Page 12 of Badd Ass
“I feel sort of betrayed, Claire,” I said. “First you move away, breaking up the Gruesome Twosome. Then you dye your hair pink. Andthenyou talk about getting a boyfriend…and now you tell me I like boring guys and insinuate that I’m afraid of intimacy.”
“I just—”
I wasn’t done though, and kept talking over her. “And when was the last timeyoulet a guy get close to the real you?”
“Remember Brian March?”
I nodded. “Tall, super skinny, long goatee, weird taste in movies?”
“Yeah, him.”
I shrugged. “I know you slept with him a couple times.”
“Try twice a month for a year and a half. He was how I got into light bondage.”
“So, you and he…”
“I’d meet him at his apartment after work every other Wednesday and we’d have sex. He’d tie me up, spank me, blindfold me and tease me with ice cubes and feathers and dildos, and I’d suck him off, and then we’d fuck. It was hot.”
“You had a bunch of other guys over every weekend.”
She sipped her wine as it arrived. “Yeah, well, we had an agreement. We weren’t exclusive, we just used each other to express a side of our sexuality we couldn’t necessarily show the other people we dated or whatever.”
I shook my head. “I feel like there’s this whole other Claire I never even knew about.”
“It’s not like I’m a super spy living a double life. I just did some things I didn’t share with you.”
“Because you thought I’d judge you for it.”
She hesitated, and then glanced down at the table. “Yeah, kind of.”
“Why?”
“I guess…it just felt like you wouldn’t understand.”
I tried to picture how I would have reacted if she’d told me this when we were roommates. And I didn’t like the answer at all. “I’m not a good person, am I? Like, I’m a shitty friend.”
Claire laughed, shaking her head at me. “You’re thebestfriend, stupid. And you’re an amazing person. You just…” she paused, frowning in thought. “You need to open your mind more. You need to figure out why you won’t let guys even be your friend, why you won’t have sex with the same guy twice, much less actually date someone.”
“Have you dated anyone?”
She nodded. “Yeah. There’s a programmer where I work. We’ve gone out a few times. Nothing, like, serious. Just…you know, getting my feet wet a little bit, in terms of trying out this whole dating thing.”
“What’s it like?”
“What? Dating?” I nodded, and she leaned back in her chair, swirling her wine in the glass. “It’s fun, to be honest. There’s something to be said for letting a guy pick you up, take you to dinner, and just…talking. Walking around, doing stuff. Gabe and I went to Pike Place the other day and just walked around talking. It was so fun. I mean, there are no expectations for either of us. I told him when he first asked me out that I wasn’t the dating type, and that I wasn’t looking for anything. He said that’s fine, neither was he; he just wanted to spend time with me, because he thought I was cool. That’s…it’s a nice feeling, Mara. Someone who likes me for my personality? Like, actually for real, he just likes who I am? It’s better than sex, in a weird kind of way. I mean, I haven’t even had sex with this guy, and I’m not sure I’m going to.”
I boggled. “Wait, you’re dating this guy you work with, which is weird by itself, by the way—and you don’t plan on sleeping with him?”
She nodded. “For one, we don’t work together, just for the same company. He’s in a whole different department, on a different floor. We met on the elevator, as a matter of fact. And yeah, I’m approaching this whole dating thing as an experiment, right? Like, what will happen if I go into it not expecting anything? If I let things play out on their own, not necessarily expecting sex or a second date or anything, just…take it one step at a time? And I like it. It’s new.”
“Nah, dating is old, we’re just weird.”
She pointed at me. “Actually, I think it’s the other way around. I mean, maybe twenty years ago you and I, the way we approach sex and relationships, ten or twenty years ago we’d have been weird, we’d be sluts—and to some people we probably still are. But I think the way we do things is becoming more common than you’d think, among both men and women. And I think old school dating like I’m trying it, I think it’s actually becoming more and more uncommon.”
“And what is all this supposed to mean for me?” I asked, swirling my wine and finally taking a sip of it.
I didn’t want to be drunk, or even very tipsy, because if I let too much alcohol enter the equation, I wouldn’t be making intelligent, informed decisions when it came to Zane. And if I was going to change the way I lived my life for a guy, I didn’t want it be because drunk Mara was in charge.