“So I have to be intimate for you, but you can’t return the favor? That’s not how friendships work.”
“I never said I wanted to be friends,” she huffed.
And with that, her sliding door closed.
Chapter 3
Jessie
The sun was never up when I was, at least not on my workdays. I got paid a pittance to apprentice with Glory Cats, a community college football-based sitcom out in Burbank. My hope was that the pittance would lead to my dream job, being the head costume designer for a show. Maybe even getting into movies.
My commute was about an hour on a good day, and call time was usually around 6 a.m. I had to become one of those weirdos who lays out their clothes and gets everything ready the night before work. Thankfully, they fed us breakfast and lunch at work,so I didn’t have to pack my own food. A nice job perk.
But on this particular commute, my mind kept wandering from my murder podcast. Did I actuallyenjoytalking to Mikey the night before? He had a quick wit and though his questions were a bit odd, he seemed to genuinely want to know about me. Sure, I talked to people all day at my job, whether I was doing a fitting or stitching and laundering pieces. But Mikey, or I guess Ben, asked deep questions of me. I’m usually the one asking deep questions of other people.
Granted, one of the questions was deeply inappropriate. I mean, yeah, Cole hadn’t exactly been a Casanova in the bedroom for quite some time. It wasn’t always that way. When we met, we could have been mistaken for rabbits at the rate we were going at it.
I guess things started “getting stale” as Ben called it after we moved to New York. At first, it was exciting: the two of us taking on the Big Apple. We felt important, glamorous even. I was interning at fashion houses and working long hours. He was working long hours for his hedge fund. We had sex as often as we could, but the spark between us slowly faded.
When Cole got an opportunity to transfer to a company in Los Angeles, I knew I’d be giving up all the progress I made in fashion. Fashion and TV aren’t exactly compatible. They’re similar for sure, but the experience isn’t the same. Dressing people for a show about a community college football team isn’t quite runway-ready, cutting-edge styles. Cole told me it was okay if I wanted to stay in New York and we just parted ways. But he did point out that L.A. had better weather than New York, and maybe it would be a little less stressful for me. He picked our Manhattan Beach apartment next to Ben, and I took whatever opportunity would have me. I sucked it up and dealt with the long commute and early wakeups.
We’d been in Los Angeles for five months when I met Ben, or when Ben had his party that irritated me enough to go talk to him. And unfortunately for me and Cole, our sex life didn’timprove with the West Coast ocean air. It remained mechanical. Familiar. And yeah, as Ben had noticed, unfulfilling for me.
But sex isn’t everything in a relationship. Relationships go through seasons. Cole and I were in a transition. I repeated those phrases to myself over and over as I mulled over why talking to Mikey was sticking with me.
What scared me most was, Cole hadn’t asked me how I felt about our lives in a long time, if ever. Sure, we talked about it before we left New York, but that was a big crossroads. How long had it been since I talked to Cole about how we felt about each other? I vowed to myself to try and restart the spark with Cole. We had so many years of history. Surely there was a reason for that, right?
But if sex wasn’t everything, why couldn’t I get the feeling of Mikey’s hands on my thighs out of my mind? Why did I keep replaying him telling me that he could satisfy me?
Still, I wanted to try with Cole. No matter how rough things got, we always found a way to work it out. I couldn’t just throw away a four-year relationship because of a few errant thoughts.
Maybe I needed to get bolder about what I wanted in the bedroom. I had things I wished he’d do, but it usually didn’t go well when I asked. If I wanted to save our relationship, I might have to force the issue.
I was going to get bold. Halfway through my day, I sent Cole a text. My boss, Irina, would have had a cow if she saw me texting, but that would imply she was actually in our office doing her job. I peeked out the window to see her flirting with one of the grips and knew I was in the clear.
Hey there
Cole
Hi. Need something?
Just you
Naked
Oh. I’m at work?
Tonight. In bed.
Ok :)
I was interrupted by the click of the wardrobe trailer’s door, a friendly face poking around the corner.
“Hi! You ready for me?”
“Kitty! Come on in!”
Kitty Gatto usually just wrote for Glory Cats, but her fellow writers had written her into a few scenes on some upcoming episodes. I needed to get her measurements to start shopping and making pieces for her. I’d seen her around set, and she was always super friendly and kind. That wasn’t a guarantee at work, so I was relieved to find allies like her who wanted to make the day fun.
