The Complications of T by Bey Deckard

quite some time. It was an indie movie—a Swiss-Welsh collaboration—and I wasn’t even the leading man, but the part just felt right… the way Maksim, the Ukrainian gypsy, had felt. However, there was something else that was continuously pushing all other thought out of my mind.
    Before I’d left Montreal, Tim had made me swear to call or email only in the event of an emergency and that, at the end of ninety days, he would be the one to contact me, since he was the one who had asked for the time to begin with. I’d agreed, but only after he allowed one caveat: if I hadn’t heard from him by the deadline, I could call him if I still felt something… just to say goodbye.
    He’d called me a masochist and kissed me, refusing to see me off at the airport. Tim had been dry-eyed when I left, but I liked to think that he shed a few quiet tears once I was gone. For my part… I must have looked absolutely bereft because the driver of the Montreal limo service Greg liked to use, usually known for being very discreet, actually asked me a few times if I was all right. I was clearly not, as evinced by the liberal tots of whiskey I kept pouring into my glass—I barely remembered getting to the airport and nothing of the flight home.
    However, once I’d recovered from my momentary lapse, I made it my singular mission to get my act together so that when, not if , Tim called me, I could offer him a much more stable environment than the one I had found myself in prior to the call from Claire that had set events in motion.
    Though it turned out that I was overly optimistic about having my divorce finalized by the time the “warranty” ran out, Claire was true to her word about making it as painless as possible. In truth, neither of us was particularly hurt about the split. She had been my anchor, and I hers, for a long time; but when her acting career had failed to flourish—eclipsed as it were by my own, however shite my roles—things like envy and fatigue had taken root, and we had grown slowly apart. My son Joshua was born in the wake of our problems, and though I will never, ever regret his birth, he was conceived in a desperate attempt to mend something that no longer had any reason to be. Claire claimed to be happier, and I believed her. Now, it was my turn to be happier.
    If only Tim would email…
    I had driven myself halfway crazy staring at his Facebook page, locked out by the friends-only setting, forced to make do with the one slightly blurry profile picture I had access to. I had read every single review he’d written over the last ninety days, and then I’d gone back and read every review he’d ever written about my movies. I don’t know why I had been so blind to it before… His deep appreciation for my work was blatantly obvious in his writing.
    I had even nervously bought myself a small dildo over the Internet to practice with—imagining that it was Tim who was on the other end—so that I would have an idea of what to expect, should things take a turn in that direction. I knew that Tim wanted me that way, and that made me want it too.
    If only Tim would call…
    It was silly to expect him to be up so early. It was just past eleven for me, but that meant it was just after six in the morning for Tim, and he was not an early riser. I knew I had to find something to do all day to distract myself or else I’d be checking my email or my phone every thirty seconds until I heard from him.
    Please god, let me hear something.
    I tapped out a quick message on my phone to the maid service to make sure that there were fresh sheets on the bed in the modest three-bedroom flat I had rented on Colville Terrace. I then sat down in front of my laptop to write an email to my lawyer to ask him how long it would take the paperwork for the sale of the yacht to be finalized—I had to adjust my budget to accommodate the pretty drastic pay cut I was taking with these new roles, and I knew it really was absurd to own both a small