Chapter 14: The Family Dinner
The drive to his parents’ house was silent for the first twenty minutes. Aidan gripped the steering wheel, the memory of last night’s peace a distant country. In the passenger seat, Margot scrolled calmly through her phone. Zola and Cho were in the back, a united front of black clothing and studied nonchalance.
“You’re sure about this?” Zola finally asked, her voice cutting through the drone of the engine.
“No,” Aidan said. “But it has to happen.”
Cho leaned forward, her hand resting on his shoulder. “We can be… a version of us. For them.”
“Don’t,” Margot said, not looking up from her screen. “Don’t shrink. It’s disrespectful—to them and to us. They get the truth. How they handle it is their work.”
The house looked smaller than he remembered. The lawn was perfectly manicured, a testament to his father’s quiet, relentless precision. The peeling floral wallpaper in the dining room was the same pattern from his childhood, a faded labyrinth of roses. The air was stifling, thick with the smell of pot roast and lemon polish and something else—anxiety, maybe, seeping from the very walls.
His mother, Linda, fluttered in the doorway, her smile a tight, practiced thing. “Aidan! Come in, come in.” Her eyes swept over the three women behind him, taking in Zola’s facial piercings, Cho’s silk wrap top, Margot’s cool, assessing gaze. The hug she gave Aidan was brief, her body rigid.
His father, Robert, emerged from the living room, wiping his hands on a dish towel. A tall, stoic man whose kindness had always been expressed through actions, not words. He shook Aidan’s hand with a firm grip, then nodded to the women. “Ladies.”
His sister, Kara, was already at the dining table, wine glass in hand. Her stare was a laser. “So. This is the commune.”
“Kara,” their mother hissed.
“What? It’s a joke. Lighten up.”
Dinner was a slow-motion collision. They were seated at the table with the plastic fruit centerpiece. His mother had used the good china, the plates with the hairline cracks.
Small talk sputtered and died. Cho complimented the food politely. Zola asked Robert about the garden, and he launched into a minute description of his battle with aphids, relief flooding his features at a safe topic. Margot listened, sipping her water, her silence more imposing than speech.
Kara zeroed in. “So, Aidan says you all work together. In… digital media?”
“That’s one term for it,” Margot said, setting her glass down precisely.
“And you live together? All four of you? In that little house next to Aidan’s?”
“We find it sufficient,” Cho said softly.
Aidan felt the ‘their’ house, ‘their’ bed, ‘their’ life burning on his tongue. He said nothing, chasing a piece of carrot around his plate.
His father cleared his throat, the sound like gravel shifting. “Aidan mentioned you’re… self-employed. Must be unpredictable.”
“We have a solid business model,” Zola said, a defensive edge creeping in. “Contract work. Consultations. It’s steady.”
“Consultations,” Kara repeated, swirling her wine. “For what? Website design?”
The air left the room. The ceiling fan’s hum became a roar. Robert put his fork down.
Margot looked directly at Kara, then at Robert, then at Linda, who was staring at her own lap. “We create bespoke intimate experiences for a private clientele,” she said, her voice clean and clinical. “We film some of those experiences for a subscription platform. We also provide educational coaching on technique and relationship dynamics. It’s legal. It’s lucrative. It’s our profession.”
The silence was absolute. Linda made a small, wounded sound.
Robert’s face hardened into something unfamiliar. “You’re prostitutes.”
“Dad.” Aidan’s voice cracked.
“No, Robert, we are not,” Margot corrected, with infinite patience. “Prostitution is a transaction for sex. We sell an artistic service, a performance, and expertise. The distinction is important to us, and to the law.”
Kara barked a laugh. “Artistic service. Jesus, Aidan. You left Stephanie for this?”
“I didn’t leave her for this,” Aidan said, heat rising in his chest. “I left because it was dead. This… found me.”
“Found you?” His mother’s head snapped up, her eyes glistening. “They’re children, Aidan! They’re teenagers! What could you possibly have in common?”
Cho spoke, her voice a calm pool in the storm. “We’re all legal adults. And we have a great deal in common. We value honesty. We’ve built something from nothing. We care for your son. Deeply.”
“He’s thirty-four,” Robert said, each word a hammer strike. “He has a divorce. He’s vulnerable. This isn’t right. It’s exploitation, on one side or the other.”
The accusation hung there, ugly and final. Aidan saw Zola’s knuckles whiten around her fork. Saw Margot’s jaw tighten. Saw Cho’s eyelids flutter shut for a second, as if absorbing a blow.
He pushed his chair back. The legs screeched on the hardwood. “That’s enough.”
“No, it’s not nearly enough,” Robert said, standing now, matching his height. “You bring this… situation into our home. You expect us to just smile and pass the peas? What you’re doing is a sin. It’s a sickness. Those girls need help, and you…” He trailed off, a lifetime of disappointment crushing the words.
Aidan felt it then, not as conflict, but as clarity. The wires Margot spoke of, the current he was now part of—it was real. It was stronger than this faded room, stronger than this choking disapproval.
“I love them,” he said. The words were quiet, but they landed like stones. His mother gasped. “I don’t expect you to understand it. I barely understand it myself. But it’s real. They are not exploiting me. I am not exploiting them. We are… a family. A different one.”
Kara stood, throwing her napkin on the table. “You’re having a mid-life crisis. You need therapy, not a harem.”
“Get out,” Robert said, his voice trembling not with rage, but with a profound, devastated finality. He wasn’t looking at the women anymore. He was looking only at his son. “Take your… partners. And go. Don’t come back until you’ve come to your senses.”
Linda began to weep, soft, hopeless sounds into her hands.
Aidan looked at the three women. Margot gave him a single, slow nod. Zola’s expression was fierce with pride. Cho’s eyes were full of a sorrow that wasn’t for herself.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t plead. He just turned and walked out of the dining room, through the hallway that smelled of his childhood, and out the front door into the cool evening air. They followed him, a silent procession.
The car doors shut, one after another, sealing them in a new kind of silence. He didn’t start the engine. He just stared at the house, at the lit window of the dining room where his old life had just ended.
In the back, Zola exhaled, long and shaky. “Well. That fucking sucked.”
A startled, wet laugh burst from Aidan’s chest. It bordered on a sob.
Margot reached over and pried one of his hands from the wheel, lacing her fingers with his. Her touch was an anchor.
“You chose,” she said simply. “It cost something. Real choices always do.”
He looked at her, then at their joined hands, then back at the house. The fracture was clean. It was terrible. And as he finally started the car and pulled away from the curb, leaving the perfect lawn and the peeling wallpaper behind, a terrible, unexpected freedom began to uncoil in the space where the pain would later settle. He was, for better or worse, entirely his own man now. And theirs.
The car carried them through streets bleached orange by sodium-vapor lights, each turning farther from that stifling dining room and its plastic fruit. No one spoke. Zola cracked her window, letting in a rush of cool air that smelled of cut grass and distant barbecue, the normal summer night a cruel contrast to the internal wreckage. Aidan drove on autopilot, his hands loose on the wheel, the declaration ‘And theirs’ echoing in the hollowed-out space where his family’s approval used to live.
He parked in their shared driveway, the two silent houses side-by-side looking like a before and after exhibit. The walk to the front door was only twenty paces but felt endless. Margot unlocked it, the familiar hum of the gaming rig and the scent of patchouli welcoming them into their curated chaos.
The neon-lit screens in the living room showed paused scenes from earlier streams, frozen, beautiful grotesques. It felt like looking at evidence.
“I need a drink that isn’t my parents’ shitty chardonnay,” Zola announced, beelining for the kitchen. The domestic normalcy of the statement was a lifeline.
Cho went straight to the bedroom, returning with a soft, worn hoodie of Aidan’s. She didn’t ask. She just guided his arms into the sleeves, her fingers brushing his neck, covering him in something that smelled of his own detergent and, faintly, of her. The care in the gesture fractured something.
He sank onto the futon, the silk slippery under him. Margot sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him, not touching, just watching his face in the kaleidoscope light of the monitors. Zola returned, handed him a glass of amber whiskey, and perched on the arm of the futon, her thigh pressed against his side.
“So,” Zola said, taking a sip from her own glass. “That was a unique form of torture. I think I preferred the client who wanted us to dress like owls.”
Aidan choked on a laugh that immediately curdled into something else. His shoulders began to shake. The tears were silent at first, just a hot spill down his cheeks. Then a ragged breath tore out of him, and it all broke open—the stoic front he’d held through the drive, through the goodbye that was really an expulsion.
He cried for the lost simplicity, for his mother’s weeping, for the finality in his father’s eyes. He cried from the sheer whiplash of having his deepest truth met with such visceral disgust.
Margot’s hand came to rest on his knee, a solid weight. Cho leaned her head against his shoulder, her hair tickling his jaw. Zola’s hand found the back of his neck, her grip firm, grounding.
“Let it out,” Zola murmured. “It’s just us here.”
They surrounded him, not with empty platitudes, but with a wordless physical witness that absorbed the tremors. They had been the targets, called whores and sinners to their faces, and yet their first instinct was to hold the man who had brought them into the line of fire. The profound injustice of that care hit him like a stomach punch, staunching the tears with a wave of shame so acute it dried his throat.
He swiped at his face with the hoodie’s sleeve, the whiskey forgotten on the table beside the lube and the polished dildo. He looked at each of them in the pulsating glow: Margot’s unwavering gaze, Zola’s fierce protectiveness, Cho’s deep empathy.
“I don’t deserve you three.” His voice was sandpaper rough. “You were essentially called whores and worse by my family and you are here comforting me because I’m upset. Let me be clear. You are incredible. What you went through this evening was horrific and I’m sorry you experienced it. I’m sorry I didn’t apologise to you all instantly. I knew they wouldn't be happy but I never thought they'd be so cruel, if I did I would never have put you in that situation."
The room was quiet save for the computer’s fan. Margot squeezed his knee.
“Your father’s words were his,” she said finally. “His fear. His limitation. They weren’t about us, not really. They were about his idea of you. We knew that going in.”
“Doesn’t make it okay,” Aidan fired back, a spark of anger cutting through the shame. “You shouldn’t have had to know that. To sit there and take it.”
“We’ve taken worse from better people,” Zola shrugged, but the brittleness in her eyes betrayed the casual lie. “Point is, we chose to go. We knew the risk. You didn’t trick us.”
Cho nodded against his shoulder. “We saw your world. Now you’ve truly seen a piece of the resistance we walk through every day. The judgment. It’s not abstract for you anymore.”
Aidan absorbed that. The bonding ritual in the dark bedroom had fused them physically. This, this brutal dinner, had fused something else—a shared understanding of the cost their world could exact. The point of no return wasn’t just pleasure anymore; it was solidarity forged in a different kind of fire.
“I chose,” he said, echoing Margot’s words from the car, the meaning richer now, bloodier. “And I choose again. Right now.”
He took Margot’s hand from his knee and laced his fingers with hers. He turned his head to press a kiss into Cho’s hair. He leaned back into the steady pressure of Zola’s grip on his neck.
“They’re my past,” he said, the words definitive. “You are my present. My only family. That’s the current.”
Margot stood then, pulling him up with her. “Good,” she said, her voice holding its usual practical tone, but her eyes were bright. “Now, we’re going to bed. Not for a ritual. Not for work. We’re going to sleep. Because tomorrow we have that shibari consult at three, and I need you rested and present.”
The forward momentum of it, the relentless pull of their shared life, was his salvation. He let them lead him to the charcoal-walled room, to the tangle of linens that smelled of them. The wires were fused, the circuit complete, and as he slipped into the dark warmth between their bodies, the current felt like the only truth left in the world.