Trade Me (Cyclone #1)(50)
It’s easier to imagine myself giving than receiving. If I’m giving, I’m still in charge. I’m not vulnerable. If I’m giving, he won’t have the chance to break me down the way I know he could. I can’t let him in that much, not even in my fantasies.
I shake my head. “I’m going down to see my parents this weekend. I’m going to be leaving Thursday afternoon.”
She looks over at me and raises an eyebrow. “Wow. You might not see Blake for three whole days. How will you manage?”
My cheeks flush. She lets out a guffaw.
“He’s coming?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Well. That will convince everyone he’s not your boyfriend.”
“I… It’s…” I shake my head. “It will help, actually. You know what my parents are like. They could drive anyone away. It’s all complicated now. I just need to remember…”
Maria is watching me with a flat expression on her face. And that’s when I realize what I said.
My parents could drive anyone away.
“No,” Maria says quietly. “Not anyone.”
I exhale and wish I could take my foot from my mouth. But those words are out there now, no matter what I say. My parents are difficult, embarrassing, impossible even. But they are also my parents, and they’ve never wanted me to be anything other than myself. By contrast, when Maria told her parents that she was a girl, they kicked her out of the house.
She was twelve.
If her grandmother hadn’t taken her in…
If I had been trans instead of Maria, I can imagine how my come-out would have gone. My mother would have been confused as hell. She would have asked me to explain it three or four times, and I’m not sure she would have gotten it even then. But I am sure of one thing: she would still love me. There is one person in this room who knows what it’s like to have parents who literally drive others away. It’s not me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That was dumb of me.”
She shrugs, but her expression is flat. “It’s just a figure of speech. I’m not going to break. I know what you meant.”
But the fun has fled the room. We’re not talking to each other about boys or making jokes about orgasms any longer. She bends over her laptop and once again, applies herself to her blog.
And me?
I have a product launch to work on for a man I shouldn’t care about, who isn’t here, and who isn’t ever going to be my boyfriend. I shake my head and look down at my screen myself.
It turns out that getting to my parents’ house is surprisingly easy.
Blake comes up with a great story—we’re borrowing a friend’s car for the drive. And because it would be completely unbelievable that a friend would let us borrow a brand-new fully tricked-out Tesla, Blake calls his lawyer and arranges for us to pick up a fifteen-year-old Toyota ten miles from my parents’ house. This, I point out, is cheating on the trade—but at this point, with the end in sight, neither of us have the heart to care.
I tell my mother when we talk on the phone that he’s coming, and no, he’s not my boyfriend.
“Looking forward to meeting your boyfriend,” she says as she hangs up. I can’t tell if she doesn’t believe me or if she’s just teasing.
But all these things feel like details, and distant details at that, as we get in the car and start down.
It’s true that Blake has come along to drive. This is necessary because I still can’t make myself drive his car at anything other than a crawl.
“Music preferences?” Blake inclines his head to me as we coast out.
“Whatever.”
He punches up something on the screen.
“Satellite radio?” I glance over at him. “In this car? Isn’t that for peons?”
He smiles. “What am I supposed to listen to instead?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have that long left to put myself in your shoes. I’m trying to think like a billionaire. I guess I just imagined that you’d hire a team of musical experts to study your tastes, and they would create a never-ending stream of perfect music for you.”
“Nah.” He shifts his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s not how a billionaire thinks. A billionaire hires a team of engineers to interface with a team of musical experts. We study everyone’s taste and create a service that automatically creates a never-ending stream of music that automatically tailors itself in response to feedback. Then we sell that service to someone else for a few million bucks. Or we grow it ourselves and get a hundred million people to pay us five dollars a month.”
“Oh.”
He glances at me. “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone about your secret music business. I signed an NDA, remember?”
“No point pursuing it. Someone else already did it.” He grins. “But you know, hiring a team of musical experts to do my bidding…trust me, it wouldn’t work like that. People aren’t robots, however much money you have. Whoever I hired would have their own favorite songs, which they would foist on me. When I complained that I hated Rush, or whatever it is that one of them adored, they would get mad. The anger would fester, and then one day, when I was stuck in a car for a six-hour drive, they would send in their resignation and put the Macarena on continuous repeat the entire time. Believe it or not, even billionaires find it easier to treat the people who inhabit their lives like they’re actually people instead of machines.”