Rooms With Doors by Margaux Williamson

Times are hard, but the stroking helps. It’s steady, mantric, grounding. Dean is comforted by the rhythm. It’s satisfying, like the easy click of a lock, the smooth opening of a door, the certainty of entry.

Jo’s close, he can feel it. Focused, he achieves new depth. Her moans rise and surround him, a serenade. He stays consistent with the strokes until she flexes and writhes, overcome by the crown of her release, trembling and unravelling with the force of it. Dean doesn’t stop. How could he? This is the closest they’ve been in days. He aches to preserve the moment, to shut them inside and lock the door. But his alarm screams a warning, impatient. He pulls out slowly, grudgingly, and whispers apologies into her ear—for the rush, for leaving. Jo doesn’t object, just grins lazily, spent. Her eyelids flutter closed, sleep falling. He retreats.

In the bathroom, door ajar, he hurries—kills the alarm, sheds the strap, urinates. He brushes molars and incisors to a sparkling gleam, willing her taste to stay even as it goes. He blows back into the bedroom for his coat, keys, Camels, wallet. He revisits Jo’s form, stilled by sleep. His thumb just barely grazes her cheek. Then he’s out, down the stairs, through the door, and he’s gone.

Outside, winter crowds. Frigid winds land incessant blows. He stays the course and takes the beating, hyper-focused on his route.

♦︎

Bells above the door announce his entrance. He moves from the trap of visibility, gliding spryly behind shelves and between stacks, pinning his name tag to the pocket of his shirt. He finds Lou in Nonfiction and approaches.

Tsk tsk, Lou chides. Late again, are we?

You know, it’s the weirdest thing, Dean says. I can never tell.

Well, we can ask Lia if you’re not sure.

You’re not funny.

I am, actually, Lou says. What’s not funny is Lia clocking your lateness and chewing you out again. You’re gonna fuck around and get fired.

Yeah, well, hopefully not today.

Dean slouches and dips his head, trying unsuccessfully to be inconspicuous. He is taller than average and remains so despite his attempt to shrink. Lou laughs at Dean’s sad effort then asks about his plans. Is he coming to Nico’s tonight? Is he going to bring Jo?

Dean blinks at him. That’s tonight?

Then Lia is there—freshly, unfortunately present. The men straighten their posture as she approaches. She asks Dean for a word, then turns and leaves without his answer. He breaks from Lou to follow her as sour nerves and dread flood him.

Lia shuts the door once they’re alone in her office. Dean’s anxiety swells, dwarfing everything; he tenses, and it’s achingly clear that the only way out is through. He apologizes for his recurring lateness, but that isn’t enough. She wants the cause.

Is it another job?

Instead of telling the truth—that, due to recent events, he only feels close to Jo when he’s inside her and, therefore, their corporeal closeness transcends his timeliness elsewhere—he swears that it's nothing, really. Lia’s lips turn linear, straight and taut.

Will you just try to be on time, please?

Dean nods, relieved. Then he’s dismissed. He texts Jo on his way back to Lou. Nico’s tonight?

She answers. Yeah, if you want.

A cigarette emoji in a text from Lou appears at the top of his screen.

Dean makes for the store’s back door, leading to an alley, while responding to Jo. I want.

♦︎

Outside, Dean ignites in silence. He bathes in the first pull, awash in a pleasant calm he hasn’t felt since earlier that morning. Mental stillness dims his surroundings so thoroughly that he’s startled when Lou speaks.

How’s Jo?

Dean hears the groaning of the bed, the cadence of her moaning.

She’s good.

Lou nods. Awkwardness arises. The fact that Jo won’t speak to Lou—her only sibling—loiters and pricks, nipping and pin-like. Dean pulls deeply on his cigarette and blows through his nose, welcoming the burn in his nostrils.

Have y’all talked about—

Nah, Dean says. I mean, not yet. We will.

Dean can see Lou is unconvinced, but Lou does not press. Instead, he says, Good, and flicks his cigarette butt into the empty alley like punctuation—a period, or perhaps an ellipsis. Hang in there, man. Ellipses then.

Lou disappears inside. Alone, Dean is better and worse. Slow pulls from the Camel beget slow exhales that deliver him again to Jo’s panting and begging, the wet vice grip of her, that safe space between her legs, where things make sense, where they’re easy. Dean would like to remain there, where it’s secure, like a room with padded walls. He considers the analogy. The two places aren’t so different, he thinks—a padded cell, the sex. They’re both secure enough to make him feel safe and certifiably insane, to make him do things he usually wouldn’t, like draw out a relationship that mostly feels over. Over. He tries to shut the door on that thought—surely an unhappy result of catastrophizing—but his stomach starts to ache. Distracted and remote, he kills two more Camels before skipping lunch and leaving his shift early for Jo’s.

♦︎

There’s a featherlight feel to their post-work reunion. Dean feels sort of like everything is fine. In the kitchen, they await the toasting of her Pop-Tart while she recounts her day. With her back to Dean, she tears off a single paper towel from the roll and pulls a butter knife from the cutlery drawer that he knows she’ll use to remove the pastry’s crust. Dean smiles weakly at the thought of her strange preference, one of many oddities he’s come to love. Things are manageable, nearly normal.

Over feels extreme to him now. How could it be over if he’s still firmly inside? He wonders briefly about the connection between time—over—and place—inside—and thinks that while they are undeniably related, they’re not reliant on each other as he had once imagined. Indeed, things can end without yielding a formal exit. Whatever, he thinks, willing thoughts of exits and endings to dissipate. He’s only marginally surprised to find that his strength of will prevails. For now, at least, his mind’s quiet is something like a salve.

His frigid concerns thaw into a puddle at his feet. He steps over it to reach Jo, hold her from behind, and squeeze. She turns to face him and they kiss, folding neatly into their desire, immediately immersed. How simple it is, he thinks, to act on pure, visceral feeling instead of wrangling with those arduous thoughts. Those labyrinthine mental meanderings leading nowhere in their open-endedness. No. This is better, productive in its own way. They hear the Pop-Tart spring as they clear the bedroom door, impatient, giddy, hungry.

Later, freshly showered, they prepare for Nico’s housewarming. Jo slides into black denim, bouncing and wiggling to fit. Dean savours the view of her until his phone rings with a call from Lou—he wants to know when they’ll arrive. Dean says they won't be long and keeps the rest brief. Gauging Jo with a glance, he notes her stillness, her distance. After the call, their energy’s new—rigid where it had been relaxed, soaked in postcoital ease.

They finish dressing in a silence masquerading as comfortable. Eventually, she asks if that was Lou on the phone and if he’ll be at Nico’s. Smoothing out his sweater and straightening his chain, he says that yeah, it was, and yeah, he’s there now. She doesn’t reply, but Dean can see she’s clearly miffed. Cowardice stops Dean from stating aloud Lou’s faultlessness and Jo’s misplaced anger. He knows where statements like that could find him, and he’s not ready to cross that threshold.

♦︎

At Nico's, Dean is buoyed by inebriation, permeated by a pleasant numbness. He's in the living room when he sees Lou and Jo talking in the kitchen. The pair move like liquid through the crowd until they're elsewhere. Dean hopes it’s someplace quieter, less packed; he hopes they’re dissolving the issue.

Marijuana smoke infiltrates the abode after a while. Dean’s up high in a haze when Lou and Jo return to his line of sight. He sees them hug from across the house and feels a thin sense of relief that they’re back on good terms, but something else in him plummets. He drowns the sensation straight away.

Two gins later and Jo grabs his hand and leads him down a dimly lit hall. She moves with purpose but without hostility. Dean lets himself be led, feeling faint arousal and a vague sense of déjà vu, as if their route is a familiar one.

She pulls them into a snug, umbral guest room and closes the door. A glimmer of street light leaks in from the lone window by the bed. The intimacy of the solitude, the darkness, stirs Dean. He pulls her close and leans in, but her abrupt step away from him punctures and burns, sizzling his ego down to zilch. Jo’s rigid. It seems she’s blind to his hurt or, worse, doesn’t care. He does not move toward her. He does not move at all. The same darkness that was just fluid with possibility has solidified into a merciful shield behind which he’d like to hide. Then it’s there, everything they’ve buried, exhumed and needy.

She’s still mad, of course. Mad at him for coming out to Lou first. She’s saying she wants to know why Dean told his best friend, her own brother, before her. She wants to know what he was so afraid of, what he thought she would do.

Dean, somehow unprepared for this and yet ripe for the chance, inhales before he speaks so that his reply takes the shape of an exhale. He says that he feared losing her, that concealing himself from her felt like the only way to postpone what could be an irreparable rupture between them, one that he felt would always occur if he lived his truth as Dean (he/him).

Then he waits. And while he waits, he watches the hypocrisy dawn on her—the hypocrisy of touting her belief to anyone who would or would not listen that one should love their partner for their personhood, not something as flimsy as gender identity, only for her to allow his transition to undo her to such a degree that the reality of her stubbornness and the validity of his fear remained unrecognizable to her until now.

Jo’s body language reveals her frustration toward the position she’s in, one where she believes herself less of a lesbian because Dean has come out as himself, buried his dead name, and started hormones. He sees her despair that he is new, a stranger she resents for the incessant bloom of internal questions about her own identity: Who is she? Who are they? What does it mean? Will they ever be restored, and who is to blame if they aren’t? Dean can practically hear it all, loud and awfully clear.

So he’s not stunned when she says that she can’t find her footing on this new terrain, that she feels like every step is on ice, solid yet uncertain. That she can’t discern what’s real since her truth, her life, was outed as a fantasy. Dean flinches at those four words. Jo says nothing’s the same, that it’s all too much, that compensating for their fracture with sex and more sex didn’t help like she’d hoped, and now she’s out of ideas. So how? How is she meant to adjust to all of this and go on like nothing’s happened and that everything is—

Urgent knob turning and knocking cuts in. Nico yells at them to come out; rooms with doors are off-limits. Jo frowns at the noise but never finishes her thought insofar as it needs finishing. Instead, she stares at Dean expectantly as if he will say something useful in the face of their once-strong relationship’s ebbing and crumbling. He knows there’s nothing to say, that there’s been nothing to say for some time. And though Dean wishes for solace, some conciliatory comforting for Jo or himself, he knows that there will be none and that to expect it would be futile. They've arrived at the worst case scenario and now they must deal with it. The only way out is through.

Déjà vu returns, like he’s lived this before or knew he would. Looking at her he sees, as if through a peephole, their inevitable fissure waiting for him to step out from inside the shuttered house of his oblivion, where the truth has just arrived and its light is seeping in.

Nico's knocking turns to pounding, reminding Dean of that morning’s alarm—unforgiving in its persistence. The difference is that he no longer feels rushed, pushed. He sits on the bed and looks at Jo, who stares into space, crying quietly into the darkness. Gazing at her, his eyes surprisingly dry, he resolves to leave—the room, the house—soon. Just not yet. He’s been coming, going, running nonstop; he’d like to be still for a while.

---

Margaux Williamson (she/her/they/them) is a Black, Queer reader and writer. Her work has appeared in Complete Sentence, Stone of Madness Press, EDGE CITY, and elsewhere. She lives in the Midwest with her wife and cat.

Insta: @margauxreadit