The Corner House: A Reverse Harem

by Daisy Jane

“We have urges, too,” she continues, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve opened Pandora's box on a treasure trove of all the repressed sexist bullshit we women have dealt with since we had the realization that we weren’t treated equally. “Just because we have ovaries and larger mammary glands doesn’t mean we want just one sexual partner at once, it doesn’t mean that it’s our job to get groceries and our job to put the meat in the crock pot. Being the owner of a vagina doesn’t automatically make it our job to put laundry away and wipe the counters down and make sure there’s laundry detergent at all times,” she rants, her voice no longer quiet. She and her fiancé Bryan had recently moved in together and both of them work full time so I suspect her rant perhaps has less to do with me wanting to hook up with the corner house guys and more about her not wanting to cook and do dishes. But still, she’s on my side and she makes good points, so I agree.

  “Yeah,” I say, popping the straw and lid onto my tumbler. I take a big, long drink and the cold water seizes control of my brain for a moment, making me stall out in the kitchen. It’s at that point I decide another Tylenol before bed isn’t a bad idea, if I am going to do three color’s tomorrow.

  “Okay, I got a little crazy on that rant but yeah, bottom line, I support you Sloane,” she says and I feel like we’re invisibly fist bumping. “Do they know how you feel?”

  I snort. “I really hope not because if I have a look that says ‘group fuck me please’ then I really need to work on my poker face.” I return to my bed and decide to save the rest of the tear-jerking Paley panel for another night. Flicking off the TV, I pull the sheets up around me and let my eyes adjust to the newly darkened room.

  “How are you going to, you know, ask them for it?” she asks, knowing now she’s invested in this.

  “I don’t know, Brynn. I mean, I almost feel insane admitting to myself that I am going to ask them for this because I’m no porn star. But the idea of them agreeing and it happening—that helps me get over the nerves of asking.”

  “So, you are going to ask, then,” she verifies, and I hear a shuffling in the background, and I wonder if it’s her or Bryan adjusting in bed. She’s said Bryan sleeps like a log so I highly doubt he’ll wake up for this, considering he’s got no idea what we’re talking about. When Brynn says she put something in the friend vault like this information, I trust her. You don’t lie about the friend vault.

  “I am but I don’t know how.” I stretch my legs out in the sheets, loving how my feet find the undiscovered pockets of cool cotton. “I’m tired of being boring Sloane.”

  She clears her throat. “You’re not boring,” she says but even she doesn’t believe it.

  “I’ve lived in the same house for eight years, doing the same job that entire time. I have dinner with my parents every Sunday. I’m a colorist who doesn’t even have colored hair, I barely wear makeup, I stick to safe choices where fashion is concerned and my last boyfriend was a tax accountant.” I adjust the pillows under my head before flopping back into them. “I’m one nap away from being the world’s most boring twenty-six-year-old.”

  Brynn laughs hard and I can hear Bryan move around next to her. She turns, cupping her palm over her phone to keep our conversation from waking him. “Don’t forget your love for earth related documentaries,” she adds, clearly agreeing with everything I’ve just said. “And if you will remember correctly, I told you that Brett was a dud. You just didn’t listen.”

  Ah, Brett. My last “serious” boyfriend. Although I was never serious about him in the way that actually makes one serious. I didn’t think I’d marry him nor did I even want to. I just didn’t want to be alone but towards the end of our one year together, which overlapped with when my headaches really ramped up, it was hard to ignore that Brett was indeed a dud.

  Outward appearances made Brett seem like the perfect boyfriend. Nice dress clothes, everything always pressed, shoes shined and his socks typically matched his sweater or tie, depending on how business-casual he was dressed. Spoiler alert: he dressed business-casual no matter what we did. Once he wore a tie and dress shoes to the movies because he “wasn’t sure” what I was wearing. As if a ball gown was somehow an option. Again, outward appearances would tell you Brett was a good lover, too. He was tall with big hands and feet and his penis lived up to the “you know what big hands mean” adage. The trouble came with using said penis. Brett, ahem, had issues with making it across the finish line. Let me tell you, nothing boosts your confidence like a man going soft mid-sex. He was so embarrassed that as much as I tried, he’d never talk about it and attempts to finish dwindled until we all together stopped having sex.

  Migraines had already started happening, so Brett was quick to blame our lack of sex on that. And I let him. I fucking let him. Because I felt bad bringing up his problem, pointing it out—I mean, he had to know. No matter how he shamed me, I knew that he knew. And that was enough for me. I didn’t need to hurt him.

  After my first really bad migraine, Brett broke up with me. He was brutally honest when he told me he didn’t love me enough to take care of me if this was going to be “a thing”.

  As if I wanted debilitating headaches to be my “thing”, as if it were even a fucking choice.

  I cried hard when Brett broke up with me but even then, I knew I wasn’t crying about Brett. I was crying because I didn’t want to be single, I wanted a partner to come home to after a long day of work. A man who would listen to me while he worked the grill (preferably shirtless), a man who would hold my hair when the headaches forced me to be sick, a man who would talk to me about his issues and not put up a wall. I wanted a boyfriend, a partner, someone who held me tight because I was the missing part of them they’d been searching for. And while I knew Brett wasn’t that, still, losing him made me feel farther away from the goal than before.

  Abbie and Kayla were single, too, but they had a whole dating pool of teachers at Eastwood Academy they could date. In fact, Abbie was on the brink of finally accepting a date with a fellow teacher, Mr. Devers. He had been pining for her since she started a few years ago and I think he was finally wearing her down.

  I didn’t know Mike Devers but I knew how Abbie behaved when she talked about him. I saw how her eyes lit up (and practically turned into little heart emojis) when he text messaged her. She even asked me for my chocolate cake recipe for his birthday, and Abbie was not a baker. But if she wanted to bake the best cake ever for him for his birthday? He must’ve been special. I didn’t tease her about it and neither did her sister or Kayla.

  Abbie, like me, had dated a series of losers before starting her teaching job. As we all edged closer to thirty years old and further from twenty, I think we all collectively felt tired and ready. Tired of the chaos of dating, ready for the real deal.

  “I think I was just holding out hope he’d, you know,” I say, not wanting to say it. I’d told Brynn about Brett’s inability to finish. She couldn’t even believe it. Truthfully, if I hadn’t experienced it first hand, I wouldn’t have believed it either. I tried to not let it worm its way into my psyche and make me feel like the world's most unsexy woman. Tried.

  “Come?” Brynn offers, knowing I hate talking about the vulgar specifics. I hate that I even call them vulgar. I know it’s all part of life. It just makes me embarrassed to acknowledge it out loud. I guess that’s somewhere in my Sloane DNA.

  “Yeah,” I say, “that.”

  “Even if he came fountains, he was still a dud, Sloane.”

  I wince at the idea of Brett coming fountains. I hadn’t even seen him in a year—it was hard to imagine that now. At one point, Brett… coming fountains, as Brynn so eloquently puts it, was all I wanted. Because then, I thought, we’d be problem free. We could just comfortably be together.

  I realized after meeting Bastian on the side of the road last week that comfort was something that I wanted only after I had that wild adventure. Maybe I didn’t know I wanted reckless and crazy adventure until now because every guy I’d ever dated
was khaki. Skin tone. Bland. Unexciting.

  Nothing about Bastian, Bodhi and Eli was bland.

  And that’s why I needed them so badly.

  I close my eyes, feeling my body grow fatigued from this level of conversing. I am always so weak after migraines, and Brynn knows it.

  “Okay, enough of that. Get your sleep. Don’t forget to take another Tylenol,” she warns, and I tell her I have.

  “Thanks for everything today. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I yawn.

  “Okay, and hey Sloane,” Brynn says before hanging up.

  “Yeah?” I yawn again, my ears popping and taking a tiny bit of cranial pressure with them.

  “I can loan you some money for rent, you know, since I know losing Charlotte won’t be easy.”

  Charlotte must’ve shown up at the salon and told them she was going to sever ties with me after I flaked today. Shame floods my hurt brain and I hate they all discussed me and my problems today. I swallow.

  “Let’s talk tomorrow,” I say, needing rest, needing to table the reality of my current stressful situation.

  “Okay,” she appeases quietly. “Goodnight.”

  The truth of the matter is, losing Charlotte won’t just be hard. It will be the point I remember, where everything changed. Because without her appointment this week and without the other’s I lost yesterday, I was officially no longer able to afford my beautiful little rental house. The one I’d invested so much TLC in when I first moved in. Planting a succulent garden, day lilies, adding mowing strips and refinishing the kitchen cabinets to reflect the popular, vintage white style that everyone was losing their minds for. I’d done so much and now I was going to lose this place.

  No amount of one-time borrows from Brynn or anyone else could save the house. Because the fact was, until my headaches went away, I couldn’t guarantee a stable enough income to make the rent.

  Turning on my side, I push my phone onto the night stand and curl my hands together under my cheek.

  Guess I’ll need to look for roommates and as much as I didn’t want to share a home with other women, I really didn’t want to admit defeat and move back with my parents.

  Tomorrow, I told myself, forcing the lump of emotion bravely down with a loud swallow. Tomorrow I’ll tackle finding people to help with the rent. Right now, though, I just need sleep.

  Sleep and sweet, ink and muscle-filled dreams.

  Chapter 8

  On my way to work in the morning, I drop the treats I’d made off to the guys at the corner house. I’d cut them up, put them on two paper plates, wrapped them in cellophane and left them on their porch. I’d even managed to leave them without being spotted by their sneaky little Ring doorbell. Or at least I’d hoped I’d not been on camera since I reverse limbo-walked back from the porch, trying not to be spotted. They would know the treats were from me but I couldn’t bear seeing any of them this morning. They probably thought I was a huge freaking flake. But that wasn’t why I didn’t want to be seen.

  My head was still sore, yeah, but my sad little hopeful heart (and crotch) was really sore. Bruised from the crushing disappointment of missing a hang out with them.

  It’s not like anything was going to happen but I don’t care. Nothing with them is still something.

  Something that thrummed inside me, kneading into the base of my spine. A want quickly becoming a need.

  The salon lights felt like interrogation lights, burning my aching eyes with no relief. I’d always been sensitive to bright light but on migraine hangover days they were virtually unbearable. I wore my sunglasses just to soften the glare but as the arms pinched my throbbing head, I wondered if they were worth it. I’d done two appointments and as soon as I put toner on my client, I had a break. A full two hours—good because I was exhausted but bad because it meant less work.

  I’ve done my very best all morning to actively go into denial over my living situation.

  I will not move back in with my freaking parents. That is just too much. It’s committing to failure on a level I don’t think I can handle right now. I can (and have) failed at making sourdough starter, the first time I reheated coffee I put a metal mug in the microwave, I’d once left a bag of groceries in the back seat of my car over a long, hot weekend which made the Prius smell like rotting death, I’d even left a library book in bag for two years. I’d had plenty of fails that were easy to swallow, that made me silly and absent minded (my mother’s words) but still, even with those mistakes, I was an adult. I could always work and support myself, no matter what.

  I can’t fail at being an adult. It’s just too depressing. I will not move in with my parents.

  As Brynn finishes cleaning her station, I know my lunch has run out. Her fiery hair is style in thick Dutch braids and with her hoop earrings and perfectly highlighted cheekbones and nose, she looks like a model. It’s always been that way.

  Bangin’ Brynn.

  Oh, Sloane’s here, too. (“She looks tired.”)

  “Are you sure I can’t help with the rent?” she whispers, and I love her so much for her discretion.

  I shake my head. “No, because even if you helped me this month, what about next?” I narrow my eyes through the darkened lenses, checking how much time my client has left with her foils on. “If my head is even ten percent better by tonight, I’m going to go through my spreadsheet and figuring out how bad off I am. Last time I input bills I didn’t have any cushion left,” I say, sitting in my own stylist seat, only a few minutes left for my client under the dryer. “So, unless my bank account took a side job as a lucrative drug dealer then, well, I’m screwed.”

  Brynn’s full amber-painted lips curl up and she holds her palms out. “Not laughing at the situation. Just laughing that after all these years, you still use your trusty spreadsheet.”

  I chuckle soft, tilting my head forward to block out some of the ambient noise around my eyes. “Funny, right? That spreadsheet helped me saved fifteen thousand dollars and guess what happened to it?” I tap my head and Brynn exhales sadly.

  I’m so tired of people exhaling sadly for me. When is it my turn for a damn slow clap or a fist bump, or a brunch in my honor? I try not to be salty about my situation but every now and then, the fact that my life seems to be working in the opposite direction as my dreams? Well, it makes you salty.

  Brynn tries to make me feel better like she always does. What an exhausting job, to be the friend of a person with a chronic health issue. I bet she gets tired of being a cheerleader, a partial caretaker and a tear catcher. I bet she wants a girls’ night where we all cut loose, I bet she wants her best friend to double date with her, not hide away in the dark because alcohol, lights, and crowds all trigger migraines. Sometimes when I tried to tell her she didn’t need to check on me so much and that she didn’t have to take care of me--she just laughed.

  ‘We aren’t Ross and Rachel, doll. We can’t take a break. We’re tied together forever and I’m not going to be less of a friend just because it’s more difficult now. We’ll get through it, together,’ she’d said.

  “We can move next week girls’ night to this week?” she says, hope in her voice, brows lifted. She nods anxiously awaiting my response but I cup my face in my hand and let my elbow keep up my head.

  “No,” I say, “I think Abbie’s date is this week, anyway. It’s one thing for me to not have a love life but I am not ruining that man’s date after he’s worked years to get it.”

  We both laugh and I have to hold my forehead as I do. Abbie made Mike Devers work to take her out. She really drew it out. I didn’t know how they’d end but I knew if they were a book, the first three-hundred pages would be slow burn and angst.

  “That man deserves it,” Brynn agreed, flopping down in her chair next to me.

  “My back hurts like hell,” she says, lazily reaching for her iced tea from the station between us. She grabs it and chugs until it’s just ice and swirls the cup. She always asks for light ice and most of it usually melts, leaving her with no
ne. This cup has a ton of ice and it occurs to me that Bryan probably popped by this morning and brought her tea. I’m not jealous of Brynn nor do I want Bryan but I am jealous of that—someone thinking of you before they start their day, thinking of what would make your day better and acting on it.

  I lean back and screw my eyes shut tight, pressing the heel of my palm to my eye as I lift my shades.

  “Doing okay?” Brynn asks.

  I let out a long, loud sigh. A sigh bigger than I thought I had in me.

  “I feel like a bag of dicks.”

  “Dicks are good though, right?” Brynn snickered.

  “Yeah,” I say, moving to the other eye to apply pressure, one of the ways I got relief from the throbbing in my temples. “They are very good. Okay, assholes, then.”

  “You feel like a bag of assholes, huh?” Brynn says, laughing even harder now.

  “I think so, yeah. I mean a bag of headaches is too on the nose, don’t you think?” I laugh, too, even though it rattles my brain something fierce.

  Then a voice interrupts us both. It’s like a hand pushing between us and turning us around. Gravel coated in velvet, the voice says, “I’m looking for a bag of assholes, can I get one here?”

  Our chairs spin in unison like a scene from a damn musical. What the fuck? It’s Bodhi.

  And then, a second behind him pushing inside is Bastian.

  My eyes go back to the door for a moment, wondering if a shy but delicious Eli is going to follow through but Bodhi shakes his head.

  “Eli’s at work,” and then, lifting one of his huge palms, he does a quick wave. “Hi again. Hello,” he nods to Brynn, who I think may have actually called on her maker when these two walked in.

  Her exact words, I believe, were ‘sweet Jesus, his body.’

  I clear my throat. “Brynn,” I step between the guys and Brynn, introducing them. “This is Officer Bastian Cute, the one who popped my leg back in the socket at the car accident, and this is his friend, Bodhi.”