After the Shut Up Ring

Chapter 12 – Brandon

“You expecting titty pics?”Shane asks over his shoulder as he squats beside an SUV, rips its hubcap off, and throws it through the car’s busted-out rear window. “You know they’re paying us to lash these here cars, right?”

I flip him off, shove my phone in my pocket, and make quick work of lashing the car in my row to the deck. Doesn’t matter how much I dick around, I’m still ahead of him. He’s slow as shit.

Angie hasn’t answered my text yet. It’s been three hours. She’s at work, too, but she usually has no problem finding time to get back to me.

She’s mad. That’s good. I just have to keep reminding myself that.

I knew Tyler was an asshole, and I assumed he was a terrible boyfriend, but I had no idea that he’d done such a number on her. She’s got opinions on shit, but you have to pry them out of her. Everything is always fine. Step on her foot by accident? It’s fine. My dick slips, pokes her in the ass, and she jumps ten feet and her eyes tear up? It’s fine.

Forget about her mom, make a bad joke about meth heads, and her face goes white as a sheet? It’s fine.

She’s trained as well as a whipped dog, and it fucking hurts my heart. She won’t fight back. She just gets real quiet, changes the subject if we’re talking, and then she’ll do something nice for me—like freshen up my beer or stroke my neck with her spider fingers—like I wasn’t the one who made her feel bad.

Apparently, between the two of us, I’m the one who knows how to be in a healthy, functional relationship. It’s ridiculous. The longest I’ve ever been with a woman was a six-month situationship where she ghosted me because she found another guy, and I didn’t pick up on that fact until I ran into her a couple weeks later at the bar, and it was awkward, and I had to figure out why.

I did have parents who loved each other, though, so that’s my leg up. I know that it isn’t normal for a woman to be agreeable all the time. It’s unnatural.

She needs to understand that she can get pissed and let me have it. I’m not perfect, and neither is she. We’ve been going out for four months now, and they’ve been the best months of my life, hands down, but in some ways, we’re still stuck at the starting gate.

I’m not Tyler Reynolds. I don’t need her to be anything other than herself, and I don’t need her to soft-pedal it when she’s mad because my ego can’t handle a woman talking back.

It makes my skin crawl when she pretends like she’s fine when she’s not, and it makes me fucking nervous. If a woman feels that she can’t be straight with you, it’s gonna come out of left field when she’s done with you. I’ve never had that experience personally, but I’ve sat next to plenty of guys down at Donovan’s while they cried over their beers. ILA Local 249 isn’t exactly known for emotional intelligence.

“Hey, how was Broyce’s?” Shane finishes with the SUV and moves on to the next vehicle, stopping to struggle with the knot of lashings that he grabbed off the rack like a kid grabbing candy from an unsupervised bowl of Halloween candy. He’s been doing this as long as I have, and he still hasn’t figured out that if you take them by the hooks and then lay them out flat, side by side, you don’t need to untangle them like Christmas lights later.

I pick up a single strap from my neat line and mosey forward. In general, I hate lashing, but it’s pouring rain today, so I don’t mind working under cover, even though the deck is stifling and the fumes are thicker than usual because of the humidity.

“Fine.” I kneel, pop the hubcap, throw it in the back seat, wind the strap through the wheel, and secure it to the deck before Shane gets a strap free from the rat’s nest he’s made.

“What’d you get?” he asks.

“Steak.”

He snorts and gives up trying to make conversation, at least for a minute or two.

Angie’s salty about dinner last night at Broyce’s. Or about me pushing her when she was obviously pissed and said, “It’s nothing” when I asked her what was wrong. Or both. No reason it can’t be both.

She did say Broyce’s was too fancy for little kids. I figured she just didn’t want to be a bother, but I’ve got money. I can tip enough that no matter what the girls spill by accident, the server won’t act bothered. And we were never going to get there again if we waited for Tyler to take his parenting time so we can have a date night. I wanted Angie to have a nice dinner. I wanted a redo.

So I told her to get everyone dressed up for a nice surprise. When I pulled up in front of the restaurant last night, she sure as shit was surprised.

I didn’t think our first date could be topped for awkwardness, but I was wrong. She spent the entire meal watching the girls like a hawk, dabbing every crumb and blotting every drop that fell on the tablecloth, moving their water cups away from the table edge each time they took a sip, ducking under the table every time their napkins fell off their laps.

At least Angie ate this time. She shoveled a fifty-dollar filet into her mouth like there was a prize for finishing first. Then she made herself smile and thank me when she was clearly miserable.

I didn’t have much time to talk to her afterwards. When we got to Mom’s house, she sent the girls ahead, but Mom was at the Seahorse Inn, so they had to wait on the porch for Angie to come with the keys. We had just long enough for me to ask her what’s wrong, and for her to say “nothing,” and for me to say, “bullshit,” and for her to say “I said it’s nothing, so I don’t know what you have to be mad about” before she slid out the truck door with her nose in the air, huffing all the way down the front walk.

Now I’ve got our first real argument memorialized in a text message chain, and she’s left me on read.

angie call me back

i know youre pissed

I’m not pissed.

talk to me. if I was pissed at you, id talk to you about it.

Dots. Minutes and minutes of dots. And then—

I told you I didn’t want to go to Broyce’s with the girls.

yeah, you did

Yeah. I did.

i didnt get that you felt that strongly about it. i wish you wouldve said.

I did say.

i just dont get whats so bad about it

You don’t take two kids under five to a fancy restaurant.

whats so bad about it?

No one looks at you if the girls make a mess or if they’re noisy.

they were fine

I mean, for kids that young, they were great. Only one glass of water got knocked over. They both left most of their steak on their plates, but they demolished the bread basket, and it’s my money to waste. Tamblyn got a little loud and whiny toward the end, but she wasn’t near as loud as the blowhard at the bar who was a few martinis deep.

That old couple beside us kept looking at me all judgy.

i didnt notice.

I know.

why do you care what they think? what anyone thinks?

Easy for you to say.

could be easy for you too

K.

you shouldnt let what other people might be thinking ruin your night

dont let other people get in your head so much

angie?

come on angie

There were so many dots, so many long pauses when she must have deleted what she was going to say. I called. She didn’t answer. Finally, she texted back.

Sorry. It’s really no big deal. Don’t worry about it.

It’s my bad.

I’m going to bed now. Goodnight.

goodnight beautiful. well talk tomorrow.

As soon as I woke up, I texted her good morning like usual. I still haven’t heard back.

Her “sorry” makes me feel like shit. I don’t want “sorry.” I want what she gives me in bed and when we’re hanging out alone or with the girls, having fun or just relaxing, when she lets her guard down, and she’s like she was when we were younger, before she started hiding herself away.

I want her to trust me. With all the stuff.

But how do you make someone trust you? Especially when they’re gun-shy.

I’m lucky she told me about the herpes and didn’t just hold me at arm’s length forever. I know she still worries about it, but she’s really uncomfortable when I bring it up. Unless we’re deep in the thick of it, she doesn’t like me looking at her pussy. She won’t let me go down on her, and she won’t talk about that, either.

She hasn’t had an outbreak since we’ve been together, and as far as I know, I haven’t caught it. If I do, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Honestly, mathematically, I should have it by now. The internet says twelve percent of people have it, and they say maybe like ninety percent don’t even know it. I haven’t fucked that much in my life, but statistically, Angie can’t be the first woman I’ve been with who’s had it.

And that twelve percent doesn’t even count mouth herpes, which can be spread to your junk. Fifty to eighty percent of people have that. That’s wild. Like what else do eighty percent of people have in common?

And yet, it’s like this huge secret that no one talks about except to make jokes. Even Angie and I can’t talk about it amongst ourselves.

I get that it’s different for a woman. Worse. Everyone still jokes about the time Big Will from Sterling’s gang got crabs from a chick he picked up at the Cancun Cabaret—and he still laughs his ass off about it, too. But then back in high school, there was a rumor—just a rumor—that Michelle Papadakis had something, and no one would date her. I haven’t seen her around in years, but I run into her brothers all the time.

When you think about it, that’s some scarlet letter shit. It’s the 21st century. We’ve got AI talking to you in the chat box. You can pay to go to space. You can get literally anything delivered to your door, but a disease about as bad as poison ivy can ruin your life. That’s crazy.

I never really thought about it much before Angie. I thought STDs were nasty, but they weren’t my problem because I always used condoms. It’s my problem now. If I want my woman totally comfortable in bed, I’ve got to figure out a way to undo the mindfuck that’s got her acting like her pretty pussy is gross. And that’s secondary to figuring out how to convince her that she’s allowed to be mad at me when I fuck up. Girlfriends are hard.

“Hey,” I call to Shane as I snug up the lashing. “How do you get a woman to talk to you when she’s mad?”

“You mean, like, how do you get her to stop throwing shit and talk?”

“No, like if she won’t talk about it. How do you get her to tell you what’s on her mind?”

“That’s really a problem? That she’s not bitching at you?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know why I asked.”

Shane snorts. “I don’t know why you did, either. No woman has ever had a problem telling me what I’m doing wrong.”

We finish the rest of our row in silence. At the meal hour, we pick up subs and eat together in my truck to listen to the Gonzaga game.

The afternoon goes slow. The drivers are running behind, so we have to stand around a while with our dicks in our hands. I get paid regardless of whether the operation runs smoothly, but I don’t have the chill some of the old guys have yet. They’ll straight up slow-walk the work to get another hour or two. I’ve got a life. Yes, I want to get paid, but I also want to finish while I still have feeling in my legs. The steel decks are hell on your feet no matter what insoles you’ve got.

I get anxious when the dinner hour comes and goes, and there are still vehicles coming up the ramp, and I’m still on read.

Angie has class tonight at the community college, so we don’t have plans, but I’m not about to leave this be. Thankfully, at eight, the port captain calls the operation. We’re finishing tomorrow. I have thirty minutes to get to my truck, book it across the terminal, drive two miles to campus, park, and meet Angie when her class finishes.

I know where the building is because we went to campus the day before her first class so we could scout the place out. It was a good day. The girls ran around the quad, and I showed them the hill I used to sled down when I was a kid and we still had blizzards in winter in Maryland.

I make it with no time to spare. It’s dark and raining when I step into Angie’s path. She’s making a beeline for her car. She doesn’t recognize me at first. Her eyes round, and she stops short. She’s got a big black umbrella, and her black jacket is zipped up to her chin. She’s loaded like a pack mule with a backpack, a laptop bag, and her purse.

“Brandon?”

Like every time she says my name, my lower abs tense, and my dick twitches.

Like every time we see each other, our feet bring us together until she has to tilt her neck back, and I have to drop mine forward. She raises her umbrella to cover us both. I slide her laptop bag off her shoulder and sling it over my own.

“What are you doing here?” She’s flustered, but she’s not hostile.

“Checking on you. You left me on read.” My face is cold and damp despite my hood, but my cheeks burn. I sound whipped. I guess I am. Why should I hide it from her?

She dips her eyes, shy and sweet, and her mouth curves. “I was busy.”

“You were mad,” I say as gently as I can. She lifts her gaze. There’s a struggle there. I wish I could fight it for her.

“I didn’t want to take the girls to Broyce’s.” She curls her free hand into a fist and hides it up her raincoat sleeve.

I nod. I keep my mouth shut. I make my face look like I’m listening so that she knows I am.

“It was stressful, worrying the whole time about how the girls were gonna act. I don’t like people looking at me.”

I want to tell her that she doesn’t have to worry, that she can choose not to care—I sure as hell don’t—but I already said that, and she did not take that advice on board.

I open my mouth to tell her that she should have told me that she didn’t want to go, but I already said that, too. And as she already pointed out, she did tell me, and I didn’t listen.

So what do I say?

Do I tell her that I just wanted her to have a nice dinner? That she can pick the restaurant next time? That sounds logical, but it doesn’t feel like it’s the right thing to say either.

She gazes up at me, braced, ready to duck back behind her defenses. Why is this hard? I need to stop ragging on Shane for being a dumbass because apparently, I am, too.

I want her to be honest with me.

So when she’s honest, I have to be cool.

I have to listen, but I already fucked that up, and I can’t reverse time.

She blinks, the hopefulness that broke across her face when she recognized me fading.

Out of desperation, I blurt out, “Yeah, I get that it sucks having people judge you and stressing about spills and shit when you just want to enjoy your meal.” I basically just repeat what she said to buy time.

“Yeah. It does suck.” Her expression softens.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get that earlier.”

“It’s okay,” she says.

“It wasn’t okay, but it is now,” I say as gently as I can, taking the umbrella so I can hold it higher. She huddles closer.

“You’re soaking wet,” she says. She pulls her shirt hem out of her sleeve and wipes the rain off my face.

I did it. I said the right thing. I made it better. I’m a god among men.

“I’ll listen better next time,” I say with the full knowledge that I had no idea that I wasn’t listening until I’d already done fucked up. We talked it out, though. We’re on the same page again. “We good?” I ask, just to be sure.

“We’re good.” She smiles.

I kiss her. She sinks into me, her breasts crushing against my chest. Raindrops patter on the fabric above our heads and the pavement beneath our feet. Except for the lamps lighting the pathway, the darkness is deep like it gets at night in spring when the cloud cover is thick.

We’re alone. The rain has dropped a curtain on the world around us. Angie sighs, and I feel like the luckiest man alive because she gazes up at me, and she’s happy. I did that. And that makes me pretty fucking happy, too.

“Ready?” I say. “I’ll follow you home.”

She nods.

“Let me take this.” I slide the backpack off her shoulders and onto mine. She grabs my hand.

I don’t expect anything else, but when we’re almost to the car, she glances over, squeezes my hand, and says, “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Ang,” I say back. It’s the most natural thing in the world, and also, the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me.

It feels precious.

It feels right.

And as delicate as glass.