“That makes him a bad father. Not a bad boss.”
I’d known it would be the coldest take even before she gave me the most appalled and betrayed look she could muster. I made to put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged me off and took a big step backward.
“Meredith—”
“I’m gonna go.”
She abruptly turned, wet hair nearly slapping me in the face, and stalked back toward my bedroom. I followed close behind, irritation sweeping me as I watched indignation gather in her shoulders.
“I thought you were staying for the weekend.”
“I was, but now I’m not.”
“Thanks, Meredith, but that was obvious,” I said flatly. “Where are you going?”
“To Caleb’s or Aiden’s houses. Or Ashton.”
“That’s fine, but are you only going because of the tantrum you’re having, or did something come up while you were getting dressed?”
Meredith froze with her back to me, then she sucked in a breath so deep it was almost like she’d just been under water. She turned, eyes blue slits and finger jabbing at my chest.
“Don’t talk down to me. I’m not having a tantrum. I’m upset.”
“You stomped out of the room because you didn’t like what I had to say.” I pushed her finger away. “That’s a tantrum.”
“I walked away because I had nothing positive to say to you in that moment, and I’d rather remove myself from the situation than tell you off.” Mere ran her hand through her damp hair, squeezing. “What you said was—”
“It was true.”
“No, it was fucked up. And heartless. My parents suck. I was invisible. I still am unless my mom needs a drinking buddy and can’t cougar her way into a suitable date. And my dad? Forget it. He only acknowledges me on a holiday. Until I apparently get hurt. You have no clue what I’ve dealt with when it comes to my parents.”
“And you have no clue what I went through with mine,” I replied, keeping my voice even despite my desire to snap at her. “Because we’ve only been on speaking terms for about fifteen hours, and there was no reason for me to start dropping bombs about my homophobic mother who encouraged me to move out at sixteen so she wouldn’t have to deal with the shame of having a dyke daughter, or the way my father would challenge me to fights since I wanted to ‘act like a man.’”
Meredith blanched. Her hand came up to her throat before shooting back down to her side. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need you to be sorry. My point is that we don’t know a thing about each other. We’ve fucked a few times, but we’ve never been out together. For all I know, we won’t know each other in a few months.” There it was, that harshness. I could feel every sharp edge of the words taking shape in my mouth, but I couldn’t soften them. Because they were true. “Look, ma, I like you, I do, but—”
Meredith put up both hands this time. “Just stop.”
I grabbed her forearm and pulled her closer to me. “Let me talk, okay? I’m not writing you off, but I am trying to be real.” Apprehension colored every inch of her face. Or maybe that was the heat already steaming up my room as the fan ineffectually swished above us. “Unless you tell me that he abused you and your brothers, or your mother, or that he is corrupt and a fucking monster, why should I not even consider an opportunity to double my current salary with decent benefits? He’d be paying me to look after you or your brothers. Or Chris, who might also be on the shit list since he took the white supremacist dude’s spot. And he doesn’t have a billionaire family to have his back.”
Meredith closed her eyes and took a long deep breath, then another. By the time she looked at me again, I was starting to wonder if she was having a fucking asthma attack.
“You’re right,” she said. “You should consider it. We barely know each other.”
It sounded shittier coming from her. They were my words, but I hadn’t meant them the way they now sounded. “Is this a deal breaker for us getting to know each other better?”
“I don’t know.” Meredith knelt to gather her belongings from last night, cringing at the dress and heels. “Would it matter if I said it was?”
“Wow, can you not do this?”
“It’s a reasonable question.” She stood up, dress bunched in her arms. “There’s no point in me answering you if it wouldn’t make a difference. Your mind is set, and I don’t know whether mine is as well.”
Holy shit, this was driving me up the wall. I brought my hands to my face, rubbing my palms over my eyes to prevent myself from saying something else harsh. This was why I was single. Why I infrequently slept with people a few times, maybe went on a couple of dates, and started from scratch all over again. I didn’t know how to deal with someone else’s expectations of me when I was still unsure of what I wanted from myself. How could I make my choices based on a person who might not even be around next week?
The room got very still around us until I could hear nothing but my creaky ceiling fan and music playing somewhere down the block. Meredith wet her lips, shifting from bare foot to bare foot. Her nerves were setting in again, and she was practically twitching under my serious stare.
“Do you need me to call you a Lyft?” I asked.
She looked down. “I can do it, but it’d be nice if you lent me some shoes.”
“I can do that.”
Meredith turned away, mumbling about finding her phone, and I stared at her back, wondering whether this was really our first and last morning in my bedroom.
“I thought you were shacking up with Meredith for the weekend.”
I sent Chris a withering glare from where he stood by the counter in Raymond and David’s kitchen. It was a tradition that when we weren’t gathered at the Rodriguez house for UFC fight nights, we came on alternating weeks for Sunday dinner. Typically it was the usual crew—me, Steph, Angel, Chris, and Ray and David—but this week Michael and Nunzio had showed up as well.
“Can we not talk about Meredith?” I asked around a mouthful of pork chop. “I just want to gorge on all this food in silence.”
“Why? Did you run her off already?”
Angel released a long-suffering sigh. “Chris, man, you never shut up.”
“I don’t,” Chris agreed. “That’s why y’all kept me around this long. Comic relief.”
“I bet Jace and Aiden like you for a lot more than comic relief,” Nunzio said, winking from where he was dishing out the bomb carbonara he’d made. He and Michael had teamed up to make an Italian/PR meal that made no sense but was fucking delicious. “I heard there were some other reasons why they’re trying to get you to move in two weeks after polying up . . .”
“My winning smile and tendency to make breakfast?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a big di—”
Michael covered his husband’s mouth with his hand. “Please don’t. I don’t want to hear about their sex lives.”
Raymond snorted into his plate. “Says the dude who used to fuck on the couch while I was home.”
They all bantered back and forth, so I kept eating my food, chugging beer, and avoiding Stephanie’s increasingly pointed stares. I knew she and Mere regularly Snapped and texted, and I knew she’d heard the story. Or some version of the story. But unlike Chris—
“No, but for real, what’d you do to Meredith?”
I slammed my beer down. “Damn, you’re like a dog with a bone, Christopher. I didn’t do shit to that girl. What, did she go crying to her brother?”
“Nah, I pretty much figured you were mean to her for one reason or another.” He shrugged unapologetically. “Am I wrong?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then what happened?”
I didn’t like his challenging tone or the way everyone was suddenly looking at me with interest. Maybe silently betting with themselves about whether or not Tonya Had Been Mean. If I wanted to be reasonable, I couldn’t blame them for the concern. As I’d told Meredith, I had a long history of shitty interactions with gi
rls who’d only wanted a fetishy hookup instead of a date. And when I’d realized they were casting me in a role, or trying to position me in a certain way because of a fantasy, I would cut them off.
Sometimes, I was too harsh about it though. Stephanie had been cautioning me for years about crushing hearts. She’d made the case that I was one of the few out people in our neighborhood, which had brought a lot of attention from young queer girls still figuring their shit out.
But why the hell did I have to put up with being a goddamn test subject? Or an experiment? Or again—an experience? It had taken me years to accept my identity, and I was sick and tired of people trying to twist who I was to suit their desires.
It was part of the reason I’d been attracted to Meredith from the first look. Bullshit aside, she clearly knew exactly who she was and what she wanted. I loved that confidence.
Although, apparently I wasn’t above being Mean to her either.
Which, what the fuck ever if I had been. I hated how everyone went around expecting me to go out of my way to use kid gloves all the time. It was more efficient to make my point in the bluntest way possible and keep it moving. “Being nice” was bullshit. And everyone expecting me to “be nice” all the time was some misogynistic bullshit.
They didn’t stop staring even when I internally ranted for a solid thirty seconds. But when Michael, my big brother from another mother, raised a concerned eyebrow, I broke.
“Her father saw the surveillance video of me going HAM on one of those dick-bags—”
“I saw it too. Was pretty sexy.”
Raymond reached out to shove Chris. “Cállate, fuck-face.”
He held up his hands.
“Anyway.” I rolled my eyes as hard as I could and kept going. “He saw the video, thought I was a badass who had the potential to fit in with his security team, and offered me a job.”
Stephanie dabbed her mouth, making it obvious she’d already heard this tale. I scowled at her.
“How much would he pay you?” Michael asked, leaning on his elbows. “Benefits?”
“He said he gives full benefits and someone with my experience could probably make almost a hundred grand. I’m thinking less since I don’t have a lot of actual bodyguard experience, but even seventy or eighty is nearly double what I make now.” There was a pause, and I shoved a finger at Stephanie. “Your brother copped his card as well.”
Again, she just nodded and took a demure little drink of her beer. I snarled at her, and the dimple in her left cheek appeared. Brat.
“That sounds great to me,” Raymond said, pushing his plate away and rubbing his stomach. “What’s the problem?”
“She hates her father,” David guessed.
“Yup,” I said. “So she wanted me to not take the job, I said I’d think about it because it was a good opportunity, and she dipped.”
A sea of blank faces stared back at me. Well, I’d already bitched to Angel for a solid evening after he’d come home sore and grumpy from a day of climbing poles to fix wires.
“Wait.” Nunzio was tempering his words as he usually did, probably trying to see this from multiple angles to figure out why this would be so monumental to Meredith. “Why does she hate him?”
“She said he and her mom ignored her, and she doesn’t want him in her business.” I slouched in the chair, realized I’d subconsciously mirrored Raymond, and kicked him under the table. “But it’s like them ignoring her doesn’t stop her from living in their mansion and living off her trust fund, right? Why should it stop me from taking a job I’m interested in that would potentially let me keep an eye on people I care about?”
Michael and Raymond were nodding, but David and Chris cringed.
“Did you . . . say it like that?” David asked carefully. “In those words?”
Defensiveness reared up in a monstrous wave. I could tell I was glaring solely by the way David began to fiddle with his fork, but he held eye contact.
“No, not those words exactly,” I said.
He slanted his big brown eyes away. “Uh, well, maybe that wasn’t the best route to go.”
“What should I have done? Lied to her? Told her I was going to give up a job opportunity for a girl I’d spent one night with?” Each word caused the cringes to spread across the room except for Raymond and Michael, who were the best people in Queens. Clearly. “Fine,” I growled. “What should I have said?”
“You could have made it about yourself instead of her,” Angel said. “Even if it’s really about you not thinking shit with her is gonna go anywhere deep, you can just . . . not say it. And talk about what you need.”
“Oh, is that what you do when you blow someone off?” Stephanie examined her nails, arched eyebrows somewhere near her hairline. “Interesting.”
Angel instantly shut up and closely examined his empty beer bottle. If I was in a better mood, I would have laughed. They’d been sleeping together off and on since the QFindr cruise over a year ago, back when Michael and Nunzio had first gotten engaged, and they couldn’t seem to get it together enough to reach the next level.
“Nice try, but I explained what that job could do for my career.” I replayed the convo in my head, frowning. “Mostly.”
“Who cares?” Raymond asked around a mouthful of pasta he’d snagged from David’s plate. “Like you said, is she giving up that dumbass gingerbread house she lives in on the Upper West Side? Or going to get a job that didn’t come without family connections, instead of living off nepotism and her asshole parent’s money? No. Sooo . . .”
Stephanie rolled her eyes at him. “You’re such a dick just for the sake of being a dick.”
“No shit, Sherlock. It’s part of my charm.”
She glared, and he flipped her off. They were not helping me. Then again, I hadn’t asked them to. But now that we were on the subject, I hated that my whole “a job is more important than us sexing” speech might have left her feeling disposable. Or like I hadn’t taken her family issues seriously.
If I replayed her words and the way she’d said them, it reminded me of the way she’d lashed out at me following that photoshoot. I could still hear the sound of her voice when she’d accused me of hurting her and pretending she didn’t exist. Was this a pattern in her life? People getting something from her, or not, and then forgetting she was alive?
Damn. Damn.
I could practically picture her turning in on herself, or maybe having taken a Lyft back to her house to be alone rather than stay with anyone. Licking her physical and metaphorical wounds like holing up in her bedroom with the security system turned on.
I looked at Stephanie. “Did she go home yesterday?”
“I think so. She sent me a Snap, and her bedroom was in the background.”
I exhaled through my nose. Just fucking great. The guilt that swarmed me was suffocating in its intensity, but I tried to keep an even expression.
“Change the subject,” Michael said finally. “Tonya can bring it up again if she wants to.”
Everyone instantly listened, partly because he’d used his teacher voice, but mostly because all of us still kind of looked at him and Nunzio as the dads of our crew. Even when we were all younger, we’d listened to them like they were our authority figures—something I’d desperately needed while spending as much time as possible outside of my own house.
I’d gravitated to Raymond in school, sensing something about him that felt too much like family to ignore, and I’d had the same closeness with Michael (the first person I’d come out to as genderqueer), then Nunzio. Now, as I looked around the kitchen after they went right back to making fun of each other (Michael threatening to cut off Raymond’s ridiculously long hair and David glaring at him; Stephanie pointedly ignoring Angel, who was poking her; and Chris grinning into his phone as Nunzio peered over his shoulder), I wondered if we’d all gravitated to each other and had instantly felt so close to each other because of our queerness. Well, Angel was straight, but he was the most stone-faced al
ly you’d ever ask for. Ride-or-die hetero.
Contentment briefly soothed my frayed nerves and worries, but it didn’t last. I walked home alone after Angel lingered around to talk to Stephanie, and tried to go to sleep in my overheated room. It was truly sweltering even after ten, and the fan and open windows produced nothing more than a hot breeze.
I tossed and turned restlessly, overly conscious of the fact that I’d yet to change my sheets and that I could still smell Meredith on them, and wound up turned on and irritated at midnight. Getting off to thoughts of someone I’d potentially hurt wasn’t really revving my engine, and neither was the idea of watching porn. Lesbian porn tended to be fucking tragic on all the free websites, so I usually went with my imagination. And images of Mere.
Fuck.
Now that I was actively trying not to think about her, I couldn’t think of anything else. And I didn’t know why. Sure, she was beautiful, smart, and funny when not being a diva, but . . . weren’t a lot of other people? Why was she the one keeping me up at night and haunting my dirty dreams for a year now? Why did I always end up creeping on her Instagram or checking up on her relationship status?
And more importantly: why did it kill me that I’d never get to figure all of that out? For a hot minute on Saturday morning, I’d been excited about the idea of dating her. Something I hadn’t done with someone I had actual interest in for year. Maybe since before my service. And now that excitement was gone, and I was once again tossing and turning in my bed. Alone.
Monday morning started with a massive email from Kenneth Stone’s lawyer, which included a boilerplate contract and a line about them being open to negotiation. Reading it, especially pre-coffee, was like reading an ancient language.
I forwarded it to Chris so he could get feedback from Aiden, who apparently sent it to the QFindr lawyer Clive, and I got a curtly bulleted email about the pros and cons of the contract.
The pros were relating to the fact that there was a clear-cut explanation about how overtime was paid, a hefty benefits package that required me to pay zip with no deductible, and no morality clause. The details about health insurance alone were enough for goose bumps to spread all over my body. I knew it was likely because I could potentially be injured while guarding Kenneth’s old pasty ass, but Redline’s benefits package wouldn’t even cover a trip to my PCP until I paid six thousand bucks.
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