by Sionna Fox
“Do you want me to call someone to pick you up?”
She wiped her face on her sleeve. “No. I’ll walk.”
He followed her numbly to the door. “Kate.”
She stopped with her hand on the knob, shoulders up, ready to fight.
“I love you.” He swallowed thickly. “I-y-I know you don’t believe that. Or that it’s hard for you to believe it. But I’ll always be here for you, no matter what.”
She didn’t turn around. She pulled her hat tighter down over her ears, nodded, and stepped out the door.
When her steps cleared the porch, Ian sank to the floor. He managed to send an SOS to Evie before he went completely numb, staring at the whorled knots of the old wooden door. He couldn’t breathe. This was so much worse than the slow parting of the year before.
He’d had hope. Had been preparing to make a home with her. And she had been looking for a way out. She had left him again. Ripped the hope out of his hands and rendered everything meaningless.
His vision blurred, fading to black. Nothing mattered without her.
Sixteen
Kate never imagined herself as the kind of woman who cried on the bus, then cried some more in a fetid, humid T station waiting for the blast of metallic, urine-scented air and screeching brakes that signaled her train. But there she sat, tears streaking her cheeks as fast as she could wipe them away on the sleeve of her jacket, sniffing and snorting as her sinuses closed against the grief of leaving him again. Knowing she was right to do it didn’t change that.
She held in the heaving sobs until she made it to her bed, then cried herself hoarse until she finally slept.
She woke up in the morning with a pounding headache, a stuffy nose, and swollen eyes. She wasn’t leaving the house for coffee. She tried to work, to push through, but she kept expecting the door to buzz, for Ian to come calling and tell her she had it all wrong, that he didn’t want to forget the past, but move forward knowing the mistakes they’d made. But all he wanted was for her to come home, to go back to work, to settle the turmoil in his life. She may have had a hand in creating it, but she couldn’t fix it for him. Not if it meant moving on by not acknowledging the past.
She gave up and texted Jolene, though she felt guilty doing it. Jolene was trying to plan her wedding, her happily-ever-after with her doting partner and their baby. She was probably exhausted and overwhelmed and needed support more than she could give it, but Kate didn’t have anyone else to talk to.
Sarah hated disruption to her chosen family unit, and even if she understood why Kate couldn’t be with Ian anymore, she’d still be rooting for a reconciliation. Evie was Ian’s best friend. Chris and Toby were up to their eyeballs in event planning for the con they were trying to get off the ground in the spring. There were other people in the scene, people who showed up at the bar meet-ups and went out for drinks with them, but they weren’t close friends. Which was weird when she’d seen a lot of them in various states of undress or engagement in kinky or sexual activity. Jolene was it.
But if they were friends, for better or worse, Kate should be able to rely on her to love her even when she was a big, confused, fucked-up mess. And Jolene showed up at her door with takeout in less than an hour.
Kate fetched plates and utensils from the closet kitchen, and they sat at her tiny table. “I’m sorry. You have so many other things to deal with, and you shouldn’t have to take care of me.”
“How many times did you sit with me drinking wine and watching bad TV when I was moping around my apartment pretending I didn’t miss Matthew? I get that you have issues trusting that people care about you if you’re not the one providing, but this is what friends do.”
“I know. How are you feeling?”
“Fine-ish. But you’re deflecting. What’s going on?”
“I broke up with Ian. Again.”
“Oh, honey. Why? I thought you were going to talk to him.?”
Kate groaned. “It’s too much. I can’t figure out how to be in a relationship while sorting through our issues, especially if he just wants to ‘let it go’ and move on. He might not be as rigidly into the role as I thought he was, but he’s still Ian. He wants me to move back in and pretend like I never left.”
“Everyone has issues. Do you know he wants you to move in and pretend like you never left? Were those actually his words?”
“Of course not. But every time I see him, some new thing I hadn’t thought about or realized contributed to how stuck I was rears its head like a fucking hydra, and he says, ‘let it go’ like we’re in a damn Disney movie.”
Jolene made a face. “He’s not totally wrong, though. At some point you have to let go of whatever resentment or pain you’re carrying around about it.”
“But how do you do that with someone who doesn’t want to even talk about it? And I know it’s not his fault, but I am still tied up figuring out what happens next and how I identify, and I don’t want to be financially dependent on anyone, but for that to happen, I might have to move who-knows-where because grant money in my particular niche is only going to get more scarce, and he’s sure as hell not going anywhere. He avoids change like it’s the plague. He wants to live in his house and go to his job, and sure, having someone to come home to gives that meaning for him, but fuck. I didn’t spend all of this time getting a PhD to be a housewife. I don’t want to be his reason to get up in the morning. It’s too much.”
Jolene set down her fork. “Okay. That is a lot going on, on a bunch of different levels, some of which are your issues to work through, and not his. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t have issues. He does struggle with change, and I know he spent a lot of the last year unclear on where it had gone wrong and pining for you to come home. And I don’t say that to make you feel guilty.”
She knew he had. That was part of the problem, that he was still pining for how it used to be. Simple, easy, enforce these rules, spank, fuck, good night, do it again tomorrow. “I know.”
“But.” Jolene pointed her fork at Kate. “You have to work on your stuff. You’re tangled up trying to figure out how you identify and what you want your future to look like, and all of that is hard. And honestly? The rest of it? The money and the work stuff? He never asked you to be his housewife. You did it because you thought that’s what you had to do to earn your place. You said that yourself.”
Kate narrowed her eyes at her plate. “Okay, that part’s fair.”
“I get the money thing, I do. I had a hard time with the background and income gap parts with Matthew. But that’s not insurmountable. And Ian is the guy who told you he’d take care of the mortgage so you would have the savings to run away to California on a tiny research stipend for a year. He doesn’t want to control you with money; he wants to help.”
Kate really, really hated how much Jolene was right. “I love you, but I need you to stop caping for my ex-boyfriend and let me wallow in feeling shitty for a minute.”
Jolene laughed. “Fine. Wallow away, and I will commiserate that getting your adult shit together sucks and it never stops. You’re going to be reevaluating your relationship to the world forever. Sorry.”
“Was I this annoying when you were moping over Matt?”
She snorted into her food. “All this and more. You had the advantage of having known Matt, and known that you were subby for years. I only kind of wanted to slap you a few times.”
“Yes, well, now you’re the exceptionally well-adjusted one.”
“Listen, I know you’ve done it before with varying degrees of success, but if I’m remotely well-adjusted, it’s thanks to therapy and medication. Which is coming in handy with this whole growing a human thing. I don’t want to be in a state of panic for the next…forever? Because I think that’s how long people say they worry about their kids.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry. You have actual adult things to worry about, and I’m whining about boys.”
Jolene scooted her chair closer and pulled Kate’s head onto her shoulder. “A
nd there are people in the world who have bigger problems than you or I will ever face. You can’t play that game with yourself. No one wins the suffering Olympics. You figuring out who you are and what you want out of a relationship, out of life, all of that is as important as my freaking out about how my body is playing host to a cluster of cells that will one day walk and talk and possibly hate me.”
“They’re not gonna hate you.” Kate was starting to sniffle a little into Jolene’s sweater. “You’re gonna be a really good mom.”
“God, I hope so.” She sighed and rubbed Kate’s arm. “You wanna watch a movie?”
They ended up skipping a movie and watching a bunch of episodes of a baking show where the contestants were expected to fail hilariously. It would have been cruel if everyone involved weren’t in on the joke, but as it was, it was silly and funny and exactly what Kate needed.
When Matt arrived to pick her up, Jolene hugged Kate extra hard and told her not to worry about calling her anytime. “It’ll be all right. No matter how it turns out. Okay?”
She tried to believe her. Wanted to believe her. But like everything else in her life, she wasn’t sure how.
* * *
Ian stared at the blinking cursor on his screen. After Evie had picked him up off the floor and gotten him to make sense again, they’d spent hours sussing out what he needed to do.
Starting with writing his resignation letter to Jeff, cc’ing it to HR and officially quitting his job. He couldn’t go back there. But every time he tried to write the words, his chest collapsed and he couldn’t breathe. Evie had offered to draft it for him, to help him explain that his recent lack of engagement was due to a need for a change, and he was resigning his position to make that happen, effective immediately.
Once she got him off the floor, Evie’s approach to Ian’s total panic had been practical. Answer the big questions—did he want to leave his job even if it meant nothing to Kate, was he prepared to take on that much change all at once or did he need to go back and ride it out for a bit with something stable in his life—then move on to making those things happen. Ian didn’t want to go back. Going back would only remind him of Kate. He would sell the house too. A clean slate.
They tore up his lists from the other day and made new ones. New goals, new tasks, everything leading him toward the unknown. His vision started to blur. He fished in the amber plastic bottle that had become a constant companion. A security blanket in the face of utter panic, even if the pills inside it were meant to be only a temporary stopgap. A way to force his nervous system to settle into submission so he could function.
He broke a tablet in half and settled it under his tongue, the chalky feeling of it melting was revolting, but they kicked in faster this way. And he had things to do. He stared at the cursor and kicked himself for insisting he had to write this on his own. He wanted to explain to Jeff that he wasn’t unappreciative of him or the company, but that he no longer felt his position was necessary. He wanted to strongly suggest Alice for promotion, rather than an external hire.
Ian had always thought of himself as being even-keeled, which Evie had laughed uproariously at when he’d said it, wondering at the strength of the panic that had gripped him in the last few weeks. “Ian, there is literally no one who knows you well who would think that. You are the most tightly wound person I know, if I exclude myself. You repress everything until your feelings are like a tyrannosaurus on a bender when they finally get out.”
He could probably blame his childhood for that. For being told to be less sensitive, less strange, if he wanted to survive in the world. But that didn’t help him write the letter that was at the top of his task list for the day. The letter would set everything else into motion. The letter had to come first.
But the words refused to come. Despite the medication slowly starting to work its way through his bloodstream, Ian was swamped in anxiety and doubt. He could go on being bored. What would be so bad about that? He could shut himself up in this house full of memories and haunt his way through the latter half of his life. This might be the best he could expect, strange and awkward and ill at ease in the world as he was. What was the point?
The point, as Evie had calmly reminded him nearly every day, was that if it couldn’t get worse, then it could certainly get better. He didn’t have to live like a turtle in its shell. He had to write the letter. The cursor blinked. He had to get out of the house. The letter could wait.
His brand new psychiatrist—who Evie had of course pulled strings to get him an appointment with—had recommended movement when Ian felt stuck. Ian had taken him at his word and kept his shoes and coat at the ready by the door. He was always stuck.
His neighborhood had once been considered a suburb, but was now nearly integrated into the city itself. Urban sprawl hadn’t quite overtaken it, and there were still leafy streets and free-standing houses like his, that dated back to the early twentieth century. He even had a tiny yard. His house would sell for a small fortune in the current market.
He’d forgotten gloves and a hat again, but instead of going back, he shoved his hands deep into his jacket pockets and kept walking. Houses sold around here with barely enough time for realty signs to go up before they were marked under contract. Limited access to public transportation was rendered worth it for access to green spaces, large parks, bigger houses. He ducked through the nearest park entrance. He used to run this way, take after-dinner walks with Kate in the summer. It was nothing but barren trees and brown grass now. Covered in snow, it might have been charming, rendered him more nostalgic. As it was, the shriveled grass reflected his feelings well enough.
He walked quickly down the familiar path. Maybe he should take up running again, instead of just walking. It used to help him think, gave his body something to do while his mind solved a problem. After she’d left, all it had done was give him time to wonder what had happened. Now he knew, but it didn’t help. They’d both made mistakes, but he didn’t want to dwell on the past, and Kate…
Evie had told him to give it time. That Kate was on the cusp of truly being out on her own for the first time—she’d put off claiming her adulthood by being a perpetual student, and living with him probably hadn’t helped. She needed to form a sense of who she was on her own. Evie had pointedly looked at him and told him he needed to do the same.
He’d spent the first few years of his adult life shaping a version of who he thought he was supposed to be. The house, the office, the books, were all symptoms of it. Then his identity had been in relationship to Kate. He’d been her Master, her Sir, her punishment and her pleasure. And she had bought into the version of him that had the house and the expensive thread-count sheets and the books.
Who was he without it? Who did he want to be? He was nearly forty years old and he didn’t know. He just knew he couldn’t be that anymore.
Evie had been unfailingly kind and supportive in the days since she’d found him nearly catatonic on the front hallway rug, but he’d asked so much of her. And he suspected he needed someone who wouldn’t handle him with kid gloves. He sat on a cold bench and with fumbling fingers dialed a number he’d deleted from his phone, but would never be able to forget.
She picked up on the second ring. “Where the fuck have you been, Ian?”
Yes, Juliette was precisely who he needed to talk to. “Hello, Juliette.”
“I’m not kidding. I haven’t heard from you in months.” He could practically hear her cross her arms and level him with a cold stare. Like so many of her kind, Juliette was incredibly competent and commanding in the day-to-day world, and giving up all that control to someone she trusted was an incredible relief. Guilt still squirmed in his belly that he’d fucked that up for her last time.
“You could have called me.” Why did the women in his life always expect him to make the first move? He’d have to fix that. Another item for another list.
“That’s never how this has worked. Are you okay? I know she’s back in town.” And there w
as the voice of his friend, instead of the woman who would happily glare at him from the other side of a conference table until he conceded to whatever she wanted.
“I’m…I’m a fucking disaster. I’m on leave from my job. I might quit. No, I’m going to quit. And sell my house. I don’t know. I don’t know who I am.” He dropped his forehead into his free hand, curled against the freezing wind while the wooden slats of the bench beneath him soaked cold into his bones. “Except apparently someone with a poorly managed panic disorder and a possible evaluation for autism in the works. Though they say getting a diagnosis at my age is more difficult because of all the coping mechanisms and I think he called it masking? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with that information.”
His chest went tight again, but he had hours before he could do anything medicinal about it. He hadn’t said those words out loud to anyone, not even to Evie. He only said that he’d gone to his first appointment, been given a prescription for the short-term, and they would continue to evaluate.
Juliette’s voice softened. “What do you need? Right now, right this second?”
“I need a friend to come kick my ass.”
Her laughter pealed through the receiver. “I’ll be right over.”
He arrived back at the house as Juliette pulled in. Her sharp gaze lingered on him as her blue eyes narrowed. “You look like shit, that’s for sure.”
Juliette, as always, looked impeccable in a perfectly tailored suit and neat knot at the nape of her neck. “You look well.”
“I am, thank you.” She hung her topcoat in the closet, shrugged out of her jacket, and stepped down from her heels. “Now. You need an ass kicking?”
“Desperately.” He toed off his shoes and hung his coat from the newel post and followed her into the living room.
“Question. Do you need the kind of ass kicking where I talk shit about your ex, or is this more about you?” Juliette settled into a chair and crossed her legs, her feet just barely peeking out from the hems of her pants now that she was without the added three inches of her shoes.