Vanilla

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“But I hurt you in the way I did it, and I’m sorry.” He pulled me closer, step by reluctant step, until we were embracing.

No man that I’d ever been with had apologized to me that way, and there’d been one who’d hurt me a lot worse than Esteban had. Repeatedly, and on purpose. I breathed in the soap-and-water scent of him as I tried to think of how to answer. Finally, there was really only one answer. I pulled away to look at him.

“Don’t do it again.”

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I was never afraid to love you. No matter how deep I fell, how hard I loved, there was no question in my mind that when we were together, everything felt right. When I held out my hand, you took it.

I wish you hadn’t let it go.

* * *

Three in the morning, another message I sent knowing I’d get no reply. I chose instead to bang myself against that wall again. To slam my fingers in the door, as Alicia said. And why? I could’ve spent a lifetime and a million dollars in therapy trying to figure out why I held on so tight to what no longer gave me anything but constant heartache. It was stupid; it was pointless; it was worthless.

I did it anyway.

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“I can’t believe you’re still doing this.” My mother’s lip curled. “Pictures like that? And I had to find out from Connex of all places. Some stranger inviting me to a show that’s got you hanging up there on the wall with your tuchus out for the entire world to see? What an embarrassment!”

“I didn’t know he tagged me in the pictures. But I’m not embarrassed.” I leaned to drag a pita chip through the bowl of hummus. I didn’t love that Scott’s invitation had sent my mother into a tizzy, but hell, I was an adult.

My mother’s twisted mouth thinned. Her chin went up. “I don’t understand you, Elise. I raised you so much better. I didn’t think you were still doing all that...stuff. With all those men.”

“Ma,” I said with a sigh, pretending she was talking about the pictures and not anything else, “it’s an art show. They’re pictures, that’s all. I could be doing a lot of worse things, couldn’t I?”

She crossed her arms. “Why can’t you just find a nice guy and settle down?”

“Don’t come if you don’t want to see them. Nobody’s going to force you to look.” I ignored her question, which had been asked many times and never had an answer.

“They’re all over your whatdoyoucallit. Your Connex page.”

My brows went up. Those pictures were ancient. “So unfriend me.”

“All my friends can see. Joan Simon told me she was invited, too. What’s he doing, soliciting everyone to come see your naked pictures?”

I gave her a sideways look. I could not, off the top of my head, name any of her friends who’d been granted access to my Connex page, but that didn’t mean anything. I’d accepted everyone who wanted to be my “friend” early on. Now I didn’t friend anyone.

“Not just me. There are lots of naked pictures of lots of people.”

My mother rolled her eyes. “Wonderful. Perfect.”

“It’s art.”

“It’s unnatural,” she said finally and waited for me to reply. Probably for me to reassure her that they were only photos. That I didn’t actually do “those things.”

I couldn’t. I’d never told my mother I was kinky, but I’d never denied it, either. I don’t think there are many people who enjoy discussing their sex lives with their parents, and people who get off on things not considered “normal” probably have an even harder time. I’d gone to my mother when I was about fourteen with some questions about sex, positions in particular, that I’d read about in one of the books she tried to keep hidden in the back of the bookcase. The woman on top position had intrigued me, but I’d been unable to figure out how, exactly, that worked. At fourteen I’d seen a penis—my brother’s, which hardly counted, but at least I was a little bit more informed than most of my friends about what one looked like. Alicia had shown me some pictures in her dad’s nudie mags of people fucking, but they’d all been doing it with the guy on top. I wanted to know how it worked the other way around.

My mother had told me then what she’d just told me now. It’s unnatural for a woman to want to be on top. She’d said it when I was fourteen and again at twenty-two, the first time she’d seen my “filthy” pictures, and several other times since. Yet, that was how I liked it, how I’d always liked it since I’d first discovered it was possible. It was how I would always like it.

“I’m just saying,” my mother continued, because of course she had to get in the last word.

“It’s also a little creepy that you keep harping on it,” I said sharply and got up to get another glass of water. “I thought we were here to help Susan with some Bar Mitzvah stuff, not talk about my private life. Where’s Jill anyway?”

This was way more my sister’s type of gig than mine. I didn’t care about the color scheme or types of napkins or any of that stuff, but I figured I’d better be there as a buffer. If Susan and I had a neutrally pleasant relationship, she and my mom had what I’d consider a “temporary cease-fire” sort. My sister, Jill, seemed to have no idea that Susan actively loathed her, but then Jill assumed the world revolved around her, and the idea that someone could actually not like her never entered her mind.

“Jill had a school board meeting, and Susan is late,” my mother said.

I looked at the clock. It was already close to eight. I didn’t really want to hang out here all night, not with a forty-five-minute drive back home. My mom would try to insist I stay over. I’d have to not-so-politely decline. She would pout. I would snap. Susan would roll her eyes.

“What time was she supposed—”

“I’m here. Sorry, sorry.” Susan, eyes bright, cheeks a little flushed, bustled into my mother’s kitchen with a brimming accordion folder.

They squared off like cowboys in an old Western, but neither of them drew. After a moment, my mother grudgingly offered coffee, which Susan politely declined. The pair of them looked at me like I had anything to say about it, but I only shrugged, and they both went into the dining room to lay out menus and brochures from different locations.

The first disagreement happened over kosher catering. Never mind I’d gone out to dinner with my mother plenty of times and watched her devour a Cobb salad like it wasn’t riddled with pig, but Susan would send her order back if it arrived with unexpected bacon. Or that neither of them actually kept a kosher kitchen with separate pots and pans and the like. My mother wanted to be able to invite and impress her friends. My sister-in-law wanted a nice place to have a party and have some good food. We didn’t live in an area where kosher catering was a common thing.

Under other circumstances I’d have popped some corn and settled back to watch the show, but tonight I was already tired because I’d been up at three in the morning being a dumbass and messaging a man who always read my messages but never answered me. I didn’t have the patience to listen to them quibble over hors d’oeuvres. It wasn’t my event, nor my money. My phone hummed from my pocket, and I drew it out, surprised to find a message from Esteban. I was also pleased, though. More than I wanted to admit.

“I won’t be serving shrimp cocktail,” Susan said stiffly. “There will be a pasta station and a mashed potato bar, which William requested. We’ll have grilled chicken skewers, too. I don’t see why this has to be an issue.”

“I simply think that you should serve food your guests will be able to eat,” my mother said with a sniff.

Susan’s eyes narrowed. “Anyone I invite will be fine with the food.”

“You’re having it at William Penn Inn, right?” I asked absently, reading Esteban’s short but descriptive list of things he wanted to do for and to me. He’d started off with “I humbly request the honor” and ended it with “If it pleases you,” and though the wording was campy and silly, I had no doubts he was sincere in his offerings.

Both of them shut up and turned to me.

“There were so many other choices,” my mother muttered.

Susan made a contemplative noise. “That’s where Evan and I had our wedding reception. We discussed this already.”

“I know,” I said, looking up with a grin at what my lover had sent me, not for either of them. “I was there, remember? Bright yellow dress, puffy sleeves? Groomsman stepped on the hem and ripped it straight off the waist seam just before we walked down the aisle?”

I’d been trying to make light. Susan didn’t laugh. My mother’s mouth twisted again.

“It’s a great location,” I told them. “I just went to a thing there a few months ago. They had a huge vegetarian buffet with hummus and grilled portobellos and stuff. You can do vegetarian meals for people who really care about it being kosher, which honestly, won’t be that many. Nobody has to eat the grilled chicken if they don’t want to. Just make it at a different station.”

“Well, maybe you don’t care what people think of this family,” my mother said, “but I do!”

Susan scribbled something on her notepad, then excused herself to use the bathroom. My mother glared at me. I dragged myself away from my increasingly dirty messages to shrug at her.

“What? It’s not your event, Ma.”

“I want to be able to invite my friends and not be embarrassed!”

“You can want what you want,” I told her, repeating one of her most-often-used phrases from my childhood, “but you get what you get.”

My phone tickled me through the pocket of my jeans again, and I bent back to it while my mother got up to putter around the kitchen.

“Is she going to invite your father?”

I pulled my attention away from Esteban’s message, which had included a photograph that made the ones my mother complained about look like they belonged in a hymnal. “I don’t know. I’d assume so.”

My parents had been divorced, at this point, almost as long as they’d been married. My dad had moved to Florida, which had meant the every other weekend custody thing hadn’t happened for us, something my mother loved to point out over and over. How she’d been a single mother, did it all on her own. By now it was old news, especially since whatever generous alimony arrangement they’d made had allowed her to work only at part-time retail jobs she cycled through whenever she decided she wanted the employee discount at some new place. My mom hadn’t had it all peaches and cream, I’d never say that, but she hadn’t exactly had to work in a labor camp to raise us, either.

“He’s not even close to William!”

“William spends a week with Dad in Florida every year, Mom. Just like we did when we were kids.”

“A week out of the year?” She sniffed. “That’s hardly anything.”

I shook my head in warning. “Not your party. Not your choice. If Evan and Susan want Dad there, he’ll be invited.”

My mother scowled. “The way you talk to me!”

“Someone has to,” I said, kind of hating that it had to be me, but for fuck’s sake, Jill was my mother times two, and Evan was Mr. Avoidance. I was already the perverted black sheep anyway. I might as well also bear the burden of being the ungrateful child.

Susan came back from the bathroom with suspiciously red eyes that made me feel bad that all of this had to be such a big freaking hassle. “It’s settled. I’ll replace the pasta bar with a vegetarian buffet. Will that be acceptable?”

Before my mother could answer, Susan picked up her purse. “I have to get going.”

She’d fled within ten minutes, leaving nothing but a few crumpled catering menus in her place. My mother, scrubbing the counter so hard I feared she meant to slaughter her sponge, barely said goodbye to her. She turned her face from mine when I tried to hug her goodbye.

“You want to stay over? Your room is ready. I saved some Shirley Temple movies on the DVR.” She turned off the water.

I snuck a peek at my phone, but to my disappointment, Esteban had signed off with a hurried GTG. I shoved my phone back in my pocket. “No. I have to work in the morning. I didn’t bring a bag.”

“You should’ve. I never get to see you since you moved so far away.”

We talked on the phone several times a week and texted more than that. I sighed and hugged her. My mother had gotten so much smaller over the past few years. We used to be about the same height—not that we’d seen eye to eye very often. Now it seemed almost like I could rest my chin on top of her head.

“I’ll call you.” I paused. Then, though I prayed the answer would be negative, asked, “So, you’re not coming to the gallery show on Friday night?”

My mother shook her head. “To what, see you in some more of those pictures? No, thank you!”

“I could email them to you,” I offered with a blankly innocent expression that Evan and I had both perfected as teens to totally flip my mother’s shit. “The pictures, I mean.”

“No, thank you!”

I laughed, though part of me cringed at the way she categorized what I considered art. And honestly, how she categorized what I considered one of the most significant parts of me. I hugged her again anyway, though, because she was my mother. Then I got the hell out of that house and headed for home.

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Alex and Olivia were not coming to the gallery show. They’d planned months ago to go out of town for the weekend. Alex had, however, told me it was okay if I wanted to take off early to go home and get ready. I knew that was so he could leave early himself without feeling guilty, if Alex Kennedy could ever be said to feel guilt. I suspected he rarely did, which was one of the reasons we’d become friends instead of only coworkers.

“I’m not sure you’re the one who gets to decide what time I leave,” I said, putting a few last minute bits of data into a client file and glancing to where he lounged in my doorway. “I mean, I’m the one who prints the paychecks. So.”

“Yeah, well, we have direct deposit, so yeah, fuck your logic.”

I laughed. “Wow. What a great workplace environment.”

“You love it,” he said and tossed a paper plane at me that I hadn’t even noticed he held.

I caught it in midair. “Where you going for the weekend?”

“A nude beach,” Alex said.

I swiveled again in my chair. “What?”

“Gotcha. Have you ever gone to one of those?”

“A nude beach.” I shuddered. “No. Are you really going?”

“How about one of those all-inclusive sex resorts?”