Page 16 of The Progressions

She sucked in a shocked breath when she heard the story of Oren and Shay Galton’s underwear. “Damn! Damn, Kasia!”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I didn’t know what to do,” I told her again, and she also repeated her words.

“Damn! He was playing with it?”

“I think he was playing with himself,” I clarified. “I don’t even want to look at that box now but someone is going to have to wash all that stuff. Would the lingerie get ruined if I use bleach? What about some kind of pure antiseptic?”

“No, don’t use bleach! Maybe vinegar, but you’ll have to be careful because I bet it’s all really nice and expensive,” Iva said.

“It looks that way. Like tiny scraps of lace and clouds, but so sexy.”

“Right now, I’m wearing a pair of underwear that someone could make into an emergency shelter,” she said glumly. “Ugh, I wish I hadn’t heard this story.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized to her, but I also meant it in a more general sense. I was sorry that we all had to live in a world where that had occurred. “I feel so bad that I let it happen—”

“You already know that you shouldn’t have,” she told me.

I did know that. But I couldn’t move everything by myself! I’d had to get help from someone, and Oren was already on the premises. I’d offered to pay him for his assistance for just a few hours, and I made sure that he only worked for me when he was off the clock for the condo complex.

“It was a mistake,” I agreed. “What do I do now?”

“What can you do?” she asked in return. “You let him in there and it’s not part of his actual job, so you can’t complain to anyone above me. Not that they would do anything about him, anyway.” In the past year and a half since he’d been hired, they hadn’t wanted to hear about any problems with him—and Iva’s boss in the main office had told her about some kind of familial relationship that Oren enjoyed with a person even more elevated in their hierarchy. That was why Iva had been keeping the log about his behavior. She’d been hoping that compiling a giant amount of evidence would make a difference, because reporting his individual transgressions sure hadn’t.

Unfortunately, I thought that she was right about what had just happened with Shay Galton’s underwear. He hadn’t been in his official maintenance capacity when he’d abused those thongs, and I didn’t feel like there was much I could do about it except to stop our extra activities and keep him out of Tyler’s condo.

“Oren knows that I’ve been working there.” I didn’t have to tell Iva that I hadn’t been as careful to only do my second job outside of when I was on the clock for my first one. I had double-dipped, as Tyler had called it when he’d considered hiring me, and now Oren was aware of that. He was rubber, with all his failures bouncing right off, but I might get fired—might? No, I would get fired for sure if my bosses also became aware of what I’d been doing. This was a great job and I didn’t want to lose it, and I didn’t want my actions to affect Iva, either.

“Shit,” she said. “I don’t want to say it, but I’ve warned you.”

She had, but she hadn’t tried to stop me from doing all my double-dipping. She knew that I needed it, because my dad and I were barely covering things. He got some disability money, but it wasn’t enough for our expenses and I wanted to improve stuff for him, like getting him more speech therapy and buying a better wheelchair so that he wouldn’t feel so trapped in our house. I saved everywhere I could, and I never did anything like buying thousands of lacy thongs so that I needed a lingerie box that was the same size as a refrigerator. I hardly ever went out like Tyler and I had done, unless I forgot my cooler (and I rarely did that). The summer before when I’d gone to the movies to watch him on the big screen was the first time in years…

There was no excuse. “You were right to warn me,” I said. “I guess I’ll tell Tyler that I can’t work for him, and I’ll—damn, I still don’t know what to do about Oren.”

In Iva’s opinion, there was nothing to do except move past it. “And also explain to Tyler Hennessy what happened with his girlfriend’s underwear, of course,” she said firmly.

Of course. I imagined myself doing that. “Then Oren reached down into his pants,” I would say, and I closed my eyes and covered them with my hand, too.

“Where is Shay, by the way?” Iva asked. “Why isn’t she there taking care of her stuff by herself?”

We settled into a gossip session fueled by my research into Shay Galton’s social media posts, because I certainly wasn’t getting any information from Tyler about her. “She’s in Thailand on the beach. Didn’t you see her posing with the snake?” I asked, and Iva quickly looked and was either horrified or impressed. She felt both ways, she explained, because it was definitely sexy but snakes slithered through their own feces and urine. Everyone knew that.

“If she’s smart, she washed her hands,” she announced. I heard water running in the background and assumed that Iva was now washing hers, after thinking about all that snake bacteria.

“I’ve asked Tyler about when she’ll get here,” I mentioned. “She had all the furniture packed and moved so she must like it, and I need to know what she’ll want to keep. I’ve told him that they’ll definitely need a bed.”

“That air mattress will deflate if they’re both on it,” Iva agreed. “Especially if they get busy.”

“They will,” I said, recalling how they’d made out in the bedroom while wearing their fur hats. “They were practically on fire when they were kissing in front of me, and they were standing up. Imagine if they’d had a flat surface and free use of all four of their limbs!”

There was silence from her end of the call—until I heard a little sniff. “Iva?” I asked. “Are you ok?”

“I have a problem but I don’t think you’ll understand it,” she said, sniffing harder.

“Please go ahead and tell me. I owe you after that Oren story.”

She was quiet, and I was too. “Dominic doesn’t want to have sex with me,” she finally said. I’d had a feeling that her unhappiness had related to her stupid boyfriend, because it always did. “I’m not sure if it’s because I’m so ugly right now, or if it’s because he only thinks of me as a mother or something, but he just won’t. Last night, I tried to give him a blow job and he pushed me away and got kind of mad. What guy gets mad about oral sex? Isn’t that why they’re always going to prostitutes?”

“He goes to prostitutes?” I asked, shocked.

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