Chapter 27
HANNA
“So, how’s your life? Fill me in.”
I take a sip of my coffee and look at my best friend across the table.
With it being Thursday morning, she and I are back at our normal coffee shop.
She’s continuing with her annual tradition of wearing a different piece of holiday clothing like she does every year during the month of December.
Today, it’s a black sweater vest lined with hand-woven Christmas trees with lights on them.
“Mm, it’s a lot of the same.” I shrug as nonchalantly as I can muster. I have yet to tell her about how Miles slept at my place a few nights earlier or that I fired him as my client.
“Santa doesn’t bring toys to children who lie,” she says with enough attitude for the entire coffee shop to feel. She purses her lips out at me and curls one of her brows. “I can see it in your eyes, something is going on with you.”
“It’s nothing. Everything is very much the same.” I shake my head at her but hold my cup in front of my mouth so she can’t see my smirk.
After crawling into bed with me, Miles and I slept the rest of the night uninterrupted.
I had patients early the next morning so, much to my dismay, I couldn’t stay in bed all day with him like I wanted.
After waking up with him next to me, I simply watched as he breathed at a steady pace.
Up and down. In and out. He finally opened his eyes when I reached a finger across and began to trace his features with it.
Smiling, he stretched an arm out and pulled me flush into his body.
I still remember how he smells several days later.
“So then why did you ask to meet me back at our normal time? I thought we had to meet earlier because you have to see the sexy fireman at this time?”
“I’m not seeing him as a patient anymore.” I hold my breath after I answer her question and wait.
“Why?” She leans into the word. “Did he quit or something? Men are so dumb like that, thinking they can figure their shit out on their own. You know, if that was true, God would never had made women—” She freezes mid-rant and stares at me blankly.
“You said you aren’t seeing him as a patient anymore?” she clarifies. Her eyes grow and I can see her connecting the dots in her mind.
“That is what I said.” The smirk I’ve been fighting is starting to win. I wrap my lips around my teeth and stifle a laugh.
“So are you seeing this sex god of a man in different ways? Naked, I hope?” she exclaims loudly. So loudly that the older woman sitting at the table next to us looks up from her magazine and glances at us.
“Rae, keep your voice down,” I hush my friend. I can already feel my cheeks burning red.
“Well, I’m sorry, sweetie, but it’s been a minute since you–you know,” she says, narrowing her eyes on me.
I scoff. “Oh, like it hasn’t been awhile for you too.”
“Actually, it hasn’t,” she replies quickly, giving me a confident look. My jaw nearly detaches from my face.
“What!”
This has us both trying to stifle our howls.
There aren’t enough people chatting to muffle our conversation and the playlist every coffee shop seems to use is doing nothing to drone us out either.
Anyone paying close enough attention would easily hear two grown women acting like teenagers talking about sex over coffee.
“Let’s just say my future husband knows how to treat a woman right.” She smiles.
“Oh my gosh,” I gush. “I’m so happy for you. So Leon is working out then?”
I know they have gone out a few times because of the texts we exchanged but I didn’t realize they’d slept together.
“Leon is working, doing, blessing, and succeeding,” she sings. I laugh when she brings her hands in front of her in a prayer position and lifts them towards the sky.
“I knew going out with him was a good idea.”
“Sweetie, I knew going out with him was a good idea. I just hate the fact that my mother will love him. I’ve done a pretty good job over the last thirty-six years of going against everything she’s wanted for me.
And here I am rolling up with a man she would have designed for me herself if I’d let her. ”
“So what did she say when you told her about him?” I ask, bracing myself for the words of Rae’s mother. Rae is outspoken and confident in every sense of the words. But her mom? Look out.
“Oh she doesn’t know he exists,” she chirps before hastily bringing her coffee to her lips. My mouth slowly falls open again.
“You little chicken,” I say slowly, gawking at my friend. “You haven’t told her about him? But you met him back in October when we went to the bar. You’ve been seeing him all this time and you haven’t told her about him?”
“She doesn’t need to know about him until I have a ring on my finger. Then she can know about him. But enough about me, I wanna know about you and the sexy fireman.” She waves a hand at me, indicating that we’re moving on in our conversation.
“Would you stop calling him that? His name is Miles.”
“Okay, Miles, the sexy fireman then. He’s not your patient anymore?”
I shake my head. “Nope. He is officially not my patient which is why I am here having coffee with you.”
“So what is he now? Your sexy little play thing?” The corner of her lips pull back.
“You have said the word ‘sexy’ far too many times for this early in the morning,” I groan.
“Am I wrong? Do you not also think he’s sexy?”
Of course I do. I’ve thought he had some level of sex appeal to him since the first time he walked into my office but I’m not going to talk about that over my honey vanilla latte at nine in the morning.
“He’s sweet. And kind. And he can cook, which is great because I do not,” I say, managing to not add another ‘sexy’ to our word count.
“That’s lovely, sweetie, but I don’t really care. I wanna know if he’s as good in bed as he looks like he is,” Rae deadpans, looking bored with my anecdotes.
I lick my lips and press my glasses higher up on my face. “I wouldn’t know.”
She blinks hard a few times before coming out of her shock. “You haven’t slept with him yet?”
I shake my head.
There’s a long pause as her face morphs into a mix of disappointment, horror, and confusion.
“Is he broken or somethin’?”
Laughing a few times, I take a breath. “No, he’s not broken or somethin’. We just…haven’t gotten there yet.”
Suddenly I’m feeling very shy about where our conversation has led.
“And why not? I’d be climbing that tree as soon as I possibly could if I was in your shoes. You need to get some girl. Bad.” She enunciates her final word so much that if she had written it down it would be bolded, italicized, and underlined.
“We only just became…” I pause. “Whatever it is we are. I don’t even know if I’m his girlfriend or just a friend who he kisses—”
“So you’ve kissed! Thank god, for a moment I thought you were going to tell me he’s some kind of devout religious type who wants to wait for marriage,” she interrupts, waving a hand in my direction.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” I sigh with an eye roll.
“Exactly!” She perks up. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I just want to make sure you’re being taken care of. We have needs as women, you know. And when we don’t have our needs met”—she leans over the table and drops her voice—“we start to go stir crazy.”
“You said it, sister,” a new voice joins the conversation. It’s from the woman sitting at the table next to us, clearly eavesdropping on our conversation instead of reading her magazine like she’s been pretending to do.
“See, she gets it,” Rae says, pointing to our new friend. They exchange a devious look of understanding.
I can’t believe I’m talking about my lack of a sex life with a random elderly woman over my morning coffee.
“Would you just calm down? I’m fine; my needs are fine. Miles and I are getting to know one another and I don’t want to rush anything.”
“Yes, yes you do. You want him to rush you. Over and over again.”
“You are a lost cause,” I lament, shaking my head at her and finishing my coffee.
“All I’m saying is that when it happens, and it will, that man is going to rock you into the next century. And I’ll be so happy for you when he does.” She smiles widely at me.
“And so will I,” the older woman adds. When she leans over and holds out her glass, Rae and I burst into a fit of laughter and clink our glasses to hers.
Later that morning I’m sitting in my office across from one of my favorite clients. I know I’m not supposed to have favorites, but if I had to pick, he would be it.
“Do you know what Malcolm told me he and Ophelia did last weekend? They had sex behind the bar. Behind the bar. Can you believe them? That’s disgusting.
Definitely goes against the health code.
And more than likely on the security footage for the bar they’ll probably watch together later, knowing them.
Just, whatever you do, don’t go to Butcher and Block for a few weeks.
Let them wash the bar a few times before they serve you some sort of sex drink,” Conrad scoffs, shaking his head.
He might complain about his friends more than not, but I know what it really is. His own way of showing how much he cares about them. No one complains or talks about something as much as he talks about them if they don’t actually love it.
“Are you jealous?” I ask, lifting my eyes up from my notepad like I know he hates.
“Jealous? Of them?” He asks as if it’s the most asinine thing he’s ever heard. “Of course not. I’m doing perfectly fine in that department, thank you very much.”
This makes me smile. He’s mentioned to me before how he’d met someone.
A client he’s helping design the tech for a new fitness studio in the area.
I’ve had plenty of patients come through my doors knowingly queer but he is the first to discover this through his time with me.
Knowing I’m a safe place for him to land while he works through this always makes my therapist’s heart smile.
“I’m glad to hear that. You’re being safe, right? Using protection and all of that?”
“Yes, mom,” he groans. “You’re just as bad as Margaret.”
“Hey, I only want to make sure my patients are well taken care of. That’s all.”
“What about you?” he shoots back. The question catches me off guard.
“What about me?”
“Are you well taken care of?” He lifts his brows at me and smirks.
“My personal life is none of your business.”
“Why? You ask me about my personal life all the time,” he scoffs.
“I’m your psychiatrist. It’s my job to ask you about your personal life.”
“I bet you’re being taken care of by that man who was in here a few weeks ago.
The one who looks like a Captain America rip-off.
There was definitely something going on there.
” He nods his head and frames his chin with his thumb and index finger.
“Big time sex vibes coming from you two the last time I was here.”
“Why is everyone suddenly so concerned about my sex life?” I cry out.
Between him and Rae my entire morning feels like it’s been surrounded by the topic of if I’ve recently gotten laid or not. And the fact that I haven’t is becoming more and more apparent.
“Who else is concerned about your sex life? Is it Captain America? You know, it’s good to have open conversations about past sexual partners with new ones. Shows a healthy level of communication and emotional stability.”
“‘A healthy level of communication and emotional stability?’” I ask, piquing my voice up. “Who the hell are you and what did you do with Conrad?”
“I couldn’t sleep one night so I did some light reading online. I’m trying this whole ‘improve myself for the sake of other people’ thing, you know.”
“And your light reading was what, some medical journal on relationships?” I ask.
“No, actually, a blog I stumbled across about being in a queer relationship. I like mine, a lot, and I’d really like to not fuck it up. I figured some research into the topic would do me some good.”
My brows push together and I pout, giving him the classic puppy dog eyes look. “Conrad, that is the sweetest thing ever!”
“Stop,” he deflects, suddenly regretting his decision to tell me about the blog he read. “Now you sound like Margaret.”
“You know, I’d like to meet her one day. I think she and I would get along swimmingly.”
“Oh, you’d get along well with all of them which is what terrifies me,” he scoffs. “Wait, weren’t we talking about you and your sex life with Captain America?”
“I don’t have a sex life with Captain America,” I deny because technically, I don’t. Not yet at least.
“Isn’t he your patient? There has to be some sort of ethical issue around sleeping with your patient.”
“First, he’s not my patient anymore but that’s also none of your business. And second, as I’ve said, I’m not sleeping with him. So let’s leave it at that.”
He scowls at me from across the room, sinking deeper into the blue velvet couch I sprang for when I rented the space. “Someone’s grumpy when it’s been awhile.”
“Says the guy who came to me because he’s tired of people calling him grumpy,” I rebuke.
“I found this wonderful cure for grumpiness though, wanna hear what it is?” He leans over his knees, waves me closer, and whispers as if God himself will hear us. “Really good sex.”
“I hate you,” I tease, throwing my pen at him and sitting back in my chair. “Now tell me about the dream you mentioned last week. I want to hear about that.”
When he groans, I know we’ve moved on from talking about me which I’m grateful for. The more people bring it up, the more I start to think about it. And the more I think about it, the more I wish I was seeing Miles later tonight.