Chapter 13: Beth, I Hear You Calling

After such an eventful Sunday, I wasn’t sure how I’d wake up on Monday. The alarm was as annoying as always, and I silenced it just like every morning. My morning woody was the same as always, and after struggling with my eyelids for a few moments I realized that I actually felt pretty damn good. All the sex and social energy I’d expended had worn me out by the time I went to sleep, but the sleep itself had been restorative, better than usual. I felt Tethys’ hand wrap around my throbbing cock, and looked down at her face. She looked back with a big, wide awake smile.

“Sleep well?” I asked rhetorically.

“Fantastic!” she answered. “You?”

“Yep,” I replied. “Race you to the bathroom!” There wasn’t going to be any morning wood fuck or blow job this morning. My bladder was way too full.

Tethys was not in nearly the hurry I was, and she happily took charge of my aiming issues as the acrid stream splashed into the bowl. As usual, she didn’t miss. She took her own turn while I prepared the shower for us. We had time to play a little, as long as we didn’t overdo it.

“Shit!” she groaned as she stepped into the shower. Her face had a look of sudden alarm on it.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, concerned.

“I left my car at Carl’s yesterday!” she lamented. “I don’t have a way home!”

“I’ll take you and drop you off, you know that. It’s not that far out of my way,” I tried to sound reassuring.

“Taylor, it’s past your work and another halfway across town!” she objected.

“Weren’t you going there anyway? It’s your workout day, isn’t it?”

“Not until this afternoon. Henri and Sonia are coming over around noon.”

“That’s right. Henri’s the sloppy seconds source today, isn’t he? It’s not a problem. We’ll have to leave earlier, but I can take you,” I insisted.

Tethys hung her head. “I’m sorry, Taylor, I feel like such an idiot. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it until now. I’ll definitely make it up to you.”

“No you won’t,” I ordered. “You’ll accept it graciously as just one of the things partners and friends do for each other, and then you’ll either pay it forward to somebody else or you’ll help me out someday when I’m in a bind. It’s really no big deal. It just means no morning sex today.”

Any morning sex would have been a quickie anyway, on a workday there just wasn’t much leisure time in the morning. Breakfast was a bowl of cereal, milk and fruit for each of us, then I donned my professional attire and she pulled over her pullover.

“No shoes?” I asked looking at her bare feet.

“In my car, at Carl’s.”

“No bra, no panties?”

She gave me an acerbic glance. “Since when?” she huffed.

I actually enjoyed the detour. Tethys was good traveling company, and I always felt comforted by her presence. We laughed, we joked, we relived yesterdays party. It had been a sublime experience, and we were still a bit on a cloud as a result. We got to Carl’s, and she ran in quickly just to let him know she had the car. I didn’t wait for her to come out. For all I knew she might have wanted to fuck him before heading home.

I got to work in plenty of time and settled into my cubical. I got through my emails, deleting most of them and moving some into action folders. I used these to help develop checklists for organizing my week’s tasks. I was working in a pleasant haze, the events of the weekend still dominating my brain activity. My professional goals seemed distant and trivial at the moment, nothing could compete with the beautiful memories of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. If every day was like those, my life would be one of blissful forgetfulness, and it would be over far too soon.

“Hey, Taylor.”

...

“Good morning, Taylor.”

...

“Earth to Taylor!”

“Huh? Oh, hi, Beth. Sorry, I was concentrating on my checklist.”

Beth nodded. “I thought so, since the checklist was about six feet over your monitor, going by the direction you were staring. How was your weekend?”

“Um, ok I guess.” I wanted to tell her to go away, but we had to work together. “We just hung out with some friends. How was yours?” I hoped for a similarly meaningless response, but I was rapidly learning to my consternation that Beth wasn’t wired for meaningless social niceties.

“I had an extremely interesting weekend, I learned a huge amount that’ll assist our project, and I can’t wait to tell you about it over lunch today,” she gave me that annoying half-grin that so far had telegraphed the approach of something I’d regret. “Let me know if you have anything that takes priority this morning, otherwise I’m working on that Temperature Options subroutine.”

“That sounds fine,” I told her. “I’ll probably have some cases to add to it later. I’ll take a look at it then, if you don’t mind.”

“Sounds good, boss!” she smiled as she turned away.

I’d half expected we’d be having lunch today, but I was more hoping we wouldn’t. We needed to refine our proposal for replacing our Oracle data engine with PostgreSQL. Our first collaborative lunch meeting had not put us on a sound footing, and that needed to change. Otherwise, we might as well just abandon the project. I already knew part of the problem was me. Beth simply annoyed the hell out of me. She was far too interested in my personal relationships, and so far I hadn’t been great at shutting those inquiries down.

The first thing I had to do was shut down my dwelling on Beth’s irritating ways. Once I put that behind me I got fairly productive. I finished a couple of code reviews, suffered through an insufferable planning meeting, and help Ricardo, a junior programmer, with some glue code interfacing Javascript in the user facing screen to the Java on the back end. I felt good about that. Then it was lunchtime. Beth reappeared.

“Same place as last time?” she asked.

“Sure,” I shrugged. To myself I muttered “not the same conversation, though.”

I had to admit that the food at China Wok was pretty good for the price. Too many other people agreed as well, and the place was crowded. We did find a booth in the corner, and I hoped that the general din of the crowd, the clinking of dishes and other’s focus on their own conversations would help mask ours. Beth’s lack of a filter, and her preoccupation with my sex life worried me that we’d attract more attention than I liked. Funny how I didn’t mind at all exposing myself within the Tribe, or even on Hera’s front porch last night, but a crowded diner full of strangers did not bring out my sense of adventure.

“I had busy weekend,” Beth began cheerfully after we’d spent a few satisfying minutes lightening the contents of our plates.

“Is it something I should even be hearing about?” I asked skeptically.

“Absolutely. I did two major things this weekend, and both of them involved you.”

“Uh-oh.”

She picked up her bag from the seat beside her and rifled through it. “First, I refined our arguments to justify the database switchover. I took your advice about the ones that had already been tried, I put different spins on a few and came up with a couple of new ones. I’ve calculated we can make the change pay for itself in the first year, and at the same time add functionality and flexibility we don’t currently have.” She handed me a professional-looking report.

I flipped through fifty pages of superbly organized exposition. The executive summary alone made it look convincing. In a quick read, what I could see of the details looked well researched, clearly laid out, and presented pros and cons of such easily understandable contrast that it was hard to see how even an executive could fail to be convinced, unless of course, he held stock in Oracle or had somehow divided loyalties.

“This is ... it’s amazing, Beth,” I shook my head. How long did this take?”

“Thursday night, then Friday night through Saturday night. I still managed to get a few hours of sleep.”

“That’s really good work,” I said. “If you weren’t such a good programmer I think you’d have a future as a researcher. I definitely think we should make this presentation, and to as many of the senior executives as we can gather in one place.”

“Thanks, Taylor, I’m grateful you gave me the chance. And speaking of research, I did some more research on Sunday. And I’m still not done.”

“On this?” I asked, thinking probably not.

She paused for a long moment. “You know, Taylor, you spent my first week at this company apologizing for what was really an innocent mistake. I know it looked bad at the moment, but only for a moment. I’m a grown woman, but I wasn’t acting like one.”

“So I’ve kept apologizing to you, but at the same time I’ve kept making you uncomfortable because my curiosity about your lifestyle was really intense. None of my business, I know,” she raised her hands in supplication as I opened my mouth to make an indignant response.

“Hear me out, Taylor, I don’t want you mad at me. I was an asshole last Thursday, a real bitch. I knew I was wrong as soon as the word left my lips, but it was too late to take it back. I could see it hurt your feelings and offended you, and it was the wrong thing for me to say not just diplomatically but factually too.”

She took a couple more deep breaths as I waited expectantly. What you said was right, I was basically setting you up to be in judgment of you. It was hypocritical of me, and it conflicted with my whole reason for asking you about it in the first place. I didn’t even realize I was carrying that attitude until it just spilled out like that. I was as surprised I said it as you were. I’ve done some soul searching since then.”

“And?” I leaned back on the bench expectantly.

“Well, I did some more research Sunday. Like I’ve said, I read as much as I could on polyamory. I didn’t realize how big a part of nature it is. It was actually a fascinating and enlightening read, and opened my eyes to a lot of the misunderstandings that people carry into their relationships in society today. It’s so easy to assume that the social standards we’re taught growing up are the ‘natural’ rules of relationships, when in reality they’re designed to benefit our social structure itself, not us as individuals. There are a huge number of incompatible cultural moral systems out there, and they all feel natural to the people who are raised in them, and wrong to the people who were taught differently. I see now that what you and Tethys have been able to do is free yourself of the rules that are imposed on you, step back and look at what’s possible and what alternatives might suit you better, create your own social standards that work for you, and find other people with the same ability to see a different perspective. After what I’ve been learning, Taylor, I think what you and Tethys and your friends have been doing is actually very courageous.”

She smiled and stirred her noodles idly. “I hope you’ll forgive me and not hate me for jumping to wrong conclusions. Knowing what I know now, I have to say my worldview has changed a lot, and I’m starting to see a lot of things differently. What hasn’t changed though,” she grinned, “is that I still have poor social skills, I still have an impulsive mouth that gets me into trouble, and I’m still just as intensely curious about things that are none of my business as I was before. I’m not sure how to fix that.”

“We’re doomed,” I groused.

I didn’t say much for the rest of the meal turning over this new turn in my head. I should have been thinking more about our database switchover project, but something told me they were somehow related.

“We’re going to have to work together, I’m going to have to trust her at some point. No, maybe not. I’ll bet she doesn’t even write erotic literature anyway.”

It was on the drive back to the office that I finally decided to go for it.

“Look, I don’t blame you for wanting to know all about my kinky sex life. After all, it’s pretty unusual for a nerd like me to have attractive women interested in him, so there’s got to be something irresistible about me, don’t you think?”

She glanced sideways at me. “What impresses me the most about you is your humility,” she deadpanned.

“What bothers me as far as trusting you with my personal information is that as curious as you always seem to be about what I’m doing with various women is that it’s all one way. You want to know everything about me, but you haven’t offered anything in return. If you want me to open up to you, shouldn’t you be a bit more open too?”

“What’s to be open about?” she leaned her head back to stare at the roof of the car. “I don’t have a sex life. I haven’t had a date in months, I haven’t had sex in over a year. I have a dildo collection, which I’m sure would be the most popular discussion around the office. ‘Hey everybody, did you hear about that loser Beth who needs modern technology to get herself off? What a geek!’”

“That’s hard to believe,” I shook my head. “How can you not get any dates? As pretty as you are there must be guys lined up around the block to ask you out.”

“Thank you for that, you’re really sweet,” she intoned. “I didn’t say nobody ever asks me out, I just don’t go out with anybody.”

“Is that because you prefer the dildos?” I could be snarky too.

“There’s two kinds of guys that ask me out – self-aggrandizing assholes who think that I should pay them to suck their dick because they’re so wonderful, and stumbling stuttering nerds like you with such low self esteem they have to apologize for being interested. Neither one is very enticing to me. And then geeky you has hot porn stars offering to pay you to suck your dick! I just don’t understand it.”

“Nobody pays me. I’m offering a public service for the less fortunate.”

“Whatever.” She looked directly at me and her tone sounded angry. But not at me. “Fine, you want to hear my deepest darkest secret? You want to know why I’m such a goddamned hypocrite for judging you? Because up until a year ago I had a boyfriend who thought I was the greatest thing since blueberry pancakes. I could do no wrong in his eyes, he thought pleasing me was the highest possible purpose in life. The most monogamous guy in the world. I cheated on him with a married man, shamelessly I might add, and destroyed his faith in me, in the goodness of humanity, his hopes for the future, and crushed his entire fucking world. That’s self-righteous me who was judging you for being in honest open relationships with honest loving women. And that’s why I don’t date. The only guys I’m interested in are those with families I’d hurt, and the only guys that ever really cared about me are too good for me.”

Tears were streaming down her face, and I felt terrible.

“So, I’ve been a total failure at monogamy, and then you come along, such a happy success at non-monogamy, and it just struck me as somehow unfair. So yeah, I wanted to titillate myself with details of your personal life while somehow finding a way to feel smug about it not being me.”