Chapter 8
Bridget
Victoria wouldn’t look at me.
I was desperately confused wondering what I’d done wrong, but it wasn’t like I could ask her, because she didn’t necessarily do anything.
I found her already cleaning up from breakfast when I got to the kitchen in the morning, and the first thing she said was, “We’ll be leaving at two thirty today. ”
“Sounds good,” I said, dropping out of a yawn in surprise. “Good morning. Everything okay?”
“Mm-hm. Good morning.” She still didn’t look at me, finished washing her plate and set it on the rack, and she walked past me, not even a glance my way. “I’m getting to work on that gig. Text me if you need something.”
“Hey—are you all right?” I said, taking a step after her and thinking better of it. “Are you stressed about dinner? You can talk to me, you know.”
“Doing fine,” she said, breezy but forced. “Just want to get ahead on things. I don’t like being unemployed. Talk later.”
She stepped into her room, and I stared at the door, my pulse pounding uncomfortably.
It wasn’t that I’d done something to make it obvious I had a crush on her.
Was it? Had I been too… I don’t know, cutesy with her yesterday, while she was on that call?
I’d been squished up against her side, giggling and sharing snacks and talking about her family, and then I knew I’d kept stealing long glances at her while we were cooking together…
I made the mistake of asking the wrong friend, Erica, the hopeless romantic of my friend group, a full-time erotic romance author, and she jumped to the same conclusion she always did, gasping that Victoria had probably caught feelings for me and was shy around me now, and she started workshopping grand gestures to win her back.
Sexy grand gestures. As if what I needed right now was to think about presenting myself naked and wrapped up with a ribbon under the Christmas tree?
Okay, I was going to think about it a little. I shouldn’t have, but, like, you couldn’t blame a girl for thinking it.
I asked Nikki next, who seemed unbothered.
“Family is the hotbed of your oldest learning pathways. Going around them triggers our most base experiences and can pull up behavioral patterns that make us change as people in a blink.”
“Sometimes I forget you studied psychology.”
“Just be there for her however you can, okay? Give her the space to be messy through this.”
I sighed, slumping back in the chair. “So I’m guessing you disagree with Erica’s idea that she’s fallen in love with me and I should win her back with a sexy grand gesture and rose petals leading to where I’m naked in a ribbon under the Christmas tree.”
“Yeah, no, but I can tell you’re turned on by the idea. If you want to get off…”
She was clearly offering to keep me company, and normally I’d have been all for it, but I was…
not… interested. I knew it was because I just wanted Victoria for company, but we weren’t up and admitting that, now, were we?
“I’ll go take care of it myself,” I sighed.
“That new grip vibrator showed up yesterday, so I guess I’ll get in a product review. ”
I shouldn’t have been getting myself off thinking about Victoria hours before I went to see her family, but sometimes a girl did some things she shouldn’t. And I thought about her finding me under the tree.
Props to Erica, it was a fun one.
∞∞∞
The drive to her family’s house was low-key miserable.
I turned the music one tick louder than usual to cover the fact that there was zero conversation, and Victoria stayed on her phone the entire time in the passenger seat, not even looking at me once.
She’d dressed beautifully in this sleek black-and-white dress and her wool coat over top, her hair pinned back into a low, romantic bun, soft contoured makeup, and it was a lousy combination, finding her even more attractive while she clearly wanted nothing to do with me.
The house was huge—not like stupid-money levels of big, but bigger than it needed to be, from the sounds of who all lived here.
I was curious if there was more family who had been regularly around when her parents had been together, but that was a thorny subject to ask about even when she liked me.
Instead, I just parked the car, and I said, “Home sweet home. Er, well, unless it’s not that sweet.
I mean, not to tell you how you should feel, but…
” She looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and I cleared my throat.
“I’m shutting up now. Are you ready? Um… doing okay?”
She met my eyes for an instant, and she looked away sharply with a sigh, and I withered. After a beat, she said, “Do you have lip balm?”
“Oh, yeah, for sure.” I reached across to open the glove compartment in front of her, and I slammed it shut again when I realized I’d left a dildo in it.
I’d forgotten about the discreet public product review video I’d done.
“Hold on, I’ve got some, uh, work stuff. Private things. I’ll go through it—”
She tightened when I said work stuff, and she opened the door, stepping out of the car, speaking too quickly. “Forget it. I’m sure they have some inside. I won’t bother you for more of your things.”
I let out a short, aggressive sigh, slumping back into my seat once she shut the door. “Fuck me,” I said. “What the hell did I do?”
Normally, when I was feeling down, having a dildo on hand close by would be a win. But I couldn’t even use it right now. Talk about lose-lose.
“Guess who,” a voice said when I got out of the car, and I turned with some brightness coming back into me at the sight of Kevin’s boyfriend Sam, dressed in a cute burgundy suit jacket with a bowtie, wearing that grin that seemed like it was permanent.
I relaxed, leaning against the car—Victoria was meeting Kevin up at the front door, so Sam and I had a second over here under the flurries of snow that drifted off the roof, light-up decorations shut off for the daytime around us.
“Well, well, if it’s not Pizza Thief Samuel Clark,” I said, and he put a hand to his chest, mock-scandalized.
“After I tell you all my riveting life stories, you pick up on one time I had no choice but to help myself to one slice of pizza?”
“Okay, save it for the jury.” I held out an arm, scoping out if he was a hugger, and he gave me a tighter hug than I’d expected—my experience with femme gay boys was that they’d give you this little fairy-tap hug, but Sam was about ready to crush my lungs.
“Good to see you,” I laughed. “Am I ever glad I’m not the only outsider assailing this scary fortress. ”
“Okay, level with me,” he said, stepping back, “and I’m not the only gay one assailing it.”
“Oh, yeah, no, for sure,” I said. “I mean, don’t… talk about it, I’m not out to anybody, but yeah, I’m a lesbian.”
“Uh-huh. Did Vicky tell you about the situation?”
“Meeting her family, they’re scary, that’s about the extent of it.”
“Vicky’s mom thinks you two are—” He made scissoring gestures with his hands, and I spat.
“She thinks what?”
“From the sounds of things, Vicky’s very serious insistence she come live with you instead of the family got read the wrong way.”
Oh my god. If they went asking me about dating Victoria, I’d explode. I put my hands up. “Did anybody tell her we’re not?”
“Not yet.” He winked. My face burned.
“Okay, wanna take a shot explaining why we’re slow-walking it?”
“Their mom was not cool with Vicky dating a woman at first, but she’s been grudgingly coming around. So we’re kind of hoping we can just… transfer that acceptance over to me and Kevin.”
“That’s not how anything works.”
He put his hands up in vindication. “See, that’s what I was saying! But Kevin assures me that’s how it works with his family. And I trust he knows this family better than I do, so what the boyfriend says, goes. Or in your case, as the girlfriend says.”
“She’s not my girlfriend!”
He folded his arms. “Okay, but you wish she were.”
I put my head in my hands. “God, you think it’s obvious then, huh?”
“I saw you two flirting yesterday. Kevin thought you two were a couple too when he saw you two on a dinner date that first day—”
“Oh my god, she was taking me for dinner to say thank you.” And I’d about attacked him to keep her for myself. Dammit, I hated facing the consequences of my own actions.
“And you two on the couch? You’re a couple of cuties.”
“Spare me,” I groaned. “She’s mad at me right now.”
“Mad?” He dropped his arms. “How come?”
“I wish I knew. She’s been stony and distant with me all day, and I want to ask her what I did, but she’s denying anything happened. We’ve had breakfast together every day—”
“Like a couple,” he said, the most helpful thing anybody had ever added to any conversation.
“—but she had finished breakfast before I’d even gotten into the kitchen this morning. Ran off to her bedroom to do work, when we normally spend all this time after breakfast together too. And she didn’t say a word on the way over here. She won’t even look at me.”
“Maybe she’s just stressed about her family.”
“I asked her, and she said it’s nothing like that. I don’t know. If she’s suddenly refusing to share stuff like that with me, then that’s its own problem.”
“Maybe she masturbated thinking about you last night and now she can’t look you in the eye.”
“Uh-huh… yeah, I’m gonna say it’s probably not that one.”
“Sammy,” Kevin’s voice said, and I looked over at where he and Victoria came back over to the two of us—she looked a little more relaxed, and then tightened again when she saw me.
That didn’t seem like it was about her family.
I wanted to cry. Kevin hugged Sam and gave him a quick kiss before he turned to me with a lopsided smile, offering the same exploratory hug I’d offered Sam, and I hugged him.
“Hey, Bridget,” he said. “Glad to see you showed up for the sting operation.”
“Oh, yeah, sting operations are nothing new for me,” I laughed. “I’m well-versed in espionage tactics. I’m secretly an instigator for hostile foreign agents.”
Victoria looked even more pointedly away. She was getting sick of my bullshit. I didn’t know why now. I’d been on the same bullshit from the moment she’d gotten here.
Sam nudged Kevin’s side. “Apparently she didn’t know about the sting operation.”
“What—nobody told you?” Kevin said, and I scratched the back of my head.
“Yeah, no, uh… I mean, everyone’s had a lot going on. And it’s a weird situation.”
Kevin gave Victoria a pointed look. Victoria didn’t meet it. At length, he turned back to me and said, “Well, it’ll be fine. Just go in as friends like everything’s normal. Sam and I will handle the talking.”
“You know, it’s not my family,” I said, “but it doesn’t seem like the most sensible route.”
Kevin gave me a grimace-smile. “You’d think.
But no. If I told her over the phone that Victoria doesn’t have a girlfriend but that I have a boyfriend, she’d have an aneurysm.
We have to get her to a place where she can’t outwardly react and we’re all together doing something.
Then she’ll keep the worst of it contained, and by the time she’s able to yell, she’ll have moved into the brooding phase anyway. ”
I scrunched up my face. “This just sounds like you’ve normalized an extreme amount of emotional labor to manage the volatile emotions of somebody who doesn’t know how to regulate them herself.”
Kevin shrugged. “She’s family.”
“Someone knows her stuff,” Sam said.
“Oh, my, uh, one of my best friends has a psych degree.”
“Well, let’s get inside,” Kevin said, standing up taller. “I’m freezing and I could go for some tacos.”
“Tacos?” I said, frowning, as Kevin took Sam’s hand and led him towards the front door. Victoria finally deigned to speak to me with a sigh.
“My family’s… holiday tradition. Passed down from my grandmother to my mother. My grandmother was the one who made it up, but we like to pretend it goes back further than that. Holiday tacos. Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, in a taco shell.”
“That sounds genuinely disgusting.”
She looked away, her voice low and awkward. “I’m sorry I… didn’t tell you. I only found out it was a thing yesterday, and I’m still reeling too.”
“Oh.” I let my shoulders fall. Maybe that was part of why she was so awkward around me.
“I was upset thinking you knew the whole time. I totally cannot blame you if you only just found out too. I thought you had a whole thing about not dating much? What’s with, uh, suddenly assuming you’re bringing a…
a girlfriend around? Are you even…?” I trailed off awkwardly.
There was no good way to ask if Victoria was gay, not when I desperately wanted her to be for all the wrong reasons.
“I am completely single,” she said, not answering the question even though I’m positive she knew what I meant. “And if I did suddenly have a girlfriend, I wouldn’t bring her around to meet my family without even telling them anything first.”
“Okay, that’s sensible. Communication isn’t exactly clear and straightforward in your family, huh?”
She smiled thinly. “You could say that.”
“Vicky, Bridge,” Sam called from the front stoop. “You coming?”
“I’m sorry,” Victoria said, walking ahead of me. “In advance. For the way my family acts.”