by J. A. Rock
“But SC members are totally the right people to give this talk, since we’re all safety conscious and stuff. Can you imagine if your college’d had a kinky group?”
My college had been a small private school with a building called the Briggs-Hawthorne Library of Rarities. So no, I could not imagine there being an extracurricular group known as the Kinky Students Society. “It would have been cool,” I admitted. I went to the fridge for some juice.
“I want to go further with this group. Do, like, community outreach and stuff.”
“What, like building houses?”
“No. Just giving BDSM—real BDSM, not 50 Shades of Bullshit—a presence in society.”
“Awesome. Do it. I just can’t help.”
“Fine.” Dave leaned back and ran a finger along the stalk of an aloe plant on the windowsill. “Ricky texted. He was at Cobalt last night, and this black woman and white guy were doing a Ferguson-themed scene.”
“And you think this is especially relevant to me because . . .”
“No. I told Kamen too. Like, white guy as cop, black woman as protestor. People were pissed.”
“I’d imagine.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
I shrugged. “We saw those Nazis at Cobalt a few months ago. It’s just role-play.”
Dave sighed. “But it’s so insensitive.”
“If kink had to look PC, there’d be no female subs with male doms, ever.”
“Where’s your dad when I need him to back me up?”
“Driving to Washington.”
“When’s his next break?”
I shrugged. “He doesn’t always come home on his breaks.” I drained my juice. “Is Gould here?”
Dave snapped off the end of the aloe stalk and rubbed the gel on his hand. “In his room.”
“You guys made up?”
“Pretty much.”
That sounded less than enthusiastic.
Dave stood. “I have to head out and meet D. But I’ll tell Ellie you’re not coming. And you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”
I decided to take him up on the offer and entered his room to use his computer for work emails. I heard him leave, and a little while later, I heard Gould’s door open.
I got up and peered through the doorway. Saw Gould at the kitchen table, eating some cereal and staring out the window.
I stepped into the kitchen. “Hi.”
Gould barely glanced at me. “Oh. Hey.”
He didn’t say anything else.
Dave often acted as though Gould’s silence was evidence of some secret shaman within. Personally, I didn’t see the appeal of spending significant amounts of time with someone who couldn’t carry on a conversation. But I did love Gould, no matter how vexing I sometimes found him. Same as I loved all of them.
Same as I’d loved Hal.
“Something wrong?”
Gould took another bite. Chewed and swallowed. “Dave’s being a real ass about the stuff with GK and Kel and Riddle.”
“It’s a tough situation.” I’d never been good at comfort.
“Whatever. I don’t want to get involved with the club politics. I just like them.”
“So keep seeing them.”
“I really am trying to move on from everything.” Gould sounded slightly defensive. “From Hal, I mean. I know nobody thinks I’m doing a good job, but . . .”
For a second, I could see what appealed to Dave about Gould. He did have a very kind face. Looked just a bit fragile.
One of the first times I’d hung out with him, he’d been with Hal. The two of them were half-drunk, laughing madly in some bar, lost in their private world. And because I hadn’t really known Gould without Hal, I’d assumed Gould was like Hal—intense and capricious and hard to be close with. It wasn’t until he and Hal broke up that I saw this quieter, gentler Gould. And even then, I’d thought it was some sort of extended sulk brought on by the breakup.
I was the one who’d introduced Dave and Kamen to Gould, since I’d seen Gould at a couple of munches. But Dave had become closer friends with him long before I had. I’d heard secondhand from Dave how much Gould worried about things like his weight, his family, his job. How hard a time he had finding doms who didn’t mind his silence. I’d only realized over the last year how unanchored Gould could be without people around to keep him grounded. He seemed like someone who’d just float off on a breeze.
“I think you’re doing well.”
He put his spoon down. “Dave says I’ve been acting weird since he and D got together.”
So this was about more than Riddle. “Have you been acting weird?”
Gould gave me that quiet, stoic look that made him appear to have witnessed untold horrors throughout all his young life and borne the pain without protest. “I don’t know. It’s like, I really, really want him to be happy. But it’s hard not having him around as much.”
I nodded. I’d always suspected Gould enjoyed Dave’s crush on him. When Gould and Hal had been together, I’d sometimes seen him flirting with Hal directly in front of Dave, as though he wanted Dave to see. I didn’t think for a moment Gould had been consciously trying to hurt Dave. But he did have some self-esteem issues, and I think he enjoyed both having a boyfriend and knowing that his best friend was a little bit in love with him.
Now Hal was gone, and Dave had a steady partner. It couldn’t be easy.
“I think it’s my fault, sometimes.” Gould’s leg was jouncing under the table. “What happened to Hal.”
I gaped. “What?”
“If I hadn’t broken up with him, he wouldn’t have played with Bill that night.”
“You’d broken up over a year before he played with Bill.”
“But if we’d stayed together . . . I just wonder.”
“Are you kidding?” A look at his face told me he wasn’t. “You think you should have stayed with someone who was making you unhappy just so—”
“He didn’t make me unhappy.” The tone was savage. Unexpected and un-Gould.
“He did, though. Toward the end.”
“He didn’t . . . make me . . . unhappy,” Gould repeated.
“All right, fine. Yes. It was a perfect love. Real Titanic stuff.”
He glared at me for a few seconds, then turned away, snorting. “Can you imagine him sketching me while I was wearing nothing but a giant blue diamond?”
I’d been braced for an argument, but I grinned. “As I recall, Hal couldn’t draw anything but penises.”
“And rabbits. He was surprisingly good at rabbits. I still have this . . . I don’t know, we were at some restaurant, and he stole a pack of crayons from the basket for kids and drew all these rabbits on the placemat. And I kept it.”
I nodded. “I remember how you and he used to talk all the time. For hours. I didn’t believe Dave when he told me you were shy, because I’d seen you with Hal.”
Gould didn’t answer. Just stared out the window with a tiny smile on his face.
Gould, I realized suddenly, was maybe our best link to Hal. He held all these memories the rest of us didn’t know about. He was familiar, I imagined, with Hal’s deepest fears.
His darkest secret—the one I hadn’t read.
“Are you scared?” Gould asked after a moment. “About having a kid?”
“No,” I lied. “I feel incredibly ready to do this.”
A long silence.
And then I couldn’t sustain it. “That’s a lie. I’m scared every day.”
“Me too. And I’m not doing anything nearly as scary as what you’re doing.”
“If GK and Kel are making you happy, keep playing with them. Dave’s just bossy.”
Gould tensed. “Dave’s bossy because he loves us.”
Like brothers, those two. Each was the only one allowed to insult the other. Then I remembered I was pretty sure they used to be jerk-off buddies, back before Gould and Hal officially got together, and I scrapped the brothers comparison.
“Sure. But he’s still bossy as fuck.”
Gould shrugged. “I don’t mind. I don’t know what I’d do without any of you.”
You shouldn’t have had to learn. Shouldn’t have had to learn what to do without Hal.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I told him. “Not even a little bit.”
But he finished his cereal like I wasn’t even there.
My mother showed up one evening in a U-Haul cargo van with a man I didn’t know.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, staring at the van without letting her in. “Uh, hi.”
She wiped her hands on the sides of her bright-purple dress. “I got you a crib.”
“What?”
“I got you a crib.” She bit off each word. “It’s an old one, like we used to have for you.”
The man was coming up the drive with an old drop-side crib.
“Mom. They say that kind of crib is dangerous for babies.”
“Who’s they?”
“I don’t know. But they banned them several years ago.”
She pushed me aside and entered the house. Drew me deeper into the hall while the man came in with the crib. “Upstairs,” she said to him. “First room when you get to the top.”
“I don’t—”
“It oughtta be the second room.” She headed toward the kitchen. “Why you wouldn’t put your baby’s nursery beside your room is beyond me.”
I followed her. “We’ve been over this. The front room gets the most natural light; it’s bigger, because the kid is going to grow; and the middle room is my office. It always has been.”
She wiped her face with a handkerchief as she approached my fridge. “You’re not gonna hear him if he cries.”
“Baby monitors, Mom.”
She tucked the handkerchief away and opened the fridge. “You have nothing in here any human would want to drink.”
I sighed. “Just drink water.”
“Do you actually drink Nature’s Choice prune juice?”
To regulate my bowel movements and facilitate anal intercourse? Yes.
She pulled out the bottle. Stared at it. “Nobody enjoys this. Your son’s going to drink this?” She held it up.
“I don’t know, Mom. He’s still negative three months old, so it’s hard to say what he’ll like.”
She shook her head and put the bottle back. Let the fridge fall shut. “O-kay. I’m going to have water.”
She used my ice machine to fill a glass to the brim with ice cubes, then added a small amount of water and chugged it. I watched her, not sure what to think or say. Antagonizing me had always been her game. But she had a way of hurting me so slowly and so calmly, all the while pretending she just had her teeth bared in play. I heard her friend creaking around upstairs.
“You know, you might want to ask before you bring cribs into my home. Especially death-trap cribs.”
“It’s a gift. Cribs are expensive.” She set her glass, still full of ice cubes, in the sink. “I had to search a long time to find one like we had for you.”
“Because they don’t make them anymore.”
She took her handkerchief out again and dabbed around her mouth. “You never died.”
“Sometimes I wish I had.”
I caught a glimpse of a smile before she hid it.
“Besides.” She placed a hand slowly on her hip, cocked the hip, and locked eyes with me. “You’ve hardly done anything to prepare for your baby.”
I was so angry I couldn’t speak for a second. “Haven’t done anything to prepare?” I stepped toward her. “You have no idea. I don’t need a crib because I’ve already bought one.” It was a lie. I still hadn’t found anything perfect, and I was running out of time.
The man’s footsteps creaked on the stairs again. “Wait in the truck,” my mother called to him.
I listened to him leave. “Do you treat everyone like your personal servant?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Do you treat everyone like they’re wasting your valuable time caring about you?”
I shook my head. “I’m worried that you’re not going to respect my choices as a parent. And that it’s going to be confusing to James.”
“You are my son. I am proud of all that you are. But that does not mean you know how to raise a child.”
“Well, I’m tired of you meddling. And if you can’t show me you’re responsible—that you’ll listen to me—then James isn’t going to be spending much time with you.”
She stared at me. Just stared.
“I have offered to help you raise this baby,” she said coldly, still enunciating each word. “You are not going to know what to do on your own.”
I was furious. And terrified that she was right. “I’ll figure it out!” I all but shouted.
“You know who else didn’t prepare? Your father. Waited for life to happen to him and then took off when he didn’t like the way it happened.” She wasn’t playing. At all. I saw her jaw tremble slightly.
I stared right back at her. “Leave,” I said. “Right now. Leave.”
“I am trying to h—”
“Leave.”
She left, moving slowly. When she was gone, I felt villainous, confused, and utterly alone. Too alone to even want to call Drix.
I was at work, thinking about James and the crib and how to make up with my mother, when a man walked in. He had long, thin limbs and a round middle, like a spider. Black hair and mustache. Wild brows. Paper in hand. He wore what appeared to be a wrestling singlet under a pair of denim high waters and an unbuttoned short-sleeved plaid shirt. Chest hair curled out from under the spandex.
“Can I help you, sir?” I asked.
He slid the paper toward me. “You got a scanner?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Okay. Okay, I filled out a thingie online. For the shirts I want. I did the words. But I didn’t have the, uh, the art? My son drew the art, so I wanted to, uh, scan it and add it to my order form.”
I unfolded the paper. Inside was a rough pen drawing of a smiling tooth holding a toothbrush. “Fantastic.” I got on the computer. “I’ll pull your order up, if you’ll just give me the last name . . .”
“Branson. It’s Bobby Branson.”
I clicked through the recent orders and found Branson. There was a note on it from Jason: Holding for graphic. “I have it right here, Mr. Branson.”
I opened the order. A hundred shirts. The text was to read: Bobby’s Discount Dentist. Your teeth are safe in our hands.
My God. It was Kamen’s dentist. In the flesh. I glanced at his exposed, hairy chest. In so much flesh.
“So can you . . .?” He scratched his chest. “Can you put the art on the shirt and then put the words in a circle around it?”
I had him show me what he wanted on a diagram. I promised him we would scan the tooth drawing and send him the proof for approval. As he was getting ready to leave, I said, “Mr. Branson?”
He was partway to the door. He turned.
“Could I . . . make a suggestion?” I took a deep breath as he stared at me. “Grammatically, ‘Bobby’s Discount Dentist’ doesn’t make sense. It’s not the dentist who’s discounted, it’s the services.”
He just stared.
“Even if you put an apostrophe s after ‘dentist’—so it’s like, short for ‘dentist’s services’—it would sound a bit odd, but it would be technically correct. But it would be better if you could say something like, ‘Bobby’s Discount Dental Care.’”
More staring. Finally he said, “That’s just the way I say it, man. Relax.”
It occurred to me with no small amount of chagrin that I might have just lost A2A a large order.
The customer is always right in theory. But the customer is not always right grammatically.
As a teenager, I’d worked as a cashier at a couple of different shops before moving on to do some gofering at my mother’s office. The cashier jobs had been menial—so simple I’d worried constantly about humiliating myself by scre
wing up at a task a monkey could have completed. I could still remember how I’d felt about the people I’d worked with. Like it wasn’t even worth finding them unlikable or obnoxious, because I was destined for something better. My tenure would be short, and my intelligence ensured that one day I’d end up working with people who were emotionally and intellectually rewarding to be around.
But now I wasn’t so sure. I still felt like the smartest guy in a lot of rooms. But I didn’t feel special. I didn’t feel untouchable. Mostly I just felt afraid.
Drix came over that night, and against my better judgment, I told him about my mother and the crib.
“Has she always been like this?”
“Sort of. Yeah. Even before my dad changed his job.” I paused. “I think she’s disappointed in how mundane her marital problems are. At least her divorced friends have good stories. They caught their husbands with the nanny, or they hit the hard-drinking bastard with a frying pan and left, or they got caught with the nanny . . .”
Drix snorted.
“But my mom? She just has to live each day knowing her husband chose a job where he wouldn’t see her very often.”
“Do you think he loves her?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
He nodded.
“But she was cruel to him. Not just when she drank. That’s just how she is—she prizes honesty—or what she thinks is honesty—over people’s feelings. She sees the world the way she wants to see it.”
“I know some people like that.”
“And that’s what I’m afraid of. What if my kid’s difficult, and so I don’t . . . treat him well? What if that’s in my nature or something?”
Drix watched me for a long moment. He looked sort of confused and sad. “How does someone so smart, so . . . accomplished have so little self-confidence?”
That hurt and felt good. Baffled me and made perfect sense. “I do. Ask my friends. I have an enormous amount of self-confidence. I’m insufferable. I think I can do anything.”
“No.” He shook his head slowly. “You don’t. You expect yourself to be able to do anything. And then when you—I don’t know, think you’ve failed—you torture yourself.”