This might be a lot harder than she’d expected.
Entering the restaurant helped a lot on the cooling down front, at least. The Pearl Palace was cool and dim. Tanks full of doomed fish and crabs lined the lobby.
“They’re in one of the side rooms to the back,” John said, looking down at his phone.
The main dining area was packed with huge round tables, all full with families fighting and chatting and talking grimly in a dull roar mixture of English, Mandarin and Cantonese. At the very back of the restaurant, diagonal to the entrance, there were several side rooms for private parties, and John strode toward one of those as Robin fell in behind him.
“Robin!” John’s dad waved at her enthusiastically. Kevin Sun was a blocky, gray-haired man—he’d given John those broad shoulders, but none of the height. That came from Shirley, tall and angular and as absolutely stunning as a 1950s movie star with her black bob and neat pantsuit. And she was glowering at John.
Robin, forcing herself to ignore whatever was simmering below the surface—not his girlfriend, it’s none of your concern—walked around the table, waving and greeting, noticing John was going the opposite direction, counterclockwise to her clockwise. John’s older brother Jack was there—God, she wondered how his parents had ever kept their English names straight—the respectable, normal brother who’d fled to New York and was even an honest-to-God brain surgeon. And his nuclear family, and assorted relatives and friends, enough so that it felt like forever before Robin and John finished their rotations and fell into the last two empty seats.
“John,” Robin whispered sweetly through the corner of her mouth as she dropped her napkin onto her lap. “Just how late are we, exactly?”
She’d thought they were on time, arriving at right before seven, but now she had to wonder.
“Um...fifteen minutes? A half hour? Forty...five minutes?” He flashed her a grin, although at least he had the good sense to look ashamed as he did so.
“You told me seven.”
“I may have lied. Didn’t want you getting stressed out. You know how you get when you’re running late.” John looked over to his dad and caught his attention. “Is Jim late?”
Robin stifled an amused grin. John had always told her he’d gotten away with a hell of a lot as a teenager simply because Jim was always, always worse.
“No,” Kevin Sun said, and twisted his lips as if his teeth had suddenly turned toxic. “He went to the bathroom. He’s been there for a very long time.”
“He’s got stomach thing,” Shirley said. “Why you draw attention to it?” She hissed like a steam kettle and stabbed at a dumpling.
That pulled Shirley and Kevin into a low-muttered argument. Other people’s problems. Not yours. Just smile and pretend it’s not happening, like everyone else is.
Thank God she didn’t speak Mandarin.
“A stomach thing. Right.” John whispered to her sarcastically, and made a quick hand motion in front of his mouth, probably meant to represent crack-smoking.
More dishes came, and tea, and beer, and John’s adorably gawky eight-year-old nephew came over and asked John about camera lenses, then listened intently to the rundown. Robin made some small talk with the boy’s mother—Los Angeles versus New York City was always a conversational gold mine. She began to relax and enjoy herself, more or less, especially since the food was excellent. Much better than the food at the—
—Oh God. The private party. That was the last time they’d eaten with so many people.
She took a deep breath and blinked. Boundaries. Everyone here had private lives.
“You took my seat,” someone said behind her. She turned.
Jim. He was dressed more sanely today, but one of his shirttails was hanging out, and his eyes were bloodshot under spasmodically twitching eyelids.
“I’m sorry. Let’s get another seat, okay? There’s plenty of space.” She began to scoot her chair over, closer to John, to back up her words. A warning voice in her head told her this probably wasn’t such a good idea, that maybe it was time to yell meat in the trunk and make for the door, but her instinct for politeness won out. She worked in a university. She was used to handling eccentrics.
“Oh, so you’re gonna act like you didn’t see me where you saw me.” Jim’s voice was way too loud to be meant for her alone. “That’s the way it’s gonna be, huh?”
That grinding sound next to her came from John, who’d shot to his feet, towering above the other seated guests.
“First they—they—they destroy my love! And then they literally take my seat at the motherfucking table!” Jim shrieked. “Replacing me in my own family now, is that it? Just because you’re more ‘respectable’ and you and my brother are—”
“Out. Now,” John barked at his brother, already crowding him toward the exit.
Jim poked his head around the riot shield of John’s advancing body. “She’s a whoooore! Google The Picky Submissive! Google it now!”
Robin’s chest seized, and she grabbed the edge of the table, desperately trying to keep herself from puking onto her plate of fried geoduck. All their planning for a hasty exit suddenly didn’t seem so funny at all, especially not the meat in the trunk excuse. Lock it down. But she couldn’t do it in front of everyone. Think fast. Lock it down, lock it down.
“Let him go!” Shirley yelled at John’s back.
“Stop making excuses for him!” Kevin yelled at Shirley.
“Jesus, and I thought you were exaggerating,” muttered John’s sister-in-law to her husband.
“I’ve got to go,” Robin said, fumbling for her phone and hoping no one else was doing the same. She fled out the other exit, the one that led to the bathroom, and burst out the emergency exit door, not caring where it led.
Oh—next to a Dumpster dripping with rancid grease. Not that it mattered, as long as she was alone. She leaned against the wall and frantically thumb-typed. Private? Yes. Settings—Apply. Invite? None.
No one. She couldn’t trust anyone. Even John. All that show of safeguarding her privacy, the stupid little lock and key on the photo book—it didn’t mean a goddamn thing. He’d either told Jim, or left a trail that he could follow.
She couldn’t look any of them in the eye again.
Get home. Lock the door. Thank God she’d had the presence of mind to swing her purse over her shoulder in her rush to leave the restaurant. She hugged it to herself, reassuring herself of its presence, then stormed around the restaurant parking lot until she’d made it around the front of the building again. Standing under the pink light of the buzzing sign, she pulled out her phone and dialed for a cab.
Get home. Get home. Get home, she recited until the dispatcher came on the line.
The neon sign loomed down on her in judgment. It might as well be spelling out Whore.
“I’m going to be two blocks west of The Pearl Palace,” she told them, and started running. She wouldn’t be standing in the parking lot when John eventually came looking for her, that was for sure.
Just get home.
Chapter Thirteen
(No Subject)
I know nobody can read this right now, but I need to decompress somehow and it’s either this or I go full-on chick flick and cry into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. I figure journaling (since I can’t rightly call this “blogging” anymore) at least won’t give me indigestion.
I emailed John—I might as well call him that now—and told him to tear up the contract. Again. I don’t see the point of these things anymore. It’s all a fiction. Who’s really being protected? And it’s more than the contract, it’s this blog too. All the care and effort I put into disguising who I really was...I suppose the reality is that anonymity on the internet is just a thing we make ourselves believe in. It’s never 100 percent. Maybe the contract is the same way. A construct we force ourselves to believe in because we need to.
I know more about myself as a submissive. So I guess the project is a success, even though we didn’t carry it throug
h exactly as planned. Still, I feel like an actress who just finished a play, but when I got up to take a bow, the whole damn set fell apart behind me, and the audience started laughing. Or the movie reel melted. I’ll stop now, but believe me, I could go on with the depressing metaphors all night.
I still love John. There, I can say it. But everything that seemed so easy before, well, it’s not anymore. And I feel so confused and ashamed and afraid of all the hard work it’s going to take on our relationship. I’ve worked so hard all my life, and I guess I’ve been rewarded for it, so I shouldn’t be complaining, but...I’m tired. I’m so tired.
She was desperate for some serious alone time before going back to work, and it just wasn’t happening. Sunday morning had already been fully scheduled with volunteer mentoring and errands and laundry...and then, in the evening, another goddamn dinner.
The last place Robin wanted to be right now was at a Saylor faculty dinner party. She stared dully at the table of canapés and held her wineglass in front of her as if she could ward away conversation-seekers.
Even Julio was being social, sipping a martini and talking up a 1960s Black Power media collection with the two other archivists that worked for Robin. The Chair of African-American Studies soon drifted over, and the graduate students followed her like moons orbiting a planet.
Usually Robin was perfectly in tune with these social patterns. She’d represent Special Collections, working the crowd and trying to reduce some of the monks-in-the-archive mystique for newcomers who didn’t really understand what they did. Her favorite moments happened when she could connect people with other people, becoming the bridge that introduced new knowledge into the world. Tonight, though, everything seemed murky and opaque, the earnest discussions all preening and ego-puffery at their core. She hated everyone and she wanted to go home and she hated herself for feeling this way. It wasn’t her.
I wish John were here.
She wasn’t ready to face him yet. She’d overreacted. It wasn’t John’s fault. And as much as she loathed Jim, in the grand scheme of things, he was already living in his own hell. The waste of his life even made her a little sad. She remembered John talking about how he’d taught his five-year-old brother to ride a bike one summer, thought about her own kid sister and wondered if they’d ever live in the same country again.
Nothing lasts.
Laini, her yoga partner who worked in Exhibitions, walked over to the table. Robin forced a smile on to her face. “Looks like I’ll be meeting with African-American Studies soon,” Laini said. “It’s great stuff. I know you’ve been working on that for a while. Got anything new and exciting in the pipeline?”
“Yes.” The Mareau collection ignited a spark in her gloom, at least. “I can’t really talk about it yet, but it’s going to be in photography, and it’s going to be big. There’ll be a lot of work for you in it. The fun kind of work.”
“Fantastic! Oh, speaking of big photography exhibitions, I heard a rumor that UCLA is buying a recovered trove of Irina Mareau photographs. My regular book dealer told me about it this morning. Can you believe that? They said all existing images of her were destroyed in the 1950s, but apparently she’s just been hiding them this whole time! Some nephew of hers decided to sell them. They’re supposed to go for more than six figures, if you can believe it! Of course you can believe it. Irina-fucking-Mareau!”
“Oh,” Robin said. And then again, “Oh.”
“Robin? What’s wrong?”
Robin opened her mouth to speak, closed it again, shook her head. “I’ve got a headache,” she finally said, her voice appropriately shaky. “A sinus thing. I think it’s allergies. I’m...going to have to leave early.” But then anger flared inside her. She was tired of excuses too, and lying. “And I’m upset about the news. That collection was mine. Saylor’s. We were just about to make the bid. Julio got the lead, I tracked it down.”
Laini’s mouth turned into a shocked O.
Robin shrugged and put on a small, bitter smile. “Someone must have gone to UCLA. I have a feeling it could have been the appraiser.”
“But that’s totally unethical! If it gets out, no one would ever hire him again. Oh God, I’m sorry. This is awful. I would have loved to—Shit, shit, shit. God, and I can’t believe you found out like this. Me and my big mouth. Do you want me to tell Julio now?”
“Could you? I really do need to go.”
“Of course.” Laini gave her a brief but fierce hug goodbye.
Once Robin extricated herself from the party—at least she didn’t have to run this time, a small mercy—she went to her car, locked the doors and laid her head against the steering wheel. God, what she wouldn’t give to call John right now, tell him everything, let him comfort her.
But she couldn’t. Not now, not after last night, not after that email she’d sent. Maybe never again. She couldn’t take him for granted. She couldn’t take anything for granted.
* * *
John rubbed his aching hand and sighed. Punching a wall. Real mature. Luckily, Andy’s face wasn’t judgmental, although he’d definitely noticed the split knuckles when John had first walked in.
“Sorry for dropping in on you without notice.” He took Andy’s offering of a bag of frozen peas. “Thanks.”
“You’d think I would have better first aid stuff around, but I guess not.” Andy shrugged and went to take a seat on the ratty couch across from the armchair where John was sitting.
John cast a look around Andy’s cramped, cluttered living room, full of dog-eared old textbooks and teetering stacks of assignments to be graded. He’d never really been inside Andy’s place before. It was kind of sad, to be honest. But then, it wasn’t like teachers made much of a salary, so the guy probably did what he could. “Well, I guess we usually do the aftercare at my place.”
“You’re not the only guy I need aftercare from, you know.” Andy smiled wanly.
“Of course not. Sorry. I know.” John wondered how much he should read into that. Was Andy hurt by John’s call to say they couldn’t do any more scenes for the foreseeable future? And was it just his pride that was hurt, or his heart? Maybe John thought too highly of himself. Andy had always seemed perfectly well-adjusted, outside of his fetishes. Why assume, now, that he was some sad pining turtledove, living alone with his pop quizzes and an empty fridge?
“So are you gonna tell me what’s got you punching hard objects?”
“Robin. Well, it started with Jim, my brother. Fuck, it’s complicated. But he hacked my email—sometimes he’s barely literate, but he happened to know the answers to my security questions, and he found out a lot of intimate stuff about Robin. And then he threw it in her face in front of my whole family. I don’t blame her in the slightest for freaking out—”
“I hope not,” Andy said.
“But God, if she’d have stayed in her seat and acted like she didn’t know what he was talking about, they would have all assumed he was on one of his drug-fueled paranoid-schizo rants. Which he was, it just happened to be accurate this time. But I guess she panicked because she ran out of the restaurant like it was on fire, and by the time I could calm my family down enough to follow her, she was gone. Then I get home and there’s this fucking email...”
“Do you want a drink? I think I need a drink for this.” Andy got up abruptly and strode to the wall of his main living space that was walled with cupboards. It had the fridge and stove and sink, but John wasn’t sure he’d go so far as to call it a kitchen.
“Yeah. If you’ve got a beer...and am I being an asshole, talking to you about this?”
When Andy opened his fridge, John saw that it was well stocked with water and vegetables and neat containers of leftovers. He pulled out two beers then closed it again, leaning back against the shut door. “That depends on if we’re friends or not.”
“Of course we are.” And they were, John realized. Even if they’d never fuck again, John would still want to call him up for drinks or to catch a game. He’d miss A
ndy. What if Robin’s idea of being exclusive meant entirely cutting off people like Andy? People he had a sexual history with? People who were important to him? John was so out of touch with the way traditional relationships were supposed to work...maybe Robin was the same way. Maybe she wasn’t. Goddamn, he didn’t have a clue.
“That’s your saving grace, you know.” Andy tossed John a cold bottle and twisted off the cap of his own. “Amazingly, I can trust you when you say something like that. I’ll be charitable. Confide away.” He made a beckoning motion with his left hand as he sat.
“She says to tear up our contract. Again. I was happy to do it the first time, of course, when it meant getting laid, but—it’s getting to be a pattern. Is this going to happen every time she has the slightest doubt about us or herself or her motivations or her needs, or whatever the fuck is her problem? She’s such a fixer, you’d think she’d want to talk it out, come up with a plan, solve whatever problem she’s got together. Instead it’s ‘tear up the contract’ like there’s nothing worth solving or saving.”
“Is there?” Andy looked at John over the butt of his bottle as he took a swig. “If she’s got cold feet or if she’s having second thoughts about being a part of this lifestyle and all it entails—I mean, I remember when I first had to balance being who I am and being a teacher, knowing that if it ever got out I’d probably get fired and blacklisted or worse—why not just let her go?”
“I can’t let her go, dammit!” John yelled, and would have punched his knee if not for the peas wrapped around his fist reminding him that he’d already punched something today. He sighed instead, mumbling into his lap, “She’s my best friend. And I kind of love her.”
Andy didn’t look remotely pitying. “So what, now that you’ve fucked, it’s that or nothing? Did she say she didn’t want to be friends anymore, or did she say she didn’t want to be your sub? Those are two different things. Believe it or not, you can go back, sort of. In theory. You’ll always have the memory and maybe it won’t be exactly as things were, but if you really want to be friends, you can. My ex and I get along okay, but then we don’t have a choice, since we’ve got a kid together and all. If we can be co-parents, you can be friends.”
The Dom Project Page 17