“Without you?”
“Or with me. Whichever. Whatever you want. I’m fine with it. I want you to be happy.”
Her smile was big at first, then faded. She took one of his hands, holding it between her two much slimmer ones and squeezing. “You make me happy.”
He felt the truth of it, but it wasn’t the whole truth anymore for either of them. “I know. And I hope I always will. But being happy with me doesn’t mean you can’t also be happy with somebody else. That doesn’t take anything away from me.” He chuckled, trying not to sound as lascivious as the wave of memories he was suddenly washed with. Not appropriate for the grocery store. “Kinda the opposite, if last weekend was any example.”
Mentioning it was a mistake. He realized as soon as he saw her face start to crumple. “It was pretty great.”
She tried to turn away and grab the apple bags she’d abandoned, but he refused to let go of her hand. “Dee.”
Her upper lip twitched. She was either about to laugh or cry. “Master? Funny seeing you here. In the produce aisle.”
Fair point. For some reason, in the produce aisle, when she called him “Master” it sounded like I Dream of Jeannie. But whatever. “If this is a direction we need to go . . . it’s just a good thing we got started. However that happened.”
She let it sit for a second, then nodded slowly. “And maybe we’ll see her at the club and talk about it.”
He pulled her into a hug, audience be damned. Nobody seemed to notice or care. “Now let’s get that cherry filling and head home.”
Her answer was muffled against his shirt, but as distinct as it needed to be. “Nice try, Daniel.”
Mara held out until Friday afternoon. Amie didn’t sound at all surprised to hear from her when she finally called, and her answer came too quickly and crisply.
“No can do.”
No apology, no explanation for why she couldn’t do a scene at the club that night. Mara wasn’t entitled to one—they weren’t dating, they were just friends, Amie’s time was her own—but she pressed anyway, doing her best impression of Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally. “Whaddya got, a hot date?”
“Why do you always say it like that?”
Mara quietly lowered her head to her desk and tapped her forehead against the calendar blotter, careful not to knock her phone against the surface. God, she should have just girded her loins and tried to set up a club date with the Fosters for Saturday or even for next weekend, instead of resorting to this. “Never mind. So you’re busy?”
“No. I’m planning to go to Onyx and see what I can pull.”
“Really? Escape is so much better. And you know the owner. And there are new people.” Was there something Mara was missing? “Why wouldn’t you go there instead?”
Amie sighed, the sharp breath overloading the phone for a second. “I am going to Onyx, and you should stay in for the evening and think about your life choices.”
“No, I’ll probably go to Escape and see what I can pull. Which will probably beat the hell out of doing that at Onyx, frankly. Maybe you should be thinking about your life choices.” She was falling into the same old pattern, responding to Amie’s tone with more bitchiness. The problem was, Amie wasn’t trying to be bitchy. She just sounded that way. The same wasn’t true for Mara, and she knew it. She knew better.
“I’m not talking about choices that have to do with kink, Mara.”
“What?”
Another harsh sigh. Or possibly it was the wind. Amie was most likely somewhere outside, doing something physical, as she often did. She was probably conducting the whole conversation from a bicycle going forty miles an hour down a mountain trail or something. “I think I should call Dru and recommend she keep you off the list tonight.”
Oh, had she really just gone there? “I beg your pardon? Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Your friend.”
“You have no right to talk to Dru about me or try to control when or where I play or who I play with. None. How dare you.” Mara couldn’t even believe Amie had suggested it. Amie, who was all about protocol, all about making sure the proper procedures were in place. Whose thinking was so squarely inside the box that she didn’t even require the box to keep it that shape.
“You’re right. Okay? You’re right.” Amie, who . . . actually sounded like she might be crying now. A first. “Look, I’ve got shit of my own to deal with, Mara. You’re going to have to handle this one by yourself. But you should know better than to try to use kink to solve a relationship problem. That’s part of what fucked us up. And I’m not your goddamn booty call.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You absolutely were. And I let you get away with it one week ago, which was my mistake. But it is not happening tonight.”
Okay. Okay. Not the conversation Mara had expected to be having, sitting in her car in the parking lot outside her office, hoping the smokers by the back door didn’t get curious and come over to see if she was okay. Which she was not. “I’m sorry.”
“Well. Like I said, it was my mistake.”
“Gee, thanks.” Fuck. She reached for the center console of her car, digging for a travel pack of tissues she hoped was still in there.
“Oh, don’t get pissy. We both enjoyed ourselves. And it seemed like you were taking my advice. From what Dru said you had a great time at Escape. Met some new people, right? She didn’t give me details. But here you are calling me. Why not call them?”
Dru had obviously given her some details. Mara sniffled into the single, bedraggled tissue she’d pulled from the plastic pack. “They were busy. They had some family thing.” And when you were a cute suburban couple, you didn’t mention to the family that you’d invited home a stray for a three-way. That’s what Mara was. A stray.
Amie made a disgusted noise. “I see. So you feel sorry for yourself about it. But you don’t call me to talk. You don’t tell me about all that. You wait until the last possible minute on a Friday, and then come at me with your passive-aggressive . . . your soft little cute-girl voice, with the ‘maybe, if you wanted to get some tension out from the week, we could’ . . . and you know what? It’s the same damn thing as always. And yeah, it’s about you not telling me what you actually want and making me guess instead and hope I get it right. But it’s also . . . you’re telling me, with this phone call, that I’m not actually what you want, Mara. I’m not your first choice. Even as a play partner, or as a friend. And I’m so tired of that.”
“I . . .” Mara scrubbed the tissue under her nose, then used her sleeve to dab her eyes. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry.” Because Amie was right. “I’ve been a total dick.”
“No . . . no. I mean no, if you’d been a dick I’d never have fucked you, right, so there’s that.”
Despite herself, she laughed. “True. You got that gold star.”
“I do. And I’m sorry too. I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to do, you know? So it wasn’t just you.”
The tissue was completely useless. Mara chucked it into the overfull litter bag in the back footwell, and sniffed back what she could. “I’m still sorry for sucking. And being a bad friend. Are you . . . okay?” She couldn’t remember ever asking Amie that. Amie was always okay, always the one giving the advice and aid. “Please tell me how I can help.”
A pause. And sniffling echoing her own. “Can you make people easier to understand? Or maybe some kind of mind-reading thing? Has science gotten on that yet?”
“No, they’re still working on hover cars.”
“Oh, fuck that. People already have enough trouble staying on the roads, can you imagine if they could just fly wherever they wanted?”
“I can. I have. It would be glorious.”
“It would be a nightmare, Mara! A nightmare!”
It might be either. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Amie and she would never have a hilarious hour-long conversation about the possible ramifications of hover cars, because Amie didn’t h
ave those conversations; she was probably already tiring of this one. And that, more than anything, was why the two of them hadn’t worked together.
There were people in the world who would have that conversation with her. Two of them had tried to invite her home pretty recently. She sort of wanted to get off the phone with Amie right now and call up Daniel or Delia, get one or both of their opinions on this vital hover car issue. The scary part was, she wanted that talk even more than she wanted to be naked with them again. Maybe.
She didn’t believe in alternate universes really. But still she believed there was one in which she’d gone home with them, and things had gone amazingly well, and she wasn’t a stray at all but the beloved pound puppy they’d loaded up with toys and affection and a sparkly pink collar from PetSmart.
Mara gave her eyes a final swipe with one cuff. “I have to get back to work. Sorry again.”
“Me too. Don’t go to the club tonight, though, seriously.”
“How is it using kink to avoid a relationship problem if there’s no relationship?”
Amie’s laugh was a brief, dry bark with no humor in it whatsoever. “There’s always a relationship, honey. Even if it’s not the one you want.”
Mara gripped her keys hard, letting the edge of the largest one print a crease into her palm. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the pain she wanted. “So what do I do? Sit at home and stare at the wall?”
“Do I really have to tell you this? Again?”
What would Amie tell her to do? What was Amie always telling her to do? “I have to ask for what I want.”
“You have to ask for what you want.”
It sounded deceptively simple. “Okay.”
Amie’s breathing grew harsher, as if she really were riding a bicycle or doing something else strenuous. “Which means that first you have to know what you want.”
Fuck me. “I knew there had to be a catch.”
“Okay, I’m about to need both hands and all my attention, so I’m gonna hang up now. Call me later if you need to talk.”
“Wait, but—”
Amie had already hung up. Leaving Mara to contemplate her tearstained face in the rearview mirror and try to decide whether it was truly necessary to walk back into the office to shut down her computer and tidy her desk.
What did she want? Not a suburban bungalow and a Goldendoodle, that was for sure. She sure as fuck didn’t want the life her parents had appeared to have up until her dad ran out. And she didn’t want to be the piece on the side he’d left for, either.
Nobody offered you either of those things, idiot. They’d invited her for a sleepover, and she’d turned them down. And maybe they really had some family thing that weekend, maybe that hadn’t been the brush-off it felt like. Master Daniel’s email had been as short as a text, though, pretty brusque. And he’d jumped right in to shut things down when Mara invited them to the shibari demo. It seemed pretty clear.
But . . . but. There were other nights. Even if there was a “family thing,” they might still be free, say, Saturday night?
Neutral territory. That might help. If the Fosters wanted to do something at home, and Mara wanted to do something at the club, maybe they could meet in the middle. Even do a nonkink thing. What did vanilla people do on Saturday nights?
Mara pulled up the movie listings. The latest installment of a comic book mega-franchise blockbuster series was still running at the Cineplex. The theater was small, kind of crappy, with a sound system she had a feeling Daniel had strong negative opinions about. But it was the closest option, and there were plenty of restaurants within a few minutes’ drive of there.
That’s what she could do. She could invite Daniel and Delia on . . . a date. A regular date. With a movie, and maybe pizza. Beer, even. Like normal people.
A normal polyamorous girl asking out a normal polyamorous couple to see if they might want to pursue being a threesome outside the kinky playroom. Sure. Normal.
Who’s to say what’s normal, anyway? If she asked and got shot down again, at least she’d know for sure. And then she could regroup. If she asked and they said yes, on the other hand . . .
Before she could second-guess herself, she opened up her text app and tapped on Delia’s icon in the recent conversations. The only issue was how to word the perfect casual—
It’s only Friday. Family dinner. We could do Saturday?
Oh, true. D’oh.
She’d missed those.
“What the fuck?” She scrolled back through the chain to make sure she was in the right conversation. Everything else was as she’d remembered. But those two at the end. They were right there. “How the fuck . . .?”
The coffeepot. The goddamn motherfucking coffeepot. Mara had just sent her last text to Daniel and Delia on Monday when a yell from the break room had mobilized everyone out of their cubicles to see what was happening. She thought she’d clicked the button to turn her phone screen off before setting it down, but she must have missed it. With the app still active, she never saw the text notifications. The next time she’d picked up the phone, she’d gone straight to the camera to take a picture of the wreckage in the break room, where somebody had burned out the coffeepot by starting it with no water in the reservoir.
The culprit was still at large.
And the texts had been sitting there all damn week.
Delia was playing real-life Tetris with plastic food containers in the fridge when her phone dinged.
“Fuck. Daniel?”
“Language, sweetie!” Her mother peered through the doorway separating the dining room from the kitchen. “Are you sure I can’t help you?”
“No, I’ve got it. I just wanted him to check my text message.” In case it was from this cute girl we met, she did not say. She wasn’t sure why she was still hoping.
“Can I do that for you?”
“No! No, no, that’s okay. No.” She forced herself not to check that her phone was facedown on the kitchen counter. “I’ll smush these in here, then I’ll see who it was. No biggie.”
“Well if you’re sure. Did you get all the cake you wanted? I feel like I’m taking an awful lot of it home.”
Mom. “I did. It was fabulous as usual, by the way.” No lie. Her mother made the best spice cake, from scratch, with thick penuche fudge frosting. And it hadn’t even been anybody’s birthday. But whatever Delia kept in the house would be gone by the next day. Accepting only a small portion was her only means of defense.
“Alice?” Daniel loped past the doorway, jingling his keys. “Ed’s all loaded up and ready to go whenever you are.”
“Oh, Lord. I hope you didn’t leave him alone out there. He’s liable to take off without me.” Delia’s mother followed Daniel for a few steps, then turned back to Delia for a good-bye hug. “Thank you for dinner, sweetheart. It was lovely, and it was so nice to see all the Fosters, too. It’s been too long since we had a good backyard party.”
Delia hugged her mom back, then trailed behind her to the driveway to say good-bye to her father as well. He was leaning out his car window, chatting with Daniel’s brother Tom.
The farewell process began anew, and lasted a good ten or fifteen minutes. Then Tom’s car wouldn’t start. Finally Daniel offered to drive him home, and he accepted. By the time Delia remembered her waiting text, at least thirty minutes had gone by.
Right before she picked up the phone, it occurred to her to wonder if it might have been somebody other than Mara, texting at ten on a Friday night.
Wonder no more.
The name Mara Tyndall leaped off the lock screen. Delia’s finger shook as she swiped on it, and she laughed at herself. She read the text, closed her eyes, then opened them and read it again.
I am sorry. I didn’t see the last two answers in this thread until a few hours ago, for REASONS. Saturday would be awesome. Yes, yes, please. *Crosses fingers* *feels like SUCH an idiot*
Hands still shaking, Delia tapped in a response before she had time to censor herself.
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Or you could come over right now? Party’s over, tons of leftovers. Cake AND pie.
Was she setting herself up for disappointment again? What kind of “reasons” could Mara have? Should she text Daniel now, or wait to see if Mara accepted? Probably wait—
You had me at pie. Address?
She sent it, then leaned back against the refrigerator, sliding down to the floor with a bump. Most of her marks from the previous weekend had faded. Only a few yellowing bruises now to remind her.
More was probably needed. She sent a quick text to Daniel, letting him know Mara was coming over for pie, then a longer one to Mara letting her know the cake was also well worth her consideration.
Crap, the cake and pie were both buried deep in the fridge, hidden behind a wall of other leftovers from the feast. Her brother’s wife had brought a pasta salad. Tom had brought fruit salad. And everybody had brought beer.
It took her almost ten minutes to unearth the desserts and stuff everything back in. She was trying to decide between paper plates and real ones when someone knocked on the front door.
Oh my God oh my God oh my God.
Delia jumped in place a few times and shook her hands, trying to release at least some of the excess energy that suddenly filled her. It didn’t work, but at least she’d tried. Exhaling hard, she headed for the front door and opened it.
Mara stood with her toes pointed in, her bangs in her eyes, like a forlorn emo kid. An anime version of a high school girlfriend. Delia took in her skinny jeans, her ragged black Chucks, her Yoda T-shirt.
She was perfect.
“Hey. You must live really close.” Duh, everything in this town is really close. “Come on in.”
“Cool, thanks. Yeah, I’m in those condos on Jefferson. It’s like a three-minute drive. Or a ten-minute bike ride.”
Which would be sound from an environmental standpoint. And great exercise. And frankly kind of more impressive than Delia had expected. “Did you ride a bike over here?”
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