A Tiny Piece of Something Greater

by Jude Sierra

  PrAISE FOR A TINY PIECE OF SOMETHING GREATER

  “Tender, touching romance…”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[FIVE STARS]… a tender, compassionate look at learning to love another person and oneself at the same time.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  PrAISE FOR Idlewild

  Named one of Kirkus Reviews’ BEST BOOKS OF 2016

  “A lovely, finely wrought romance that reminds us that to truly love another, we must know our own hearts.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  PrAISE FOR What It Takes

  “[STARRED REVIEW] Sierra (Hush) uses rich characterization and lyrical writing to infuse this slow-building romance with depth, humor, and pathos. Readers will savor every dip and peak of Milo and Andrew’s relationship as they balance the need for safety with the necessary risk of pursuing happiness.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This story was so satisfying, and one of the most wonderful depictions of friendship as a cornerstone of romance I’ve ever read.”

  —USA Today’s HEA Blog

  PrAISE FOR Hush

  “Sierra skillfully captures the frustration of navigating identity and interpersonal relationships for those to whom it doesn’t come easy… a worthy read and a valuable addition to the genre.”

  —Library Journal

  Copyright © 2018 Jude Sierra

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-60-3 (trade)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-61-0 (ebook)

  LCCN: 2018940092

  Published by Interlude Press

  http://interludepress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  Book Design and Cover Illustration by CB Messer

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Interlude Press

  For Anetia, Rachel and Katie

  For being lifesaving pieces in my something greater

  This is an #ownvoices book, both in lovely and painful ways. This book does contain sensitive subject matter that may be difficult or triggering for readers.

  A Tiny Piece of Something Greater includes the following:

  Discussion of mental illness, therapy, and recovery. It includes a portrayal of a cyclothymic character who experiences rapid mood cycles and anxiety. There is non-graphic discussion of past self-harm and off-page relapse. It also contains non-graphic reference to a past suicide attempt.

  (www.interludepress.com/content-warnings)

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  Reid Watsford taps his fingers on the steering wheel. The tap is constant and amplifies in intensity as he pointedly refuses to look in the rearview mirror.

  Faced with the thought of her son in a car for more than twenty-four hours, his mother Autumn gave him a gift card he could use to pay for hotels. Knowing it would be months before Reid came home, his father Sean bestowed rare affection; he ruffled Reid’s hair and pulled him into a rough, tight hug.

  Now, with Wisconsin at his back, Reid’s tension gives way to relief. The highway stretches before him, cracked and rough in places, narrowed by construction in others, and disconcertingly smooth and deep black where recently fixed. Reid tries not to deconstruct the loosening of his father’s shoulders when Reid had come to them with this plan. This trip is a new start, a restart, and he hates to think that his parents need it as much as he does.

  Felix told him he’d turn back by Kentucky. He pulled Reid into bed, touched him until Reid’s reluctance to sleep with Felix slipped into acceptance, until Reid broke promises he’d made to himself yet again. Felix smirked as he kissed each of Reid’s ribs, climbing the ladder of bone with lips that tasted of I-Told-You-So by the time they landed on Reid’s.

  Reid hits the steering wheel with one final, loud smack and resolves not to linger on any of their worries. Old Reid can’t seem to do anything right; not for himself, much less for them.

  He rolls down the window. The thick, sharp smell of asphalt is cloying in the hot air. He sits bumper-to-bumper waiting for construction traffic to clear. He turns the radio up as loud as he can stand, and music mixes, cacophonous, with the sound of machinery at work. Reid loses himself in the onslaught on his senses. There’s nothing behind me. Everything is ahead.

  What’s waiting for him at The Largos? He has memories of visiting his grandmother when he was a kid. His grandmother tells him he still is a kid at twenty, but it’s been years since he felt like one. He remembers that there were lots of old people living in the condo complex. He remembers sitting under a glass-top patio table while his grandmother and her friends, who were always sort of drunk, played various games. He was the only kid around, which was sometimes a bummer but mostly okay. Reid didn’t have many friends back home either. Sometimes being alone was what he wanted. Whenever he got angry, when he felt jittery and uncomfortable, holing up in his room with a book and loud music felt safe. Usually when this happened at home, he ignored his parents behind a locked door and yelled into his pillow. Reid has clear memories of himself as a kid, punching his pillow or the wall when he was most overwhelmed.

  They all probably should have recognized that wasn’t normal behavior. But it’s not as if he told his parents. The rational part of Reid’s brain now understands that they couldn’t have known the warning signs. Reid isn’t always rational about this, though, and although he tries his best not to be, and god knows his therapy group has heard about it enough, he’s still angry at his parents.

  He’s angry at everyone, which is why he’s running away. Complicit in this is his grandmother, Monica. Even though she wasn’t in Wisconsin for any of it—only living here part of the year and spending the rest in the Florida warmth—she was one of the few people Reid wanted to talk to while he was at Sycamore Grove Treatment Center. Despite months of work learning skills and tweaking meds to find out what would work for him, coming home wasn’t healthy. After months of struggle and lots of encouragement from his therapy group, Reid finally decided he needed a break: from his parents; from his hometown, Eau Claire; and from Felix, his ex.

  Struggling to hold a job and living away from his parents’ house were road blocks until his grandmother fell near the pool at her condo in Key Largo. She came back to Eau Claire so Autumn could take care of her but, after only one week with his family, she pulled Reid aside and asked him if he could take care of the condo for her. She
worded this to seem as if he were doing her a favor. Wasn’t caring for the condo covered by her homeowners’ association fees? But he took the offer immediately. One more minute in his home and he might have imploded.

  Of course, it took longer than a minute to pull everything together, to convince his parents, to work out how he could still participate in his therapy group, and to gently sever ties with the things and people in his life that were unhealthy. Namely, Felix. Reid is under no illusions about the mess he’s made of his life and himself. His boyfriend is a huge part of that. Ex-boyfriend, Reid reminds himself firmly.

  He’s struggling to get to ex mentally, and has been. The push and pull, the back and forth, the fundamentally unhealthy codependence between them have had long-term negative effects on Reid. He has ladders of healed cuts on his ribs to prove it.

  Reid shifts and fiddles with the radio. Things like this—relapsing a few months ago and the exhaustion of constant practice rebuilding—these are things he can think about later. Right now, he has to get to fucking Florida.

  Reid spends the night at a Red Roof Inn in Kentucky. He arrives late, painfully exhausted from sitting so long, and barely takes in the beige linoleum floors and spare double beds. He thinks of the countless rest stops he blew past in his rush to get to his destination and regrets not stopping to walk around and unkink his body.

  The room is cold, and the bedding is light. At home, Reid’s bed was always a sanctuary, with lots of blankets and a heavy comforter, washed often because the smell of the dryer sheets soothes him. Nancy, his therapist, told him once that the weight of blankets and comforters is a therapeutic tool for some people, particularly when going through mixed states or rapidly cycling moods.

  Reid is exhausted and anxious about the unfamiliar, sterile, cold room. In the unforgiving lights of the bathroom his skin reflects, pale and drawn. His eyes have borne the same haunted, lost look for months. Under his skin is the beginning of anxiety, or worse, a rapid cycle.

  He takes his medications dutifully. As always, he counts out the pills and checks their colors and shapes as he was taught at Sycamore Grove Treatment Center.

  Lamictal. Dark blue and round.

  Neurotonin. Large oval or, as Mom calls it, my “horse pill.”

  Ambien. Small and dark yellow.

  Klonopin. It looks so much like Ambien. Don’t mix them up. Last time I did that, I almost lost my job because I couldn’t function.

  If I take the Klonopin, will I be able to handle being somewhere new?

  The Klonopin helps with anxiety, sure, but it makes him tired too.

  He’s embarking on a phase in his life that will be nothing but new and potentially uncomfortable. Hell, most of his life has been uncomfortable, to say the least.

  Outside the motel room door, he can hear everything: laughter, the sound of a bottle being broken, and cars on the interstate, loud and intrusive. The walls and door and cheap beds offer no buffer against anything or everything that could happen. Reid piles all of the blankets and sheets from both beds on himself. He tucks the extra pillows between blankets in the hope that they will stay in place as he tosses and turns.

  After scanning the TV for something to watch, Reid gives up. His tastes run toward fun reality shows rather than conspiracy theory and drama. Grey’s Anatomy is still on; he takes a moment to marvel at its staying power and yes, perhaps judgmentally, to wonder at the taste of its still-existing audience. Reid tosses the remote onto the nightstand and huddles under the blankets with his Kindle. He doesn’t have WiFi, so he settles down with Paul and Noah, with Tony and Joni and every character and the almost memorized words of his favorite book, Boy Meets Boy. Its oddity and loveliness and sharp humor create a little world where Reid got lost over and over as a teenager. He needs this familiarity. Every now and then he lifts the covers for fresh air; the cool relief of clean air is the only cold he can bear. Eventually he falls asleep.

  * * *

  Morning comes too soon, but not soon enough. Noises outside wake him. He considers reading in bed a bit longer, trying to luxuriate on a soft surface before he has to get back into the car, but his Kindle shows a page far past any part of the book he can remember reading last night.

  When he showers, he makes the water almost unbearably hot and struggles not to worry the fine lines of just-formed scars on his ribs with his fingertips or to read the story of older, thicker scars he knows all too well. He’s untethered enough to worry he’ll spiral into something close to relapse if he lets himself linger. He’s never grown a beard, but he doesn’t have a razor. He considers and decides he can buy one when he’s settled at his grandmother’s, when he’s steadier.

  He ignores the mirror and dresses quickly. He grabs his Kindle and charger before stepping out into tepid sunlight and the rushing sound of cars a few yards away. His beat-up white Honda is June-warm, which is nice. His destination is at least another day away. Still, Reid checks the map on his phone. He’s not hungry, so he dutifully turns onto the expressway and sends out some positive hope that there will be no more construction. Reid doesn’t pray, but sometimes he likes to think that the energy he and others put out into the world might make a small difference.

  Two

  “Tchau, Mãe, beijos pra todos,” Joaquim Oliveira says, struggling yet again to get off the phone. His mother says goodbye and sends kisses as well. She immediately follows this by reminding him that his cousin is coming to the States and that Joaquim should try to meet up with him. Joaquim doesn’t want to remind her yet again that Miami-Dade is at least an hour away and he doesn’t have a car.

  “Mãe,” he says. His mother is awful at letting him off the phone. He misses her and his family terribly, but, after thirty minutes on the phone, Joaquim’s finished. He’s not a phone person. Perhaps this contributes to his homesickness. He and his sister Sofia keep in touch via email and text, so he gets more constant contact with her, rather than large chunks in weekly phone calls.

  On the bed across the tiny room, Bobby, his roommate, laughs at him silently, narrow shoulders shaking. Joaquim throws a balled-up pair of socks at him. He’s been folding laundry and talking at the same time, which always gives him a crick in his neck. But he’s got to do something. Between the scuba diving classes he’s been teaching at the pool at the Key Largo Dive Center, his new responsibilities taking people out on dives, and work at the shop, Joaquim doesn’t have time for both a social life and keeping up on chores. Bobby could care less about the clean room, but, if the mess bugs Joaquim, he can usually get Bobby to do something.

  “Mamãe, tenho que ir,” he tries again. He doesn’t have to go, but telling her he wants to might not go over well.

  Finally, finally he gets his mother off the phone. He tosses it on the bed and rubs his hot, sweaty ear. “Jesus, Maria e José,” he mutters in exasperation.

  “You should set a timer for her,” Bobby says. His headset is still around his neck, but he’s gone back to his computer. He’s been gaming since he got out of the shower post-dive, so his tawny brown hair has dried in uneven clumps. Joaquim is never sure what he’s playing. Right now, some game with “M-80” in the title. Bobby is happy to unwind in their room playing games, talking to his guild, and Skyping friends he’s made online. But Joaquim isn’t a big gamer. “Mentally, I have,” Joaquim says.

  In the two months Joaquim and Bobby have been working as interns at the Dive Center, Joaquim has developed a real friendship with only one of the other interns, Nina, and both of them get along pretty well with Tammy, another intern. They go out together sometimes—nothing too crazy. Joaquim needs to get out of this room and out of the facility sometimes, to sit by the water when he’s not working in it, to explore the Keys one by one, to wear his youth. Their jobs leave them so little time. He’s used to a more relaxed pace in life and in his approach to work. It’s probably good for him, though, to transition into a more American way of handling these
things—for whenever he decides what he wants to do with the rest of his life.

  Joaquim stacks his clothes haphazardly in his drawers. He checks the time. Almost nine, pretty close to curfew. He didn’t have set plans with the girls, but he’s hemmed in. Even though Joaquim comes from a much warmer place than Bobby’s native North Dakota, Bobby likes it warmer in their room than he does; he loves the Florida warmth and the salt in the air when they open the windows. Sometimes that makes Joaquim more homesick.

  The city of São Paulo, where he’s from, isn’t close to the ocean, so that’s not what makes him homesick. Maybe it’s the warmth, or the strangeness of a whole new place with a different pace, or the unfamiliar accents. Over his bed is a bulletin board completely covered in pictures of friends and family, of his city, and the jungles and beaches he’s visited in the past. His small world map has pins in it, with string connecting them. There’s a pin for every place he’s visited: a pin in São Paulo, of course, but also in Rio and Bahia and Manaus in Brazil. He’s been to Caracas and Maracay in Venezuela to visit friends from grade school. And he went on a trip after high school to Cartagena in Colombia. That’s where he first went scuba diving and fell absolutely in love with it. He’s been scuba diving ever since. Joaquim has only been to Miami and the Keys in the States thus far. But he and Nina have made loose plans to go on a road trip to Orlando and, if they ever have the time and money after their internship is over, Savannah.

  Beyond food and board and a small stipend, Joaquim isn’t making money from this internship. He’s not saving for future trips now, but as soon as he’s certified as a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer, he plans to start making and saving money. He wants to visit so many places. He’d love to see snow. Sometimes he makes Bobby describe it to him. Bobby rolls his eyes but humors him.

  * * *

  Wednesday’s shift is boring, even though he’s manning the dive shop alone since Nina is down with a bad chest cold. He understands not diving, obviously, but thinks she was being a bit dramatic when he went to check on her.