“I thought you were shacking up with Meredith for the weekend.”
I sent Chris a withering glare from where he stood by the counter in Raymond and David’s kitchen. It was a tradition that when we weren’t gathered at the Rodriguez house for UFC fight nights, we came on alternating weeks for Sunday dinner. Typically it was the usual crew—me, Steph, Angel, Chris, and Ray and David—but this week Michael and Nunzio had showed up as well.
“Can we not talk about Meredith?” I asked around a mouthful of pork chop. “I just want to gorge on all this food in silence.”
“Why? Did you run her off already?”
Angel released a long-suffering sigh. “Chris, man, you never shut up.”
“I don’t,” Chris agreed. “That’s why y’all kept me around this long. Comic relief.”
“I bet Jace and Aiden like you for a lot more than comic relief,” Nunzio said, winking from where he was dishing out the bomb carbonara he’d made. He and Michael had teamed up to make an Italian/PR meal that made no sense but was fucking delicious. “I heard there were some other reasons why they’re trying to get you to move in two weeks after polying up . . .”
“My winning smile and tendency to make breakfast?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a big di—”
Michael covered his husband’s mouth with his hand. “Please don’t. I don’t want to hear about their sex lives.”
Raymond snorted into his plate. “Says the dude who used to fuck on the couch while I was home.”
They all bantered back and forth, so I kept eating my food, chugging beer, and avoiding Stephanie’s increasingly pointed stares. I knew she and Mere regularly Snapped and texted, and I knew she’d heard the story. Or some version of the story. But unlike Chris—
“No, but for real, what’d you do to Meredith?”
I slammed my beer down. “Damn, you’re like a dog with a bone, Christopher. I didn’t do shit to that girl. What, did she go crying to her brother?”
“Nah, I pretty much figured you were mean to her for one reason or another.” He shrugged unapologetically. “Am I wrong?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then what happened?”
I didn’t like his challenging tone or the way everyone was suddenly looking at me with interest. Maybe silently betting with themselves about whether or not Tonya Had Been Mean. If I wanted to be reasonable, I couldn’t blame them for the concern. As I’d told Meredith, I had a long history of shitty interactions with girls who’d only wanted a fetishy hookup instead of a date. And when I’d realized they were casting me in a role, or trying to position me in a certain way because of a fantasy, I would cut them off.
Sometimes, I was too harsh about it though. Stephanie had been cautioning me for years about crushing hearts. She’d made the case that I was one of the few out people in our neighborhood, which had brought a lot of attention from young queer girls still figuring their shit out.
But why the hell did I have to put up with being a goddamn test subject? Or an experiment? Or again—an experience? It had taken me years to accept my identity, and I was sick and tired of people trying to twist who I was to suit their desires.
It was part of the reason I’d been attracted to Meredith from the first look. Bullshit aside, she clearly knew exactly who she was and what she wanted. I loved that confidence.
Although, apparently I wasn’t above being Mean to her either.
Which, what the fuck ever if I had been. I hated how everyone went around expecting me to go out of my way to use kid gloves all the time. It was more efficient to make my point in the bluntest way possible and keep it moving. “Being nice” was bullshit. And everyone expecting me to “be nice” all the time was some misogynistic bullshit.
They didn’t stop staring even when I internally ranted for a solid thirty seconds. But when Michael, my big brother from another mother, raised a concerned eyebrow, I broke.
“Her father saw the surveillance video of me going HAM on one of those dick-bags—”
“I saw it too. Was pretty sexy.”
Raymond reached out to shove Chris. “Cállate, fuck-face.”
He held up his hands.
“Anyway.” I rolled my eyes as hard as I could and kept going. “He saw the video, thought I was a badass who had the potential to fit in with his security team, and offered me a job.”
Stephanie dabbed her mouth, making it obvious she’d already heard this tale. I scowled at her.
“How much would he pay you?” Michael asked, leaning on his elbows. “Benefits?”
“He said he gives full benefits and someone with my experience could probably make almost a hundred grand. I’m thinking less since I don’t have a lot of actual bodyguard experience, but even seventy or eighty is nearly double what I make now.” There was a pause, and I shoved a finger at Stephanie. “Your brother copped his card as well.”
Again, she just nodded and took a demure little drink of her beer. I snarled at her, and the dimple in her left cheek appeared. Brat.
“That sounds great to me,” Raymond said, pushing his plate away and rubbing his stomach. “What’s the problem?”
“She hates her father,” David guessed.
“Yup,” I said. “So she wanted me to not take the job, I said I’d think about it because it was a good opportunity, and she dipped.”
A sea of blank faces stared back at me. Well, I’d already bitched to Angel for a solid evening after he’d come home sore and grumpy from a day of climbing poles to fix wires.
“Wait.” Nunzio was tempering his words as he usually did, probably trying to see this from multiple angles to figure out why this would be so monumental to Meredith. “Why does she hate him?”
“She said he and her mom ignored her, and she doesn’t want him in her business.” I slouched in the chair, realized I’d subconsciously mirrored Raymond, and kicked him under the table. “But it’s like them ignoring her doesn’t stop her from living in their mansion and living off her trust fund, right? Why should it stop me from taking a job I’m interested in that would potentially let me keep an eye on people I care about?”
Michael and Raymond were nodding, but David and Chris cringed.
“Did you . . . say it like that?” David asked carefully. “In those words?”
Defensiveness reared up in a monstrous wave. I could tell I was glaring solely by the way David began to fiddle with his fork, but he held eye contact.
“No, not those words exactly,” I said.
He slanted his big brown eyes away. “Uh, well, maybe that wasn’t the best route to go.”
“What should I have done? Lied to her? Told her I was going to give up a job opportunity for a girl I’d spent one night with?” Each word caused the cringes to spread across the room except for Raymond and Michael, who were the best people in Queens. Clearly. “Fine,” I growled. “What should I have said?”
“You could have made it about yourself instead of her,” Angel said. “Even if it’s really about you not thinking shit with her is gonna go anywhere deep, you can just . . . not say it. And talk about what you need.”
“Oh, is that what you do when you blow someone off?” Stephanie examined her nails, arched eyebrows somewhere near her hairline. “Interesting.”
Angel instantly shut up and closely examined his empty beer bottle. If I was in a better mood, I would have laughed. They’d been sleeping together off and on since the QFindr cruise over a year ago, back when Michael and Nunzio had first gotten engaged, and they couldn’t seem to get it together enough to reach the next level.
“Nice try, but I explained what that job could do for my career.” I replayed the convo in my head, frowning. “Mostly.”
“Who cares?” Raymond asked around a mouthful of pasta he’d snagged from David’s plate. “Like you said, is she giving up that dumbass gingerbread house she lives in on the Upper West Side? Or going to get a job that didn’t come without family connections, instead of living off nepotism and her asshole parent’s money? No. Sooo . . .”
Stephanie rolled her eyes at him. “You’re such a dick just for the sake of being a dick.”
“No shit, Sherlock. It’s part of my charm.”
She glared, and he flipped her off. They were not helping me. Then again, I hadn’t asked them to. But now that we were on the subject, I hated that my whole “a job is more important than us sexing” speech might have left her feeling disposable. Or like I hadn’t taken her family issues seriously.
If I replayed her words and the way she’d said them, it reminded me of the way she’d lashed out at me following that photoshoot. I could still hear the sound of her voice when she’d accused me of hurting her and pretending she didn’t exist. Was this a pattern in her life? People getting something from her, or not, and then forgetting she was alive?
Damn. Damn.
I could practically picture her turning in on herself, or maybe having taken a Lyft back to her house to be alone rather than stay with anyone. Licking her physical and metaphorical wounds like holing up in her bedroom with the security system turned on.
I looked at Stephanie. “Did she go home yesterday?”
“I think so. She sent me a Snap, and her bedroom was in the background.”
I exhaled through my nose. Just fucking great. The guilt that swarmed me was suffocating in its intensity, but I tried to keep an even expression.
“Change the subject,” Michael said finally. “Tonya can bring it up again if she wants to.”
Everyone instantly listened, partly because he’d used his teacher voice, but mostly because all of us still kind of looked at him and Nunzio as the dads of our crew. Even when we were all younger, we’d listened to them like they were our authority figures—something I’d desperately needed while spending as much time as possible outside of my own house.
I’d gravitated to Raymond in school, sensing something about him that felt too much like family to ignore, and I’d had the same closeness with Michael (the first person I’d come out to as genderqueer), then Nunzio. Now, as I looked around the kitchen after they went right back to making fun of each other (Michael threatening to cut off Raymond’s ridiculously long hair and David glaring at him; Stephanie pointedly ignoring Angel, who was poking her; and Chris grinning into his phone as Nunzio peered over his shoulder), I wondered if we’d all gravitated to each other and had instantly felt so close to each other because of our queerness. Well, Angel was straight, but he was the most stone-faced ally you’d ever ask for. Ride-or-die hetero.
Contentment briefly soothed my frayed nerves and worries, but it didn’t last. I walked home alone after Angel lingered around to talk to Stephanie, and tried to go to sleep in my overheated room. It was truly sweltering even after ten, and the fan and open windows produced nothing more than a hot breeze.
I tossed and turned restlessly, overly conscious of the fact that I’d yet to change my sheets and that I could still smell Meredith on them, and wound up turned on and irritated at midnight. Getting off to thoughts of someone I’d potentially hurt wasn’t really revving my engine, and neither was the idea of watching porn. Lesbian porn tended to be fucking tragic on all the free websites, so I usually went with my imagination. And images of Mere.
Fuck.
Now that I was actively trying not to think about her, I couldn’t think of anything else. And I didn’t know why. Sure, she was beautiful, smart, and funny when not being a diva, but . . . weren’t a lot of other people? Why was she the one keeping me up at night and haunting my dirty dreams for a year now? Why did I always end up creeping on her Instagram or checking up on her relationship status?
And more importantly: why did it kill me that I’d never get to figure all of that out? For a hot minute on Saturday morning, I’d been excited about the idea of dating her. Something I hadn’t done with someone I had actual interest in for year. Maybe since before my service. And now that excitement was gone, and I was once again tossing and turning in my bed. Alone.
Monday morning started with a massive email from Kenneth Stone’s lawyer, which included a boilerplate contract and a line about them being open to negotiation. Reading it, especially pre-coffee, was like reading an ancient language.
I forwarded it to Chris so he could get feedback from Aiden, who apparently sent it to the QFindr lawyer Clive, and I got a curtly bulleted email about the pros and cons of the contract.
The pros were relating to the fact that there was a clear-cut explanation about how overtime was paid, a hefty benefits package that required me to pay zip with no deductible, and no morality clause. The details about health insurance alone were enough for goose bumps to spread all over my body. I knew it was likely because I could potentially be injured while guarding Kenneth’s old pasty ass, but Redline’s benefits package wouldn’t even cover a trip to my PCP until I paid six thousand bucks.
The cons weren’t that bad either. There was a nondisclosure agreement I had to sign that Clive found questionable if I observed any illegal activities; he wanted more specifics on expectations relating to overnight service and travel; and he thought I should be higher on the salary schedule due to my extensive military service.
All in all, it was as good an opportunity as I’d thought.
I wanted it. I wanted it like I’d wanted to re-enlist with the Marines over and over again. The very idea of it made me feel like I had a purpose again. A real shot at doing something I cared about for decent money, and this time close to the people I loved.
But if I signed it right now, I knew my chances with Meredith were out the window. And that ate at me. If I reacted this strongly to losing the chance to get to know her better, who knew how intense things could be if we actually managed to get anywhere.
“Fuck.”
I blindly reached for my phone, realized I didn’t have Mere’s number, and settled for an ineffective Instagram direct message.
Tonya: How are you doing?
It was late, and I didn’t expect her to respond, but shockingly my phone pinged only a moment later.
Meredith: I’m okay.
Tonya: Why didn’t you tell me you went home?
Meredith: It’s fine. Chester is here. One of the guards on my dad’s team.
Tonya: He’s there 24/7?
Meredith: No, they were here in three shifts. I’m starting to feel stupid with all of this manpower being used on me.
Tonya: That other guy is still out there though.
Meredith: No, he got picked up earlier today.
Tonya: For real? That’s great. Are you sure it’s him?
Meredith: Well, I don’t know. I’m hoping his friend sold him out, but I have to meet with an investigator tomorrow.
Tonya: Want me to come?
She stopped responding. I wondered if it was because she didn’t want to see me or if it was because she did. Not knowing kept me up for the rest of the damn night.
I woke up covered in sweat, sunlight streaming into my face, with the contract on my mind. I was almost positive I’d had a dream about going to the precinct with Meredith to talk to the investigator only to have the damn cop start quizzing me about the contract’s clauses.
A quick glance at my phone showed Meredith had never replied, and that it was seven in the morning. I had no jobs assigned today, which wasn’t entirely shocking—I guess Redline just saved me for queer events—but I stumbled into the kitchen to find coffee. Instead, I found Victor in a suit. He looked like a gang member about to face a judge.
“Where the hell are you going?”
Victor jerked his thumb at the already-brewed coffeepot. “Stone’s office.”
I froze with my hand on the handle of the carafe. “You serious?”
“As a fucking heart attack, sis.” He jerked at his tie. “Seems too good to be true, but I have nothing to lose, right?”
“Yeah. Especially if you getting a job with him means you getting up off my couch.”
Victor smirked. “Go get yourself dressed and come with me. He’s just having a preliminary meeting with me, but you’re pretty much guaranteed a job if you really want it.”
I hesitated and dropped my gaze to the coffeepot. My mind still hadn’t made a decision about what to do, which was a pretty big indicator that I was more into Meredith than I’d let myself admit before this weekend. The usual me would have already moved on this, but here I was—dragging my feet. Over a girl. I lived my life pretty much trying to never do shit that would later leave me regretful and full of shoulda-couldas.
Frustration choked me and turned me off everything. Even coffee.
“Let me get dressed,” I said finally. “I can at least talk to the guy.”
Maybe he’d know which precinct Meredith was at.