by Mysti Parker
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Other Books by Mysti Parker
Connect with the authors:
About the authors:
Sealed With a Kiss
By Mysti Parker & MJ Post
*****
PUBLISHED BY:
Mysti Parker on Kindle Direct Publishing
Sealed With a Kiss
City Meets Country #3
Copyright © 2018 Mysti Parker & MJ Post
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.
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All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and/or persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are the property of their respective owners and are used for reference only and not an implied endorsement. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Other Books by Mysti Parker
Connect with the authors:
About the authors:
Chapter One
July 2018
The dark-haired girl with a tattoo of a blonde girl on her face brought Rachel her rum and cola and set a presidente in front of Gabriel. “I learned to make it just for you, handsome,” she told Gabriel, grinning. She turned to Rachel. “If you ever want to share him, give me a call, honey.”
“Just serve the drinks,” Rachel barked at her. “And shut up if you want a tip.”
The Freak Bar on Surf Avenue had been their place for about a year — it was right near the aquarium, where they both worked, and the side show atmosphere, with old circus posters and unusual employees, appealed to Rachel Morales, who thought of herself as a serious Coney Island girl. This bartender was new, and Gabriel Castillo had a feeling they wouldn’t be returning. Rachel had fought hard to be his girlfriend since high school, and now that they were both twenty-three, she somehow wasn’t done fighting for it.
“Bitch,” Rachel said to him as she gulped her drink. Slim with hollow cheeks, she had arresting green eyes, strong shoulders, and a delicate neck.
“Who, me?” Gabriel answered.
“You know who. That witch with the tattoo.”
“It’s just supposed to be an edgy bar is all. You have nothing to worry about. I just like the drinks here.”
“Yeah, right. I know, G. Come on, let’s take a selfie.”
Rachel brandished her new tablet phone, lined their faces up. “Quit scowling. Come on, show some teeth.”
Gabriel was worried. His dad, Rafael, had gone to the hospital — dragged by his mother Sofia, all but kicking and screaming — for some tests that morning, and he hadn’t gotten a call with results yet. He’d done all the shows that afternoon with the two sea lions, Pepper and Jorge, and had been lonely without his father’s commanding presence. Gentle with the animals, Rafael was stern with him at the job, always demanding he be at his very best. He’d criticized Gabriel for giving too much or too little fish, for standing too close or too far from the pool, for being distracted by pretty women in the stands that he had actually never noticed. Today, without his dad for only the second or third time since being hired to work on the shows, Gabriel had deliberately done wrong all the things Rafael had been on him about. Now he felt horrible about it.
Rachel snapped three selfies, then began to look them over for social media. She showed him the three. “You aren’t smiling in this one, baby.” Delete. “Why’d you move right there? Look, the top of my head is cut off.”
“You look great,” Gabriel muttered. He sipped his drink. The bite of the dark rum and the sweetness of the curacao didn’t ease his anxiety.
“Okay, I’ll go with this one. Dios mio, you’re so handsome in this picture, even with your silly frowny face. Look. Look!”
Gabriel studied his image. A deeply tanned brown face, reflecting his Cuban heritage and the outdoor work he did; tight curls, five o’clock shadow, a little beard tuft below his lips. Sorrowful eyes, he thought. Why? He loved the sea lions, and his dad would be okay. Wouldn't he?
Rachel tapped at her phone, adding the picture to Facebook with the caption ‘I and my gorgeous boyfriend’ and tagged a bunch of their mutual friends, her girlfriend, her mother, three of her aunts, two of whom didn’t like him, and two of their coworkers, including his best friend Dwight the head groundskeeper, who always clicked ‘like.’
“You want to dance?” Rachel asked after she had also shared the picture on Instagram and Twitter. “I feel like going dancing at the club.”
Gabriel was tense. Dancing might help, but he was watching expenses till payday. “Let’s go Friday, when I get paid.”
“Come on, papi. Don’t you want us to get crazy on the dance floor?” Rachel knocked back her drink. Seeing that, he did the same, coughed a little. He signaled to the bartender for another, holding up two fingers to mean both their drinks. The bartender nodded, gave him a blatant come-hither look that he figured was an act playing for tips.
Rachel didn't notice, thankfully. Her phone rang, the tone some Taylor Swift song about a boyfriend. “Yeah, hello? Yeah, Mamita, what’s up?”
Gabriel’s attention, divided between the ice in his glass and the swaying hips of the bartender, snapped to Rachel’s conversation. ‘Mamita’ was what she called his mother, Sofia.
Rachel jabbed him sharply in the arm. “Check your phone, boy! She left like ten messages for you. It’s serious.”
Gabriel reached into his pocket for his phone. It wasn’t there. He must have left it in his locker at the aquarium, where he kept it when working in the stadium by the pool. He raised his hands, frustrated. Rachel slammed the phone into his hand.
“What’s up, Mama?” Gabriel asked.
“You don’t answer your phone?” His mother sounded panicked. “I needed you, hijo! Your father…” She sniffled. “He died. We
were waiting for the biopsy results, and he died.”
****
Twenty minutes later they were standing with Sofia in Coney Island Hospital’s Emergency Room waiting area. Sofia was an elegant lady with a face that showed grace and character more than beauty. She was only five feet one inch tall, but when she made eye contact with you, she seemed twice that size. Her face was tear-streaked, but her lips were pressed tightly together, and she wasn't trembling.
"Tell me the whole story, Mama," Gabriel said. His breaths had been coming faster all the way to the hospital; he hadn't responded to anything Rachel had said or done.
“I’m sitting here waiting for the doctor. They did a biopsy, you know, they wanted to rule out cancer? They thought it was an ulcer. And I see the doctor coming toward me with a look like El Diablo is following him, holding a clipboard, and then there is all this noise and people running the other way, and a nurse grabs him and pulls him away. I never thought it was about my Rafael. He is a busy doctor. And then there he is coming back to me with a nurse, and he says come quickly. I go to your father’s side, and I hold his hand as he slips away. It wasn’t ten minutes.”
“Ay, mierda,” said Rachel.
"It was a blood clot." Sofia clutched at Gabriel’s hand. He felt his knuckles shift under the ferocity of her thin fingers. He pulled her to him, hugged her. Rachel came on the other side and held them both.
“He was a great man,” Gabriel said.
“He was a great man,” Rachel added. “It was just his time, that’s all. Who knows why God takes people? I loved him like a father.”
Gabriel suddenly couldn’t feel Rachel there. He’d been dating her for seven years, sleeping with her for five, and suddenly she wasn’t real to him. What the hell could she know about it, with her jealousy and her show-off selfies and her way of dragging him along with her silly whims? Was it really all about his being good-looking and following her around so she could show him off? And she hadn't ever treated Rafael like a father; she hadn't taken the time to talk to him more than a few words at an occasional family dinner. He could remember Rachel complaining that Rafael was too tight with a dollar and that was why the four of them never ate out anywhere together. She loved him like a father? How could she say that? How dare she say that?
****
Less than a week later, the funeral home was crowded with family, neighbors and Rafael's co-workers. Gabriel sat in the front pew with his mother on his right, holding his hand, and Rachel on his left, her right hand on the inside of his left thigh. Rachel was wearing a black veil -- it looked ridiculous, since Sofia, the actual widow, wasn't wearing one. Was she still trying to prove she had loved Rafael like a father? Despite their parents being lifelong friends, her mother and father were on vacation in Cancun and hadn't shown up. Hadn't even sent flowers.
Uncle Federico, his mother's oldest brother, sat to Sofia's right and held her hand. He blew into a tissue, and it sounded like a fog horn as the priest came to the podium. The priest spoke of Rafael's faith and of his love for animals. He wasn't the regular priest at their parish, and he didn't know the Castillo family. He did the best he could.
Dwight Candy, Gabriel's best friend and coworker, joined them after the service. He would be a pall-bearer. He was big enough to be two pall-bearers. "So sorry, Mama," he told Sofia.
Gabriel stood, disentangling himself from his mother and his girlfriend. He shook Dwight's hand.
"I don't know what to say," Dwight offered.
"Well, I have something to say," Gabriel replied. "Rachel! Dios mio. This is not the place." She was taking a selfie of her own veiled face, glanced at him, and then took another.
“Our old life is done,” Gabriel explained. “I need to show respect for Papa. From now on, I dedicate myself to his memory. I will step into his shoes and do the best that I can.” He took a few steps away and looked at his father's casket, where a stone-faced Sofia now stood with Ella, one of his many cousins, who had wrapped her arm around Sofia's stiff shoulders. His mother was trying so hard to be strong.
Gabriel needed to be strong for her now. He imagined himself standing the way his father used to stand. His father had been so big, so rugged, so intense — how could he, Gabriel, be all those things at twenty-three years old? He’d just gotten his degree in marine biology two years before, had only a little job experience, hadn’t even bought himself the car he drove.
Rachel came up behind him, put her arms around him. “Papi, I understand if you need to take some time, think things through. That happens. This is all so sudden. But we’ll be fine. Right? We’ll be fine. We’re a team.”
"No. Not anymore. I'm standing on my own from now on."
Rachel burst out, "What the …." but choked down the f word. She said hoarsely, "I can't believe you're breaking up with me at a funeral!"
"And I can't believe you loved him like a father, or me as a boyfriend. You're too busy showing off to care."
Her cell phone in a white-knuckled grip, Rachel snatched up her purse and stormed out, pushing past a trio of his cousins gathered in the aisle. They watched her leave, then turned to Gabriel, their wide eyes full of questions.
"Dude," said Dwight.
"I'm sorry," said Gabriel. "But I need to be the man Papa was, and I can only do that alone."
****
Two months later, September
By the time the third show was done, both sea lions, Pepper and Jorge, were getting tired, a little slow to respond to his prompts, a little less elevated on their jumps, a little less vocal in their trumpeting calls. Gabriel wondered if he had overfed them or underfed them, or if he simply lacked his father’s ability to connect with the animals.
As the crowd dispersed to the pathways where other exhibits awaited them, he lifted the gate to move the sea lions into their holding tank. Jorge, the bigger of the two, honked annoyance at him, and he threw the creature a bit of chopped fish to catch before upending the rest of the bucket into their enclosure for them to lap up at their convenience.
His skill with the animals had improved with experience, but the constant learning by trial-and-error each day left him with a sinking feeling in his gut. One step forward, two steps back; that was the drill. He had suggested the purchase of a third sea lion, a young one he could train in order to give these senior animals a lighter performance load, but he had been refused. The budget wasn’t there, his boss Arnie said. Maybe next year, when the major construction was finished on the shark and ray and the shore attractions.
Gabriel didn’t understand budgets and capital campaigns; it wasn’t his field. “They think I’m not seasoned enough, goddamn it,” he told himself. “They think I can’t train a new animal on my own. Okay. I’ll work harder. I’ll show them I have the skills and I’m willing to put in the time.”
He certainly now had the time. He had ended his relationship with Rachel only days after his father’s untimely death, at the funeral, no less. It had gotten so her every word annoyed him. He didn’t see her as his woman, but as a clutching mass of tentacular need, and had even come to call the aquarium’s California two-spot octopus by her name when she was out of earshot. Her constant demand for reassurance had become intolerable. Hey, Papi, you're okay, right? No, he wasn’t. Hey, Papi, we're okay, right? No, they weren’t. He didn’t want to cheer up. He didn’t want to go back to normal, when normal was Rachel pulling him around like he had a ring and chain attached to his nose. Or when normal was pretending the loss of Rafael Castillo had not entirely redefined both his daily life and his priorities. High school was over. His high school girlfriend wanted him to cling to those memories like she did, and still be young at heart, when now was his time to take responsibility and be a man. Now was the time for him to make himself into the man his father had been.
Dwight Candy was the aquarium’s head groundskeeper. A big, sandy-haired man with twinkling eyes and perpetually scraped knuckles, he arrived after the last amphitheater show with two of his crew, Rogerio and Enrique,
to gather up the refuse left by the guests, broom the seats, and clean the performing tank.
“Great shows, G,” Dwight said. “Best yet. How about Turkish tonight? I get my dinner break at 6:30 like usual.”
“Going to my mother,” Gabriel answered.
“I’ll come with, if you want. We can get Turkish takeout on the way back.”
“That’s okay.”
“Come on. Your mama loves the Dwight-ster.”
Gabriel nodded. “Thanks, then. I’ll meet you in the parking lot at 6:30.”
“Hey, how’s Rachel?”
“The octopus?”
“No, the hot girl. Your ex.”
“She’s still Rachel. I didn’t see her today. That’s why I don’t have any sucker-marks on my face and shoulders.”
“Dude. Harsh.”
Rachel worked in the education department, where she led summer and day camps and acted as a guide for school field trips. Gabriel had heard they were hiring another girl to give an occasional tour as well as to work on new website content about environmental protection; he hoped she would become Rachel’s friend and distract his ex from trying to get him back.
A man and a teenage boy were approaching — guests, returned after Dwight neglected to close the entrance gate. Gabriel put on his game face and gave his warmest smile, which involved forcing his lips apart to show some teeth.
“Stop that, you look like a gargoyle,” Dwight whispered.
“Great show,” said the man. “I could tell you’re a natural with those seals.”
“They’re sea lions, actually,” Gabriel said. He closed his lips. “You can tell by the ear flaps and the large flippers. They walk on the flippers. Seals crawl on their bellies. And they also smell worse.”
Dwight made a nyuk-nyuk sound. Gabriel punched him on the arm without looking back.
“You’re in great shape,” the boy said. “I’m on the swim team at my high school. Would that help me get a summer job here next year?”
“Not with the animals, because you need a degree, but maybe with the grounds crew, right, Dwight?”