Amie finished pulling her shirt on and turned to Dru, hands on her hips. “Okay. You want honesty? You want me to tell you how I’m feeling when I say you’re a piece of shit? Fine. I feel like you knew you were moving back to Seattle, and you didn’t tell me before we fucked because you knew I wouldn’t do it after I found out. I trusted you, and I feel like you fucking manipulated and used me to get some sort of . . . emotional one-up on me. Or a notch in your belt, I really don’t know.”
“But I didn’t—”
“And I feel,” Amie continued, “like I am in love with you. You’re stuck in my head like a fucking earworm, only one that you can’t get out of your system by listening through to the end a few times, or finding some other song that’s even stickier. And I was okay with it, you know? I was okay with it because you were my favorite song of all time, Dru. I was happy to have you in my head. You were the only person ever in my life I trusted in there. And when you said everything would work out okay, I believed you. I believed you.”
She snapped her mouth shut, turned, and stalked from the room. Shocked, Dru listened to her gather her shoes and purse, heard the jingle of keys. Then the door opened and closed, leaving a horrible silence in its wake.
Amie could have finished off her declaration, but she didn’t have to. Dru knew the ending. I believed you, and you lied. I believed you, and you screwed me over. I believed you, and you’re leaving me behind . . . again.
I believed you, and you broke my heart.
Amie made it to her car before the tears fell. She found herself behind the wheel again, hunched over as she had been earlier, but this time instead of stomach butterflies it was huge, gulping sobs and a gathering, searing pain behind her eyes.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. Probably around the last time Dru had left town. Though it hadn’t been over that. No, back then she’d been crying in her car because she’d finally admitted to herself that she would have to sleep in it for at least a few nights, maybe longer. Her friends with the available couch had gone home for the summer, giving up their lease. She’d had a line on another friend who only needed a summer roommate—but then that girl’s boyfriend had moved in with her instead. Next semester was a whole new unsolvable problem; most of her friends had just graduated and wouldn’t be back to St. Andrews in the fall. She’d had no idea where September would find her.
Everything she’d owned had been in that car—a fifteen-year-old Honda that might have once been dark blue, but had aged into a nondescript matte slate. She’d bought it for two hundred fifty scraped-together dollars, from a guy who was graduating and moving to New York City. It had only half a front bumper, and she’d had to pour Coke on the battery leads about once a month, but other than that, it had run fine. It had gotten her where she needed to go.
She’d cried herself to sleep that night, little twenty-one-year-old Amie—or had she already turned twenty-two by then? She couldn’t remember anymore—clinging to one thin thread of hope. She’d interviewed the day before at a new gym opening up near what passed for downtown in St. Andrews. Near the college, near the business district and the main strip of shops. The job was almost full time, thirty hours, a mix of membership paperwork, reception desk time, and a few cardio classes with multiple sessions per week. Room for advancement, sponsored training in new fitness skills, even help with personal-trainer certification if she stuck around. And if she stayed long enough and went full-time—benefits, insurance, the sky was the limit. It had sounded too good to be true—almost triple the money she was currently making teaching three hours a week of aerobics at a big chain gym one town over.
Torque had been a literal lifesaver for her. And for the most part, except for dealing with the occasional jerk like Chris or the odd problem client, Amie loved her job. She was good at it. She looked forward to getting there every day. Helping people meet their potential. Doing the same at the club. Her life had been fine. Not perfect, no, but fine before Dru had come back into it, with her fancy club and her bedroom eyes and her pretty ass and the keys to Amie’s heart. And libido.
Fuck. Dru wasn’t the damn Danielle Steel heroine. She was.
Knock knock knock.
“SHIT.”
Dru stood outside the car again, wrapped in a trench coat like a flasher.
Amie glared as she rolled down the window a few inches, sniffing back a noseful of misery. “What?”
Dru lifted her eyebrows. “You’ve been sitting here for like five minutes. I’m not leaving you out here like this. Come back inside, you shouldn’t drive if you’re this upset.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do.”
After a second, Dru smiled. “Who, me?” She shrugged. “At least come in and wash your face, get some water.”
She was right, and Amie knew it. But felt under no obligation to be happy or even all that civil about it. “Fine.”
It was déjà vu, following Dru back to the apartment. Last time Amie had been anxious about the evening’s bad news, and sick to death with worry about her own disclosure regarding Chris. This time, she was sick with worry about . . . well, everything. All the original topics magnified and multiplied.
Dru dropped the coat to reveal some flannel boxers and a T-shirt. Regular sleep clothes. Nothing fancy. No particular allure . . . except she looked cute in them. Not elegant or mysterious. Cute. It was even worse, in a way. It was such an accessible look, when the one thing at issue was her continued accessibility.
By the time Amie finished washing up, Dru had made her a cup of hot tea. She brought it into the living room on a saucer, being careful not to slosh.
“Still no sugar?”
“Right.” Amie dunked the tea bag, watching the water darken as it steeped. Trying to recall the last time she’d had a cup of tea. Letting her mind rest briefly on the fact that Dru still remembered how she took it. Was that a good thing, or part of the problem? How much of this was real, and how much was Amie grasping desperately back into her past, to the version of herself she’d been before her life imploded? Getting closer to Dru couldn’t return Amie to that time, that life. But something about their time together now felt that way—like time-traveling back to a happier, less anxious era. Which was ridiculous considering all the bullshit that had gone on since Amie had first crossed the threshold at Escape.
She watched the steam from the brewing tea rise, breathed it in, sniffled. She had begun to suspect she’d overreacted earlier, perhaps, a trifle. Jumped to the worst-case scenario. Possibly. Judged Dru a bit harshly, because she’d let her emotions get the best of her. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“I’m . . . sorry. For stomping out like a drama queen. Even for the piece-of-shit thing. And that probably wasn’t all about you. I think I brought at least half of that mess to the table with me. So. Sorry about that.”
Dru sat next to her on the couch, stretching. Not too close, but not squeezed against the opposite end, either. “You worded it strongly, but I was kind of shitty. And I’m the one who’s sorry. I should have mentioned Trip’s offer before trying to bang you.” She took a breath as if she were about to say something else, then closed her mouth and shrugged.
“And I should have mentioned Chris’s ‘gonna’ before you had to close your club down.”
“It was only three days, and you thought it was a hunch,” Dru reasoned.
“You don’t even know yet whether you’re taking Trip’s job offer,” countered Amie.
“So.” Dru stretched again, popping her neck. Amie refrained from telling her that was bad for her. “We’re both kinda shitty.”
Amie ducked her head to hide a smile. “There’s a reason I don’t do relationships.”
“My last one worked out okay.” Dru shrugged again, then chuckled softly. “I guess I’ll never know if it would’ve lasted forever, but it was great while it lasted.”
“Well.” Amie looked up, scanning Dru’s face for sadness and finding none. She decided to take a risk. “For all y
ou know, Padma was also shitty and that’s your type.”
Dru snorted, then pursed her lips, considering. “She had her moments. Like everybody else. We are all shitty here.”
Despite herself, Amie laughed. “That is horribly accurate. That’s human beings, though.”
“Hey, on the bright side, we are better than Master Cool.”
“Oh, hands down.” Amie used the spoon to pull out the tea bag, wrapping the string around it to squeeze out the last few drops of oversteeped tea. She took a sip; it was perfect, and just as she’d remembered. “Why did I ever switch to coffee?”
“Convenience? Peer pressure?” Dru retrieved the spoon and tea bag from the saucer and took them to the kitchen, holding one hand underneath to catch any drips.
It was a sudden moment of domestic tranquility: Amie in the living room, sipping tea; Dru in the kitchen, discarding the bag and depositing the spoon in the dishwasher. Home noises, the motions of daily life. Things that could be shared.
“I won’t make you stay,” Dru said as she returned, “if you feel better and you really want to go. But I wish you’d stay.”
“All night?” It would be unprecedented.
Dru sat down again, shrugged, then nodded, looking down at the couch leather as if it held deep secrets. “Yeah.”
Amie set the cup on the saucer, tracing a finger over the gold trim on the cup’s handle as she chose her words. “When I let my guard down . . . in the past, whenever I’ve done that? It’s almost always been a mistake. And I know a lot of that is how I feel about it—God, with the feelings, again. And a lot of it’s down to my parents being pretty much douche bags and screwing up a lot of stuff for me from the get-go. I got dropped into adulthood at the deep end and you weren’t around to see how that went at first. It didn’t always go so well. And I was demi, or whatever, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. That doesn’t exactly make it easy to form new relationships, you know? So for a lot of reasons, trust is . . . hard.” It was the understatement of the century. But probably Dru had already figured that out.
“You said— Earlier, I mean, you said that you . . . were in love with me.”
The words hung between them for an uncomfortable few seconds before Amie finally replied. “Yeah. I am. I think I probably was before, too, but I had too much on my plate to realize it. So. Yes. I love you. And no, not just because of the orgasm thing, although that’s nice too. But Druse, loving you won’t pay my rent. That’s why I didn’t tell you about Chris sooner. That’s why my first impulse when you say you’re thinking about leaving is to make tracks out of here before I get in any deeper. It took me years of hard work to get financially secure. Even now that I am, I still don’t really feel that way. I doubt I ever will. I could have a million bucks socked away in the bank and part of me will always remember . . . having to sleep in my car and picking half-empty snack wrappers out of the trash at the gym when nobody was looking. I can’t risk my livelihood. Not even for love.”
Dru’s lips parted. Her eyes were shining as if she might cry at any second. “I would never ask you to.”
They moved into an embrace—impossible to say who started it. For long moments they held each other, smoothing one another’s ruffled souls with gentle pressure and fingertips placed to telegraph the most care possible. Finally Dru kissed Amie’s hair and whispered, “I had no idea it got that bad. I wish you’d kept writing to me.”
Amie laughed, but the sound got all choked up halfway through. “I couldn’t afford the stamps. And I didn’t have a computer. And I was jealous,” she admitted. “Embarrassed, but also so jealous. Not just of you, of all that group of friends. Graduating, getting good jobs, moving on. At the time it seemed like it was about me. Everyone abandoning me.”
“Of course it did. I . . . I don’t think any of us realized.”
“I put up a really good front. I didn’t want people to know. I didn’t want pity. Or handouts. Which was dumb, because I really could have used some handouts.” She eased out of the hug, but kept an arm around Dru, keeping her in close proximity. “If I had it to do again, that’s what I’d change. Tell everybody what dick-bags my parents had been, and run a Kickstarter or something.”
“That was before Kickstarter,” Dru pointed out.
“I’d have passed a hat, then. I’d have been all about the handouts.”
“I love you too. You know that, right?”
Amie’s heart skipped a beat. Or it could have been a sudden resurgence of earlier’s butterflies. “I do now.” Did it change anything? Possibly not.
Dru tucked herself closer, getting more comfortable in the curve of Amie’s arm. Snuggling. It didn’t feel bad at all. In fact, it felt very nice. “One of the reasons I told Trip I’d have to think about it was that I wasn’t sure whether it was too soon to ask you to move to Seattle with me. There were a lot of other factors, but that was one of them. I’m not telling you that to try and manipulate you into staying the night or anything. I wanted you to know because earlier, I was pretty needy, and that was more about wanting to screw around and have naked time with somebody. For comfort. But that isn’t why I want you, specifically, to stay tonight. Two different things.”
“Sure, you say that now.” Amie adjusted her arm. “But after you’ve gotten your night of spooning, will you still feel the same way in the morning?”
Dru nodded. “Pretty sure. And you won’t sneak off in the night to cry in your car?”
“No guarantees.” Seriously. She balanced on a knife’s edge, still. Too many things unresolved. Too many fears waiting to pounce. Triggers, her last therapist had called them. Fear of abandonment? Anxiety. Missing a meal and having to go hungry for a few hours? Anxiety. A question about the bank balance? Anxiety. And all of those were improvements on the previous state of affairs, where these and a number of other “triggers” could result in anything from nervous vomiting to a total panic meltdown. She’d come a long way. And learned enough to know she still had a long way to go, and probably always would. Fear of losing her job? That was the biggie. So small wonder she’d needed some time and space to process that fear before she could even calm down enough to realize that was what was happening, that she’d been triggered. Because in the middle of the panic, all she ever knew was panic. “You won’t sneak off to Seattle in the night?”
“No sneaking. There would be plenty of advance notice. And it probably would be a daytime flight. It’s not like I’d be going overseas or something.”
“Okay.” Amie squeezed Dru, tried a quick pinch at her hip, just because she could. “I’ll stay the night. But only for cuddling. No funny business.”
Dru half expected Amie to be gone when she woke up. Or at least to have decamped to the couch, since she had fretted about her ability to even sleep in a bed with another person. But at five thirty, when Dru had gotten up to go to the bathroom, she’d had to work her way carefully out from underneath Amie’s arm to avoid waking her. And at seven thirty, when Amie’s phone alarm went off, it was a drowsing Dru who had to nudge Amie to get her to wake up fully.
“Hey. Hey. Sleepyhead. Turn your alarm off. Time to get up.”
Amie lifted her head from the pillow, blinking, then rubbing sleep from her eyes. “The hell?” She grappled toward the sound of her phone, eventually found it, and punched a finger at the screen until it stopped making noises.
Dru stretched, trying to motivate herself to get up and go to the kitchen to pull some sort of breakfast together. “Are you going to be able to function on only . . . what was that, like four hours of sleep?”
“Ngghhh.”
“I’ll take that as a maybe. Tea?”
“Yes, please.”
“Would you like to snooze until the tea is ready?”
“Yes, please. Thank you.”
Amie remained sleepy and grumpy—but kind of adorably so, and Dru figured it was a bad sign to find that kind of thing cute—until she had eaten and showered and emerged from the bathroom fully dressed
with her game face on. “Okay! Ready for the day! Gonna work that first client so hard . . . and . . .” She dropped the facade and draped herself over Dru. “Make him do planks the whole time while I nap.”
“Nope.” Dru slapped Amie’s Lycra-clad butt, earning a growl. “No napping. Where’s my cheerleader?”
“Gimme an N,” Amie said, flapping her arms listlessly over Dru’s shoulders. “Gimme an A. Gimme a P. What’s that spell?”
“They don’t even do cheers like that anymore,” Dru protested, laughing.
Her computer dinged, and she apologized as she pushed Amie upright. “Sorry, had the sound up so I could hear it while I was in the kitchen. I wonder if Gavin’s . . .” She jiggled the mouse to light the screen up, and clicked on the new email in her inbox. “Yeah, he got the stuff. And . . .” Too much. It was too much to take in and talk at the same time. Dru skimmed the rest of Gavin’s email, then clicked the link he’d included. By the time she finished reading that page, she was jumping up and down, unable to contain her excitement and relief.
“What is it? Share!” demanded Amie.
“It’s . . . Oh my God. It’s an overnight miracle. Well, not yet, but it might be one. Look. Oh, go backwards, look at this first.” She pointed to the page and identified it—probably needlessly for Amie. “It’s Onyx’s website. They posted this last night. Or early this morning, I guess.”
Amie scanned the page, while Dru read it for a second time and delighted in it all over again. A “Community Policy Statement” on the Onyx home page, with very serious-looking bullet points indicating that they would refuse entrance and/or cancel the membership of anyone found to have participated in the recent hack of Escape’s website or any other attempt to “doxx” or threaten to “doxx” members of the kink community. They would likewise help pursue any criminal case against such individuals. And, as a special for the rest of the month and all of the following month, they would offer one night of free cover at Onyx to anyone who brought a receipt and proof of participation in one of the classes being offered at Escape.
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