But they at least got to enjoy the dinner anyway, because when they came back a minute later, they’d already polished off their plates in the kitchen, saying how they couldn’t help digging into their tacos while their plates were drying off.
“Do you want another?” I said once Bridget was sitting next to me again, gesturing to the platter of tacos, and she shook her head quickly.
“Oh, no, god, I can’t… couldn’t possibly eat another. They’re so filling.”
Sam nodded. “Sofilling. I think it’s all the protein from the… turkey…?”
Bridget nodded too, both of them bobbing their heads along. “Just going to sit here and digest a bit before dessert.”
Nan, sitting down the table a bit, chuckled. “Not often you’re turning down taco from Victoria, is it, Bridget?”
Bridget—who had gotten used to Nan’s, well, Nan-ness—just smiled tiredly at her. Mom, on the other hand, stiffened and turned white along with half the family, who had—I was pretty sure they all knew by now what Bridget did for a living, but nobody ever talked to her about it, all pretending it wasn’t a thing. Of course, that was with us having never sat all the adults at one table since then, and now here we all were, and Bridget’s attempts to brush off Nan probably weren’t enough, with, “We have had a lot of good food over the last year! Victoria and I are like proper foodies now.”
Nan nodded. “Oh, I’ll bet you’re getting the best food in town with that good smut money.”
Mom cleared her throat hard. “So, Victoria, Bridget, darlings, why don’t you tell us all about California? I know you told me and Kevin and Sam, but this is the first time most of us are hearing the details.”
It was a bold choice of topic change, given we’d taken that trip to Sacramento to meet Gina and her girlfriends. Despite all of her insistence, Bridget and I did not join her for messy five-way sex, but we did, well… have sex in the same room. One thing had led to another, and Evie had started fondling Gina in the middle of a conversation in their living room, and I could tell Bridget was getting turned on watching it, so I’d just… helped her. And then she’d helped me. But I wasn’t inclined to tellMom that part. She’d clearly done some work to come around on Bridget’s job, but she still avoided talking about it.
“California was beautiful,” I said.
“The mountains are amazing,” Bridget added.
“Great hiking,” I said.
Grandpa chimed in. “California’s too expensive by far. Do I even want to know how much you spent on a hotel room?”
“Oh, we stayed in a friend’s extra bedroom,” Bridget said. Nan cut in.
“One of your porn star friends?”
Aunt Ines spat her drink back into her glass, muttering something about needing some more vodka. Bridget sighed. “Yep,” she said. “The one with a lesbian throuple who posts lots of videos.”
“Bridget, darling,” Mom said, her voice ashen.
“Oh, what’s a throuple?” Nan said. “That sounds exciting.”
Mom waved her off. “Don’t worry about it, Grandma.”
“It’s like a couple, but, you know, three,” Bridget said. “She has two girlfriends.”
Nan shot Mom a look. “Oh, you thought I couldn’t handle that, did you?”
“Let’s talk about something more appropriate,” Mom said.
My cousin Daniel finished drinking his third Old Fashioned and said, “Who’s this friend who posts lesbian threesome videos? Where’s she post them?”
“Daniel,” Mom said, at the same time Grandpa said it, and Aunt Ines got up to rummage in the liquor cabinet for the Grey Goose. Bridget beamed at him.
“I’ll send you her page. I’ll tell her she owes me a finder’s fee.”
“I hear they’re building new developments in Bolton,” Mom said, her voice a little louder than usual, changing thesubject with the subtlety of a slap to the face, and this time it worked, the rest of the table going along with it.
It was a relief when the kids came around for the afternoon and we got to fully zip up the topic of Bridget’s job, and we had a normal Christmas—a Christmas as a family, where even though I still felt nervous sitting together with my mother and some of the other family members, I was starting to settle in. Starting to feel like I was allowed to be here, like I didn’t have to stay constantly on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I got to sit on the sofa with my arm wrapped around Bridget, the woman I was so unbelievably in love with pressed into my side, and I held her close and owned it for all to see.
Maybe it was a benefit of that Bridget made smut for a living. The fact that I was dating a woman was buried and forgotten under the fact that I was dating someone who half the family still considered a porn star despite Bridget’s insistences that wasn’t the term for her, and nobody wanted to say the wordsporn star,so nobody confronted us about any aspects of our relationship.
And it had worked out for Kevin and Sam too, who were far from the most controversial couple in the family now. Once Mom had learned about Bridget’s job and then gone to a reconciliation dinner with me and the two of them, it was clear Sam was no longer the biggest problem in her mind. It helped that Uncle Rob and Grandpa liked him so much, and at this point, anybody who’d had issues had given up carrying them, and the kids loved Sam, too. He was great with them—naturally a little bit on the flamboyant side, he dialed it up with the kids, and they all laughed and played along and told him they liked him much better than they did Kevin. While Kevin was in earshot. Kevin took it well.
