Manties in a Twist (The Subs Club Book 3) (10 page)

I didn’t know if I was really stupid or not. My mom said I just saw the world differently, but that sounded like the kind of thing moms said when their kids were basically dimwads. I definitely cared more about my own life than world issues. Which was probably why I always kind of sucked at the Subs Club. Because I used it more as hanging-out time than a way to talk about Important Shit.

But I wasn’t, like,
not interested
in things besides me. For instance, I loved Stephen Hawking’s books. I didn’t understand everything in them, but I really was fascinated by his ideas. I’d watched like eight documentaries about him, and
The Theory of Everything
was pretty much my favorite movie. Except watching it for the first time was suspenseful, because I knew he was gonna come down with that disease, I just didn’t know when. It was like
Ghost Dad
, where you know Bill Cosby’s going to die, but they have all those red-herring almost-deaths to keep you on your toes.

“So the move went okay?” Dad asked.

“Yeah. Ryan and I love the place. We’ve been decorating like fiends.” I paused. “What’s chevron?”

“An oil company.”

“No, but, like, Dave called my new curtains chevron.”

Dad sped up to keep someone from passing us. “Uh . . . I don’t know. A color, maybe? Why didn’t you ask Dave?”

I shrugged. “I dunno.”

“So you like this guy?” he asked. “Ryan, I mean?”

I shot him a pretty world-class
duh
look. “I wouldn’t have moved in with him if I didn’t. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Literally.”

Dad moved his jaw back and forth for a second and glanced out his window. “And you’re still doing the—the stuff your mom does? At the clubs?”

“God! Don’t put it like that. We don’t do the same stuff. But, yeah, I still do BDSM.”

He nodded and didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he adjusted the AC and said, “I actually wanted to talk to you about that.”

I got really freaked then. A few months ago, Miles tried telling his mom he was into kink, and she didn’t approve at all. My mom’d had to give her a talking to, which had been supes awkward. What if my dad was about to tell me he thought I was fucked up or something?

Which would be weird, since he’d known since I was twenty-two. I’d told Mom, and she’d told him, and then she’d told me she’d told him, and said he was “coming to terms with it.”

He cleared his throat. “As you know, your mother and I separated for several reasons. One of them being her . . . needs, which at the time I didn’t understand very well.”

I’d been eight when they’d split up. When I was sixteen, I’d found Mom’s BDSM stuff in her closet when I was looking for a hat to borrow for a school project. We’d had a talk, and she’d explained what BDSM was and how it was totally normal but that a lot of people didn’t get it. I’d been too shocked to tell her I watched leather porn all the time. Then she’d told me about my grandma starting a leather group for women in San Francisco in the 1970s, which was awesome but crazy. And then I hadn’t been able to watch BDSM porn for like two months after that, because gross, my mom.

Anyway, she’d explained that Dad hadn’t shared her interests, and that was part of the reason for the separation. I’d gotten sort of pissed, because I thought that was a stupid reason to split. Then she’d reminded me cheating was the
big
reason, and I was like,
Oh yeah
.

“We, uh . . .” Dad trailed off awkwardly. “She tried to introduce me to some of the—the lifestyle . . . aspects . . . but . . .”

Oh man. This was stuff I didn’t need to hear.

“I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. At the
time
.” He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “You okay with all this?”

The government should probably give free cyanide capsules to everyone, just in case we ever get captured by terrorists or our parents start talking about sex in front of us. “Yeah. For sure.”

We passed a billboard for
Abortion Is Murder
.

“Over the past couple of years,” he went on, “I’ve realized that I do have a certain amount of the interest in me. I’ve done some experimenting. With Kim. You remember Kim?”

Kim had been the HR director at Dad’s firm. She’d left the company a few years ago to get back into horses. I knocked my head gently against the window. “Yeah.”

“I’ve also acquired a considerable amount of equipment.” He bobbed his head as road signs flashed by us.

Gross.

I sat up and checked the speedometer. “You’re going, like, eighty.”

He also had the wheel in a death grip. He slowed down. “Sorry. I just rarely talk about this out loud. Guess I’m nervous.”

I seriously had no idea what to say.

“I’ve been updating my living will. And I’d like you to be in charge of—when I . . . pass away—going to the house and . . .” He took a breath. “Clearing out all equipment of that nature.”

“
What
?” Fucking for real? I already had a mom who stepped on guys’ balls in high heels, and now I had a dad who was gonna make me throw away all his butt plugs when he died?

He shot me a glance. “I need someone to do it. And I’d rather it be someone who understands and is compassionate than . . . You can donate it, throw it out, keep it . . .”

“Why would I
keep
it?” This just kept getting worse.

“Well, throw it away, then.” He sounded vaguely annoyed. Which was unfair, given that he was the one crapbliterating all the standards of decent father-son conversation.

“Did you come all the way out here to tell me this?”

He sighed. “I came back in part to apologize in person to your mom for some of the things I said to her years ago. About her lifestyle. Particularly things I said when she told me you had come out about being . . . having the interest.”

Now I was curious. “What did you say to her?”

My dad took his hand off the wheel to rub the black fuzz around his bald spot. “At the time, I was worried about you. And I thought— I implied that maybe she’d encouraged you to believe you were like her.”

“You think she made me kinky?”

“I don’t think that anymore.” His voice was kind of clangy and jarring, like when you try to put a pen between the bars of a fan. “Anyway, I figured while I was out here—”

“That’s our exit.”

“Shit.” He swerved into the exit lane. “While I was out here, I thought I’d talk to you about the will. I wanted to visit you anyway, and this way I get a chance to talk to each of you face-to-face.”

He slowed as we came off the ramp. Got in the left lane at the light.

I watched the turn signal blink on the car in front of us. “Mom has a friend who’s doing that for her. Clearing the weird stuff out of her house. Don’t you have friends?”

He laughed uncomfortably. “None I can talk to about this.”

I always forgot that other people didn’t have friends they could talk to about BDSM. I was lucky as shit.

We were silent until we reached the drive-in. We sat for a moment in the parking lot.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

A server was coming toward our car. I nodded. “All right. But you owe me.”

“Anything.”

Anything
? Well, then . . . “When we go back to town, stop in the Twin Oaks Plaza. At the Bed Bath & Beyond. There’s something there I’ve been waiting for.”

I walked into the kitchen two hours later with our new juicer. “You’d better buy some carrots and kale, mothafucka,” I called to Ryan, setting the box on the counter. “’Cause we’re having fresh juice every goddamn morning.”

“What the hell?” Ryan padded in from the bedroom, wearing a flannel shirt and boxers. He touched the box. “Did you put it on a card?”

“Give your regards to Jimmy Willman.”

“Who?”

“My dad.” I slit the tape on the box with a steak knife. “He wanted to buy us something.”

“Why does he have a different last name than you?”

I ripped the box open. “I told you this. He wanted to keep his name. My mom wanted to keep hers. She gave me her last name.”

“I don’t think you told me that.”

“Pretty sure I did.” I pulled the juicer out and set it beside the box. “Hallelujah. How the . . . frizzles does this thing work?” I picked up the plastic-wrapped parts.

“But he’s your real dad?”

I tore open the plastic. “Of course.”

“That’s cool.” He came over and helped me unwrap the pieces. “Did you have a good time with him?”

I summed up my convo with Dad. Ryan’s eyes got wide. “So do you think kink really is genetic?”

“Well, I apparently got it from all freaking sides, so yeah.”

We made pasta for dinner using the Pasta Boat, and then Ryan had some files to look over for work, so I promised I’d sit with him on the couch and not bother him.

It worked for like half an hour. I played QuizUp on my phone, and he scowled at some documents on his tablet, and then I got bored and asked, “What are your files about?”

“They’re about how Erica can’t type up a brief to save her life so I have to redo it.” He looked up. “You know how I feel about Erica.”

“You wanna put her in a hamster ball full of turds and roll her down a hill.”

“I do. Kind of. Yeah. She really just
bothers
me.”

He didn’t say anything else, so I changed the subject. “Do you wanna meet my dad on Thursday? Tomorrow he has a thing with an old coworker, but he wants to hang out again Thursday.”

“Uhhh . . . sure.” He swiped through some pages on the tablet, frowning. “I was gonna work late that evening. But we could do lunch break.”

“That’d be cool. Lunch is good because we’ve got an out if we need one.”

“I want to thank the man who bought us a juicer.”

“Who knows what else he might buy us if he feels guilty enough.”

“I think we should get a bagless vacuum. With hose attachments.”

“Okay.”

“But the one I was looking at was three nineteen.”

“Holy cat balls.”

He looked up. “You know what, though? We spent two hundred dollars on that sex sling when we were drunk last month. And we never even use it because we’re too lazy to put hooks in the ceiling.”

“We’ll do the hooks. This weekend.”

“We could send it back, though, since we never used it. And use the money for a vacuum.”

“I’d rather have the sex sling.”

“Then figure out how to mount it.”

There were so many “mount it” jokes I could have made in that moment that I just sat there hyperventilating until my brain exploded.

He focused on his tablet again and was quiet for a while. I beat Captain Wizzerbam from Romania in a name-that-celebrity round of QuizUp.

Eventually Ryan sighed. “I should live in Seattle.”

I lifted my head. “Huh?”

“It’s one of the best cities for paralegals. They pay a lot.”

“But you don’t want to live in Seattle.” I paused, because something had just occurred to me. “
Do
you?”

“Why not?”

“Doesn’t it rain a lot?”

He put the tablet on the coffee table and leaned back, hands laced behind his head. “I’d get used to it.”

“It’s freaking far away.”

“From what? If we lived there, it would be our home. Everything else would be far away.”

I hesitated, not sure how serious he was. Laughed. “Um, Mr. I-don’t-get-to-see-my-family-enough. You’d be like a million miles from them.”

He put his feet up on the coffee table. “You’re right. Maybe a cool city closer to here. That pays paralegals a lot.”

“What’s wrong with here?” I slung my arms over the back of the sofa. “Just not enough money, or what?”

“No, it’s fine here. I just like to try new places.”

Uhhh . . .
“Well, bad news. We have a year lease, so we’re stuck here for a while.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Maybe someday, though.”

I gazed up at the ceiling. I thought about Mom telling me I liked to take risks and try new things, and how it wasn’t really true, but I wished it was. “It must be cool. I mean, you’ve lived all over, and I’ve just lived here.”

“Only San Fran. And Annapolis, for school. There’s a lot I haven’t seen.”

“Maybe you should sell your art and make millions of dollars, and then we could travel all the time but still live here.”

“Pfffff.” He grinned, shaking his head.

“Why’s that so funny?”

“Because I’m not an artist.”

“Shut your tiny face.”

He turned toward me. “You’re sweet.”

I didn’t push. But it kinda bugged me that I suggested a real thing he could do to be happier, and he was like,
Oh, how cute.
But the thing was, I could tell he liked the idea. That it was more than just flattery to him. That somewhere, deep down, he believed he had talent and that it should be recognized. I’m not that great with words. But I know what people’s faces mean.

After a while I said, “I guess I’d like to see other places. But everything I need is here in this city, so I’ve been too lazy to, you know. Explore or whatever.”

He nodded, leaning forward to play with his tablet again. “Bet this was a fun place to grow up.”