chapter 14
Decca
“He doesn’t sleep in the same room with you?” Bethany asked.
“No.” I avoided her probing and concerned eyes.
“And since you came back from Memphis, he’s been cold?”
“Not cold. Just friendly. And I mean just friendly. He didn’t try to hug me or kiss me. When I was gone, I kind of hoped maybe he’d at least thought about me. He didn’t text me once. But I’m not so na?ve to think there wouldn’t be a learning curve with us. Besides, I’m letting go. I’ve decided to stop trying to control my destiny, and other people, and... see what happens on whatever path the spirit leads me.”
“When you say not control people, does that include my diet?” Soula asked.
“Fair enough. Yes, I suppose it does.” I grimaced. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Soula would eat like shit if I didn’t do her meal preps for her. She didn’t mind, normally, as long as I hid the veggies. But she was pregnant with baby number two and still breastfeeding baby number one, which increased the need for me to get her to eat anything other than barbeque. She still had DHA to produce, and I’d given her the optimum number of calories every day, with every nutrient delivered from the most bio-available sources. That diet plan had taken me months. Could I really give up control over that?
I sighed. “Go ahead and eat your all pork diet and see how long it takes you to poop before you start adding vegetables again.”
“Hey, I eat the coleslaw. Besides, you’ve got Waylon cooking now. When he has time. You can keep feeding him recipes, anytime. He definitely doesn’t have time to find good ones.”
“Oh! That reminds me—”
“You don’t either, Decca,” Bethany jumped in before I could insist otherwise. She was right, of course. Bethany was always right. Especially when it came to people. Anything clinical—that was Soula’s domain. Mine was... I still didn’t know. I considered myself the lost lamb of the cohort. Maybe that’s why I inserted myself so domineeringly into their lives. I’d forced my way in, dared them to move me from their path. Maybe I was always searching for my place. Seeking out ways I could be useful and feel loved, wanted, and respected.
Bethany and Soula did that. Really and truly. It wasn’t their fault that I didn’t feel like I deserved it.
“I’m sorry, Dec, but I’m supposed to be the always busy one. I’m on call half the time I’m not already at work, but you’re the one we can never get hold of. You take on too much of our burdens as it is. You practically birthed Soula’s baby single-handedly, you help out with Sofia all the time, you work constantly at your real job, and you volunteer to sit vigil at people’s deathbeds whenever you’re not there. Have you stopped to think that Gus might like to sleep in bed with you, but you’re not around often enough to have an actual relationship with?”
“I know. I know all my pitfalls and shortcomings. I know I try to buy love wherever I go. It’s a side effect from being left by everyone I’ve ever loved.”
“You love us. We’ll never leave you,” Soula said.
“I know. And that means everything. I just hope that one day I’ll bring myself to believe it, instead of feeling the need to win you over with my usefulness.”
“Trust me. You’re not that useful. We love you in spite of it,” Bethany said, rolling her eyes and sipping her beverage from a tiny straw. She glanced up just in time to meet eyes with the cute, freckled redhead coming into the room, strapped and laden with so many bags, she looked like a New York City commuter instead of a woman meeting her friends at a neighborhood watering hole and pool hall. “Finally, the pool shark’s here.” She took another sip, waving Soula’s new forensic pathology fellow, Quinn, over to the corner high-top we were all squashed around.
“Sorry, I’m late. I walked from the office. What’d I miss?” Quinn asked, unstrapping her totes and messenger bags.
“Decca and Gus don’t know how to be married to each other yet,” Bethany recapped before turning back to me. “You need to give it time, Decca. You have a nontraditional marriage, you can’t expect it to sort itself out in traditional ways. Not immediately. Fuck’s sake, you’ve been gone longer than you’ve been there in the…what? Three weeks since your wedding? What do you expect?”
“I expected him to treat me like a wife. That’s what he wanted, after all. That’s why I proposed. I thought he wanted someone to share meals with, and have s about our bad days, and sleep together. That’s why I offered.”
“What a sacrifice.” Bethany gave me a sarcastic look, like she was calling me on some bullshit.
“I didn’t mean... Yeah, I wanted something in return. I wanted our marriage to be like our friendship. We were never awkward as friends. Even if our fingers accidentally brushed. If I squeezed around a tight corner and rubbed his elbow. We could be real with each other. We could live in human bodies. Now it’s like I’m a poison dart frog if my fingers accidentally touched his, reaching for the coffeepot. I don’t know what changed.”
“Sex changed. Or almost-sex.” Soula said, sipping her Coke. “You can’t have almost-sex and expect things to return to normal.”
Everyone at the table, even Quinn, who wasn’t even around when Soula was undergoing her own existential crisis/romance, stopped drinking and stared at her as if she’d suddenly announced she was going into labor.
Before Waylon, Soula didn’t do relationships. Ever. Thought they were disgusting, slimy things with tails that fell off and regenerated with DNA-shifting cells. She was very clear on that. Sure, she’d have sex, but only as a one-shot deal. The less a man knew about her, the better. Waylon broke down her defenses—and her uterus—and they figured out their own bones of love.
Nevertheless, Soula had been the reigning champ of “having sex and expecting things to return to normal” after, so hearing her say that even almost-sex could change things was a particularly loud record-skip.
“Have you told him what you want from him?” she asked.
“Who are you and what have you done with Soula?” Bethany flattened her hand to Soula’s forehead, feeling her temperature. Soula jerked away from her.
“Ew. Don’t touch my face with your bar hands.”
“There she is.” Bethany rolled her eyes at our persnickety friend. “She’s right, though. Have you been upfront with your own expectations? Have you talked about your feelings at all so far, or has it all been scheduling and chores and mundane shit that keeps a household running? You can’t expect romance to thrive if you only feed it toilet cleaning and sermon topics.”
“No. I’m afraid. It’s not like I’m you,“ I said to Bethany, the platinum blonde centerfold who turned heads wherever she went. People crumpled at her feet. She could get whoever she wanted whenever she wanted, and she’d proven it by snagging the one guy who didn’t worship her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“I don’t look like you.”
She made a scoffing noise. “Honey, I don’t even look like me until I’m made up, hair done, airbrushed, and in a glossy magazine.”
“No, but you look like a celebrity.”
“I don’t,” said Quinn’s small voice. “I’m normal. It doesn’t mean I’m any less deserving of my needs being met than Bethany.”
“Same,” came Soula’s monotone voice.
“Wrong. You’re all gorgeous. Quinn, you can flirt with any guy in here, and he’d want you. And I can’t take a page from your book, Soula, and just ask Gus if he wants to fuck. It’s not even about the sex, it’s the...” I didn’t even know what I wanted. I was making an idiot out of myself.
“Soula’s trying to help. And look, in the past, I tried not drawing attention to the way I look. I’ve worn the baggy clothes and no makeup and it’s not me, but if you need me to—“
“What, Bethany? You think I need you to ugly yourself up because you’re outshining me? I’m so jealous that I want you to—?”
“I would,” she said pointedly. “For you.” She was angry. “But that’s not what you need. Right now, you need to stop lashing out at the people who do love you.”
I put down my drink. It wasn’t the gin that was the problem. It was me. I was a lasher. At my friends. At myself. It hadn’t happened in a while. Not since I’d thrown myself into my spirituality and practice. Not since I’d started studying orthodoxy and its beautiful traditions and rituals that allied so closely with my granny’s teachings and my new understanding of the universe and its cycles.
But I’d been working more and more. And stressing more and more.
And the more work I did, the more stress I felt, the tighter the world felt around me, like I was being caged in by expectations and privilege and loss and all the pressure to win at life. I was a snake coiled in the corner, striking at anything that came near, even that curved, snake-tamer pole that only wanted to help me.
What was Gus’s prayer again? “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”I thought it quietly to myself as I breathed deeply, calming myself, disrupting the emerging adrenaline response.
The breathing I got from Bethany.
“I’m going to grab a beer from the bar. It looks like those guys are leaving the table, Bethany. Are we up next, or do we have to wait longer?” Quinn gestured to the money on the pool table next to us. It was the new pattern that developed after Quinn began her fellowship in Soula’s morgue, whenever our schedules cooperated, which was more infrequent these days. Bethany nodded, still seething and not even looking at Quinn as she got lost in the Friday night crowd.
“You calm?” she asked me, a little softer now.
“I think so. Soula, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insinuate there’s anything wrong with your approach, it just came out as a dig because I... Well, I have no excuse. Bethany, I...”
“I know, honey. You don’t have to say it. You dug yourself in a hole when you asked Gus to marry you. I was worried this would happen. In a way, I’m glad it’s already happening, so you can get it all out of the way and have a real shot at that real marriage you say you want. But first, I think you need to figure out for yourself what a real marriage looks like for you.” She took my hand between hers since we were too deep in our seats to hug. Soula sipped her Coke. She wouldn’t have been in on a hug no matter what.
“Now, you’re right about one thing. Your partnership won’t look like mine, and it won’t look like Soula’s. We all have way different love languages. George and I... Unless you count the thorns on the roses, we don’t do the romance thing at all. Soula and Waylon are trying to have a litter of kids before she hits forty. And Waylon’s a romantic, but Soula’s immune. She just needs to be fed high-caloric foods to feel loved.”
“It’s true.” Soula nodded.
I laughed. I hadn’t realized I’d leaked out enough frustrated tears that my laugh was punctuated by a runny-nosed sniff.
“I’ve seen the way Gus looks at you. I’ve seen the way you look at him. Googly-eyed, both of you. Between the three of us, you might have the most traditional marriage.”
“Take that back.” I smiled.
“No way, TradWife.” Bethany leaned back, smugly sipping her Mai-Tai.
“Ew. TradWife?” Quinn came back just in time. “Decca. No.”
“Maybe that can be your kink. Everyone has one.” Bethany winked. “Try it out. Look, I’m not saying quit your job and defer to him for all financial decisions. Just do a little greety-greet at the front door with a tray full of your famous biscuits and nothing but an apron. It is your honeymoon, still.“ She shrugged. “Might as well experiment. And before you say that’s a page out of my book, it isn’t. In my book I’m completely naked and suspended from a hook in the ceiling, begging him to punish me for not drinking all my water.” Bethany’s eyes glazed over. A slight smile played on her mouth before she bit into her juicy red bottom lip. “Sorry, where was I?”
“Dangling from your bedroom ceiling,” Soula said helpfully.
“Before that. Oh, right. Look, you’ve got no guarantees, anyway. Might as well take a chance. He’s not a priest just yet. Does all the fun naughty stuff need to stop after he gets ordained?”
I blushed. As sexually open as Bethany was, we’d never had such frank discussions when their eyes turned to me. I’d always pretended to be more comfortable with the frankness because that was who I wanted to be, but in actuality, I had nothing to add because I had very little idea what I was doing, or what I even liked. And I had no idea about how “naughty stuff” (which I assumed meant anything kinkier than missionary-position, penis-in-vagina intercourse) and the priesthood corresponded.
His ordination was in a few days. It didn’t change much. As a seminarian, he lived a spiritual life already, but I didn’t know if that would officially change anything on his part.
The internet wasn’t particularly forthcoming about Greek Orthodox priests getting kinky with their wives, so I honestly couldn’t answer where Gus or the Church stood on “naughty stuff”.
“Look, Quinn and I are up, but I will say one more thing I just thought of. Soula and Waylon started as a one-night stand. I couldn’t get George to open up to me until I basically forced him to dominate me. We found the loves of our lives through sex. Maybe sex will be the key to unlocking your marriage, too. If I’m to believe the rumors, Gus was once a very sexual creature.” She wagged her eyebrows like Groucho Marx. Because everything Bethany did was old school.
She was right, though. Not about the sex. Or the naughty stuff. But I hadn’t been open about our communication. Communication was scary when you didn’t have the kind of relationship that could back up the hard words.
Ordination loomed. The entire reason for my proposal.
Maybe after that, Gus would feel more solid. He was in a state of uncertainty right now. On the verge of his calling, but unable to act on it.
I hoped the collar would be enough for him.