Always Wear Pants
An outtake from the New Confederacy stories — who missed these crazy children?
[Going through the New Confederacy manuscript, I’m deleting a lot of stories that I put on Substack but didn’t really need in book form. But then I found this little standalone that I never posted here. So I’ve polished it up for y’all. It would never happen, because Dorrie’s more grounded morally, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. What would Statius do if Dorrie sexually assaulted him?
This comes a few weeks after Ekphrasis — you remember, the story where Statius gives Dorrie a real shellacking as part of her genius idea to create a sort of Steve Stephenson persona for him and generally convince folks of his viciousness.
Anyhow, if you weren’t around to read it all those months ago, it’s almost impossible for him to hurt her. So she uses a sort of long flirting conversation to gin him up to it, or maybe fairer to say they each gin the other up. Afterward, they’re both troubled enough by the dynamic that Dorrie agrees to Statius’ ultimatum — no ducks, drakes, dares; i.e., no sex, at least until he feels all right about it again. But he was never going to feel all right about it; he’s very religious and prefers zero sex while they’re not married. So Statius, who never fails to exploit every situation, uses beating Dorrie as leverage to once again get his way about something.
We also start to see the early long-tail effects of Dorrie’s concussions, or the start of her TBD. I finally decided there’s really no big change for her until she’s pregnant with Ava, but in this version, she starts showing signs earlier — here, loss of impulse control and just a little tendency to drift when the conversation becomes complicated.
Reading back through the New Confederacy stories, I’m struck by how well a shadow reading works: Statius does everything intending the outcome. Brrr. I must have thought that way at one time. In this one I even had him using a little technical language around how he conditions Dorrie’s behavior and eventually her thoughts.
It’s not true. (I hope it’s not true.) But what if it is? What all those rapid-fire switches in whether he’s willing to have sex with Dorrie are just randomized rewards to make her more dependent on him emotionally? What if he knew from the first that beating her in that tight corner would mean she was getting a lot more damage to the back of her head than the temporary face decorations? What if — ? OMG.
Not true. Or maybe only sometimes true. Dorrie thinks he has magical amounts of foresight, but he doesn’t. He takes the accidental consequence of an action and leverages it for maximum benefit. It’s an interesting mind space. He’s not a chess player — he can’t really think far ahead, and he’s right that Dorrie is the intelligent one (though she has no idea how to leverage it in personal life). But I doubt he ever loses at checkers.
NO, I won’t write more about them. Their adventures absolutely end in 2045. Though I won’t promise Statius doesn’t have an affair with that cute Franciscan who teaches Head Start.
Need to catch up? I’m trying to for-real get this one published, so I took it down, but I still have the preview links. All 125,000 words of them! Just message/comment and I’ll send them to you.]
No ducks, drakes, or dares spread like a wet weather creek, carving its own channel before widening on either side to encompass more territory than Dorrie was prepared for. Almost, she began to think, her whole life. At home, only the skunkworks shop allowed her to escape from longing that first made her restless, then made her ache all over as if she had the flu.
When she was young her friends had played a game called The Sims. Now she sometimes felt she had fallen into that game. Moving around her house like a woman from a game, washing dishes, working in the garden, but not present in anything but the skunkworks shop.
What did anything matter if Statius did not love her? Of course he had never said any such thing. He only spoke kindly to her. But her touches were her love, and now he did not want them.
Her mood after the day Statius beat her had been elated, despite a sick dizzy headache and a tendency to pitch forward headfirst when she stood up. Look what a genius idea, what a big sacrifice, she had thought. No one else in the world would ever invite this. She peered at her face in the mirror — the big cut across her left temple where his ring had ripped through her skin, her torn, swollen lips, her right eye now completely closed — and knew very well Statius would never volunteer to have his beauty marred for her sake. She kissed her reflection.
But as the weeks wore on she began to think she had earned herself only punishment.
One morning she woke up happy. She forgot, for the moment, their promise. The day was already hot. Cicadas hollered outside. Statius lay face-down asleep on top of the coverlet, both arms over his head. She began stroking his back, shoulder to hip. She had once looked up his old national competition videos from the late teens and early 20s and binged them. Now she thought of that youth, stern and intent on his work, traversing the pommel horse or working the still rings. He did not have as much showmanship as some of the other young men. But he never made an error.
It was his focus, she thought. He never missed a detail. She felt it in everything he did — the penmanship with never a blot, the conversations in which she always felt he had foreseen the end before the beginning.
Now, he seemed to draw her eyes and hands and all the light in the room. And she felt — she had felt it before — that his body was shrinking under its own gravitational force, condensing to diamond.
Illusion, she thought. Only a matter of scale. She was small for a woman past 40, but compared to Statius she felt big and blowsy.
She liked to touch him. His skin was soft and almost velvety. It made him seem more like her. More human.
She traced the rapid descent of his sides from lats to waist, his small hips, his sacrum where she knew his back hurt. She pressed in, enjoying watching him relax more deeply. He slept tense, close enough to the surface that he tended to respond to touch. She pressed her hands down into his upper glutes, again, waiting for the little resistance followed by softness.
He sighed in his sleep and wiggled his feet apart. Dorrie crept on her knees further around him and lay on her side, head on her arm, to look at his feet. Perfect, precious little feet. All the sadness of the past weeks went away from Dorrie, gone past memory. She kissed his left heel, then the inner arch of his left foot.
He spread his toes and half-woke on a laugh.
My sweet boy, Dorrie thought. She knelt up and, cupping her hand, slid it up along the inside of his legs until she found his perineum with her middle two fingers. She rotated her hand and pressed her thumb back up along the lowest bones of his spine.
Statius drew a breath, rising up along her hand, then grew still. He reached back to press her hand away. “This counts too, you know. Back up, please.”
“Nope.” Delighted with his beauty and charmed by his resistance, Dorrie pressed the pads of her fingers into the dusky rose-colored skin. “This is my ass and you’re gonna have to fight me for it.”
“I’m not fighting for anything. — You back up off me now.”
Statius snapped the last word so sharply that Dorrie scuttled backward off the bed, first cracking her lower back on the floor then standing up she hardly knew how. She ending up pressed against the doorframe, barely holding herself back from flight.
Statius rose to his knees and turned to look at her. He was aroused, but she didn’t understand his face. Rage, she thought. Sorrow. He also climbed off the bed and turned away from her. He took a couple of breaths to collect himself, then bent over to pick up his clothes and put them on.
He was about to slide past her out the door, eyes cast down, but caught himself. He looked up at her face. “My turn to cook, right?”
“Yeah. Your turn.”
Statius fried potatoes and scrambled eggs into the skillet as the potatoes finished cooking. Dorrie, as always when it was not her turn to cook, sat at the table to watch him. He set the plate between them. One plate, as always. One mug of coffee. He was being careful, she thought, not to change a thing. Not to withdraw from her in any way.
They ate. Neither was hungry, but they sat across the table from each other, foreheads almost touching, and cleaned the plate.
All that day they were careful with each other — quiet voices, a minimum of words. Statius in particular stayed out of arm’s reach of Dorrie, or when he had to come closer, murmured “Excuse me” as he passed through her space — something he had never done before.
Neither could forget that he had raised his voice for a single syllable and sent Dorrie into blind panic.
In the afternoon he went out. Dorrie, relieved, worked through her tasks on the skunkworks shop, packaged the target list for the hacker kids to use, transferred over to the laptop, and set up the encrypted file transfer. She never sent unless the recipient entered the day’s code between certain minutes on the clock. She blinked at the screen. Her head throbbed.
Dorrie completed the transfer, switched back to the skunkworks computer, and started poking around at some back-end maintenance. Statius came in the back door, having to pass close enough to touch the chair as he went into the bedroom and again as he went back to the front room.
“Good afternoon, excuse me.”
“No problem, you’re fine.”
He sat on the sofa to read — Dorrie’s usual spot. She stood in the doorway a while. Sun through the crepe myrtle tree outside the west window cast a mottled pattern on the sofa and the floor, even on the page of the book in front of him. Despite the turning fan, the afternoon air stood hot and still.
Dorrie went around and sat on the floor in front of him, as he typically sat on the floor to talk to her. He looked up, closed the book around a piece of folded paper, and set it aside.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He looked at her a while. “Why?”
“You asked me to stop touching you and I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
“You assaulted me.”
She nodded. There didn’t seem any use crying. A breath, a handful of words, a second or two of pressure that wouldn’t crack an egg — but it was enough. So easily, she thought, do we give away everything. For a whim, for nothing at all.
“If you do it again, I will alter you until the very thought of touching me is fearful to you, are we clear?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He stroked her hairline. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry times ten thousand.”
She echoed his question: “Why?”
“Because I’ve created this household where these things happen. Because I brought you here. And I thought it would be beautiful, I planned out everything — and now — ” His voice rose like a child’s about to weep.
“Don’t cry.”
He shook his head. “No. No crying. But Dorrie, I don’t expect you to pay any mind my weird beliefs, but I’ve made you violate your own. Think about it — how careful you were last summer about my boundaries. Now think about you now. How, how abandoned you are — and this morning you were afraid of me, you’ve never been afraid of me — It’s all my fault.”
She took his hand and lowered it away from her head. “How is it your fault?”
“I tricked you, I made you believe illusions, I hit you — ”
She wrapped his hand in both hers. “We both agreed to that; we’re square.”
“If I made you an arsenic Kool-Aid and you drank it with full assent, would it therefore be rendered innocuous? Whatever sophistry your mind is struggling to maintain, your body knows that here is someone who will hurt you.”
She was still holding his hand. “But would you do it again?”
“Probably yes. I’m sorry, but yes.” He squeezed her hand. “Your genius idea is turning out to be mighty useful.”
“Maybe … maybe right and wrong don’t really matter. We think they matter, we have all these noble conversations, and we believe our fancy words.” Dorrie looked up at him. “But we just keep doing what we were always going to do.”
He smiled down at her. “Now there’s a cheerful thought.”
She scooted in and rested her head on his knee. “As much as I love this — and I love it enough I would give all my life just to be here like this with you — I would let it all go if it causes me to hurt you.”
He paused with his fingers half-twined in her hair. “What are you talking about?”
“You could do that thing now that you said you would do. Make me afraid to touch you. And then I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t hurt you anymore.”
He sat still for a minute. “Even the best operant conditioning takes a little while, you know.”
She said with some dryness, “At your leisure, of course.”
He moved his hand across her head. The light stretched across the room, distending the leafy shadows across the books in the cases on the far wall. He said, “This is my one happiness, too.”
“Then why are we so eager to destroy it?”
His voice grew warm. “I did ask you to run a good QA. Test to failure, all that, right?”
“So we’ve identified a weak spot.”
“We’ve identified Dorrie rattling the bars a bit, I think.”
“If you didn’t lie there so beautiful with your legs spread all ready for it — ”
“If she hadn’t worn that tight dress — you’re right, of course, I was acting immodestly, given the circumstances. That will change.”
“How come you can change yourself so easily, while I’m over here terrified I’ll make a mistake?”
“Possibly because I threatened you.” His voice changed. “Dorrie, sit up, listen — do you realize I threatened to make this assault on you and within five minutes you were asking me to do it? Now what if you didn’t tell me you were asking me to; you just set about provoking the very thing I threatened?”
She sat up. “I might have done that, I suppose.”
“You’re cleverer than I am, I might not realize until it was too late.”
“Okay, and?”
“Come up here — or wait — ” He slid onto the floor, putting their eyes on level. “This is why I have to be the boss. I’ve been trying to think how to articulate it. Because you’re more clever than I am and because you’re absolutely enamored of destroying yourself for me, and if I don’t have an arbitrary way to stop you then you’ll do it. I can’t trust myself to persuade you because you’ll outsmart me, you’re always just around the next corner — so if it’s not physical force it has to be abstract force, command and obedience.”
Dorrie let her gaze travel away from him and along the shadowy bookcases around the window on the west side of the room. After a while he stroked her cheek once. She focused in again.
“A lot to take in?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I believe it all.” She frowned. “Or even remember it all.”
“You’re welcome to doubt the conclusion. But you have to admit the premises are sound.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” She let herself fall forward until she lay curled on one side, head in his lap. “I think today’s main takeaway is for you to always wear pants.”