Loverboy Butch, page 6
‘Oh, you know.’ Running away on my wedding day. Practically begging her to be my accomplice and leaving her to deal with the shit when it inevitably hit the fan. Asking her to be my bridesmaid despite not having spoken one-on-one in years. The way I abandoned her long before that. Not moving across the country to follow our plans at eighteen.
‘You think she’s still pissed about what everyone said at the wedding?’
‘I’m not—wait, what?’ Parker’s words stop me dead in my tracks. ‘What did everyone say at the wedding?’
‘Well, not everyone but Khloe.’
I place my spoon back in my bowl with a clank.
‘What did Khloe say?’ I ask again, keeping my tone carefully neutral.
My brother’s eyes go wide, suddenly aware he’s waddled his way into a tense situation. He coughs and retreats into his hoodie.
‘You didn’t know?’
‘Didn’t know what?’
‘Oh, uh, well. When you… bolted.’ I have quite literally never seen Parker trip over his words this much. It would almost be amusing if my nerves weren’t straightened and ready to spark. ‘Dean had to-to tell everyone.
‘It was fucking awkward. We were all in the bar and she came in in her fancy dress. She said she’d gone to pee, and while she was in the en suite, you popped the window and, well, you know.’ I’ve heard parts of this lie before. The little white one Dean gave when I leapt through the window, so that she didn’t have to explain how she’d opened it for me. ‘It wasn’t pretty. Mum and Dad freaked out about the money, and then about your safety. Liam tried to go look for you. Then we had to find Khloe and tell her. That was worse. Well, Mum was worried, and Sabina was frantic, but Khloe was like… mad. Like, I’ve never seen someone that mad. She didn’t exactly look surprised or sad, I guess. It was weird. She said some mean things about you, about our family and—and then she zeroed in on Dean.’
‘Zeroed in how?’
Parker exhales as though dragging forth the memory is a challenge. ‘I don’t know, dude. We were all busy trying to make sure you were safe, but it sort of sounded as if she accused Dean of being jealous. Said shouldn’t have even been there. Then Khloe’s sister got in on it, and she was a piece of work. It was messy. Pom stepped in eventually and told them to back off. Said that if you left, that was your decision, that maybe Khloe should take a look in the mirror before blaming other people for her relationship ending. There were a lot of tears.’
I push back in my chair, digging my spine into its back with enough force to make the wood creak.
There’s too much energy in my body to think clearly.
I want to track Khloe down and retrospectively yell at her. I want to turn back time and slap past me. I want to never have been the catalyst for all this shit. I’m hoping that bearing down on this chair until my back hurts will prevent me from doing those things.
When I left, things were a mess. I refused to see family. I didn’t want to talk to my few remaining friends. Even though it was I jumped out the window, I was just as distraught and confused as everyone else involved in our relationship.
There is no excuse for my behaviour. Truthfully, some part of me was hoping that, by behaving badly, I had ensured myself a breakup. The idea that one bad action would make me undesirable to Khloe.
She returned to our flat while I was packing up my things. She yelled. I apologised. A couple of plates were thrown at me. I’ve muddled through this with my therapist over the years since. But almost all of it was a rehash of previous fights.
I was a bad partner, selfish, unable to give her the life she wanted, and my family never accepted her as one of us. I don’t know what parts of it are true.
When I said how I’d been feeling, how I had tried to voice my concerns as we planned the wedding, and explained that gender was a part of it too, she claimed that I was just confused. Said I would regret getting married in a suit or cutting my hair.
The sad truth is that was standard fare for that relationship. I don’t believe Khloe loved me all that much by the end of it. We were both just going through the motions, we thought came next.
She only said one thing about Dean in the argument: that I would never let anyone into my life completely while she was around. We had trod that path before. Khloe hated our friendship; jealousy isn’t an adequate word for the way she felt. It went beyond that. And maybe she had some right to feel that way, but the repercussions should have never gone to anyone but me.
In the time it takes for me to process these thoughts, I’m practically vibrating with rage. I feel pale and shaky, and I’m freaking my brother out.
‘Are you alright?’ Parker asks tentatively.
‘I didn’t know.’ The words come out strained as if each one carries the weight of my mistakes. They land in the room like stones, heavy and unmovable. My burden to bear.
Fuck.
Things make more sense now. The way Dean avoided my eye, the pointed glare she sent my way when I did catch her looking. I’m piecing together what happened from her side, and I’m liking myself a heck of a lot less.
I bet she was hoping I would apologise. Or that I wouldn’t ever come home, save us both the trouble of dealing with this.
I can’t change Khloe’s past behaviour, but I can make up for my own. I have to find a way to explain, to apologise in a meaningful way. Tonight. Or tomorrow. Definitely sooner rather than later.
Dean has waited long enough.
Apology rapidly incoming.
It’s a good thing we have two full weeks of uninterrupted time together. That definitely won’t make things weird if she doesn’t want to see or forgive me.
Chapter Eight
Dean
There are a million people in my parents’ house—at least, that’s how it feels until the doorbell rings, and the millionth and one person enters with a wave and a hug.
This was supposed to be a small, intimate dinner, just the two families pressed together, but we forgot that those two families make up half the population of Portsea Island. I fucking hate it.
I’m crammed into the narrow hallway, smiling at the OG Mrs Carpenter, Serena’s mum and trying desperately to sip my drink in small, lady-like gulps that’ll get me drunk fast without ruining the vibe. OGrandma has known me my whole life; I have a photo of her changing Dex’s nappy somewhere whilst a fat baby me giggles in the corner like it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I was zero; it probably was. Yet, somehow, she can’t ever separate the lives of my sisters and me. After the third polite correction on my studies, I excuse myself to refill my abysmally empty glass.
I may be a smidge anxious about tonight’s dinner. I’m still living down the embarrassment that was legging it out of a family gathering earlier this week. I haven’t come up with a good excuse yet, so I keep avoiding adults who might pry.
Based on the way Dad asked if I was feeling better, I’m willing to bet Pom told them I had some kind of food poisoning or tummy bug. It’s a toss-up as to which version is more embarrassing, fleeing from whatever Dex made me feel or running to the nearest bathroom in an emergency.
Cringing, I neck back another gin and tonic and eye up the main source of my stress this evening.
There, stood between the monstera plant I gave Mum last Mother’s Day and the cheese plate, is Callie. She’s smiling at Kyle, laughing as if they have a world of things in common over their cracked beer cans. Who knows, maybe they do have a lot in common. One thing I’ve realised since she arrived at my door this evening to ‘talk’ is that I know absolutely nothing about this woman I may or may not be dating.
She only got invited because Pom is a nosy cow who likes to see me squirm. We were dressed and ready to leave when the doorbell went. I was on all fours, trying to locate my lucky lipstick that I’d unluckily dropped behind the bathroom vanity, so I had Pom answer, and she decided, since we were heading out anyway, that Callie should come with us. What could I say but great, fine, just fan-freaking-tastic! So now here she is, shaking hands with the Carpenter-Browns, smiling, looping her hand around my waist when I stand with her.
It’s awful.
There’s about a 0.01 per cent chance that we aren’t dating. I’m sure of that now. The other 99.99 chances all point to an emphatic yes. It would be alright if this weren’t a big deal. But it is. I’ve never brought someone home. I’ve never so much as voiced a crush aloud to my parents, and now, well, Callie. She’s all perfect smiles, curly brown hair and neat teeth, and I’m not attracted to her. She’s a hot, shaggy-haired masc and objectively pretty good in bed, enthusiastic if not always a bullseye. But she leaves me empty inside.
Watching her make even Pom blush has me considering whether I might simply be dead inside, a hollow husk of a woman without sexual desire at all.
I am broken, faulty machinery that needs to be pulled apart, individually tested and reassembled. If only it were that simple.
That I could manage, but sadly, my body isn’t a machine; my vagina isn’t a sputtering Chevy I can rigorously test and then order a fully functioning replacement. Well, I’m sure I could if I had Kardashian-level money, but that thought is too strange to linger on.
To my immense relief, I feel a brush at my elbow, and I’m faced with the other living cause of my heart palpitations.
‘Sense a second prohibition coming, did you?’
I see Dex’s hands first. Those same rings, on those same fingers, the way their veins pop as they reach for the bottle of Jack, Liam brought before moving to the Coke.
It’s slowly done, an idle hedonic pour, lavishing in more than a single’s worth.
I turn to them, blinking as I process their words.
‘With the current rise in fascism, I wouldn’t be surprised. Although we’ll probably be rounded up and sent somewhere remote first.’
‘We?’
‘Queer people, people of colour, the mentally ill.’ Of which, I am impressively all three. ‘Anyone with a disability.’ We’re going for bingo here.
‘Glad to see you haven’t lost your dark streak.’ They laugh, and it’s a paradoxically bright thing. It irks me. ‘So if you’re not knocking back the drinks for fear of shortages, is lesbian loverboy the cause?’
‘Loverboy?’ I frown, brought back in time to a memory deep in the recesses of my brain. I wonder briefly if they remember it, too. If that word conjures up the same thought to them as it does me, but the meaningless mirth holds no sign of it, so I drop it, burying the thought behind forgotten classmates’ names and GCSE knowledge I wilfully parted with.
It’s time that I admit to myself that nothing with Dex meant anything to them. All the moments between us that I held dear over the years are just fodder for their romantic origin story. I am just a part of their lore, a footnote in the story they tell to woo girls, along with their childhood cat Beans or their brother’s too-big hand-me-downs.
‘You mean Callie?’
‘Do I?’ Their eyebrows dart up, auburn and straighter than I remember them being. I stare at them, momentarily transfixed.
Then, I drag my eyes from their forehead back to my girlfriend(?). She’s hugging Dadu now, or rather, Dadu’s hugging her, hunching Callie over to her five-foot nothingness and enveloping her in a squashy cuddle overly familiar and far too heavily perfumed. The poor woman can’t get a word in edgewise. She’s met Dadu before, once when she bumped into us in town one day. She helped carry her shopping out to the car, very chivalrous, and I’m reminded again that I’m completely fucking unworthy of a girl this…perfect.
She’s smart and kind and pretty, and I forget she exists most days. Time to humour the idea that I might be a cold-hearted bitch after all.
Beside me, Dex snorts. They know exactly what a Dadu hug feels like; they’ve been engulfed by her wide arms more times than they deserve.
‘Careful,’ they lean into my shoulder, their breath grazing the hair around my earlobes, ‘or she’ll drown in the smell of patchouli.’
I fight against my laugh. They’re right, but I don’t want to admit it, so I charge forward. I’m tall and wide at the hips, so it’s more of a barrel, and I almost send poor Callie flying as I lock my hand around her wrist and pull her away from my grandmother’s clutches.
‘What are you doing?’ we ask each other at the same time and then stop.
‘What am I doing? I’m rescuing you.’
‘What am I doing? I was fine. You just hauled me away from a perfectly nice conversation.’
‘Perfectly nice?’ Has the girl gone mad, or did she speak to a different elderly Bangladeshi lady in my parents’ house? Dadu is funny, eccentric, and caring, but also a little mean. She never hides her true thoughts, even when you desperately wish she would, and we’ve only just trained her out of saying some of the more inappropriate ones.
‘Yes. That was very rude, Daena.’
My insides wince at the use of my full name.
Here’s the other thing I should probably fess up about. When I first met Callie, she bugged me. She kept beating me to the right answer in class. I’d bicker, and she’d ignore it. So when I realised she only called me by my birth name, I thought Callie was toying with me and the nauseous sensation I felt at it, well, I mistook it for butterflies. I thought maybe I was finally experiencing excitement. Turns out I just hate it. I haven’t worked out how to tell her yet.
‘Don’t worry about being rude,’ I say in a smiled hiss. I am hyper-aware of my nosy family’s presence, and I don’t feel like becoming the subject of another spectacle.
Around us, Dadu has moved on, unbothered by my apparent social transgression. She’s currently hassling Kyle about something on the meat platter. Dad and Serena are talking to Priti and Liam. Archer and Parker are in the hallway chatting over beers. Only Dex remains close enough to overhear our conversation.
‘I was trying to rescue you.’
‘Daena, I like you. I would like to get to know your family.’ At her own admission, Callie’s eyes go all gooey around the edges. The idea of her liking me evidently enough to make her feel the warm and fuzzy feelings I’ve yet to experience.
By all accounts, Callie is perfect. So why can’t I bring myself to fancy her? She’s exactly the sort of woman people want me to end up with: smart and sensible, respectful, she’s never been late to meet me, we work well together, and most importantly, she’s going to make a lot of money.
Wait. I’ve just heard that back. Something is wrong with that logic.
I guess those are the traits one looks for in an employee, not a long-term partner. Shit.
My face gives way to a frown. The kind of expression my family has always joked about speaks volumes without me needing to open my mouth.
Callie shifts her weight then, which is when I realise she is wearing boat shoes in my parent’s crappy kitchen. Boat shoes! Indoors! There are two major problems with this.
First of all, boat shoes are one of the single worst choices of footwear available to anyone. A crime to both eyes and feet. And secondly, she’s indoors, far away from the ocean.
We’re not exactly a fancy family, but Callie came in on the heels of me and Pom. How did she miss the part where we slipped off our shoes at the front door before walking through the rest of the house?
It’s enough. An excuse I can use to segue my confusion into another feeling. The crumb I can use to demolish the whole bloody cake.
The boat shoes settle it. I’m going to end things with Callie tonight. Now maybe. Yes, I give my arms a shake, readying myself to make the first move.
Until Dex sweeps in.
They’re smiling, offering a cider to Callie in an extended hand. I glare at them, appalled at their timing. I was just working up the verbal responses to end this thing, and they chose now to interrupt. As if I could hate them anymore.
‘Trust me,’ they say with a conspiratorial smile, the one that dazzles everyone. ‘You were about to get a full FBI-scale interrogation from Dadu if you stayed there. She’d be trying to get you to adopt a pug before the conversation even started.’
Callie, to her credit, smiles back at this person she knows nothing about. I wonder if she’s sizing us up together, collecting the creases of their smile lines, the freckles scattered across their sun-kissed cheeks, assessing whether their eyes look as if they could be a cousin of mine. Our house is filled with Ashrafs and Carpenter-Browns alike; for all she knows, we might be one long, convoluted bloodline.
‘I’m Dex, by the way.’
‘Dex?’
‘The prodigal Carpenter-Brown child.’ They offer as if that will trigger a response from this woman who doesn’t understand who the Carpenter-Browns are to my family. I wince as my oversight in explanation becomes clear to them both. ‘It’s my mum’s birthday dinner.’ They finally offer, trying very hard not to show the disappointment that I can see gathering in the downturned corner of their mouth.
Damn, why is being responsible for that such a gut punch? I didn’t tell Callie about them for a reason. They weren’t important to me. They disappeared and had no place in my life for years. That was their doing. Being excluded from the narrative of my life is a natural conclusion, and hurting them was kind of part of the plan.
So why do I wish I could take it back?
I look down and realise the glass in their other hand is a gin and tonic. They’re offering it to me. What the fuck? It’s like they insist on being inconveniently kind just to make this harder.
As if to prove my point and because the universe hates to see me succeed, Dex’s eyes dart to the floor—no, the boat shoes. Of course, they would also notice exactly the one thing I had about Callie.
They look back up at me, the slow flush of red inching up my neck in anger and then back to Callie.
‘Oh hey, mate, this is a no-shoes kind of house.’ Dex says with authority that suggests my parents’ house is as comfortable to them as their own.
‘Oh, really?’ Callie’s voice hitches in surprise. Her eyes dart to me.
It’s weird, and something in the air between the three of us shifts. Callie looks from her feet back to Dex and then back to me. I would let it pass if the silence didn’t feel so heavy. And then her eyes go back from me to Dex, lingering as though a spider web string connects the two of us, and suddenly it all makes sense.
