I was impressed. I took a sip of tea. It was unlike anything I had ever tasted before. It was sweet, but with a hint of something I couldn't put my finger on. “What's in this?” I asked.
She looked concerned. “You don't like it?”
“I didn't say that, it's just different is all.”
She smiled. “I'm afraid I developed a taste for it when I went to Amsterdam. I used to spend like half my paycheck importing it in before I toned down my habit.”
I hadn't realized it was so expensive. “Oh, I didn't mean-”
“Oh don't say that I shouldn't have. Your brother bought me this box of tea anyway.”
I laughed. “He does seem to try to keep you employees happy. So why don't you like him?”
She laughed back at me. “Are you kidding me? He's a riot. He's one of the only people I know who doesn't tiptoe around my sexuality. Even bigots feel the need to disguise their true feelings around me, but not James.”
I took another sip. “And what are James' true feelings about your sexuality?”
Anne shrugged. “They don't seem to matter to him at all. I hear he's very LGBT friendly. At least one of his lead programmers is a gay guy, and it doesn't bother James at all. Also,” she said with a conspiratorial nudge. “I've seen him out on a date with a couple of bisexual girls on more than one occasion.”
My stomach dropped a little without even thinking. A threesome was one of the things that he had mentioned in the shower with me. It had been said as if it was a joke, but then again, Nicole had been calling him Daddy over the Internet. Maybe he really did reveal all his fantasies to me.
“Gross,” I said without thinking. Anne gave me a weird look, as if I had just said something bigoted myself. “Oh, nothing against those bisexual girls, but that's my brother you're talking about.”
Anne looked relieved. “I swear you have a little Bi-rannosaurus just waiting to come out.”
I shrugged. The conversation didn't make me uncomfortable at all, even though I knew Anne had a thing for me. “I'd love to have a threesome someday, but I'd like to be in a committed relationship first. Then it's just a matter of finding the right girl.”
Anne lifted her mug in the air. “I'll cheers to that,” she said, sounding a little sad.
I turned and gave her a little bit of a wry smile. “Hey, how are you single, by the way? A girl as cool and as well-traveled as you should have girls lined up to hang out with you?”
Anne made an amused little “hmm” sound. “I do like to travel, and I am a pretty cool chick. Unfortunately, I never really stuck around long enough to make girlfriends.” She turned around and sat down on the couch, and I followed her. “And now that I do stay in one place, it seems that I don't know how to meet people anymore.”
I had heard the same about people after they left college. Where do you go to meet friends after classes are over? I didn't have a good answer to that. As I sat down on the couch next to her, my fingers brushed up against my belly and it made me smile. Parents found friends at their kids' preschools anyway, I knew.
“I did have one girlfriend since moving here,” she continued. “Unfortunately, I learned very quickly that she didn't trust bisexual women.”
“Really?” I asked, kind of incredulous. How could anyone not trust Anne?
“Yeah. It's actually pretty common in the LGBT community, believe it or not. You either have to be super gay or super straight. Anyway, I never even felt comfortable mentioning if I found a guy handsome around her. But she was the jealous type, and one day she discovered I had slept with a guy in high school and enjoyed it. She said that it was a lie by omission.”
“Wow.”
Anne still managed to smile. “Yeah, so she broke up with me immediately. It was a blessing in disguise, really. I can't imagine not even being able to talk about who I found attractive or not.”
I thought about it for a moment. The way she phrased it made it sound different to my situation, but somehow still the same. James hadn't taken any action to encourage Nicole at all, and I could definitely admit that she was hot as hell. From the way I was acting, James couldn't tell me who he found attractive either.
At that moment, I felt like a lousy girlfriend, or whatever I was to James.
Still, I smiled. “Yeah, I can't imagine it either. I think we are going to find you a girl, Anne.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don't need some eighteen year old from out of town to play matchmaker for me.”
My jaw dropped, then I smiled. “See, that's exactly the kind of wit we're going to sell. The girls from your band aren't down?”
Her eyes rolled. “Worse. Two of them are in a relationship with each other, and the third is the ex I was just talking about.”
“You still hang out with her even though she dumped you like that?” I asked. “I don't think I would be so easy-going about it.”