“I don’t want you caught up in it. I will deal with it. It’s my fault, and it’s up to me to deal with the fallout.”
Anjali waved her hand in the air. “All I hear is I, I, I, one, one, one, me, me, me,” she said. “You sound like you are singing scales,me me ME me me.You have to think more of how to do thingstogether.”
Colleen nodded and leaned back in her chair, a move to cede the proverbial floor. “Anjali is right.”
Anjali’s nod was a sharp jab of her chin. “I would have thought better of you because you sound like you are British, but Colleen has told me that you are an American by birth and raised in Iowa. That is why you think too much of everything being all aboutme-me-me.Even the most important things in your life, you think you have to do everything all alone, like finding someone to marry and being married. You think that you just marrya person.In India, we know that we marry the family and the friends and the whole community.”
Tristan shook his head. “How did we start talking about getting married?”
Anjali wagged a finger at him. “Becauseeven in thatmost important decision in your lifeyou think you aresingular. You go and hunt through the people you know like a solitary tiger. But humans are not tigers. We live together in communities. In Indian families, if you don’t know who you want to marry, your aunties will know somebody who is good for you. You make the decision together, and then you have all the support of the aunties and all of your friends. This is why the divorce rate is so high in America, you know. It is because you are sosingular. If Colleen doesn’t find someone to marry, my aunties are going to arrange her.”
The scotch hit the back of Tristan’s throat and stuck there, and he sputtered. He asked Colleen, “You’re going to let Anjali’s aunts stick you in anarranged marriage?”
Colleen shrugged, but her lively eyes that were always amused at everything were crinkled and laughing. “Well, Anjali hasn’t taught me how to make Kashmiri dum aloo, so I guess it isn’t going to happen yet.”
Anjali grumped, “I will teach you to make Kashmiri dum aloo. I can have you married in a month.”
The sheer and utter wrongness of thatincensedTristan.“You can’t do that.Colleen, you wouldn’t let her do that.”
Colleen shrugged again, still laughing with her eyes. “I don’t know, man. If you aren’t around, I don’t know what choices I’ll have. Who knows what I might do?”
“That isn’t funny.You wouldn’t really do that, right? You wouldn’t get married to someone else?”
Colleen leaned on her arms on the table, all amusement gone from her features. The grim set of her jaw was the angriest that Tristan had ever seen her. She asked,“What, if you aren’t around anymore?”
The magnitude of it slammed Tristan.
He wasn’t going to be around anymore.
He wasn’t going to be there when another guy wanted to date Colleen.
He wasn’t going to be there if her father showed up and tried to take her back to run his feed store and then cast her aside.
He wasn’t going to be there when Colleen was beating herself up andneededsomeone to tell her that she was a good girl.
That was the jobof a Dom in a Big/little dynamic. The Dom was supposedto be therewhen the little needed them. They were supposed to adore and spoil and show their little the world, and they were supposed to help their little becomeeverything.
Tristanneededto be there.
Needrushed through him with the ferocity of the determination to cling to the side of a cliff rather than fall.
“Then what can we do?” he asked them.
Anjali’s grimace turned to a prim smile, and she batted her eyes at Colleen. “I told you I could talk him around.”
But Colleen was staring at Tristan, a smile playing around her lips. “Yeah,let’sform a plan. All ofus, let’sfigure out whatwe’regoing to do.”
The plan took three hours, at least twenty napkins because nobody had any notebook paper, and several rounds of drinks to explore and then decide.
By the end, they were all exhausted, laughing, and a little bit drunk, but each of them had a list of tasks and times.
Before they started, Tristan needed to know one thing. “You guys know this is highly illegal, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Colleen said. “Absolutely. This is market manipulation and collusion and five other kinds of illegal. If we actually went somewhere and did it, it would be a heist. We’re likeOcean’s Eleven, but on the internet.”
Anjali nodded. “Oh, yeah. Completely illegal. It is notunethical,like a politician getting a briefing about a coming deadly pandemic and selling all their manufacturing stocks and buying shares in healthcare companies. Or a rich guy buying a small generic pharmaceutical company and jacking up the price of insulin or EpiPens a thousand-fold so that regular people can’t afford their medications and die. Or oil companies knowing from their own research that gasoline cars and oil-based plastic are destroying the planet that we live on but paying politicians to stomp out research and innovation in electric cars and other materials. Yeah, that’s all perfectly fine, butthisisillegal.Yeah.Sure.”
“Just so we’re clear.” Tristan was shaking his head and staring at his list of action items. They started with misinformation in the Killer Whales’ Pequod chat room and ended with nerves of steel whilst catching the proverbial falling knife. “It’s going to come right down to the wire. The last couple of trades are going to have to slide right in at seconds before four o’clock Eastern time.”
