Kris Byrd is a higher education professional living in Charlotte, NC with her husband. This story was inspired by a quickly deleted tweet from someone she admires a great deal. Kris loves traveling, cooking, and her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel (Jake). Her most recent travel adventure was a solo trip to Portugal. You can find her on social media as @islandskris where she posts about politics, food, her dog Jake, and her addiction to the tv show The West Wing. 

Playing Games

“When should we play poker and fuck?”

Your tweet was sent.

“No! No! No!” Josie screamed to her phone as she realized what she’d done. “That was supposed to be a DM!” she cried.

Josie’s long, elegant French manicure got in the way as she struggled to find and delete the tweet she mistakenly posted. Her heart raced so loudly she could hear it pounding in her temples. The minute or two it took her to remove the tweet felt like hours as she imagined how many people had seen it. Her panic rose as she got one text message and then another from friends asking about the uncharacteristic tweet. Hopefully she had deleted it in time, but that was unlikely.

She knew Thomas got a notification on his phone the moment she sent the tweet, and he would use that as a direct link to get to the tweet quicker than she could find and delete it. Josie and Thomas were a couple – sort of.  They weren’t exclusive, but they kept any details of outside relationships to themselves. Until this tweet.

For Josie, the fun she had outside her relationship with Thomas was just that: FUN. Thomas was a serious man, and their time together tended to be filled with serious pursuits such as fine dining, the ballet, bird watching, and reading the Wall Street Journal over Sunday morning coffee. She never complained, but Josie often found herself bored, sometimes even uncomfortable when they were out together. Last weekend when they had dinner at a new trendy restaurant, the server looked directly at her when he said, “The chef wants you to know that the beef tartare is a raw preparation.” Josie felt as if he sensed she didn’t belong there, and he may as well have said, “You hick, I am going to explain this to you so you don’t waste everyone’s time and order something you don’t even know how to eat.” It made her feel small and insignificant.

When she was able to spend time with other men, Josie felt more like herself. Honestly, she felt more alive. This was especially true of her time with Josh. Unlike Thomas, Josh’s job required him to work odd hours, and it didn’t involve wearing a suit. Josh was a field investigator for an environmental policy attorney. He wore hiking boots and jeans to work most frequently, and sometimes he’d stop by Josie’s small apartment with a thin, greasy New York style pepperoni pizza and a 6 pack of beer when he was done for the day. With Josh, she felt comfortable enough to pull her long, light brown hair into a ponytail tied back with a scrunchie. She’d even sometimes skip freshening her makeup from the workday before his arrival. If she found herself feeling bored around Thomas, she found herself feeling relaxed with Josh. He was a lot of fun.

He was also never going to get married again. “Been there, done that,” he’d say. Josie often wondered if that was why she felt relaxed and had fun with Josh. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t so serious, he wasn’t serious at all about her. Did this relieve the pressure?

Josie still felt her heart racing from the panic she felt over accidentally sending that tweet. She honestly didn’t know what to do, but she worked it out in her head that there were three options. 1. She could act like nothing ever happened and hope Thomas never mentioned it. 2. She could send Thomas the text of the tweet as a DM, acting like it had been meant for him all along. 3. She could confront the situation head on and explain what happened to Thomas. Who was she kidding? That last one was never going to happen. The way Josie saw it, she had two options.

The problem with option two was that it would seem so out of character that Thomas would think Josie had lost her mind. Thomas didn’t know this person who would DM, “When should we play poker and fuck?” She and Josh played poker and fucked. They fucked on the couch, on the floor in front of the fireplace, against the wall inside her pantry, and once even in the dugout at an abandoned little league field. They didn’t just play poker. It could be backgammon, rummy, Monopoly, or almost any other game. Just not chess; Josh didn’t like to play chess.  Josie thought it was an eccentric quirk that Josh thought the best foreplay was playing some kind of card game or board game. He was due back from his trip this weekend, and she hoped to see him soon.

She heard the upbeat cadence of sound come from her phone indicating she had a message. Panic washed back over her, making her face feel flush while her stomach tightened.  This could be the moment she’d been dreading, but it wasn’t.

“Are we still going to the Star Wars trilogy movie marathon at the Beacon tomorrow?” Suze asked.

Josie had forgotten all about the plans they’d made last week. “Of course!” she replied. She thought about telling Suze what she had done, but Suze was consistently disapproving of Josie’s “lifestyle,” as she called it. Suze had been married a couple of years, and she didn’t seem to understand anything about the dating world now. Thomas dated other women, but Suze only seemed to disapprove of Josie spending time with Josh.

Sometimes Josie thought about Thomas with other women. Was he just as serious and boring with them as he was with her? Or was he also someone else entirely when he was with someone else? No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t imagine Thomas ever suggesting they play poker and fuck. Thomas didn’t even like the word, finding it crass, but she overheard him use it once when he didn’t realize she was nearby. Maybe this was proof he wasn’t as stiff when she wasn’t around.

Josie fell asleep on her couch, the green and white plaid couch her aunt had handed down to her when she moved into the apartment last year. She still occasionally found a tuft of white dog hair from her aunt’s poodle mix from time to time, but it happened less often. The couch was comfortable for napping, but not for sleeping long periods. Josie wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep, but the pain in her shoulders and hips told her it had been longer than a couple of hours. She grabbed her phone to check on the time and noticed she had missed a message from Thomas.

It was unsettling how quickly her panic returned. She read the message with dread. “When should we play poker and fuck? Explain yourself.”

It had been hours since he’d sent the text, and it was too late to get into this tonight. This was a short reprieve, time to develop a plan. She still didn’t see any new options as she pondered the situation. And at least one of her original options was eliminated. She couldn’t just ignore it; Thomas had seen the tweet just as she thought he would.

She had never seen Thomas display much emotion. So, it took her by surprise when he appeared visibly shaken, even a bit disheveled when she met him at the coffee shop late the next afternoon after her plans with Suze. “Explain the tweet you deleted last night!” he demanded.

“I meant to send it as a DM, and I accidently tweeted it. I deleted it as fast as I could when I realized what I’d done,” Josie explained.

“Who?”

“What?”

“Who did you mean to send that to? Clearly it wasn’t to me,” Thomas stammered, his voice both shaking and rising as he spoke.

Josie hadn’t decided how she was going to deal with this, so she sipped her latte slowly trying to buy time to think. “You see other women, Thomas. We both know you do.” She searched his face trying to pinpoint which emotion he was feeling. As she looked at his sharp features and dark eyes, she suddenly wondered what it was she was afraid would happen? Was she afraid of losing Thomas? Why? She didn’t particularly enjoy spending time with him and was often bored or worse. Why had she spent the past 24 hours feeling physical and psychological panic? Before Thomas had a chance to respond, she heard herself speaking again, but even she wasn’t sure what she was going to say until the words spilled out. “I enjoy my time with other men more than I enjoy my time with you. You haven’t done anything wrong here. I understand why that tweet was upsetting to you, but if I’m being honest, and I think it’s way past time for that, I don’t think you and I are a very good fit.”

She waited at least a full minute before Thomas had anything to say. “I’ve tried to be the perfect partner to you, taking you to all the places you wouldn’t get to go otherwise, teaching you about things you should know something about.” It finally hit her; Thomas was trying to educate her about what he considered the finer things in life. She didn’t need a mentor; she needed a boyfriend. She didn’t need a husband either. Josie didn’t have any married friends that weren’t miserable at least half the time. The truth was, Josie enjoyed her own company quite a lot.

“All I ever wanted was someone to spend time and have fun with,” she said as she gathered her things and stood up. “This has never been that, and I don’t want to waste my time any longer.”

Tears fell down her cheeks, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. The tears were more about feeling emotionally charged than feeling any sense of loss. She didn’t want Thomas to see her like this, so she turned her head toward the door as she headed out into the courtyard beyond the coffeeshop. Confrontation was never a comfortable feeling for Josie. Her breathing was quick and she was walking more briskly than usual. She heard that familiar tone on her phone, and hoped the message wasn’t from Thomas. She had nothing else to say to him. The last 24 hours had been confusing, but had brought about much clarity.

Her hands were shaking as she fumbled with the small front zipper on her leather backpack. Her manicure made it hard to open that zipper on a good day, but the surge of adrenaline from her confrontation with Thomas made it even more difficult. She finally had the phone in her hand. She grinned from ear to ear when she saw the message was from Josh. “I’m back in town. When should we play poker and fuck?”

“How about right now?” Josie replied as she headed to the train station.