Chapter 5 Henry
Henry
Iwas just planing one of the edges of my latest table when my phone buzzed.
I flicked the curl of wood off the edge of the plane, set the thing down, and wiped my forehead where the bandana I wore over my hair had failed to catch a drop of sweat.
It was nine in the morning on a Saturday, who the hell was messaging me now?
Wiping my now-damp hand on my pants, I reached for my phone where I’d set it aside before I started working and checked my texts.
Jamison Duschene: Got a second?
Me: Sure, what’s up?
Jamison and I had been texting irregularly over the past few weeks, initially to vent the anxiety we couldn’t share with anyone else and then just because we got in the habit of exchanging messages periodically.
I wondered if this was going to be a vent - in which case I should probably pull up a chair - or a chat.
Jamison Duschene: My sister knows. She’s getting up my ass and it’s driving me nuts.
Me: That was a weirdly passive phrasing. She knows…how?
Jamison Duschene: Sigh. I kind of sort of caved and told her when she asked me why I’ve been so quiet lately. In my defense, she’s three years older than me and I’m used to doing what she says after a childhood of bullying.
I had a hard time picturing anyone bullying assertive, self-assured Jamison Duschene, but I supposed being a younger sibling would do that to you.
Me: What exactly did you tell her?
Jamison Duschene: Basically that I’d had an HIV scare and we were still testing and that it was making me nervous. I kept it as bare-bones as I could but just those facts kinda tell enough of the story, you know?
Jamison Duschene: And now she’s madly researching HIV transmission statistics and texting them to me. Those are the good texts.
Me: Those are the good ones?
Jamison Duschene: Yep. The bad ones are the ones where she lectures me about safe sex, risk vectors, and how if I can’t have sex like an adult maybe I shouldn’t be having sex.
Me: Oh, ouch. I can see how that would be getting on your nerves.
Sighing in sympathy, I set my phone down and reached for a piece of sandpaper.
I could type with one hand while sanding with the other, and keeping my hands busy seemed like a good idea for this conversation.
With light pressure, I started working on one corner of the table until my phone buzzed again.
Switching my sandpaper to the other hand, I picked up the phone.
Jamison Duschene: This is why I didn’t want to tell anyone, you know?
As if I didn’t feel dumb enough having made The Mistake (?), now I get to listen to my bossy older sister tell me I made The Mistake (?) and how incompetent I must be at fucking sex.
Sex! I am perfectly competent - dare I say, I excel - at sex!
Me: Lol, can confirm that you excel. Tell her that you bet she’s had risky sex before, too, and see what she says. It’s not just men that make dumb decisions.
Me: On second thought, that probably isn’t going to de-escalate the situation, so maybe don’t say that. Also, when did we trademark The Mistake (?)?
Jamison Duschene: I know for a fact that she’s had at least one STI scare, so you kinda have a point, though you’re also right that me saying it would just piss her off worse.
Jamison Duschene: And we trademarked The Mistake (?) last week when we were talking about what to call what happened. You voted for ‘That thing that shall not be named’ but I overruled you on the basis of succinctness.
Me: Yeah, yeah, just because you’re better with words…
I knew me. I wasn’t a wordsmith, I was a woodsmith. And yeah, that wasn’t a word, but who was going to fight me on it, hmm?
Jamison Duschene: Hey, you’re just fine with words. Don’t do that thing.
Me: That thing?
Jamison Duschene: Yeah, that thing where you’re all ‘I’m just a humble woodworker of little brain, I can’t compare to the big professional man.’ It’s bullshit.
I blinked at my phone. Did I do that? I thought I did a pretty good job of projecting self-confidence, and I wouldn’t have said I had a habit of deprecating myself out loud, but as I sorted through my memories of my conversations with Jamison, I realized that yeah, I probably had dropped that sentiment a time or two, mostly when thinking about how my job compared to his.
He wrote legal policies and documentation all day. I…cut wood. Sometimes badly.
Me: Ok but like, you demonstrably write a shitload more than me and I’m fairly sure your vocabulary is twice the size of mine.
Jamison Duschene: Bull. *cough* Shit.
Me: We were talking about your sister. Back on topic, short stuff.
Jamison Duschene: Who you callin’ ‘short stuff’? I’m a perfectly average height.
I grinned at my phone.
Me: For an Oompa-Loompa.
Jamison Duschene: Fuck you! Are you saying I’m orange? I’ll have you know that my self-tanner does not streak orange.
Me: Omg wait you use self-tanner? That might be the gayest thing I’ve ever known you to do, and that includes having buttsex with me.
Jamison Duschene: You just made me snort my Coke. Rude. See if you ever get buttsex again.
Jamison Duschene: BUTTSEX.
Jamison Duschene: Butttttt….sexxxxxx.
Me: You ok over there, dude?
Jamison Duschene: I can’t believe you’re pushing forty and you literally just used ‘buttsex’ in a conversation.
Me: Thirty-five is not ‘pushing forty’, thank you very much. And sometimes you just gotta say ‘buttsex’. BUT BACK TO YOUR SISTER.
Jamison Duschene: Can we not put ‘buttsex’ and ‘my sister’ in the same text tyvm. But yeah I don’t even know what to say to her, or should I just ignore her? Is she worried or just being bossy? I mean of course she’s probably worried but is the right answer to reassure her or fight with her?
I thought about that as I worked at my sanding.
I tried to put myself in the headspace of someone whose younger sibling just confessed that there was a chance they had contracted a life-changing disease following a sexual misadventure.
Yeah, I’d be lecturing my sibling, but what would make me feel better?
Me: Trying to put myself in her shoes, I actually wonder if it might make her feel better to know you’re still in contact with me and we’re sort of in this together?
Like, it somehow makes it feel less like ‘risk and run’ when you can say ‘and my partner and I are still actively trading test results and occasionally just staying in touch to chat.’ I mean, that doesn’t fix the ‘omg safe sex’ stuff, but it might calm down her internal freaking out. Or, well, external.
Jamison Duschene: So I should just drop in conversation with her, ‘And by the way, when I was talking to Hen last night…’?
Me: Yeah? Worth a try, right?
Jamison Duschene: Ig except that means I need to talk to her more and I’m kinda done at the moment.
Me: Just next time it comes up. And you know it will.
I leaned over to blow some sawdust off the table and gauge the smoothness of the edge. Was I satisfied?
Mrow?
The quiet noise nevertheless made me jump.
I’d forgotten that my cat, Curie, had followed me out to my workshop this morning.
Usually she was a housecat, but every now and then she got very insistent about coming with me to work in the shed, and since she’d never strayed off the path between my house and my workshop, I let her follow me when she got like that.
“You’re a good girl,” I told her, leaning down to scratch her rump where it rose into the air as she uncurled from her pillow and stretched. There were an embarrassing number of pillows and cat beds scattered throughout my workshop and home; the princess required soft surfaces at all times.
She chirruped at me and gave her butt a little wiggle, then leapt gracefully from her floor pillow onto the table I’d been working on.
“No, girl,” I protested, trying to brush her off the surface, “we don’t get fur on Daddy’s work, remember?”
The cat, being a cat, ignored me and extended a tentative paw toward the corner I’d been working on. I hoped I’d gotten it smooth enough to avoid splinters, because prying a splinter out of a cat’s paw pad was an activity I never wanted to repeat after the first dozen times.
My phone buzzed, startling both Curie and me. Her fur rose along her back and she hissed at the device as I grabbed for it.
Jamison Duschene: I guess. Maybe it’ll make her feel better to know you’re a friend and not just a nameless hook-up?
Me: Aw, I’m a friend?
Jamison Duschene: Not with questions like that, you’re not. *tongue-out emoji*
Teasing or not, it did sort of warm me up inside to think that Jamison thought of me as a friend.
Friends of circumstance, sure, but friendship could rise out of some weird places and this was just another one of them.
I smiled to myself and plopped down in a half-constructed chair that I’d been working on as a side project.
Me: But seriously, I do feel like we’re friends. It was either never talk to or think about each other again after the embarrassment of The Mistake (?) or bond over it, you know?
Jamison Duschene: You’re too nice to pretend I never met you. I had to recruit you to my side so I’d always have your little apologies waiting around for me when I needed them.
Me: My little apologies?
Jamison Duschene: Yeah, you know, you’re always apologizing any time you feel like you talk too much or get too serious.
I was? I did?
Me: Sorry, I didn’t realize I did that.
Jamison Duschene: Lol.
What was he…oh.
Me: *facepalm*
Jamison Duschene: You’re adorable. And adorkable.
Me: Hmph. I’m big and scary. I’m a bear. Rawr.
Jamison Duschene: You’re a teddy bear. Meep. Or whatever noise teddy bears make.
Me: I don’t think teddy bears make noise. Mostly because they’re inanimate stuffed animals.
Jamison Duschene: Picky, picky. Just because they’re not real doesn’t mean they aren’t real.
Me: I have no idea what that even means.