yours, really, as much as I tried to be angry at you for not noticing that I was unhappy.”
“It wasn’t your fault. It was my responsibility to keep checking in to make sure you were getting what you needed, that you were happy.”
“I don’t know if I could have told you the truth, even if you had. I didn’t want to disappoint you.” She had cared enough for his good opinion of her that she’d spared his feelings until
she’d been left with no choice but to break his heart. Kate shook her head, wishing she still had enough hair to hide behind.
Ian’s voice softened. “You could never have disappointed me, Kate. Not like that.”
She wanted to believe him. “I disappointed you all the time.”
“Within the rules of the game, maybe, the rules you’d asked for. There’s a difference between the disappointment that you didn’t complete a task I had set for you and the real thing. You know that.”
“I know.”
He slumped forward on his elbows, forehead in his hands. “I should have known you better than anyone, and I had no idea you were so unhappy.”
“I lied to myself as much as I lied to you, you know.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better, if that’s what you’re trying to do.”
“I’m not.”
They lapsed into silence, both of them staring at the counter. Her hands were starting to tingle from being sat on, but the urge to reach out and comfort him was still too strong. She had failed as much as he had. She was supposed to have known him as well as he had known her, but the possibility that he might have wanted something different, might have been happy to play a different role from her remote and imperious Master, was only occurring to her a year after the fact. She hadn’t known him at all.
“Were you happy?” Everything depended on his answer. If he said yes, they were truly incompatible and they could both move on. If he said no, then her failing had been just as great for not seeing it, questioning it, making sure that his needs and desires were accounted for. If they’d both kept silent out of love for the other, out of not wanting to upset or disappoint each other, what then? Could they possibly start over?
He let out a long, low sigh and turned his head to look at her. His gaze met hers, serious and sad. “No.”
“You never said anything.”