Read Snow Skins – Part 1 here.

Trigger Warning: Mentions of Sex

San Francisco, when she arrived, was terrifying and exciting. Moving in with her friend was less so. They’d known each other since elementary school, and his girlfriend, Sarah, was even easier to get along with. Deirdre got hired at a bakery called Bake and Shake, where the manager had bright blue hair shorn into a mohawk and a tattoo sleeve. Daniel and Sarah took her to her first drag show to celebrate getting hired at the small, specialty bakery.

Work came in steadily. Every time she turned around, there was a customer requesting something specific and highly stylized. At the end of her first month, she designed a wedding cake for the owner of a tattoo parlor. Said owner inked Deirdre’s first tattoo free of charge. Before she knew it, an entire year had passed. 

Of course, it wasn’t all fun. Even with three of them paying the rent, there were still weeks where they lived off of ramen and cakes that were too messed up to sell. Sarah was in her last year of med school before her residency, and Daniel was in and out of the apartment at odd hours working for a catering service in between his Film Studies courses. They used every dollar stretching trick Deirdre’s mother had ever taught her to get by. She even joined a dog walking service part-time to help make ends meet.

She’d just finished collecting the two Welsh corgis from the gay couple in apartment 7A when a ping went off on her app. A new owner had been added to her route. She knocked on the new door, waiting as its occupant shouted, “In a minute,” over their excited dog’s yelping. 

The man that opened the door was maybe a decade older than her, tall, and handsome in a generic way. Deirdre smiled as he fought to keep back the ready-to-play dog behind him. 

“I’m so sorry,” he said breathlessly. “She’s been waiting for this all day.”

“It’s alright,” Deirdre said, leaning down to kiss at the brown, half-grown Pitbull. “At least she’s not afraid of strangers.”

They worked out the details. Ian, the owner, explained that Lady needed walked every other afternoon when he’d be getting home late due to work. He gave Deirdre a key in case he wasn’t there to let them in. As Deirdre studied her new charge, the pitbull’s tongue lolled out in a large smile. Deirdre fell in love. 

“Alright, Baby Girl,” she cooed. “Let’s get to it.”

Lady pranced around her legs as they walked. The corgis, who were as immune to her puppy wiles as an addict to their drug of choice, immediately decided it was playtime. In minutes, Deirdre had three excited dogs running in circles on their leashes as they yipped and tried to chase each other.  

“You’re a bad influence,” she baby-talked at Lady while vigorously rubbing her big head. All the while, the dog kept up her dopey grin. “You hear me? A bad influence. Yes, you are.”

Walking Lady in the evenings wasn’t a big change in her routine. Grab the corgis for their evening walk, pick up Lady every other night, and take her small, fluffy posse to the dog park for an hour or two. Afterward, she’d drop off the corgis then take Lady home. However, she saw more of Ian than she’d expected to.

He got home late most days of the week, running into her occasionally in the hallway. Every time she saw him, his dark hair was wild around his face, as if he’d been running his fingers through it. Every time he thanked her for her troubles, offering a pastry or whatever he’d gotten from the office. Eventually, she started accepting. 

“So what is it you do, exactly?” She asked one night, sitting on his couch with a croissant in one hand while the other ran over Lady’s fur.

The dog gnawed happily on one of those bone treats that looked uncomfortably real. She’d learned many things about him this way. She’d learned that he was twelve years older than her, thirty-seven to her twenty-five. She’d learned that he had no kids and that his sister was back home in Seattle along with his parents. Ian stopped hovering around the french press to answer her. 

“Oh, uh.” He rubbed a hand underneath his glasses, there to correct his ‘appalling short-sightedness.’ “I’m a script editor.” He gestured at a desk in the corner, a messy amalgamation of papers held together by rubber bands and paper clips. 

“Like movies?” She asked around her last bite.

“And other things.”

The percolator began rattling on the stove. Deirdre stood up.

“Can I look?”

“Sure.” 

The sheets were oddly thick, the paper rough under her fingers. The words were printed in precise Courier font, but the lines and notes scribbled all over them were anything but neat. 

The words looped around the page, squished and broad in turns. It looked like Ian had gone over the draft once in blue ink and again in red. Lines were crossed, whole sections cut out of existence by the slash of a red pen.

Someone wrote this, she thought. Someone sat down and said they would tell a story and did it. The thought was foreign to her. She expressed herself through her baking, not through words. As much as Daniel had tried to explain the numerous intricacies of film, Deirdre didn’t understand it. She had no idea what Daniel, or the critics he praised and despised, meant when they spoke about the qualities of a movie that made it worth watching. 

She knew films were art, and therefore went through a winnowing process to make the final product as good as possible. She’d never considered that the process for that would look like a cluttered desk filled with pages bruised by pen, pencil, and old coffee stains. 

“I’ve got a friend in film school right now,” she said, accepting the daffodil-covered mug, Ian’s purchase for her, when he offered. “He wants to direct.”

Ian nodded, gulping down a mouthful of lightly sweetened coffee. 

“Has he started his thesis yet?” 

“He calls it ‘The Hellbeast.’” Deirdre smirked. “We found him asleep on a plate of pizza bagels last week. Said he’d been working until 4 a.m. and wanted a snack.” 

Ian sighed, his cup held close enough to his face that the liquid steamed his glasses. “I remember those days.” They sipped their coffee, Lady’s gnawing the only sound in the room. “I’d love to look at his work sometime?”

“I’ll ask him.”

Just like that, Ian became a bigger, more ingrained part of her life. In the half-year that she’d known him, he’d graduated from client to friend to frequent visitor at their apartment. Now, with Daniel swallowing all of his advice like a man deprived, Ian became more. He was there when Sarah was accepted for residency, celebrating her friend’s success with a cake of Deirdre’s. He was there when Daniel got his thesis approved and then won a fellowship to make it a reality. Her roommates loved him. They liked his calm demeanor and how mature and adult he seemed. Daniel thought Ian would be good for her. 

“Just try one dinner alone,” he pushed one night between movies. “Maybe he’s the one.”

“You could be the next Hallmark story!” Sarah cried, already wine-drunk. 

Her roommates liked that he was respectful to her and asked each time before entering their space. Much like the daffodil mug, something that just appeared in Ian’s kitchen and integrated into her life, Ian became something steady, fixed, attractive… Wanted. It was with a certain pride that she watched him read over Daniel’s scripts. The two men often sat on their couch, paper fanned out in sections, arguing until she silenced them with questions of dinner. He felt like part of their group, but in her mind, Ian was hers.

It was Deirdre’s opinion Ian went along with for takeout. It was her room he asked to leave his jacket in. He was a piece of her life, something she only had to share with Daniel and Sarah when she wanted to. He’d stay away if she asked him to and come if she called. He was hers, no question.

They’d go to dinner with her roommates or alone. He’d tell her about his work, and she’d talk about her annoying clients. When he asked to carry her bag, she let him. When he offered her a kiss outside her house, she didn’t see a reason to deny him.

The warmth of a mouth on hers was strange but not unpleasant. It was something else that just appeared because Ian had seen fit to provide it. The kisses continued, and Deirdre began to like them. When he’d asked if they could have sex, he didn’t know he was asking for her virginity. Not considering it worth much and thinking it was probably time, Deirdre gave it.

“Did you decorate your bedroom?”

She’d never known a man to care about throw pillows. Ian hesitated. She’d noticed he was often hesitant about odd things, like his very mentioning them would be too much of an imposition. He’d stumbled over asking her back to his room enough times after dinner that she’d begun to ask for him.

“My sister helped put everything together. I’m awful with decorating.” He pulled her into another kiss and then towards the bed.

The act itself was more awkward than romantic. It was odd to learn her body through someone else’s hands. Odder still to find that something she’d once considered to be important and life-affirming was, in reality, a brief moment of pleasure followed by sweaty bodies too close together. It wasn’t the ‘Love’ she’d imagined as a child, and Deirdre was fine with that. There were so many other things to focus on. Love was just a little something extra she could come back to when she was ready for it. 

The longer they were together, the more she slept over. The right side became her side, and the pillows were arranged into the shapes she liked. Ian’s double bed was much more comfortable than her futon at the apartment.

Lady slept on her side, lulled to sleep by Ian’s quiet snores and Deardre’s scratching fingers. More and more, Deirdre was waking up to Lady’s drooling face and Ian’s deep blue jersey sheets. The books she was reading were on his nightstand, and her spare toothbrush was in his bathroom. Her daffodil mug was set by his coffee pot in the evenings and filled the next morning. It felt comfortable being there, but it wasn’t Love.

Even after examining her emotions one sleepy morning, Deirdre still wouldn’t classify that warm, content feeling as love. Maybe she could try, though. Loving Ian couldn’t be too difficult. She’d already learned most of his habits and mannerisms. What became annoying, he soon remedied, capitulating to her whim with concerning ease. Often she felt he needed her there so he didn’t get taken advantage of by the world.

Deirdre had learned Ian’s body, too, the softness low on his belly and the fine trail of hairs running between his pecs. She learned how to give and take pleasure from him and reveled in that power. In moments when she leaned to kiss him, lacing his fingers between her own, with her hair falling around them in a curtain, she almost convinced herself. She could let go of reality enough to pretend that this was love. She pretended that her moving above him, accepting every groan and sigh, wasn’t just an act. Sometimes she wondered if she was wrong for not loving him. If she was, she didn’t care. If this wasn’t love, maybe it was good enough. Ian never asked for more.

Photo by Andriyko Podilnyk on Unsplash.