Fair Exchange - Part III
Last week in Part II, Bíbí meets Deckland at his house for dinner. She learns that he and his partner, Delia, are open, and the two discuss monogamy and intimacy, a conversation which moves to the bedroom.
Sex with Deckland was like nothing Bíbí had ever experienced. He was knowledgeable, but kind, asking to turn her this way and that, checking in after each move, talking her through orgasms that surprised her. He could sense them coming better than the women she dated during college. She’d never had more than one a night with Steven—if she had them at all—so the second, third, and fourth rose in her with a jolt of terror that made her spasm, but there was Deckland’s quiet-storm voice calling her back to herself, reminding her to relax and let each one go. When her body went limp while on top of him, he wrapped her in a bear hug, and every nerve ending crackled alive again. On and on they went until Bíbí heard a door shut downstairs. She froze. Her eyes went wide in the dark as she looked behind her. Deckland reached up and turned her face back toward his.
“Focus.”
“But, your girlfriend….”
“She knows what’s happening. She won’t interrupt—unless you want her to.”
Bíbí looked around the room again. What kind of home was this, where people lived together, claimed to be together, but left each other to their own devices? She didn’t know how to be in a couple without wrapping oneself so tightly around the other person that when you arrived somewhere alone, people asked about your missing piece. Even when Bíbí and Steven separately circulated at parties, folks could look across the room and see the other half of them. That was how it was supposed to be, wasn’t it? But was it ever really like that? With her graduating to a dead-end job and Steven struggling to get back to his own work, you would have thought they’d hold each other tighter, closer, but instead they had retreated into separate panics. Bíbí had felt lonely—sometimes desperately so—but she’d survived. She’d buckled herself into the frenzy of chapter revisions and the sometimes-callous scribbles of feedback from her committee, into sporadic sleeps and delirious scurries to the computer in the dead of the night to fix a flaw she remembered mid-dream. But she’d finished. On her own. She’d wanted Steven around, tending to her the same way she tended to him, but he hadn’t done that. In fact, she hadn’t really needed him at all. She’d just needed the idea of him, the hope of his becoming what she pretended he already was.
Bíbí was still frozen. Deckland looked up at her quizzically.
“No—nothing’s wrong,” she told him. “I’m just…. I got lost again.”
He planted his hands on her hips.
“That’s alright,” he said. “As long as you’re back.”
*****
Bíbí was never explained the rules of Deckland’s non-monogamy. She only knew that when she arrived, Delia would be on her way out of the door or already gone, a trail of some rich musk lingering in the hallways even on the nights Bíbí didn’t see her. Sometimes she wondered if this was because Delia didn’t want to see her. What did she think of Bíbí, anyway? That she was desperate to be coming for a man already spoken for? Annoying for wanting what was still Delia’s at the end of the night? Bíbí wondered often, but one evening, as they crossed paths, Delia smiled at her with lips the color of wet, ripe cherries.
“You look delectable today. It’s like you’re glowing,” said Delia warmly. Bíbí was wearing a slim-fitting dark turtleneck and a pair of army green cargo pants that looked like a skirt when she stood still. Shell-toed sneakers peeked out from beneath billowy hems.
“Not me,” said Bíbí, “but you do. You are stunning.” Delia’s hair was elaborately pinned, with bits of golden thread peeking through her locs. Her ballet flats were gold too, but everything else was black: a tight black t-shirt and jeans, black chandelier earrings, a large onyx bracelet on her right wrist. Her eyes were kohl-rimmed, but her eye makeup cast a golden sheen that lit up the rest of her face.
Delia smiled.
“Ah, thank you, love. Going on an overdue first date. I hope it’s worth the time I took getting ready for it.”
Bíbí floundered. Well, of course, Delia would date too; she just hadn’t thought about it.
“That’s great. Who is he? How’d you meet?” she managed to stammer.
Delia rolled her eyes playfully. “On the apps, which I hate but what can you do? That’s where everyone meets these days if my friends tell it. I’ve been skeptical mostly, but this one seems okay. He’s so awkward, kind of like Deckland used to be. Come to think of it, maybe it’s nostalgia.” Delia put a hand on her hip and laughed. “You know how it is when you grow them up, but you miss who they were? Deckland was a mess when we met. Fidgety and oh my God, every other word that came out of his mouth was a quote from somebody else: Freire, Fanon. It was like he didn’t even know how to talk on his own. Now he’s Sweater Ken, who comes with his very own Italian loafers.” Her last words purred like the voice-over for a luxury clothier ad.
Bíbí laughed timidly, trying to imagine Deckland without his carefully coordinated ensembles and penetrating questions. For her, he might have been even more alluring back then. Or, at least safer, she reasoned, to fall in love with.
“Well, I hope he’s worth your time,” Bíbí offered. “And your beauty.” Of course, it sounded weird when she said it, but Delia smiled sweetly and reached behind Bíbí for her purse, which was hanging on a hook next to the front door. As she drew back, she gave Bíbí a small kiss on the cheek. Bíbí hoped Delia couldn’t feel how rapidly her skin warmed at the touch.
“Me too,” whispered Delia conspiratorially. Then, over her shoulder, she shouted, “Deck, I’m gone! Don’t wait up!” before tip-toeing in her own expensive-looking shoes out of the front door.
In the weeks since she started coming to their house, Bíbí didn’t talk to Steven about it at all, and he was nonchalantly none the wiser. She still cooked and cleaned and folded shirts. On rare occasions when his attention strayed from his computer long enough to wonder aloud where she was going, Bíbí simply replied she was visiting a friend. Steven had never cared enough about her life apart from him to even remember her former friends’ names, so she never needed to include one as an alibi. If she had, he would have had no idea who it was anyway. And technically, Deckland was a secret she didn’t have to keep; she kept it because, in the days since their first night together, Bíbí realized how much of her had been siphoned away into her relationship. It was nice now to have a little piece of herself sequestered, a treat she indulged in in solitude, solely for her own pleasure.
*****
That night, Deckland sat Bíbí up on the counter so she could watch him cook dinner: fajitas with handmade tortillas that he pressed in front of her while she sipped a margarita he’d made with vodka. He apologized profusely as he handed it to her (they were out of tequila), but it was one of the best drinks she’d ever tasted.
“Homemade mix,” he said, grinning proudly at her.
Bíbí licked the rim of a tumbler streaked with blue and green as she asked him where he learned to cook.
“Delia knows a lot. She was born in Texas but grew up in Central America and the Antilles. Her parents were missionaries there.” He set a ball of dough on the counter and began stretching it. “The rest, you just learn from being around, you know? One of the first steps to understanding people is to learn what they consume.”
“Spoken like a true sociologist,” Bíbí cooed. Her head was feeling lighter, her breastbone warm.
“Or lover,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at her. “Being a good lover requires that too, knowing what your lover has taken in. What they’ve been through.”
Bíbí took another sip of her drink and nodded. “That’s how you got me, I guess,” she said. “You made me open up to you.”
“I don’t think so,” he replied, shaking his head. “You opened because you wanted to. The difference between me and your partner is I was paying attention.”
The honesty of his reply left Bíbí speechless. Deckland walked over to grab a bowl from the cabinet next to her. When he closed the cabinet, he kissed her nose.
“You should stop that,” he said.
“Stop what?”
“Being perpetually taken aback. The world isn’t as shocking a place as you think. Sometimes, it’s exactly as it should be; you just expected something different.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” said Bíbí. “I wanted a faithful boyfriend, but here we are.”
Deckland was back at the stove now, but he kept talking to her.
“You should stop that too—always taking the default position of being acted upon. Here you are. Not him. And you’re here of your own accord. That’s your agency. It doesn’t mean you have as much power as you should in the relationship. But what you do have, you need to own it. Then use it.”
Bíbí was just about to ask, genuinely, what he meant by that. In this uncharted territory of her life, she wanted someone to outline her powers so she wouldn’t overstep boundaries. She wanted some sense, even if rudimentary, of what she could do. But maybe Delia was better for that kind of talk. The next time they ran into each other, Bíbí thought tipsily, she would ask her to stay, so they could talk.
And then, almost as if her wish had grown wings, they heard the front door open, and after a jangle of keys and quick steps, Delia peeked her head around the corner into the kitchen.
Bíbí, a couple of drinks in and emboldened by the conversation, spoke first.
“Oh no! Was he really that bad? It hasn’t even been an hour!”
Delia closed her eyes and smiled painfully.
“He’s fine. But he forgot to make reservations.”
Deckland, who was now chopping peppers, laughed. “Brother might have been distracted by your profile photo. Give him some grace.”
“Can we eat here?” she pleaded. “I’m starving.”
“There’s enough,” said Deckland with a shrug. “Bíbí, do you mind?”
“No, not at all,” said Bíbí. And what if she had? It wasn’t her house.
“I know it’s not your house,” said Deckland, reading her mind. “But here, we defer to the preferences of our guests.” He waltzed over and bowed in front of her, then gave her a light kiss on the lips as if to let her know that, plus or minus an extra two at the table, their night would go on as intended.
Still, Bíbí blushed and nodded shyly. Delia clasped her hands in gratitude.
“Ahhhh, thank you, dears. I also think he’s on a budget. I’ll run to the car and get him.” She darted back around the corner.
“Don’t be bringing no scrubs in here!” yelled Deckland as the front door slammed shut.
Then he turned to Bíbí. “I want to make sure you’re okay,” he said.
“No-no—it’s fine,” she stammered. She stirred the ice in her glass and Deckland came over to refill it from a pitcher in the fridge. After he did, he stood in front of her and kissed her as she sat on the counter, his body blocking the view of the hallway. She kissed him back, freely. With the vodka thinning her blood and with the permission he’d given her to just be, she felt…unencumbered. She hadn’t been sure before, but she could live like this, you know? With dinner dates and delicious food and sex that made her body feel reanimated and young. She wasn’t even thirty, and grad school had both taken years off her life and accelerated her aging. She felt constantly weary, except when she was there.
Bíbí could hear only one set of footsteps when Delia walked back to the kitchen, but when Deckland moved back to the cutting board, she was standing there with her date, chuckling as she scolded the two for being caught in the act. It took Bíbí a beat to register who it was, as Delia introduced her partner and his “friend” to a man whose face Bíbí would have recognized three drinks in. Or seven. Or nine.
Steven?!
To be continued…
Destiny O. Birdsong is a writer whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, Poets & Writers, African American Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published by Tin House Books in 2020. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published by Grand Central in 2022, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. It won the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. She earned her BA in English and history from Fisk University, and her MFA in poetry and PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. In 2022, she was selected as the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark, and served as a 2022-24 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She is a contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine.
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