Chapter Twenty-One
“What’s on for the weekend, Tom?” That’s the question he got from Delray in the elevator on Friday night.
Tom didn’t understand Delray. He was unfailingly cheerful. He worked in the accounts department. He had the unenviable job of chasing consultants for missing time sheets, and clients for payments. You could be rude to Delray and he’d still smile, which either made him an idiot or a genius. Neither verdict meant Tom had to be truthful about the weekend.
“Not a lot.” If you didn’t count tonight’s exploration of the Kama Sutra, Saturday’s dinner party and Sunday’s lingerie shopping. “Quiet one. You?”
After last night, he probably should be planning a quiet one. Last night he’d made it home in record time to find Flick had beaten him there and was, as instructed, impatiently naked and ready to go.
They’d had furiously passionate sex on the floor of the hallway. It was determined and mindlessly hedonistic at the same time. Utterly glorious. It knocked the breath out of him thinking about it. He’d been mostly dressed. They toppled a glass bowl off the hall table. Flick got rug burn on her elbow. He needed to dry-clean that suit. They’d lain there in a tangle after that explosive encounter and laughed hysterically, struck with the insanity of what they’d done.
“Someone could’ve lost an eye,” he’d said, when he’d been able to talk again. It only made her snort-laugh. “In my defense, your honor, she called me at work and talked dirty until my health was seriously endangered. It was an inciting incident and I beg for clemency.”
He wasn’t going to get any mercy from Flick. Once their knees were working again he bathed her elbow and slathered it with aloe vera, and they ate leftovers before falling into bed with the kind of exhaustion reserved for a day’s worth of expectation and seven minutes of going at it like maniacs.
“Weather is supposed to be great,” said Delray. He’d said something about playing golf, but Tom wasn’t listening.
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t expect to see a lot of weather, unless it was the moisture on Flick’s skin, the wetness between her legs or from her mouth, and the steam they could make together.
The elevator hit bottom. “Have a great one, Tom,” Delray said with a wave and a smile as he stepped out.
If only he knew Tom was going home with the express intention of having sex with his temporary roommate and trying out poses called the Dolphin and the Scorpion. That might put a different expression on Delray’s face.
The expression on Flick’s face when she arrived home and smelled dinner was almost as good as the expression on her face when he made her come. “What is that?”
“Chicken tagine.”
“I could live in it. I’m starving.” She sat at the counter and he heard the clunk of her shoes hitting the floor. She unhooked earrings and took her hair down.
He caught her arm and examined the burn. “Did you put more gel on this?” It was blistered and a little weepy.
“My sex wound? Yes, I put the gel on it. I had to tell people it was a yoga injury.”
He let her forearm go but took her hand. “I don’t think yoga is known for its first-degree-burns threat factor.”
“It is now,” she said. “I know how to sell an idea.”
He brought the back of her hand to his lips, but couldn’t pucker past his laughter. He intertwined their fingers. “I was thinking I should shuffle the coupons, look for one that’s not likely to cause another sex wound.” If he chose the massage coupon, he could switch it up and massage her.
“I’m proud of my sex wound. I have plans to add at least a pulled muscle tonight or we’re not trying.”
After they’d eaten, cleaned the kitchen and changed out of work clothing, they sat on the sectional with Flick’s tablet opened to a website that had cartoon drawings of hundreds of crowd-sourced sex positions. It was the Kama Sutra in spirit if not origin.
Each was graded for type, stimulation point, penetration style, accessibility for touch, action; which was essentially who was doing the most work, and complexity; which was an indication of how much of a weight lifter or an acrobat you had to be.
Every few minutes a screen popped up offering them a webcam experience that promised to be explicit. Tom had spent the afternoon watching footage of hip replacements to approve the best cut for a surgical instruction video. He could do without more video of naked bodies, but if Flick led, fool for her that he was, he’d follow.
“You’d have to be in Cirque du Soleil to do half of these,” she said, angling the tablet so he could see a position called the Beautiful Bridge. It was a backward sixty-nine. The man was on his back, knees raised, bent and slightly apart. The woman knelt at his shoulders facing the opposite way, perfectly positioned for his mouth but bent backward over him to take him in her mouth.
“‘Position type, sixty-nine, woman on top. Stimulation, clitoral, while giving a blow job. Complexity, hard,’” he read. “But that’s only because they don’t want to say impossible unless you have a rubber spine.”
“Embarrassment level explaining that to the emergency extraction team and physical therapist—nuclear,” she said. “I don’t think my back would...no, I can’t even.”
He took the tablet from her hands and studied the screen. “I don’t know, it looks suitably unlike anything we’ve done. I get to use both my hands on you.”
“And put a delicate part of your anatomy at risk of me biting it off.”
He winced, which made what he said absolute bluster. “Isn’t it my coupon, my decision?”
And that was about as real as this position was practical. The coupons were his gift, but Flick’s permission-granting device. They were the beautiful bridge between Tom’s reluctance and his desire, between Flick’s generosity and the end point to this affair. She’d knowingly created the excuse he needed to live in the moment for once, at a time when his life plan had disappointed him, and he loved her for that.
He loved her.
She was all he could think about. Gravitron spinout, eight ball to the heart. Game over. But she was leaving and this had temporary stamped on it from the word go. Fourteen remaining coupons said so.
She took the tablet out of his hands. “Oh, Tom, honey, that’s so sweet—you think it’s your decision.”
Yep. She’d stuck a ring through his nose and she was leading him around with it. She had ever since she crashed into him at the hacks-and-flacks mixer and made herself his roommate. It was the most fun he’d had in a very long time and it would take some adjusting to get back to normal.
“Let me sell you a few positions I think you might like,” she said, and then tried to convince him he wanted to do a position called the Grasshopper, a kind of crisscross backward kneeling doggy that he noped out of on account of not being made of bendable plastic.
He noped out of the next five or six positions she suggested. The Pile Driver; if someone’s neck didn’t get broken it was a miracle. The Hourglass, in which he was supposed to roll up on his shoulders with his knees around his ears so she could sit on the back of his thighs and dick, and then bounce. Dear God. And the Candle, where he was supposed to do a headstand while she knelt and gave him a blow job. Since he’d never done a headstand in his life, it looked about equivalent to giving yourself brain damage.
“Bring on the Scorpion.” He thought she’d made these names up to amuse him, but there was a drawing of the Scorpion on the screen. It was doggy style, all the stimulations possible, with touch including kissing. It required the woman to lie facedown but propped up on a big cushion, ass high so the man could penetrate her while in a push-up position.
“You’re thinking about it,” she said. “Can you do that?”
Well, hell, now he could. He pulled her to her feet, and then took the big cushion from the sectional back and threw it on the floor. Her mouth flapped, no words came out. “What?”
“You just put a cushion on the floor. The floor. The cushion.” She pointed back and forth. “You want to do it using a cushion from your pristine designer sectional, on the floor.”
He grabbed the bottom of her T-shirt, under which he knew she wasn’t wearing a bra, and dragged her toward him, put his mouth to her neck, his hand to her breast, and between kisses said, “I. Want. To. Rock. Your. World.” She didn’t laugh till he added, “Scorpion-style.”
That’s all it took to go from their clinical assessment of the Twister of sex positions to becoming aroused. Flick’s laughter, her scent in his nose, her body pressed against him.
She pulled at his shirt. “What have I done to Tom who doesn’t like things messy?”
“Commercial break.” That’s what this was, a short and priceless vacation from his usual routine. It made the blood run to his head like he was upside down. “Now lose the pants and get on the cushion.”
The Scorpion was a success. It was a slow rocking off the balls of his feet, toward Flick’s orgasm, which became his own pleasure. They tried the Reverse Mermaid, and the Butterfly, but his favorite part of the evening didn’t have a name or a difficulty rating, it was when Flick curled up on his lap and they simply kissed without any need or expectation, as if time had no meaning.
Late the next afternoon it had plenty of meaning as they got ready to have Wren and Josh over. Josh was in town for an office leaders’ meeting that Tom would’ve been attending if things had gone to plan.
They split the chores up. Tom shopped, Flick cleaned the condo. He prepared dessert, she set the table on the balcony. She came into the kitchen reluctantly when she’d run out of household tasks.
“What do you need me to do?”
He handed her the wooden spoon. “Stir—it needs to simmer until it’s syrupy.”
“Tell me about Josh. I know Wren. Great girl. Amazing shoes. Quick study. She should’ve been promoted long before this, but Rendel’s is a boys’ club, so you and Josh got ahead and Wren is still waiting for her shot.”
“No, that—” Yeah, he hated admitting it. He went back to prepping the duck. “It’s true. I’d have promoted Wren into my old job. We both lost when Harry’s retirement didn’t happen. You know, she never complained about it.”
“What would be the point of that? It’s what happens. Women do the same work and often get paid less, need to be twice as good as the nearest average male to be promoted and rarely ever get a shot at a job we’re not already qualified for.”
“Keep stirring.”
“I thought I was. Women get promoted on actual merits and proven capability. Nothing wrong with that, but men get promoted on potential. We have to fit a job, fill out all its corners, have solid experience in all its highs and lows. Men get to grow into it.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you.”
“You’ve gone all granite boulder.”
“I’ve been the beneficiary of the way the system works, Josh too, and Wren has been the victim and yeah, it makes me tense. I can’t single-handedly change it from where I am, but if I was MD, then I could’ve made sure Rendel’s Michigan office was a level playing field.”
Her hand to his back. This subject was raw. That Wren had effectively been undercut again wasn’t lost on him. “I’m glad you feel that way,” she said.
“Glad? Keep stirring.” Maybe they were going to kill each other in the kitchen.
“People make change happen when they’re uncomfortable. That’s why change often comes from outside a system because those inside like things the way they are. Happy people like the status quo. Outsiders are disrupters in a way insiders most often don’t care to be. If you hate what happened to Wren and other women at Rendel as much as I see in your reaction, I’m pretty much dancing with joy because when you get the chance you will make change happen.”
His hands were covered in oil. But he still managed to hug her.
“Get that slime on me and I’ll stop stirring.”
Tempting to slime her. Nicer to kiss the back of her neck and have her turn to him, wrap him in a hug and tuck her face into his chest.
“About Josh,” she said.
“He became a good friend. We’re both work-obsessed.” He turned her back to the stove. “Stir. He blames his tiger grandma, who won’t be satisfied until he takes over Rendel and renames it Lam. She also wants great-grandchildren. Josh wants real estate; they’ll compromise at some point. When I bought this place, it was with Josh’s help. He did the scouting and the decorating. He already owns a home in LA and a condo in Hawaii.”
“Josh chose all your furniture?”
Tom nodded. “He dragged me around showrooms and through websites and worked out what I liked and then forced me to open my wallet. My idea was to make do with what I had, like I’d always done, until I could afford better. His was to live the life I wanted and quit waiting for it to happen.”
“You went with the dream.” And had felt a fool for overextending himself, until he got used to living in a home he enjoyed and saw its value appreciate.
“Bit off more than I could chew. Which is why I needed you, roomie.”
“Gross, I’m really just your chew toy.”
He glanced at her, making a game of the stirring, moving the spoon first one way and then the other in a pattern of her own devising, and a surge of feeling hit his gut. Complex emotions he had limited experience sorting through. All of his successes had come from plain old-fashioned hard work, application, diligence and the luck of having been born a white male. He was decisive but he wasn’t a risk-taker. He had a comfort zone and he was happy in it, didn’t like disruption or change not of his own making.
The home he loved happened because a good friend had convinced him it was the right thing to do and pushed him into thinking bigger. He’d acted out of character getting involved with Flick. He could call it casual, convenient, temporary, a commercial break before regular programming recommenced, but no one had pushed him into it and now he didn’t know what to do about it because she was the outsider, the disrupter, and much as he craved her style of commotion now, it wasn’t what he’d have chosen without a push.
Josh arrived early. He had shorter hair and new glasses and the same taste in expensive microbrew beer. He was the only man Tom could hug without feeling awkward and needing two or three backslaps to complete the process. Josh had trained him out of it.
As soon as they broke apart, Josh inspected the place. “I was worried you might start regressing without me.”
“Fuck you and the designer denim you’re wearing.”
“That’s fake designer denim to you. Came via Shanghai. Shoppers’ paradise. No Wren yet, and where’s Miss Felicity Dalgetty?”
“In your old room changing.”
“Ah, she got the en suite. Are you cooking duck?”
Tom moved behind the counter to check the oven. It was an experiment, outside the aisle of comfort foods in his regular repertoire, and he was fretting over it. “Problem?”
“What are you going to do when she’s gone?”
Not a duck problem, a roommate issue, and the answer was sulk, hike more than the usual amount, try not to fall off mountains. “I need to get organized about that.” Find a new roommate. Commit to Rendel or take a new job.
“Remember my cousin Eunice? Works at the Courier.” Not even a vague recollection. “She might be looking for a new place.”
“Eunice is a woman?”
“No, she’s a droid. Absolutely lacking in personality, so she should suit you. A shortie, so she won’t take up much space, and you can have her speech chip removed each evening.”
Tom closed the oven door and gave Josh, who’d settled on a stool at the counter, a what-the-fuck look.
“What?” Josh said with raised hands. “Oh wait, Flick has ruined you for living with another woman. Can’t handle the perfume and the hair and the femaleness.”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Thomas O’Connell, what do you mean? I’m the one with the four languages and I have no idea what you’re saying. Did something happen with you and the roommate?”
Josh would see it anyway. “We hooked up.”
“What? Like, ooh. I’d high-five you but we’re not fifteen. And?”
“We’re not fifteen. I’m not giving you details.”
“Lift, hold and drop.”
The tagline from the Kegel device advertising. “Something like that.”
“And you don’t want another woman as a roommate.”
“I don’t want a roommate, but you talked me into this condo and this mortgage, and Harry fucked over my plan to be able to manage my debt. Tell me more about Eunice.”
“She’s my cousin, that’s the only important thing you need to know. She’s little and snarky and ambitious and wants to be the managing editor of the Courier.”
“Works long hours?” He’d had a list of rules he’d tried to put Flick off with.
“Do the words my cousin mean anything to you?”
“Doesn’t smoke, do drugs. Have stripper friends who like to party or a pet—” what was it Flick had said “—iguana?”
Josh’s brows lifted. “I’d like Eunice a lot more if she had stripper friends. No iguana. She’s allergic to scales.”
“Doesn’t leave her things all over the place?”
“Tidiness is a Lam family tradition. It’s scalded into us.”
“My preference is for a roommate who lives like a cloistered nun—” who’d never touched a vibrator, let alone used it as a weapon “—who’s taken a lifelong vow of silence.”
“I already mentioned the speech chip is removable. Knew you’d be interested in that.”
“She sounds perfect.”
“I see you don’t want a roommate.” Josh took his glasses off, checked them for smudges and put them back on. “Nice to know I was irreplaceable, and speaking of perfect, how is Wren?”
“She misses you.”
“You miss me.” Josh blew a kiss.
“She complains about that, but nothing else. She got screwed over just as badly as I did. Worse, since it’s not the first time she’s been robbed of a promotion she deserves.”
Josh wrinkled his nose and his glasses shifted. “I miss her. It’s so frustrating I’m not bi. She’d be my soul mate.”
“Your soul mate has to be someone you’re in love with, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, Tom,” said Josh with his are-you-a-moron tone, “that’s how it works. I love Wren, but I’m not in love with her, in part because I don’t want to sleep with her, but that’s kind of a deal-breaker and you know all this.”
“I know nothing about this stuff.” He wanted to sleep with Flick, to Scorpion and Butterfly and take her against a plaster wall, and he loved her, at least that’s what he thought it was he felt. The deal-breaker was that she was a reverse Josh—she wanted to Scorpion and Butterfly and bubble bath with him, she loved his body, but she didn’t love him. “I like old classic music and hiking and my investment-grade condo and cooking decent food and working. Hookups are an adjacent activity.”
“I don’t think Eunice would be into you. As far as I know she lives on air, coffee, click rates and newsprint.”
He turned to check the oven timer. “She’s hired.” He heard Flick before he saw her.
“Replaced me already?”
“No. Er. Josh has a cousin and, I mean, I need to think about it.”
Flick laughed. She wore a dress, flowers on it, lots of skirt, a kind of 1950s-sex-kitten-on-a-wholesome-family-picnic style about it. He liked it. The way it nipped her waist and fitted to her chest, that barest hint of cleavage that was intoxicating. It’d looked like one of Gram’s old tablecloths on the hanger. He tried not to stare at her in front of Josh.
“Oh, Tom, don’t get uptight about it.” It’s what he might’ve expected her to say. She turned to Josh. “The last time I saw you was the night the Courier fired Jack Haley and half the industry showed up for farewell drinks and he’d already left the bar. You were the official whiskey taster, I believe.”
Josh groaned. “I was so drunk that night. The Courier firing Haley, felt like the end of journalism. That’s your last memory of me. Gah, that’s bad in a way that’s probably good for my star power.”
Tom coughed a laugh. “Your star power?” He remembered the night. The shock of Haley’s axing. How drunk everyone got because it felt like all of their careers and lives would suffer the loss of quality reporting that truly mattered.
“I haz it,” Josh said.
“You do,” said Flick. “I had never seen an official whiskey taster pole-dance on a bar top without a pole before that night.”
Josh laughed with a self-deprecating shoulder shrug.
“You were there?” Tom said to Flick. He didn’t recall seeing her that night.
She turned her eyes to him. “You used to avoid me when we ended up somewhere together.” She didn’t say it unkindly, and it was the truth. Now he tried to avoid time spent without her. Flick’s leaving was going to hurt in ways he couldn’t account for; replacing her was going to be impossible.
“Where’s Wren?” Josh said, and as if he’d summoned her, the intercom buzzed.
There were tears. Josh’s, though Wren got glassy-eyed.
Tom stood there dumbly watching, trying to understand how love and being in love with someone who wasn’t in love enough with you was supposed to work until Flick poked him. “Come on, we must have kitchen things to do.”
“Yes, ignore us at least until I’m less embarrassed about sobbing my heart out in front of you all,” said Josh.
“He’s not embarrassed. He was born without that capability,” said Wren. She took Josh’s hand, and pulled him toward the balcony. “No one wants to see you ugly-cry.”
The moment they were outside, Tom started up. “I didn’t mean for you to hear that.”
“You auditioning a new roommate? Tom, it’s fine. It has to be done.”
The fact he felt very much not fine about it was more than anxiety about dry duck. What’d possessed him to do a dish he’d never tried out before? Could’ve simply barbequed.
“Tom.” Flick touched his arm. “What can I do to help?”
Stay. “Drinks.”
She went out to the balcony to play hostess and he stood in the kitchen and watched her pour wine, admire Wren’s shoes and chide Josh. Flick was a social creature and he could get angsty about seeing his dad and serving a meal to the best friends he had. It was good to see her laughing, enjoying herself. Once she hit Washington it would be hard work settling in with no friends on deck except new ones she’d have to take the time to make.
The duck, as it turned out, was not dry. The conversation was easy, and he should’ve known it would be. Josh was entertaining, talking about the blunders he’d made trying to navigate the China office, with command of the language but not the nuance, and Wren and Flick traded barbs about reporters they’d both worked with. Tom could sit back and let it all happen. By the time he plated and served the cheesecake, he relaxed for the first time since Josh arrived. There was more than a decade of friendship between them—it felt good to have the old team back together again.
“The plan was for the three of us to take over Rendel,” Josh told Flick. “We used to joke about it when we were mere graduates without the money between us to split a Happy Meal.”
It had been a break-room joke over pizza or pot stickers on nights they’d been forced to work. It was a joke now. “We were idiots,” Tom said.
“We learned.” Josh topped up their glasses. “We’ve begun our ascendency.” He lifted his to prompt a toast.
“Those of us with dicks,” Wren said, but she lifted her glass to accept more wine.
“We need to get Tom into Harry’s office, or we should think about starting our own firm,” Josh said.
Tom lifted his glass. His ascendency. Wren’s. Their own business. It was a toast worth making.
“To Lams,” said Josh.
“To Lam, O’Connell, Kingston,” he countered with a laugh.
“Kingston, Lam, O’Connell,” said Wren. “Or I’m taking my vagina and my gender equity elsewhere, and you can be another boys’ club like all the rest.”
Josh raised his glass higher. “To the strict alphabetical order logic—
Tom cut in. “And the natural justice of Kingston, Lam, O’Connell, Chicago’s finest PR firm.”
“Kingston, Lam, O’Connell,” they chorused, clinking glasses.
After Josh and Wren left, after Flick helped him clean up, he learned she’d captured that toast on camera.
“You could do it,” she said, showing him her phone.
The three of them looked slightly drunk. Josh had his mouth open, Wren had her eyes closed. Tom’s glass was in front of his face. But stranger things had happened than three good friends seeing to their ambitions together.