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She picks up the check from the table. This time she’s the one deflecting, but I’m not mad at her. I guess we’re both a little afraid of baring our souls.
I thank Tandy for dinner. The ride back to my place is quieter than the ride to the restaurant, and each lull in the conversation fills me with a little more despair that turns into self-loathing.How could you have been so stupid, Bliss? Why did you ask her so many personal questions?No wonder you’re alone.
Tandy walks me to the door of my house. On the small porch we stand under the light.
“I had fun tonight,” I say.
“So did I.”
Kiss me! Please kiss me!The plea is so loud in my head I’m surprised she can’t hear it.I look at her full lips, willing them to descend onto mine.
“I did too,” she says, and trails the back of her fingers down the side of my arm. I shudder from her touch. Is the desperation for more evident in my eyes? I’ve never been good at hiding my feelings.
“Do you want to come in?” I ask.Please say yes.
She smiles. “I’d love to, but I need to get home. I’ve got a client coming in from out of town in the morning for a tattoo. I’m going to get everything set up.”
“Okay,” I say. I turn and unlock the door. Tears blur my vision. I feel like a fool. I leave the light off as I peek through the curtain, watching her drive away. How can it hurt so bad to have someone you hardly know leave? I think of what she said, about wanting something real. I want that, too.
Chapter six
TANDY
It took three cups of coffee to get me moving this morning.
“You look like shit,” I said to my reflection. There were dark circles under my eyes. With my high cheekbones and straight nose, the woman in the mirror looked haunted. It matched how I felt. I got less than two hours of sleep, and what I did get was restless.
Bliss’s innocent questions about my past had brought back memories Tandy had worked hard to put behind her. Now her thoughts drifting back to a tumultuous relationship she had tried to forget. Memories of Celeste flooded her mind, the wounds still fresh despite the passage of time. It had started with passion and promise, but gradually descended into a suffocating whirlwind of jealousy and possessiveness.
Celeste had come to Club Cross as a guest, a fifth wheel friend accompanying two couples. She was bubbly, pretty, and direct about what she wanted. When she spotted me, she made it clear she wanted to scene with her.
The attraction had been mutual. I’d had strapped her to the St. Andrew’s cross and the chemistry between us was so strong that a crowd gathered to watch. Celeste was as experienced a sub as I was a top, with a round ass made for spanking. After the club closed, I broke my one professional rule: don’t go home with someone you’ve done a scene with.
It was the first of many rules I would break with Celeste.
Two weeks later Celeste was moving her things my apartment.
“They’ll call us U-Haul lesbians,” she’d joked, and I had laughed. It was a line I’d used before when describing friends who’d moved too fast in relationships, another thing I said I’d never do. But there I was, putting my art prints in storage so Celeste – a film student - could hang her collectible movie posters on the wall of what she was already calling “our place.”
I’d jokingly told Celeste that anyone who criticized their relationship was just jealous. In the end, it was jealous that destroyed our relationship, but not any that came from the outside.
The first sign of trouble came when Celeste began getting so sick that I had to rush her to the emergency room. It was always the same complaint – stomach pains. At first, I’d been so worried that I didn’t consider the coincidental timing of symptoms which almost always occurred on nights I was scheduled to work at the club. Celeste knew the club counted on me and I’d assured her that playing with others professionally didn’t mean I cared about them. I cared about her. She said she understood.
That turned out to be a lie. One afternoon when Celeste was in school, the club manager asked if I could come in because they were short-staffed. I left Celeste a note and at around 10 p.m., she burst into the club in the middle of a scene I was having with another woman. She watched from the side, arms crossed. Afterwards I saw Celeste pull her aside.
Two days later the manager told me there was a problem; Celeste had threatened the woman to stay away from Club Cross, and from me. Upset, I confronted Celeste. Accusations flew like poisoned arrows, rapid and unexpected. Celeste accused me of fucking the women from the club – a wild and baseless accusation. She accused me of having women in the loft when she was at school. She provided no evidence and when I took her in her arms and told her work was work and her love life was a separate thing, she broke down in tears and blamed her behavior on the stress of school.
But I somehow knew it was more than that, and it scared me. My phone wasn’t password protected; I’d never felt the need to do it. When contacts started mysteriously disappearing form my call list, I blamed the mobile carrier until I caught Celeste going through my phone. She denied changing anything. I set up a password to protect my information. Three days later she picked up my phone and flipped out when she couldn’t open it.
She demanded to know what I was hiding, and why I’d grown distant. “You keep things from me! You never touch me!”
I was starting to resent her and the disruption her suspicions were causing in my life. I told Celeste that a reasonable expectation of privacy didn’t mean I was hiding something and warned her that the meltdowns and accusations had made me reluctant to engage in the kind of intimacy we’d enjoyed. “If you see me as a villain, I can’t top you,” I’d said. “And I won’t.”
The argument escalated. A vase shattered against the wall, scattering shards of glass I’m still finding to this day. I told her it was over, that this wasn’t how love was supposed to feel, that I couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t eating well. I wasn’t sleeping. The strain was affecting the quality of work at the tattoo shop and at Club Cross, word had gotten out about my crazy girlfriend. For all the things I loved about Celeste, the jealousy was a deal breaker.
Getting Celeste into my apartment had been easy. Getting her out was hard. She didn’t want to go. She begged. She pleaded. She threatened to hurt me. She threatened to hurt herself. I was on the verge of getting a restraining order when she came to her senses enough to realize that she couldn’t force the relationship to continue. The U-Haul moment we’d joked about finally happened, but not in the way we’d imagined as Celeste packed all her things into a tag-a-long trailer and left town for Phoenix.
The aftermath left me questioning myself, doubting my own worth and the choices I had made. While I was relieved to have the drama out of my life, I mourned the love that had twisted into something unrecognizable. I mourned the woman Celeste had become and blamed myself for missing the signs of her jealously.
