Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Christina
? Vote for a progressive political candidate
I’m reading in my Cozy Corner when my phone buzzes.
Danny: My bed still smells like you
Danny: It wakes me up in the middle of the night, hard and aching
I squirm on command, face instantly hot.
I wasn’t lying when I said I want to live each day with Danny just trying to do the next right thing, playing things by ear as needed.
But damn, it doesn’t just feel right to have unlocked this sexual layer with Danny.
It feels good. I didn’t realize how much suppressing this part of our connection was strapping me into a straitjacket until it slinked off me.
Me: No smutty footage this week?
Me: A clip of you doing yoga might get me going just as much as the bar kiss
I would have had to revert to child’s pose every two minutes even if I could stop staring at Danny, who wore leggings under his shorts and secured his hair in a small ponytail at his nape.
Charlie made sure to zoom in on me gawking when Danny’s long fingers ran through the brown strands to gather it up.
The entire afternoon’s footage is no doubt a veritable storm of me drooling over the man’s powerful body as he expertly nailed each pose.
Danny: Yeah, I know it makes you hot to see why I’m strong enough to throw you around
Fuck me, his dirty talk does something to me.
Maybe it’s because I lived my whole life so restrained, always on a leash, always avoiding the raunchy or the taboo.
Being dirty with Danny makes me feel whole, somehow.
Like I’m embracing every single thrum of my body, reveling in what this life has to offer.
Me: I’m trying to pick up where we left off in our book
Me: But I hear it in your voice now. And it’s very distracting
Danny: Thinking of you in your Cozy Corner is distracting for me
Me: Why do you like my Cozy Corner so much?
Typing bubbles bounce for a minute, as if he’s struggling to put it into words.
Danny: You deserve peace
Danny: It’s peaceful
Danny: You and your books
Danny: True salvation
Salvation. The first milestone we tackled in my EMDR therapy was for me to believe that I do not need saving from an external force.
That I was not born a sinner. That I’m good and whole just as I am.
But maybe I’ve been laying the groundwork to save myself for a long time, even in the height of my religious fervor.
And just maybe my inner voice really is as intact as Danny says it is. Because choosing one rainy Sunday with him made up for at least a year of Sundays performing on the church stage.
It’s amazing how Danny and I can go from lewd teasing to deep insights in the span of one text.
A little while later, Danny drops an audio recording. I hit play, and Danny’s whiskey voice fills my room. He’s picked up where we left off in our shared banned book, reading the next chapter to me. My whole chest constricts.
And then he drops another audio recording. I press play, and after thirty seconds, my jaw drops.
It’s one of our erotic short stories.
Danny: Think of me when you wet those little fingers
Jesus fucking Christ.
I guess these blasphemous phrases are just a staple of my vocabulary now if Danny’s going to keep saying shit like this to me.
By Thursday, I call him the second I open my apartment mailbox, barely able to contain my excitement.
“Hello? Christina?”
“It’s here! My absentee ballot from my home county is here!”
“Oh?” I can hear the smile in his voice.
I jog up the stairs to my apartment. “I’m so excited about this one. I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to actually do the Vote for a progressive political candidate item for the doc since voting is usually in the fall, but yay for special elections!”
“Well, there’s a special election because the congressman had a heart attack and died.”
I fumble unlocking my door. “Oh, shit, I didn’t know that.”
He laughs. “Why are you so excited for this one, Christina?”
I throw myself onto the couch and close my eyes to think.
“In my high school English class, before I could vote, we wrote this analysis comparing the two presidential candidates’ main speeches at the time.
And I found that one was much more effective than the other.
But that wasn’t the candidate my family had backed.
So I wrote my paper to argue the opposite of what I actually found in my analysis. ”
Danny says nothing, but I can imagine his burning eyes clearly, invested and concerned.
“I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget critical, analytical thinking leading me in one direction, and then blatantly choosing to pursue the other.”
Just another example of cutting down my inner voice, shoving her into a tight box, and suffocating her.
“That’s really hard, Christina.”
“It is. But this TJL item feels like an olive branch to the real me—the one who knew which speech was better.”
A beat. “You know you’re gonna have to repeat all of that on camera, yes?”
I laugh. “Yes, Maestro.”
Explaining why items are on TJL for the camera is having an effect that I didn’t expect.
I made the list to joyfully soak up experiences in the world that I was denied.
But untangling why each item was denied, and how that denial felt, and how it now feels to be free, complicates the journey of joy.
In one sense, the joy is heightened with the explicit awareness of why these seemingly innocuous activities matter.
I’m reminded with each one just how far I’ve come and just how lucky I am to have gotten out of all the toxic bullshit.
In another sense, there’s a pulse of sadness beneath the joy—sadness for the girl who felt she had to suffocate her inner voice and separate from the world to be loved.
It’s oddly the sadness that makes me more committed to the documentary with every checked-off item.
I keep imagining women who might be in the same position I was.
I don’t want them to be stuck there for one more second beyond whatever shakes them loose.
Maybe TJL can be what shakes them loose.
Or maybe, at the very least, it can make them feel less alone.
Thankfully, I now know I won’t be completely lost if some items need to be altered or changed as I am altered and changed through this process. That flexibility in the face of fear may be more important to show on the documentary than anything.
“Speaking of,” I say to Danny, “I have a proposition for you.”
“Another proposition, you mean? Because you already made one on my front porch.”
I roll my eyes, even as my stomach clenches at his low words. “Technicality. I know we were supposed to Dance in a club this weekend, but is there wiggle room to shuffle things around?”
“Of course. What are you thinking?”
“Well, there’s an imbalance now. I met your best friend, but you have yet to meet mine.”
God, I loved seeing the Reeves Boys in action. So much happened wordlessly between them—the implicit choreography of siblings and best friends—but then they could also banter and riff and tease with the best of them.
My heart ached a little to witness what I might have had with my brothers in another life.
“Runzhou’s not your best friend?”
“Oh, be careful saying that aloud. Runzhou’s my soulmate, Danny boy. Ally is my best friend.”
I spent almost all of yesterday with Ally, both of us giggling like teenagers as she pushed for more and more graphic details from the weekend.
“It does only seem fair that I get to meet Ally, then.”
“She agreed to relinquish her Selector role for this week’s Movie Church so we could do the NC-17 double feature from TJL.”
A pause. “You’re inviting me to Movie Church?”
He sounds surprised. I guess it is rather a lot to invite him to my self-proclaimed family time. “Unless you’d rather do the movies another time—”
“No, no,” he cuts me off. “I really wanna do Movie Church.”
Warmth spreads through my chest at the raw earnestness in his voice. “Good. Then you could actually come over on Saturday to film me researching and filling out my absentee ballot first.”
Another pause. “And come over again on Sunday?”
That’s amusement in his voice. He knows what I’m asking, but he’s going to make me say it.
I’m already on edge without spelling this out.
I’ve barely been able to function all week between his dirty texts and erotica recording.
And that doesn’t even account for the all-consuming need that suddenly overrides my senses when a memory flares up at seemingly random moments: his hair in my fist, his tongue burying deep, his hot cum on my skin.
I sigh heavily. “No, Danny. You could arrive on Saturday, stay over, and still be here on Sunday.”
“I guess you do have a really nice couch I could crash on.”
I make an exasperated noise.
He chuckles. “Hey, Christina?”
“What?” I snap.
“Will you have sex with me at your place on Saturday?”
I try to tamp down my grin so he doesn’t pick up on it. “That would be fine, I guess.”
“Fine, huh?” How do I know his every expression just from the inflection in his voice? He’s smirking. “I’ll make it more than fine, baby.” His voice burns darker. “I’ve been fucking starved for you all week.”
A traitorous little whimper sneaks out of me.
He laughs. “Tell me more about Movie Church traditions, then.”
“Yeah, so—”
“And Ally.”
“Okay, well, Ally—”
“And how your day was.”
“I—”
“And what you think of our nation’s current sociopolitical climate.”
We don’t hang up until well past my usual bedtime.
When Danny texts “Coming up the stairs now,” I do one last check in my full-length mirror. Runzhou signed off on my look before he left for K’s, but at the last second, I decide to messily gather my hair up in a big clip on top of my head.
As soon as I reach my apartment’s front door, Danny knocks twice. I inhale deeply, blow it out, and crack the door open just enough to peek my face out at him.