xiii.

SO, THEN THEY were officially dating.

She spent nearly every night at his place, and they went to get coffee together in town every morning and people got used to seeing them together. They commented on how cute they were together, how happy they were for them.

(Also, there were a number of very invasive conversations about her asexuality, wherein she had to explain the difference between being aromantic and asexual and how they weren't mutually exclusive.)

He took out to all kinds of dinners, and she cooked for him in her apartment. She brought her guitar to his house and plugged in and played with foot pedals, and he worked on writing long, screaming violin solos to her songs—which totally changed the entire way that the songs even worked, but she liked it, and he liked it, too.

They played together at open mic, her guitar, his violin, her singing, covers and her own originals.

She wrote a song about him.

It was called "Real," and it was about how she'd imagined love and then she'd felt it, and real was real, no matter what sort of perfection you could think up, real was always going to win. "Real wins my heart," she would sing into the microphone, and then he'd play a little riff he'd made up to go along with it, and everyone who'd come to open mic night would cheer and clap and sing along.

It was good.

It was after the song they had the conversation about being official. It was weeks and weeks into it. He was talking about whether or not she should have clothes she kept there, since girlfriends usually like to have space like that.

"On TV shows, there's often discussion of a drawer. Do people do drawers in real life?"

"I'm your girlfriend, huh?" she said, giggling, teasing. "Awfully presumptuous of you to assume that."

"Wait, what? You're not my girlfriend?"

"I mean, we haven't even talked about it." She was giggling.

"You're just fucking with me," he said.

"I thought you were waiting to have the we're-official conversation, and that it was going to be punctuated with a bunch of gratuitous and inappropriately expensive gifts," she said. "I've been waiting for this, actually."

He laughed. "Oh, so once you're my girlfriend, then I get to give you gifts?"

"It's a requirement, yes. I will examine said gifts, and if they are to my liking, I'll keep you."

He laughed.

She beamed at him.

He came closer and touched her face.

"Yes," she said in a soft voice. "I'm your girlfriend."

"Good," he said. "That's very good."

And then there were gifts. Expensive gifts. He got her a tablet and a smart watch and earrings and perfume and flowers and new sheets for her bed for when he slept over—even though they always ended up at his place.

She joked about being a kept woman, and he seemed to like it when she said it, getting all rumbly-voiced and touchy-feely in response to it, saying things like, "Yes, I want to keep you. Can I keep you?"

She wanted to be kept, she said.

She wrote another song called "For Keeps." It was slow and acoustic and she wouldn't let him play on that one. Soon enough, she had four or five new songs, all about him, and she started thinking about recording them. She usually did record her songs. She had software on her laptop and she did it right in her apartment. It maybe wasn't professional, but it was good enough, and she did make some money from her fans who would purchase her music or from downloads on various sites.

It wasn't anywhere near enough to support herself, of course. Touring had been much more lucrative in that sense. She wondered if it made sense to bother recording a bunch of songs if she wasn't going to tour. She wondered if she'd end up with a whole album's worth of songs about Hollis. Or—maybe two or three albums. Maybe she'd just write years' worth of songs about Hollis.

And, well, if she ended up with Hollis longterm, did money matter?

She hated thinking that.

It was insane, really. She couldn't do that, rely on him in that way.

Because, if at some point it ended, she'd be destroyed. No way to support herself, all alone, years of her life wasted. It was not a good plan. No, no, and no.

Still, when he brought up buying a tour bus for her again, she was a little tentative about it. That was also insane.

I cannot accept a gift like that from this man. I would never be able to pay it back.

But it didn't mean anything to him. She had been with him long enough at this point to understand what his finances were like, exactly how much money he had. Buying her something like that, he wouldn't even feel it. It didn't hurt him. Her paying it back would mean nothing to him, so there was hardly a point in even offering such a thing. Why not take advantage?

Then, if it did fall apart, she'd have something tangible, something to fall back on.

Touring did sound better with a home base that was comfortable. It sounded better with Hollis along. He could help with driving and he could be there for her. He was like home to her, she thought, and bringing her home along, it would help.

Of course, if Hollis were to do that, he'd have to quit his job at Gigi's shop. She wouldn't be able to hold it for him while he was gone. She needed someone to cover the place when she wasn't there.

Hollis said he didn't care. "I do that job because I'm bored."

"But if you didn't have that job, then… everything would revolve around me," she said. And she didn't need to tour, not really. She wanted the tour bus only as… as security? In case they broke up? But then, she'd have to tour alone, anyway, and it wouldn't make that much difference.

"Everything already revolves around you," he said.

"No, I don't want that," she said. "I want you to want other things, your things."

"Fifer, haven't I explained to you how much I try not to want things?"

He had.

But it all seemed precarious to her in a way she couldn't quite quantify. It was too much pressure on her if everything was about her own desires. If her happiness drove everything, she wasn't sure if that was sustainable. Which only proved that she needed to do something about her finances and soon, because the tour money was going to run out, and she wouldn't be able to pay rent, and Hollis was going to ask her to just move in with him, and she…

Would she be strong enough to say no?

She and Ross talked about it, and he said it must be nice to have a sugar daddy skull-faced rich dude ready to take care of her for the rest of her life.

"So," she said to Ross, "you think I should just let him?"

"Why wouldn't you?" said Ross. "Is it because you think you don't deserve it?"

"It's because it's too good to be true," she said. "Because no one deserves life being that easy. And because… because somehow, if life is that easy, it's not even appealing."

Ross scoffed. "It's appealing to me."

She didn't know what to do.

One area in which she liked the arrangement and wouldn't change a thing about it was their sex life, such as it was, considering there was no actual sex.

Usually, they were both fully clothed, lying on Hollis's bed together, wrapped up in each other, while they drove fantasies in each other's heads.

After the night she'd let him put his fingers inside her, she didn't even bother for realism with sex. She touched herself (she was better at touching herself than he was at touching her, she reasoned, and though she let Hollis try a couple of times, she deemed the cost of training him to be not worth it in the end, and he was happy enough either way. He just wanted to vicariously experience her desire and pleasure, after all) and she imagined all manner of filthy and exciting things.

She pretended there was a traveling medieval fae princess, in a carriage, going through the woods when her party was set upon by ogres. They killed everyone but took the princess to their ogre king, who stripped her naked and fucked her in front of the entire ogre tribe, whispering in her ear as he took her that she was his now, there for his pleasure, and that he would have her any time he wished.

She liked varying this fantasy. Sometimes, she liked it if the ogre king grew fond of the princess and began to see to her pleasure, if he treated her well and began to use his thick, black ogre tongue to lick the princess's wet little slit. Hollis liked this variation, too.

But just as often, she liked for the ogre to treat the princess with little regard except as a collection of usable holes to be pumped full of ogre semen. Sometimes she liked to pretend the ogre semen tasted like some kind of sweet dessert, like the ogres' cocks were full of delicious cream filling, and that the princess became quickly addicted to the taste of the ogres' come.

One variation was that the ogre king fed her only on his cock, and that the princess would come crawling into his chamber—utterly naked—each morning and kneel at the foot of his bed and beg plaintively for a taste. The ogre king would kindly and fondly welcome her into his bed and say, There you go, little one, have a bit of breakfast, then.

But sometimes, she liked to pretend the ogre semen was foul and viscous, and that the princess was forced to swallow it down even as it was unpleasant, and that she was tied and sobbing as she was gagged on the ogre king's cock over and over again.

She liked to pretend the ogre king used the princess's ass, too, that always seemed remarkably dirty and got her going. And eventually, the imaginings began to shift to the ogre king throwing the princess to the other ogres to be shared by them.

She worried about going there with Hollis. Would he be disgusted by the idea of more than one man? Would that ruin his enjoyment of the sexual fantasy?

But it wasn't. Hollis liked anything she did.

When she felt embarrassed or horrified by wherever her fantasies were going, thinking they were too much or too intense or that she was likely setting the woman's movement back to the dark ages by fantasizing about these things, he just soothed her and said that fantasies didn't hurt anyone, and that it was just for play.

Just a game, that was what Hollis said.

So, she indulged, and they did princess-and-the-ogre-king fantasies for as long as she could wring out new and exciting ideas from it. Eventually, though, the fantasy shifted to a different scenario. This was about a man who was selling his wife for sex and who happened upon a rich fae lord who wished to pay for the experience but only if the husband would stay and watch and be vocally mocked by the wife as she unfavorably compared him to the fae lord.

She worried Hollis wouldn't like that one either, but he was like, "Don't they make a lot of porn like that?"

Often the scenarios that aroused her the most bothered her on some level, because she felt as if the woman in the scenarios was just… well, not even really there. She was treated as if she was a thing, something to be used for fucking, and that made Fifer's entire pelvis light up just to think that, but it bothered her.

She didn't like that idea.

Clearly, it was disturbing and she didn't understand why sex always had to be like that to turn her on.

Hollis held her in his arms in the afterglow of her orgasms and said to her, "It doesn't always have to be like that. Sometimes you fantasize about the woman liking it."

"It's hotter when she doesn't, I think."

"Maybe just because it's forbidden," said Hollis. "Sex is a hidden, secret thing, and it's easy to associate with other secret things, with shame, and sometimes the shame makes it more intense. That's normal, I think."

"But doesn't it bother you," she said, "that essentially we're supposed to say to ourselves, ‘I'm aroused by something I think is abhorrent in reality'? How am I supposed to live with that sort of a paradoxical disconnect?"

"You don't, though," he said. "You only like the idea. You never submit to the reality."

"No one does," she said. She thought about. "Well, not no one. Some people really do act out weird scenarios, I think."

"Look, sex is that," said Hollis. "Sex is about men taking advantage of women for male pleasure."

"No, it's not." Now, she sat up and looked down at him. "No, it's not ."

He took a deep breath. "All right, if you say so. Never mind."

"Don't do that." She settled back and folded her arms over her chest, looking down at his blank skull face. "Explain yourself."

"It just seems to me," he said, "that the way that nature works, it seems to have sort of… made it like that. In species where the male animal has a penis, it's sort of, uh, rapey."

"Look, I watched this documentary about bonobo monkeys, and they were all just having lots of sex with each other, lots of same-sex pairings, and it wasn't rapey, and—"

"No, I see what you're saying." He shrugged. "I don't know."

It was quiet.

"So, you're just dropping it?"

"Maybe it's because I feel like my desire for you is sort of…"

"Rapey?" She was horrified.

He tilted his head back and reached up to trace a pattern on his headboard. "I think I'd say that it's, um, predatory. I don't think I'm doing anything to you that you don't like. I definitely don't feel like a rapist. But, am I taking advantage of you? Maybe."

She shook her head. "You're not."

"If it's a transaction, Fifer, you'd get exactly what you're getting out of this if I wasn't here, and I'm not giving you anything," he said. "You're giving it to me, sharing it with me."

"Well, you're sharing with me, too," she said. "It matters that you're here."

"I like hearing that," he said, his voice affectionate and soft.

"It's true," she said.

"Well, I want to please you," he said. "More than anything. But I can't say I don't feel as if it's sort of because I want to, er, repay you for all this pleasure that you give me."

"Look, if you want to interpret anything as transactional, you can. You just have to look at it that way and turn it into something gross. But we're in love , Hollis. It's not like you're making it."

"Shit," he breathed, reaching for her. "Shit, I love you, too. Come here." He tugged her down, rolled her under him.

She sighed against him, kissed his smooth bone, played with his antlers, and he ran his nostrils over her jaw and neck and shoulders. "I love you, I love you," she said.

And he said it back, his voice cracking. "Briars, Fifer, the way I love you…"