Vanilla

“Robots, I guess.” William shrugged. “Can you tell my mom?”

  “Sure, buddy. I’ll tell her.” I ruffled his hair before I could stop myself. William suffered my touch and even gave me a grin that seemed much more like his normal self. “It’s all going to be okay.”

  19

  The Chinese Acrobats were amazing. Alex and Olivia’s tickets were Orchestra, three rows back. I’d never been to a show at the Hershey Theater before, but the art-deco architecture was beautiful, and they sold chocolate during intermission. You can’t beat that.

  “He’s cute,” Olivia told me in the bathroom during the break. “Alex says you guys met through your brother?”

  I’d washed my hands and now touched up my makeup in the mirror. “Is this lipstick too much?”

  She eyed me critically then shook her head. “No. It works on you. That red is great.”

  “I don’t want it to look like, you know.” I laughed, self-conscious. “Like I’m trying too hard. Like this is a date?”

  “Isn’t it?” She laughed and dried her hands.

  I shrugged. “He asked me out for Saturday night. I asked him to go tonight, but...I don’t know. I haven’t been on a date in forever, not the kind where the guy calls you up and asks you out.”

  “Why not?” Olivia smoothed the front of her dress and looked to me for unspoken affirmation that she was put together all right before we both headed out of the ladies’ room.

  “Haven’t met anyone. Haven’t tried,” I added. “At least not for the boyfriend-type thing.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I get you.”

  When we got back to our seats, Niall had bought me a glass of wine. It made me laugh a little, because the theater rules stated you could take drinks into the theater, so long as the cup was covered. It was like drinking out of a toddler’s sippy cup. But still, it was good wine, and he’d bought chocolate, too.

  “My favorite,” I said about the rich milk chocolate and almonds. “Thank you.”

  “Not everyone likes nuts,” Niall said. “But you looked like you do.”

  Beside me, Alex started to laugh. Olivia, on his other side, punched him in the arm. I laughed, too, still channeling teenage boy, I guess, but I also got warm and tingly because he was right. I do like nuts in my chocolate. We were both still chortling when the lights flickered and dimmed, and as the theater got dark, Niall leaned close to me to murmur in my ear.

  “You have the best laugh I’ve ever heard.”

  I found it very hard to concentrate on the show’s second act.

  His knee brushed mine every so often. His pinky finger, splayed on his thigh, brushed mine, too. I waited, semi-breathless, for him to take my hand. He didn’t. But I wanted him to.

  Just before the end of the second act, my phone pinged. I scrambled for it, embarrassed that I’d forgotten to turn off the ringer. The music in the show was loud enough that I don’t think anyone heard it, at least not enough to be severely annoyed. I thumbed the screen to see a notification from my message app.

  New message from JohnSmith

  I didn’t read it, and I tucked my phone into the side pocket of my purse, but the blink, blink of it lighting up let me know he was sending me a lot of messages. The show ended, and the lights came up. While we waited our turn to exit, Niall gestured at my bag.

  “Do you need to check that?”

  “Not right now.”

  We let the crowd sweep us outside and into the parking lot, where we said goodbye to Alex and Olivia. Neither of us made a move to get into our cars. It was a repeat of the first night we’d hung out, though much warmer. I found myself wishing it was cold, so I’d have an excuse to borrow his jacket again.

  “So,” Niall began, his standard start to a conversation. His phone rang from his pocket. “Ah, hold on a second. It’s my mother.”

  While he chatted with her, I pulled out my phone to check the messages from Esteban. Close to twenty of them, increasingly graphic, and though he had to have seen that I wasn’t reading any of them, increasingly inquisitive, as well. The last one was the direct question:

  R U there?

  Sorry. Out right now, will catch you in a bit, I typed, hitting Send as Niall disconnected.

  “I told her I was going out tonight, but she forgot.” He shrugged. “Since my dad died, she’s been a little...needy.”

  “But you’re a good boy to take care of your mother,” I said lightly.

  He didn’t look thrilled. “Good boy, nice one. Thanks.”

  “I was teasing you. Good man?”

  “I’d rather be called a man,” he said, and looked at the phone in my hand, which was merrily lighting up every time a new message came in. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh. Yeah. That...is a friend.”

  “A pretty insistent friend, huh? One of the guys from the pictures?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  Weird, awkward silence. The parking lot had cleared out, and we were among the last people there. Security would probably kick us out soon.

  “So...” I laughed at how I’d picked up his pet phrase. “Do you want to go somewhere else, or...?”

  “It’s kind of late. Work in the morning.” Niall looked around the lot then back at me. “Unless you wanted to? I mean...”

  “No, it’s all right.” I waited to see if he’d lean in for a kiss. A handshake. An awkward shoulder punch. Something, anything, but all he did was take a few backward steps toward his car.

  “I’ll call you about Saturday,” he said.

  I nodded. “Sure. Talk to you later.”

  Feeling a little disgruntled, a little put off, I watched him drive away. In the front seat of my car, I looked over my phone again to find another few messages from Esteban.

  Where R U?

  What R U doing?

  There’d been plenty of times when I didn’t hear back from Esteban immediately. For him to be so adamant about a reply from me was irritating. I thought about simply deleting the texts, but that was a thing with me. I hated not being answered so fiercely that it had become sort of sadly pathological for me to never ignore a message.

  I was out.

  He read it and replied at once. Where?

  The problem with having a conversation via written messages on a tiny screen is that you can’t judge the other person’s tone of voice. Add the tiniest bit of a language barrier—Esteban’s English was impeccable, but he didn’t always get the idioms correct, for example—and I knew I should be careful about assuming he was grilling me versus merely being curious.

  I went to see a show with some friends.

  After that, he didn’t message again until I was walking in my front door.

  May I call you?

  Before I even had time to type an answer, my phone was ringing. “Hello?”

  “Hello,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve been missing you.”

  There are things that men say to women that should be flattering, but sometimes are not, depending on how and where and when and who. “You have great tits” whispered in a whiskey-soaked voice late at night in bed can make a woman moan; that same “compliment” shouted at her by a bunch of strangers as she crosses the street, not so much. Esteban had told me that he missed me before, but tonight it sounded more like an accusation.

  “I was out,” I said.

  “Was it a good show? What did you see?”

  I described the show to him as I undressed, an eye on the clock, thinking that the morning was going to come too early. “Listen, it’s late, and I’m tired.”

  “Who did you go with?”

  “Some friends.”

  “Was it a date?” he asked.

  We were more complicated than we were supposed to be, but I was not his girlfriend. He was not my boyfriend. We had an arrangement that had been carefully constructed and was still somewhat fragile in the aftermath of his abruptly breaking it off.

  “Yes, it was,” I said.

  Silence, then a sharp sigh. “I see.”


  “You know, Esteban, I don’t ask you where you go or who you go with when you’re not with me.”

  “You could. If you wanted to know.”

  “Well,” I said sharply, “I don’t want to know.”

  “I want you now, so much. I’m so horny.”

  I was not in the mood for phone sex, nor in the mood to coddle Esteban through whatever shit he obviously had going on. However, a good, hard fucking was not something I’d ever be likely to turn down, especially not these few days before I was due to get my period, when my hormones were raging. If I couldn’t eat everything in sight, an orgasm or three would suffice.

  “Come over.” I’d never invited him to my house before, but I didn’t feel like going out again.

  “I...can’t.”

  “Well, then, I guess you’re out of luck.” Annoyed again, I took off my earrings and bracelets and put them away. Next step would be the bathroom to brush my teeth and shower. His time was rapidly running out.

  “I’m on fire for you.”

  I frowned. “And? What do you want me to do, sweetheart, talk you through jerking off?”

  “Oh, please! Por favor...” He lilted another long plea in Spanish that normally would’ve melted me, but tonight I only felt manipulated.

  That was it. We were going to have an honest-to-goodness argument. Part of me wanted it, in that twisted sort of way that happens in complicated relationships where too much goes unsaid until finally you end up exploding with it. Part of me wanted to remind him of his place, because he did have one, and it was meant to be at my feet.

  “You seem to have forgotten something, sweetheart, and that is you exist for my pleasure. Not the other way around.” In panties and bra, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and ran a hand over my body, thinking of Esteban.

  “Oh, yes,” he muttered. “Yes, I know that. I exist to serve you.”

  “Words. Nice words, but really, you don’t, do you? You exist to work and eat and shit and sleep. Not to serve me.”

  “No,” he protested. “I do. I want to! I want to please you, I want to give you—”

  “You want me to get you off,” I told him coldly.

  “Yes. I do.”

  I looked away from my reflection. “I’m tired now. I don’t want you to beg me. I want to go to sleep.”

  “Take me into bed with you. Let me help you fall asleep, touch yourself, I want to hear you make yourself—”

  “You are not listening to me,” I said. “Do you remember what I told you in the beginning? At the very start?”

  He sighed. “I remember many things you told me.”

  “I said I wanted a man who would listen to me,” I said.

  “And obey you. Yes, I remember.” He coughed a little.

  “I don’t feel like getting you off right now. I don’t feel like making the effort. I am tired, and I have cramps and what I really, really want is to just eat something really bad for me. Okay?” I put paste on my toothbrush, but had lost the energy for more than toothbrushing. “I know your cock is hard, but you’ll have to take care of it yourself tonight, and the more you pester me about it, the more aggravated I’m going to get.”

  “I understand.” He sounded angry.

  I didn’t care. “I’m going to sleep now.”

  “Thank you for letting me call you,” Esteban said, and my heart panged.

  The bitchy domme is a stereotype for a reason—because there are plenty of men who get off on being humiliated, and lots of women who like to assert their control with arrogance or cruelty. And hey, I’m all about whatever works. If a guy wants someone to put his balls in a vise and his cock in a cage or to get whipped by a riding crop, I’d never say it’s wrong. But that’s never been my style. I would never call myself particularly tenderhearted, and certainly never unselfish. I might not always be kind, but I’m never purposefully cruel. I fumbled, sometimes, with him.

  “Good night,” I told him. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Will I still see you Friday?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “I thought maybe no. If you were angry with me.”

  “No. I still want to see you. Even if I’m a little angry with you, I still want to see you.”

  He made a noise as though he meant to say more, and I waited, giving him the chance to speak. But all he did was disconnect, and all I heard was silence. I looked at myself again in the mirror. Tits and ass and belly, tired eyes and no smile. And I was alone.

  In bed, beneath the weight of a sheet that was too heavy for the heat, I cradled my phone and wept until I had to flip my pillow. Then I stared with swollen eyes into the dark and tried to imagine the stars. I couldn’t do it. All I saw was dark.

  I miss you.

  The message went out. Unread. Unanswered. I was too tired even to cry again, but one thing I decided before I at last let sleep overtake me.

  I’d wanted to be alone for a long time, but I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

  20

  Thursday passed in a flurry of work. Friday, Alex was out of the office, meeting with clients and working whatever magic he did to get people to invest their money with him. I’d seen him put on the charm. It was pretty impressive. His absence left the office too quiet, though, which I noticed during a welcome lull in the steady stream of phone calls and emails I’d been dealing with all day.

  Niall had not called. I’d checked my phone several times, when I remembered, and checked it again now. Nothing. I had his number. I’d called him already; I could do it again. Yet something stopped me. He’d said he would call me about Saturday. Shouldn’t I wait to let him?

  The pseudo fight with Esteban had left me restless. We hadn’t spoken since. My stupidly predictable late-night text to George had been less than cathartic, even if it had made me think about my life and what I wanted from it now. The idea of actually dating made my stomach twist, but...well, who really wants to be alone forever? Monthly and even weekly hot sex dates were great and all, but there was a lot of time left in the month when that was over. Love could keep its distance, but finding someone to go out with on a regular basis, someone to cuddle with while watching TV, that was suddenly looking a lot more appealing than it had in the past few years. I wasn’t quite ready to sign up on a dating site, and besides, when a ready-made date slaps you in the face, you don’t turn it down.

  I called Niall.

  “Hey,” he said, sounding wary. “I was going to call you.”

  “I had a little break at work and thought I’d call you,” I said, then paused. “Is that okay?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I was just, um, hey, I’m pretty busy now. Can I call you back?”

  “Of course. Later, then.”

  “Sure. Later,” Niall said.

  And that was it. The full extent of our conversation had taken oh, fifteen or twenty seconds, tops. And he had not sounded glad to hear from me; nope. I didn’t need a degree in astrophysics or even interpersonal communications to figure that out. I put my phone flat on my desk and ignored the chiming from my computer of more emails coming in.

  To Esteban I might be Goddess—benevolent, stern and fully at ease with the knowledge I deserved every bit of his worship, but that self-confidence was not always natural. Sometimes, all it takes is twenty seconds of blatant disinterest to make even a goddess feel unwanted. Nobody likes that.

  I spent the rest of the morning working and texting my mother and Jill, who were now all caught up in some kerfuffle about hosting a brunch on the Sunday after William’s Bar Mitzvah. Susan, as it turned out, had told them to do whatever they pleased, to invite whomever they chose, and both of them were somehow affronted that they were getting exactly what they wanted.

  “I don’t care what you do,” I said finally to my mother, when I could no longer deal with typing on my phone and called her. “I’m busy at work. Susan said you and Jill should plan the brunch, so just do it.”

  “Well, we need to think about who to invite. This is su
pposed to be for our family.”

  I grimaced. “So you don’t want to invite Susan’s family, or what? They’re all coming in from out of town, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t even know them.”

  “Ma,” I said. “You can’t have some kind of brunch thing and not invite Susan’s family. They’re William’s family, too. Either invite everyone who’s staying at the hotel, or don’t have it. Why is this such a thing? It’s common courtesy!”

  “Don’t you take that tone of voice with me. I don’t need a lecture from you on how to live my life,” my mother said.

  “Apparently, you do.”

  When I was small, my mother had taught me how to dance the Watusi and the Pony to old records she played on the record player she’d had since high school. A cigarette tucked in one corner of her mouth, she’d roll up the living room rug and take my hands to teach me the steps while she sang along with whatever song she’d put on. My mother had taught me how to put on lipstick, how to match my shoes to my belt. She’d once gone to the school to confront a teacher who’d given me a hard time about the books I’d chosen to read for my book reports, telling him that her daughter could read any damn book she pleased, even if technically it was from the reading list two grades higher.

  In short, my mom has not always been a raging thundertwat.

  “I find your attitude disgusting!”

  I sighed. “I find your consistent and utter lack of consideration for anyone but yourself to be really disappointing.”

  She was quiet, to my surprise. Then she said, “Fine, I’ll invite everyone.”

  I needed a shot of liquor after that conversation, but I settled for a coffee from the Morningstar Mocha, where I went to grab some lunch. “Hey, Tesla. How’s the panini today?”

  The Mocha’s manager sported an asymmetrical haircut, bleached blond, and today wore a T-shirt with a picture of a zombie Marilyn Monroe on the front. She turned to look at the menu board. “I’d go with the avocado, Portobello and...oh, I’ll make it without bacon for you. I can add some sprouts or something, instead.”

  “And some macaroni salad.” I looked in the glass case. “Oh, I’ll take one of those giant frosted brownies, too.”