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CHAPTER FOUR: ELYSIA EBOOKS - PART ONE
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“Who the hell does he think he is?” Joelle Washington pinched her nose and waved her fork.
Pip stifled a snort as she watched her friend bristle on her behalf. This was why she loved these lunches. She had lots of friends, partners, and associations of different kinds, all with different backgrounds and outlooks on things. And she loved that, loved the variety and perspective. But, though she’d never admit it to her other friends, there was a unique kind of comfort in being around people who grew up with you—with the same set of people around, similar values, same circumstances, and, yes, the same race as you.
There were just parts of herself that, for all the diversity and perspective her other friends could give, they just would never understand. There were experiences that they would never be able to appreciate quite as well. No one knew her and had her back like her friends from her old neighborhood.
“That prissy, little, white boy thinks that he can talk to you like that?” Joelle shook her head. “If I were you, I’d just forget him and his niece; let them figure it out themselves.”
Logan Belton, the group’s voice of reason, shook his head too. “She can’t do that and you know it.” Even when they’d been in grade school, he’d always been the responsible, level-headed one. “Let some forty-year-old pervert prey on that sweet, young girl?” Logan shut his eyes, likely thinking of his own little, sixteen-month old girl at home with his husband. “Least she can do is ask around and let that girl know that she’s here, if Sam needs somebody to talk to.”
“Not if her uncle doesn’t want her to be there.” Joelle rolled her eyes. “Don’t get involved, girl. You just know, when this all goes bad, they’re going to blame you. Say you led that sweet, All-American, white girl astray.”
“Jeez, Jo,” Pip said before taking a drink of her soda, “not everything’s about race.”
Joelle snorted. “Sure, but, if you’re not careful, anything could be.” Ever since Phil did an article about whether race could genetically prove superiority—even though the piece had stated that it definitively couldn’t—Joelle had held a grudge against him for even asking the question. She leaned into Pip pointedly. “You really think they’re going to look at the downfall of that blond, innocent high schooler and her connection to you, this proud, black, vocal-as-hell, free-spirited, free-love, bisexual-pansexual-whatever-sexual kinkster into all the freaky shit, and not pin you as the root of it all?” Joelle poked her food with her fork. “Hell, I’m your friend and, listening to it all, I think you both need to ditch the married guy and the judgmental uncle and find Jesus.”
“Phil’s not that bad. He’s just…”
“Judgey.”
Pip tossed a crouton at her. “You’re one to talk.” Joelle would never say it outright, but the woman was definitely one of those good, church-going girls who thought bisexuals were just being greedy and being a single woman after thirty was indicative of some kind of flaw. Luckily, Joelle, the baby of the group had a whole year and a half to find herself a husband before she had to worry about such a horrible fate.
Then there was Pip, a thirty-three year old pansexual woman involved in poly relationships that Joelle refused to acknowledge beyond a strainingly polite, “Oh.” Pip wasn’t looking for a husband, or a wife, and didn’t exactly see the tragedy in never having one.
She bit her straw and sucked her bubbly drink through the constricted bit of plastic. It was so strange how there were so many aspects of her life that fit Pip perfectly—Joelle and Logan, the kink community at Donovan’s, her coworkers like Phil at Infommunity—that never seemed to fit well together. Like disparate parts of herself that made-up her whole but left her world forever fractured. She always felt exactly herself with each group, but she wondered what the others would think of her, if they were all in the same room.
She sighed and set down her soda. “I just don’t want to see anyone hurt.” Not Sam. Not Phil. Not her community. And, yeah, not herself either.
Logan shrugged. “Then find the action that does the most good with the least amount of harm and do that.”
Whatever that was. She nodded. “I guess there’s really nothing to do until I hear back from Peter anyway.” Not if Phil didn’t want her corrupting his niece with information about safer practices in the kink community. Much as she hated to admit it, it still stung that he didn’t want her help. This was her thing. Her field of expertise. Whenever she had a science question that stumped her Google-fu skills, she always turned to him. It hurt that he didn’t feel like he could do the same.
Pip grumbled and sat back in her seat, half-heartedly listening as topics moved on from her to Logan’s baby and his new-parent woes.
She didn’t get Phil sometimes. For such a smart guy, he could be stubbornly clueless.
———
Phil sat at the table and held the book—well-read and dog-eared—in his hands as he watched his sister pace around the kitchen. Steele’s Edge. It’d been somewhere on the top ten bestsellers for the past fourteen months, spent at least six of those months at number one. There wasn’t a person alive who hadn’t heard of it, few who hadn’t read or heard at least some part of it.
Thanks to Pip—who got positively livid at the mention of it—even Phil had heard random passages and summaries of it. The story of Helene Kensington, a blandly ordinary college girl, who finds herself involved in an illicit affair with a wealthy but emotionally damaged dignitary, Gregor Steele. In addition to taking her on expensive, luxury getaways and buying her extravagant gifts, he also introduces her to the dark and decadent world of BDSM.
According to the reviews on the book jacket, it was a whirlwind romance filled with danger, desire, and two incomplete people coming together to fix the broken parts of themselves to form a whole.
Phil thought it sounded like a waste of paper.
“I found it under her bed,” Jenna said, sounding stressed as she paced and ran her hand through her short bob of sandy blond hair.
Phil sighed and laid his head in his hands, the sound of her feet on the hardwood floor grating. “Calm down.” He loved his sister, he really did, but she was easily excitable and prone to panic. “Look, it’s just a book. One everyone and their mother has read.”
“Except, unlike everyone’s mother, Sam’s gone off and tried to make this book her reality.” She stopped in the middle of the room, putting her hand over her mouth. She shook her head. “I tried to get onto her computer, but it’s password protected.”
Phil rolled his eyes. “I don’t think snooping through her things is a good solution.”
“Well, I don’t know what else to do.” She threw her arms down to her sides.
“About what?”
They both turned to see Sam standing in the kitchen archway, her backpack slung over her shoulder.
Jenna grabbed the book out of his hands and stormed up to her daughter. “This.” Jenna waved the book around. “Where did you get this?”
“Where did you?” Sam spat back. “You searched my room?” Shocked, she dropped her bag onto the floor.
“How else am I supposed to know anything?” her mother shot back. “You never talk to me anymore.”
“Because no one ever asks me anything.” Sam snatched her book back. “Everyone talks at me; no one talks to me.”
“So why don’t we all just sit down and talk then?” Phil suggested, toeing a chair at the table out for Sam.
Sam looked from him to the chair and back to him before nodding. “Okay.” She sat down at the table, folding her hands on the smooth surface in front of her.
“Jenna?” He gestured to the other chair next to him. “Want to join us?”
His sister crossed her arms over her chest, jutted out her jaw stubbornly, and sucked in a tense breath. Her expression and stance reminded him a bit of the day she’d told their parents that she was pregnant. Phil’s heart softened a bit. Jenna had always been the type to get defensive when hurt or scared. And, like always, it made him want to protect her. Take care of her.
So he stood and put one hand on her shoulder, the other on her elbow, and led her to the table.
“Okay,” he said, once they were all seated, “why don’t we start at the beginning?”
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