by Amy DeMeritt
“Pizza then?”
“Perfect.”
They looked at the menus together, picked a few items, then while Katie called to put the order in, Mel took it upon herself to go into the cabinet to get a can of food for Sprite. Katie’s heart fluttered and her veins rushed with joy as she watched her wash Sprite’s food dish, dry it, then empty the fresh can of food into it. She walked out to the entryway of the kitchen, made a clicking sound with her tongue, and only a few moments later, Sprite came bounding into the kitchen meowing, purring, and rubbing against Mel’s legs. Mel bent down to put the dish by her water bowl and gave her a loving pet and kiss on the head before standing up. As their eyes locked, Mel’s cheeks blushed and she smiled from the look of love and affection Katie was giving her.
After hanging up with the pizza shop, Katie wrapped her arms around the back of Mel’s neck and kissed her lips. “Thanks for feeding Sprite.”
“You’re welcome. Thanks for calling the food in.”
“No problem. It should be here in about forty minutes.” She gave Mel another kiss on the lips, then grabbed their beers and started walking out of the kitchen. “Did you see the pictures Raven sent?”
“Layla texted me about them, but I didn’t get to look at them yet.”
“They turned out really great.” Before sitting down, Katie grabbed her tablet off of the charger by the TV, then cozied up next to Mel on the couch. “Raven is an excellent photographer.” She pulled up her personal email on the tablet, clicked on the link to the party’s online album, then gave the tablet to Mel to look at. “That first one of Layla and Blake is really cute.”
“Yeah, that’s a good picture.” Mel started laughing as she scrolled down. “Oh, shit, look what she did with the wand duels! That’s so awesome.”
Raven added effects to the images so blue, red, or gold sparks were flowing out of the wands. And she even added some very realistic looking cuts and dirt smudges to the duelers faces to show the impact of the attacks.
“These look amazing.”
She gasped as she scrolled down a little further and came to the photograph of her and Katie kissing at the beginning of the party. Her eyes teared up and she clicked on the image to make it bigger. Raven superimposed them over a scene with a Quidditch pitch in the background. It was done so well that it looked like they had really been on the movie set when their photo was taken.
“I love this so fucking much.” As she looked up at Katie, she also had tears in her eyes. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” Katie kissed her lips for a moment. “I had such an amazing time at that party, and these pictures are just perfect. They’re like the icing on the cake. You think Raven would travel to England?”
Mel’s face lit up as her mouth spread into a huge smile. “Yes. I think many people I know would travel to England for the right occasion.”
“Good to know.”
Katie tried to play it cool by taking a sip of beer, but before she could swallow, Mel kissed her right on the mouth, nearly making her spit beer on her as she laughed with her lips tightly pinched. Mel pulled away after a few moments, then leaned into her to continue looking at the pictures together.
“Does Raven always edit the pictures like this?”
“Not to this level. She gets better with the special effects every year. This is her best batch of pictures yet. I loved that she kept the originals too so we don’t lose the party details.” Mel looked up at Katie, and asked, “You didn’t think the party was too nerdy?”
“No, it was perfect. I had a wonderful time. Do you have big parties like that for any other movie marathons?”
“Yeah, but nothing as big as what we do for Harry Potter. The other marathons we’ve had were when a new movie in a series was going to be released to theatres. We’d have a party to watch the previous movies in the series, then we’d go as a group to see the new release. We haven’t done that in a couple of years though.” Mel set the tablet down to take a sip of beer, then asked, “What about you? Do you ever host any parties?”
Katie shook her head as she also took a drink of her beer. “I haven’t hosted an actual party in years, but I do small dinner parties for a handful of friends or family on occasions. The last big party I held was a housewarming after I bought this place.” She picked at the corner of the label on her sweating beer bottle for a moment, then slowly met Mel’s eyes, and asked, “How do you feel about meeting some of my friends soon?”
“I feel like that’s the next logical step in our relationship, but the way you’re looking at me kind of makes me feel like you just asked if I want to jump in a snake pit with you. I’m guessing your friends don’t approve of us being together?”
“The commentary on my love life definitely has been less than heartwarming and comforting over the past few years and dating you has had little positive change in the feedback.” Katie exhaled hard as she ran a hand through her hair to brush it backwards off of her face and ears. “You remember the friends I was with at the club on the night we met?”
“The two married guys and your best friend, right?”
Katie nodded. “I’ve been friends with Bianca since we were kids, so she knows me better than anyone else and she’s been there for all of my previous relationships, the good, the bad, and the truly ugly. She knows I wouldn’t risk my career for a fling. But because I’m new to the company and you had applied for the same position, she’s worried your motives may not be the same as mine.”
“Like I’m going to make you fall in love with me, then dump you and make work miserable so you want to quit?” Mel released a small scoffing laugh as she rolled her eyes, then took a drink of beer. “Yeah, I guess I could see that, except for the fact that I respected your wishes when you broke up with me and I kept it strictly professional. I didn’t try to seduce you or get you back and I wasn’t an asshole about it.”
“I know, and I pointed that out to her. Bianca has pretty much distrusted every woman I’ve dated since my ex left and we found out she had been cheating on me for so long. And unfortunately, she has been justified in her distrust with the women I dated prior to meeting you.” Mel looked down as her jaw tightened, so Katie quickly added, “I don’t think she’s right about you. That’s not what I meant. Even though her concerns are weak or completely unfounded, I don’t think she’ll be all that enthusiastic about us for a while.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know…”
“No, Katie, it’s fine. She cares about you and she doesn’t want to see you get hurt. I understand and that’s great. But I hope she doesn’t hold a grudge when I prove her wrong.”
Katie smiled as her eyes moistened with affection and she leaned in to give Mel a brief kiss. “I love you and I know they’ll all grow to love you too, even if it takes a little longer. Would you be up to having a small dinner party here so I can introduce you? After the server swap next week, of course.”
“Sounds great. I’ll wear my Elvis costume and they’ll be throwing their bras and panties at me by the end of the night.”
Katie fell forward laughing hard. “Oh, my god.” She firmly kissed Mel’s lips, still laughing. “I love your sense of humor.” As she started absentmindedly scrapping her fingernails through Mel’s hair, making her look sleepy and super relaxed, she asked, “What do you think will happen when work finds out we’re dating?”
With her eyes closed and her head slightly lolling, Mel answered, “Throw us a party.” Katie lightly tugged her hair, making her release a small chuckle. “I don’t know.” She opened her eyes to look at Katie, and asked, “Are you still concerned about slipping up in the office or something?”
“No, I think we’ve been doing very well in controlling our impulses and we’ve figured out where it’s safe to have personal conversations.” She nodded towards the sleeping tablet on the coffee table. “But those pictures are hard to explain if someone happens to stumble upon them.”
“I don’t know what
I’m supposed to say right now. Are you upset about the pictures or…?”
“No.” Katie shook her head as she leaned in to kiss Mel’s furrowed brow. “I love the pictures and I don’t care that your friends have them or that Raven owns the rights to them and could have them posted on her photography website and on her social media accounts. I’m in this Mel, whatever happens. You’ve been there longer, so I wanted to know if there is any precedent for this kind of situation. We probably should have discussed it sooner, but we were still in a small bubble before. Now that we’re meeting each other’s friends, families to follow, and pictures are being taken, our little protective bubble is disappearing.”
“There have been a few dating situations at work, but none like ours that I know of. There was a supervisor in sales dating an entry level computer technician a few years ago. It caused some exciting gossip in the office, but I don’t think they had any disciplinary fallout for it.” Mel released a small laugh. “There was a love-triangle in customer service a couple of years ago. That was bad. Really bad. They were using the instant messaging tool for sexting.”
“Oh, no.” Katie chuckled. “What happened?”
“There’s a whole team in IT that basically just scrubs the instant messages for possible compliance violations, like sharing a customer’s private information or other confidential information. Sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you that; you already know that.” Katie released a small laugh, but she didn’t say anything. “Anyway, they found the conversations and had to report them, and they were written up for misuse of company property. The kicker was that the two women didn’t know they were dating the same guy, so like two days later, they actually went at each other right on the floor. Something stupid like pretending to accidentally bump into the other turned into a verbal fight, then they were throwing fists and trying to rip each other’s hair out. It was wild.”
“I will never understand why people do that. The one partner that was lying and cheating on both of them is the one they should have been mad at.”
“Yeah, it’s stupid.”
“So, to your knowledge, there hasn’t been a manager and supervisor of the same team dating and planning their wedding in England?”
Mel’s face split into such a huge smile it made Katie’s veins rush with a wonderful tingling sensation.
“No, we might just be the first.”
“How do you feel about getting ahead of it and spilling the beans after the sever swap?”
While taking a long breath through her nose with her eyes wide, Mel slowly lifted her beer bottle to her lips and drank several very large gulps.
“Okay.” She groaned as she rubbed a hand over her face, then drank the rest of her beer. “Are you secretly a snake charmer, or do you speak Parseltongue or something? These back-to-back snake pits are going to be pretty brutal if not.”
“No, but I have ways to make you feel better if you get bitten.”
Mel sighed as she lifted her empty bottle and had to return it to resting on her thigh without having the gulp of beer she really wanted. “That’s cute and all, but what if we get fired? Or what if they treat us like high schoolers and try to tell us we can’t close our office doors and we have to keep the interior window blinds open at all times. Which, if you haven’t noticed, I never do, even before you started. I hate having to see people randomly congregating in the hall to chat or picking at their asses as they walk by. If our windows looked out onto the team, it would be different, but that hall is too heavily traveled. It’s annoying and distracting.”
Mel lifted her empty bottle again, so Katie took it and offered the rest of her own bottle, which she accepted and drank without hesitation. Unsure what to say to make her feel better, because she too had the same concerns, Katie just continued alternating between running her fingers through Mel’s short, soft light brown hair and massaging the back of her neck and shoulders.
After a few minutes, Mel finally broke the silence. “It would be better if it came from us instead of someone finding a picture online and it getting spread around the office. Frank would probably be pissed and accuse us of making him look like a fool if he was last to know. But I think we should tell him before the server swap deadline. With the deadline on the hook, we have something to prove – we can prove that we can function professionally and we get results, better results than the manager and supervisor we had the last time we swapped out servers. Plus, we’re necessary right now. They can’t afford to lose us before the server is swapped out. But how much are we going to tell him? Are we going to tell him we met at the club before you even started?”
“As unbelievable as he may think it is, yes, I think we should just stick to the truth.”
After watching a few tiny beads of condensation trail down the side of the beer bottle to dampen the black shorts she was wearing, Mel looked up at Katie with a smile and her tired looking eyes slightly glistening with tears. “You must really love me to be willing to risk your career like this.”
“I do. And I could say the same for you.”
“Yeah, but Bianca is right. The risk is greater for you. I’ve been there longer and you’re in a position of authority over me. Even though there aren’t any rules explicitly spelled out in the code of conduct for a consensual relationship, there are plenty of rules they could try to twist to rewrite our story to match whatever narrative they want. If they decide they don’t like two lesbians running that team, it doesn’t matter if we met at the club or you just threw me against the back of the elevator one day.” Mel exhaled hard as she shook her head and rubbed a hand over her face. “I can’t stay there if they twist this and turn it into something that it wasn’t and they decide to fire you to make an example or something.” She looked up at Katie, and added, “If they do that, I’m going to quit on the spot.”
“No, Mel, I…”
“I’m serious. It’s bullshit that Texas still has archaic one-sided laws and we don’t have any protections against employment discrimination based on our sexual orientation. If Zops chooses to go that route, I’m not doing them a favor by sticking around. They can sink or swim all on their own. I won’t be the good team player for people like that.”
“Okay.” Katie gave her a soft kiss on the lips and caressed her cheek. “We’ll jump into the snake pit together and walk out of it together.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Unable to sleep, Mel was awake long before her alarm clock went off. She was already sitting on the side of her bed meticulously cleaning, buffing, and shining her black leather wingtips for work. Her shirt and suit were freshly steam ironed. She showered, shaved, clipped and filed her fingernails. Using Layla’s lighted magnifying mirror, she hunted and plucked every tiny stray hair that didn’t belong in the gentle curve of her brows. Every single detail of her appearance was scrutinized and perfected. Her appearance at work was very important to Mel and she always took care to look her best.
But the effort to look good was creeping into the realm of obsession. After five solid minutes, she was still standing in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom just staring at herself. But after a couple of minutes, the mirror faded and her mind became consumed with images flashing behind her eyes like a film reel playing out the many scenarios that could take place today.
“You going to ask her out, or are you just going to keep staring at her like a weirdo?” Mel spun around to see Blake leaning against the open doorframe with her tattooed arms crossed over her chest. Instead of wearing one of her customary cocky smirks, she was giving Mel a look of sympathy and understanding. “You alright, Melrose?”
“Why do you call me Melrose when I’ve asked you a million times to call me Mel?”
“Because I like unique names. Melrose is pretty rare, while Mel is common and short for other common names. Why would you want to be common when you can be rare?”
Mel wasn’t expecting that answer. She hadn’t asked before because she was convinced that Blake did it just
to annoy her. But it was the only thing she could think of to ask at that moment to distract herself from her anxiety and fraying nerves.
“Why don’t you like your name?”
“When people hear Melrose, they automatically think my parents named me after that 90’s soap-opera.”
“Did they?”
“No. Melrose is my mother’s maiden name.”
“That’s an awesome origin story – which is also rare.” She held Mel’s eyes for a few moments of silence, then reiterated, “You okay?” Mel just shrugged, so Blake took a step into the bathroom and held her arms out slightly in front of herself. “Look at my arms. Start at the top left shoulder down to my wrists, then up the right arm. They tell a story.”
Mel stepped forward to get a closer look at Blake’s tattoos. She’d already seen them dozens of times, but she had never had a chance to study them. They were incredibly detailed, colorful, and basically amazing pieces of art that covered both arms from her shoulders to her wrists.
While Mel looked at the details, Blake explained what she was seeing. “There is a Chinese legend about a giant koi that swam upstream against the current all the way to the top of a mountain. The koi survived tons of obstacles and overcame great challenges and hardships to get there. At the top of the mountain was the Dragon Gate, and when the koi passed through the gate, it was transformed into a dragon. A koi symbolizes courage, longevity, ambition, perseverance, and success. A dragon symbolizes strength and brings good luck, but they’re also believed to have control over rainfall, floods, and typhoons. So, basically, the koi survived everything the river threw at it, and in doing so, it became the master of it. Get it?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
Blake released a small laugh as she shook her head. “Yeah, it’s cool, but do you really get it?” Mel’s brow furrowed, so Blake explained. “Life is shit, sometimes. We have constant battles and obstacles we have to survive and learn to conquer. But the only thing strong enough to defeat you is what you give power to. You hold the strength and power and it’s up to you to claim it. Go against the stream, get to the top of the fucking mountain, and become the dragon – become the master of your life.” She griped Mel’s shoulder for a moment. “If you’re nervous, you’ve already given away some of your power. Be confident in who you are and the life you’re living. If they don’t like it, move on. Humoring fear is a waste of energy.”