by Fiona Zedde
“Good.”
“Now, go and put your life in order. That woman won’t wait her whole life for you.”
Sage didn’t have the heart, or the balls, to tell her that it was over. “I’m glad you guys came,” she said, giving each of them one last hug. “Email or call with your dates so we can get something solid arranged for Christmas.”
Miss Opal didn’t miss a thing. “At least try, honey.” She held on to Sage the longest.
Sage stood watching the slow movement of the security line long after all three disappeared past the creepy body scan thing. She didn’t want to go home. Not yet. She’d left Phil there, floating through the house in her silk robe, beautiful and silent, probably waiting for some man to come sweep her away.
She was still staring at the line of strangers and thinking about her shitty home life when her phone rang.
It was Errol.
“Hey.” She turned away to head back outside and to her car. No point in standing there like an idiot and thinking about things she couldn’t change. “Thanks for calling me back.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“You know I can’t legally drink, right?” Errol sat perched on a stool next to the bar where Sage had invited him to sit, still glowing from his graduation, his thin and graceful body covered in what Sage was sure was a graduation gift outfit. A thin, peach-colored linen shirt with three-quarter sleeves, worn untucked over white linen pants. Pink-painted toe nails peeked from elegant leather sandals.
When Sage only stared at him, he snorted through a smile. “I graduated from high school, not college,” he said. “Which means I’m not twenty-one yet.”
She didn’t see what the big deal was. At eighteen, she’d never cared much about what was legal, just fun. She’d drank, snorted, smoked, swallowed anything she wanted to get her to the desired altitude of the evening.
“So, you don’t want a drink?”
Errol smirked. “I didn’t say that.”
Sage signaled the bartender over. After she ordered her usual rum and coke, Errol got himself a piña colada. Once she slid over some money, she took him to a table near the railing.
“So what’s on your mind?” Errol asked her as soon as they sat down.
There was no animosity in his voice, just a curiosity to know what was going on.
“Not too much.” Sage savored the sweetness of the drink on her tongue, the burst of effervescence that made her nose twitch even after all these years and countless versions of the drink. “Just felt like chatting with you for a bit.”
Errol mostly played with his drink, turning the curvy glass around and around between his hands. “Why now, after all the years I’ve been here?” he asked. “I asked you to come have lunch or whatever with me a few times but you always said you were too busy.”
A flush of embarrassment climbed in Sage’s cheeks. Yeah, she had been that asshole. In the name of full disclosure, and in an effort to be better than she had been before, she inched toward honesty.
“I wasn’t ready to meet the guy who took my place with my parents.” The drink bubbled in her mouth again. And she almost didn’t notice Errol’s breath of surprise.
“For real?”
“Yeah.” Sage shrugged. She knew it then but was painfully aware of it now, of how wrong she was.
“Weren’t you the one who didn’t want to go home much, and didn’t have much to say to them when they called?”
How the hell did he know that?
“They talk about you a lot,” Errol said, answering the unasked question. “They’re proud of you too, I guess. Although…” His voice trailed off and she didn’t have to be a mind reader to figure out the rest of his aborted sentence: Although you’re a bit of an asshole. Which was true enough.
“I was a dick and an idiot. I’m trying not to be so much of one now.”
Another smirk. A sly slide of laughing eyes. “How’s that going for you?”
“It’s been hard as fuck…” Which was a kind of an understatement. She’d pushed everyone away, and it was taking time and humility she didn’t possess much of to make things right.
“You don’t seem like the type to make this easy,” he said, finally taking a sip of his melting drink.
She didn’t bother denying it. Anybody who’d been in her company for more than ten minutes could see through to her paper soul. She liked fun. Loved Phil. Was a hypocrite. Clear as glass.
“Well, I’m trying to change it up now, at least a little bit.” She chewed on a piece of ice and Miss Opal’s voice came at her from the past. You shouldn’t chew ice. You’ll mess up you pretty teeth dem.
“So, shoot.” Errol said. “How can I help this poor little rich girl soothe her conscience?”
She rolled her eyes. This boy was a real smart ass. “Tell me…” Sage paused, thinking of all the things she wanted to know. “Tell me how my parents found you.”
He squirmed, looking uncomfortable for the first time since they sat down together. “It’s not pretty.”
“I’m not asking for a fairy tale.”
“Are you sure about that?” He looked at her with a faint smile, but there was no humor in it. “Well, I’ll give you one anyway. It’s called Cinderella, Jamaican style.”
Errol played with his soda, hands turning the tall glass around and around, occasionally looking up at Sage, a considering look on his face. Finally, he spoke. “They found me in the gully.”
Shock thudded into Sage’s chest.
The gully was a shitty place. A series of drainage ditches in Kingston, hellish and filthy, but also just about the only “safe” space for gay boys in Jamaica to escape to. These were kids who’d been chased out of their homes or who just left because they were tired of being treated like crap by their families.
“I’d been there for a few months. It was hard, getting used to sleeping in drainage pipes and being…selling my mouth or my ass to eat. Some of them refused to do that shit.” He shrugged as if their choices were ones he understood, were nothing compared to the other thing. The thing that had landed them on the streets in the first place. “They stole or did scams, the prettier, smaller ones pretended to be girls and then blackmailed the straight guys they fucked into paying them hush money.”
Dangerous shit. Nothing Sage knew from personal experience. Errol was right, she was a poor little rich girl. She had complaints, but she always had a place to sleep. Always had people to show her they cared.
Shoulders gradually stooping down, getting narrower as he immersed himself in memories of the past he’d escaped from, Errol plucked at the label on the brown bottle while he talked. “When my father threw me out, I couldn’t believe it. We had our differences, but everything seemed okay. I was doing in school and working some online jobs to bring in money to the family. But then…” He stopped.
His father got a new girlfriend, pretty and sexually adventurous enough to try anything, even the crazy stuff Errol senior had seen on TV. He’d walked on his father and her often enough to know. And the walls of their small house were thin.
“She didn’t want to share him, maybe.” He shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
One day after school, she hemmed Errol up in the front yard. He had his backpack and was excited because he got a new client willing to pay him a decent rate for updates to their website. As usual, he planned to save half, contribute the rest to the household.
“I see what you’re doing,” she shouted, sticking a boney finger in Errol’s face. “You’re trying to be a wife to him. Bringing in your little pin money, waving your ass in his face!”
It was crazy. All the times she’d looked at him with poison in her gaze, he never thought something like that was going through her mind.
“It was so stupid. I don’t even think she believed it. But my father did.”
Errol landed on his ass in the street with only the backpack he’d quickly stuffed with clothes and the bank card linked to his savings account.
Between his savi
ngs and the work he was able to get, he avoided starving, but he didn’t have any place to live. So, he ended up in the gully with a lot of the gay boys and trans girls in Kingston.
“Sometimes a boy or two would go missing. But people didn’t care, you know. To our own families we were disposable, how else were strangers supposed to feel about us?”
The strangers who came into the gully were furtive men with money in their wallets and a hunger to fuck something different, unable to be open about what they preferred at home. Sometimes these strangers were cruel. Murderous. Fucking then killing the same boys they had turned to for pleasure. For escape.
The gully almost killed Errol.
“People think life is cheap in Jamaica overall, it’s worth even less than a ten-minute blowjob in the gully.”
The boys slashed each other up, shot each other, scratched, and tore themselves in two. They had been hurt, they were in pain, and didn’t know anything else to do but pass along that pain. To each other, to anybody stupid enough to get close.
“You could’ve knocked over with a piece of bread the day the Bennetts stopped to help me.” He rolled his eyes and smiled, fond and pained at the same time. “I was leaving the library when somebody pushed me off my bicycle. I was cussing and carrying on, trying to get back on the bicycle, get away from the two guys who looked like they were ready to kick me to death. But they stopped their car and helped me up, waited for me to clean the scrapes off my knees. Then they took me to dinner, told me about their daughter—”
Sage winced at that.
Errol continued “Then asked if they could help me.” His smile leaked away. “I wasn’t proud enough to say no.”
“So, they helped you get back in school, helped you get an American visa, and that’s it. All because you got shoved off your bicycle in front of them?”
“Pretty much. I think I was just a gay kid they needed to rescue. Because they couldn’t rescue you, you know?”
“Rescue me?”
“Yeah. I guess from yourself.”
Sage’s teeth clenched hard enough to creak in her jaw, trapping the automatic reaction she wanted to spit at Errol. She held herself still. Her hand tightened around the cool glass, and her feelings rushed through her too fast to name. Another sip of the drink fizzed over tongue.
“Do you think I need rescuing?” she asked once she got herself under control.
“I don’t know you,” Errol said with a shrug. “So, I can’t really say.”
Although it didn’t seem like he was making a dig at Sage, she felt the jolt of it anyway. She’d had the chance to get to know him in the four years since he’d been in America. Her parents told her to reach out to him, saying she might be surprised at what they had in common. But she’d always had excuses. Or more to the point, she hadn’t wanted to meet him.
Damn. She could’ve saved herself so much shit if she’d just— She cut off that useless train of thought. It didn’t matter now. They could only move forward.
She swallowed the last of her drink. “You’re right.”
“Of course I am.” He grinned, showing some of what she realized was his natural vivaciousness. It was kind of cute.
She grunted a short laugh, unable to get where he was yet. “Hey, you want to get out of here and grab a real meal? This place is a little seedy.”
“Sure. I thought you were trying to tell me something when you suggested this place.”
“No. I was just…” She hitched up a shoulder to indicate her general obliviousness and he laughed like she meant him to. “So you want to go head over to Novlette’s or someplace else?”
“You pick,” he said.
Naturally, they ended up at Gillespie’s, easily getting into the usually fully booked spot despite not having a reservation. It paid to have friends in useful places.
Sage and Errol settled at a quiet table on the upper floor of the restaurant and bar with a table full of food since she remembered just how much he could eat. Rémi was nowhere in sight but that didn’t mean her friend wasn’t working. Sage sent Rémi a quick text to let her know she was in the building then went back to paying attention to her lunch companion.
“So that we got how much of I’m asshole out of the way, tell me about yourself.”
“Damn, you really jump in, don’t you?”
“I’m trying to make up for lost time.” As if that was even possible.
Over a long lunch, he told her about the new life he’d built for himself in Miami, the guy he was seeing but hadn’t had sex with yet.
“Why not?”
“When I have sex next, I want it to be important now that I don’t just have to do it to survive, you know.”
The boy was too sweet for his own damn good.
In exchange for his confidence, she spilled her guts about Phil and how much of a dick she’d been.
“I would’ve dumped your ass in a minute,” he said, giving her some serious side-eye.
“Good thing you’re not my girlfriend then,” she said with an unrepentant grin, only to joke about it now that things were…better.
After their meal was over, she invited him over to the house later in the week for a family dinner and told him to bring his boyfriend if he wanted to. No sex didn’t mean no companionship.
He said he’d think about it, then he drove off, waving at her through the window of his clean Honda Civic with a wide smile. Sage didn’t feel like the idiot she thought she would when she grinned and waved right back.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“This is the sweetest Cuban spot I know of right now.” Nuria tossed the comment over her shoulder as she led the way into the restaurant, hips swaying in tight white jeans and red-bottomed gold stilettos. A gold blouse, light and sheer, bared her flat belly.
“You know I’m all about the sweet spot,” Sage said. She tried to smile but her joke felt flat.
“Uh huh…”
The hostess quickly seated them at a well-lit table on the second floor of the lofted style restaurant. The place was small, about the size of an actual lofted apartment with six small tables upstairs where they sat and twice that downstairs. The food smelled good but Sage wasn’t in the mood to appreciate it.
Days had passed since she last saw Nuria at Errol’s graduation. They’d talked about things, skimmed over the big elephant in the room of their friendship but hadn’t arrived at a conclusion that satisfied them both.
With a wriggle of contentment, Nuria settled into her chair once the server brought her mojito and Sage’s rum and coke.
“So what’s going on with you, macha?” Nuria paused with the drink near her deep purple lips. “You look like shit.”
“Thank you very much…” Sage muttered. She downed half her rum and coke in a few swallows.
“Obviously you own a mirror, so this can’t be news.”
“Well, I’m trying to act like everything is fine.”
“That’s never a good plan, I can tell you that from personal experience.” Nuria sipped her mojito and licked a droplet of the drink from her bottom lip. “I like to match my inside with my outside as much as possible, and since I always look fabulous—” She spread her arms wide and leaned back in the chair so Sage could get a good look at all her fabulousness. “—I work a lot on making myself happy, no matter what the rest of the world trips me up with.”
“Easy for you to say, baby love.”
Little frown lines marred the smoothness of Nuria’s mahogany skin. “You know that’s not true…”
Yeah, Sage knew better. When all was said and done, Nuria didn’t have it any easier than the rest of them did.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Nuria said. “Tell me what’s up. Apart from what I already know, that is. You screwed up and kicked Phil out. You showed me your whole bi-phobic ass—” Sage sputtered in protest but Nuria kept going. “—and you’ve finally unstuck your head from up your own ass enough to see that your parents are better than you gave them credit
for.” She propped an elbow up on the table, balanced her pointy chin on top of her first. “What else?”
“I told you I’m not bi-phobic or—”
“Yeah, yeah. Skip over that. You need to get over whatever issues you have with my people. You’re not there yet and because I love you, I’ll be patient. But let’s just be real with each other and move on from where we both are, okay?”
Sage released a deep breath and thought of the sea change that had taken place in her life over the last few days. “Okay.”
The waitress popped up just then with their food, platters of ropa vieja, rice and beans, and tostones, in the middle of the table for them to share.
“Thanks, darling,” Nuria said to the waitress then immediately reached for her empty plate to start serving herself. When she called to invite Sage out, she’d claimed to be starving.
Though Sage couldn’t bring herself to eat yet, she put some of the food on her own plate. “This separation isn’t as easy as I thought it would be,” she said.
The tostones and shredded beef on Nuria’s plate were fast disappearing into her mouth. But she was still able to talk just fine. “Oh, so you thought kicking out the woman who’d been in your heart for over a decade was gonna be like pissing out your morning tea?” Chewing slowly, she peered at Sage with a raised eyebrow like she was really waiting for an answer.
Of course, she wouldn’t get it. “I can’t be with somebody bi.”
“Somebody,” Nuria parroted with a sneer. “I wonder what the real reason is for you being so anti-bi? Because it can’t be your fear of diseases. The way you carry on with these bitches like you can’t get crabs or whatever else when you throw your mouth all over their pussies.” She paused with a fork full of rice and beans pointed at Sage. “There’s definitely something else here. And the way you’re carrying on, I wonder if even you know what it is.”
“Nope,” Sage said with a quick shake of her head. “It’s not any deep shit you may be thinking. I just don’t like it.”
To give her fingers something to do, she clumsily unwrapped her utensils from the paper napkin.