Hungry for It

by Fiona Zedde

  Chapter 18

  “Are you home to rest this time?” Yvette called out from the kitchen as Rémi walked into the condo.

  “Something like that.”

  For once, the television wasn’t on. Just a moody violin from the speakers. Sun poured in through the open windows, highlighting the small changes that had taken place since Yvette moved in. The fashion magazine on the coffee table. A rumpled blanket in the middle of the sofa instead of being neatly folded over its back. A bright pink cell phone and a physics textbook on the floor in front of the blank TV.

  Her sister came into the living room drinking a glass of water. “Is all that busy-ness to do with the club, or do the ladies have your attentions that much?”

  “None of your busy-ness.”

  “That answers my question then.” Yvette giggled as she flopped onto the couch, shoving the blanket out of her way. “For an old chick, Claudia can hang. I thought for sure she didn’t keep these crazy hours.”

  “I wasn’t with Claudia.”

  “Oh.”

  Rémi sat on the couch and dropped her head back. The nap she’d had at the club after sending Monique away did her good. It left her mind clear and her body a few levels above functioning.

  “Do you want me to make breakfast?”

  She opened one eye to look at her sister in surprise. Yvette hadn’t made a move toward the stove in Rémi’s presence the entire time she’d been here. “Sure. Eggs and waffles.”

  “How did I know you’d say that?”

  “You’re psychic?” Rémi shut her eyes. “Not to mention that’s the only thing in the fridge that’s not takeout.”

  “Hm.” Rémi heard the sound of her drinking the water, her throat gulping down the fluid. Yvette breathing after each swallow.

  “You’ll have to make the eggs yourself. But the waffles I can definitely do.”

  Rémi smiled, tilting up the corner of her mouth. “Sure, why not?”

  In the kitchen, she pulled the gray carton of eggs from the fridge, checking to make sure that the expiration date hadn’t passed. Her finger skated over the bumpy ridges of the carton. Claudia’s eggs probably never got the chance to expire. She smiled and stepped around her sister.

  “So.” Yvette closed the freezer door. “Do you consider yourself one of those Aggressives or AGs that I keep hearing about?”

  “What?” Rémi looked up from the stove. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, those lesbians who are mostly in their twenties. They act like guys but still consider themselves female and feminine.” Yvette paused. “You seem like that type.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m curious about you. We’re complete strangers to each other. I want to change that.”

  “That’s a strange way to get to know me, asking if I’m an AG or whatever.”

  “Aggressive. They even made a movie about those girls.” She paused in the act of pulling two plates from the cupboard. “Bois. I think most of them call themselves bois.” Yvette closed the cupboard and took the plates to the kitchen island.

  “You finding out what kind of lesbian I am”—Rémi chuckled at the thought—“is not going to lead to knowing me better.” She broke an egg in the oil swimming with heat, and it splashed, immediately curling up at the sides and turning brown. “I’m just the daughter Auguste and Kelia threw away.” With a cool twist of her lips, Rémi tossed the eggshells in the trash can under the sink.

  Yvette looked up from pulling waffles from their yellow box. “What our parents did doesn’t make you who you are.” The freezer exhaled cool mist as she put the box back inside. “I’d like to think of you as one of these AGs. Kinda strong and making their own rules.” At the counter, she pressed the lever on the toaster, submerging two waffles into the depths of the machine.

  Rémi glanced at her sister. “Maybe one day I’ll get to that place where what Mama did won’t matter much anymore.” She nodded. “That would be real nice.”

  Side by side, they finished making their respective breakfasts. Rémi didn’t even ask where Yvette found the vegetarian sausages she quickly heated up in the saucepan while Rémi plucked her eggs out of the oil and took down glasses for both of them. They sat at the kitchen table across from each other with a bottle of maple syrup and the crystal butter dish between them.

  Rémi pinched off the crispy brown curve from her egg and bit into it, sighing at the small pleasure, the crisped and lightly salted egg white saturating her tongue with flavor. Suddenly, it felt like she hadn’t eaten in days. She tore off a bigger piece.

  “How can you eat those little aborted chickens?”

  Rémi continued chewing. “They’re a little taste of heaven.”

  “If you think heaven is an abortion.”

  “Eat your veggie sausage and shut up. The day you have an abortion is the day you can talk to me about eating it on my plate.”

  “I’ve had one.”

  “What?” Rémi nearly choked on her food.

  “Well, not really,” Yvette muttered, looking down at her plate. “But I thought about what it would feel like.”

  Rémi cut her glance over her sister, the hair caught up in a single bushy ponytail, a red tank top, and yoga pants pushed down to show her belly button.

  “Mama is a drama queen too, if I remember things correctly,” Rémi said.

  Yvette’s mouth snapped shut around her waffle, and her eyes narrowed. Before she could open her mouth again, Rémi held up her hand. “Don’t say it. Just let me eat my breakfast in peace. Please.” She shook her head. “No wonder Mama is having a heart attack about you.”

  Yvette smiled, impish and unrepentant. “Speaking of Mama, she called yesterday.”

  Rémi sliced into the thick yolk with her fork. It burst, sticky yellow, exploding over her plate and up the tines of her fork. “What does she want?”

  “Me. Back home.”

  “That was a fast turnaround.”

  “Tell me about it. Maybe she was looking at my old baby pictures and realized just how cute I am.” Her smile flashed. “Deep down.”

  “Ha! Real deep down.”

  Yvette’s smile faded. “So, if I go back to Maine, will you come with me?”

  The waffle, heavy with the golden maple syrup, squished between Rémi’s fingers as she tore off a piece to put in her mouth. “Okay.”

  Her sister grinned. “Really?”

  “Sure. Why not? I can’t stay long, maybe a long weekend. A holiday weekend.”

  She’d never been invited home before. After she’d left Auguste’s house, not once did she receive an invitation back. When he died last year, Kelia called, leaving a simple sentence on Rémi’s voice mail. “Your father is dead.” Within twenty-four hours she was in Maine, checking into a hotel five miles from the Boothbay Harbor house where she spent the first fourteen years of her life. And while Rémi stood there at the funeral, drowning in memories of a man who’d shown nothing but contempt for her once he found out that she was gay, Kelia never once invited her back home.

  “That’s so awesome,” Yvette said, leaning toward Rémi with a greasy hand extended. “I can definitely deal with that.”

  Rémi took her sister’s hand and returned the squeeze. “Cool.”

  Chapter 19

  “You look good.” Dez threw Rémi a smile from her chair in the middle of the bustling café. She briefly stood up from the table to exchange hugs.

  Do I? “Thanks.” Rémi pulled out a heavy wrought iron chair across from her friend and sat down.

  When she’d gotten the call from Dez saying that she was back in town from her honeymoon and wanted to see her, Rémi froze, feeling as if she’d gotten caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar. Guilt led her to a bottle of Scotch much too early, then to the kitchen for caffeine to clear her head before finally heading out to Victoriana’s to meet Dez. Sitting across from her, alcohol and caffeine warred in Rémi’s body with nauseating results.

&nbs
p; The last time they’d been together at Victoriana’s, the bookstore and café owned by Dez’s new wife, Rémi and Dez had been wasted. It was after a sleepless night of fucking, smoking, and drinking. They’d been nearly comatose from their night of debauchery but Dez still found enough strength to go after Victoria.

  “Back to the scene of the crime?” Rémi murmured.

  She toyed with a glass of water on the table, turning it idly between her hands. Nerves. She was showing her nerves. Rémi consciously bit off a sigh, left the water alone, and leaned back in her chair. Dez’s smile wouldn’t be that big if she knew about the relationship with Claudia. But what will I do when she does find out? Rémi ignored the nagging question and focused on acting blameless.

  “Not a crime,” Dez said. “The best decision of my life.”

  “I’m glad you still think so. Forty-five days alone on a rocking boat with one other person isn’t always a good thing.”

  Dez grinned and leaned toward her as if sharing a secret. “It was the best. Incredible.”

  And it obviously had been. Dez looked happier and more relaxed than Rémi had seen her in a long time. Maybe ever. On the long boat trip, her pecan skin had tanned to a darker brown. Her lean body looked fit, even a bit more muscular in the loose designer jeans and thin long-sleeved white shirt rolled up at the elbows.

  “I guess you didn’t miss your friends, then?”

  “I missed you, all of you, but not the things we used to do.” Dez’s eyes flashed as if remembering all the things they’d gotten into together. The women. The drugs. The over-the-top parties. “Part of me thought that I would—I mean shit! It’s been over a year since I slept with anyone else. But Victoria has been the perfect lover and the perfect partner. There’s nothing else I want.”

  Rémi didn’t doubt it. Before touching Claudia, the other experiences had been to pass the time. To temporarily fill the space that her need for the older woman had left in her. Now she was fulfilled. Rémi reached for the glass of water, thinking, with a savage twist of her mouth, that Dez would probably not appreciate her sharing that piece of news.

  “You deserve it,” she said instead. And meant it.

  “What does my darling deserve?”

  Rémi turned her head to look at Victoria as she approached their table. In a peach floral print dress belted high beneath her full breasts and fluttering around her dimpled knees, she glowed in the early afternoon light.

  “Only the best.” Rémi stood up to greet the new bride with a kiss on the cheek. “Which is why she has you.”

  Victoria laughed and squeezed her arm. “You always know just the thing to say, Ms. Bouchard.”

  “When it comes to pleasing women, I like to think I know what I’m doing.” Rémi teased her, enjoying the riotous spill of curls around Victoria’s face and shoulders, her ripe cleavage, and disarming smile.

  “Lay off. That’s my woman,” Dez growled.

  Rémi and Victoria exchanged another smile.

  “I think she knows that,” Rémi said.

  She spent another hour with the couple in the café, graduating her drink to chamomile tea over the PG-13 details of their honeymoon. The fish they caught. How beautiful the stretch of sea between the Dominican Republic and Jamaica was this time of year. How they couldn’t wait to get away from it all again.

  But their exchanged smiles and lingering touches eventually drove her away, made her want to seek out Claudia and bask in the warm glow of her presence. In the stinging heat of her kisses. Rémi didn’t get what she wanted, though. Instead, she had to go back to Gillespie’s and tend to some minor emergency that thankfully had none of Anderson’s fingerprints on it.

  Chapter 20

  “Sluts need love too,” Nuria pouted, her chin propped up on a loose fist.

  Her friends laughed. At Gillespie’s, the night’s performance was over and the stage lay bare of everything except a few instruments and a dimmed spotlight. At three in the morning, dinnertime was long gone. People drank. Laughed. Gestured more broadly under the influence of the club’s endless supply of alcohol.

  “No one is saying that they—you—don’t,” Rémi sipped her mineral water and raised an eyebrow at her friend. “I’m just asking people to stop calling it polyamory when all they want is the right to fuck anybody they want, whether or not they themselves are in a relationship.”

  “Then what is this polyamory if not that?” Nicoletta Nakamura leaned in toward the other women at the circular table, the silver bangles on her arm tinkling as she gestured emphatically. “People seem so confused about it. I know I am.”

  Across the table, her sister, Matsuko, laughed. “You’re always confused, Letta.”

  “Shut up,” Chance Nakamura said, her gravelly voice deep with affection.

  The sisters had agreed to join Rémi and her friends at the club for dinner and drinks, gracing Gillespie’s with their triple-threat beauty and causing Sage to lose her mind. Again. Rémi’s friend sat next to Nicoletta, trying her best to get the triplets into her bed for the night. Phil had agreed to watch if Sage got what she wanted.

  “You are one of these polyamorous ones, Nuria, yes?” Nicoletta asked.

  “I’ve never claimed to be,” Nuria murmured, her eyes twinkling like faraway stars. She was enjoying this conversation too much. “Sex is one of the greatest gifts that human beings have been given. I love to fuck and will happily claim the title of slut. That is until I find the one person for me. After that, I’m only fucking her. Or him.”

  “I’ll jump in to defend polyamory,” Sage said, pressing her shoulder against Nicoletta’s. Her eyes dropped to the Japanese woman’s cleavage.

  “There’s no reason to defend it,” Rémi said. “From everything I’ve read it sounds great. Threes and fours being in a sexual and loving relationship together. Nice. But so far, everyone I know who claims to be polyamorous, again single or not, just seems to want to have license to fuck anything with a hole.” She turned in her chair. “Isn’t that right, Phil?”

  Phillida sputtered, almost choking on her martini while her friends laughed. “Not funny,” she said, wiping off the front of her dress. “I don’t know about the rest of you bitches, but I’m a swinger. Sage will always be my baby, but if I see something hot and I can have them according to the rules our relationship, I’m taking it.”

  “Here, here.” Chance raised her glass. “That is the kind of relationship I have with my lover, also. We do what we wish when apart, but when together it is just the two of us.”

  “I’ll drink to whatever keeps you available.” Sage raised her rum and Coke while her girlfriend rolled her eyes, not bothering to raise hers.

  “Is this a celebration I should be a part of?”

  Rémi froze at the sound of Matthias Anderson’s voice.

  “Quite the opposite, actually,” she said, turning and raising her eyes to look at him.

  He stood too close to her, his hair haloed by the amber lights suspended from the ceiling. Dressed all in white except for a red handkerchief neatly folded and peeking from the pocket of his blazer, he looked like a European aristocrat summering in a country not quite to his liking. With hands in the pockets of his slacks, Anderson’s eyes roved over the women at the table. Taking note of her friends, Rémi thought.

  She felt the muscle in her jaw begin to tick. She glanced at her friends, the smile flicking like a seizure across her face. “I’ll be back in a second, guys.”

  “Everything all right?” Someone at the table asked the question but Rémi was too far from all right to answer.

  She left the table, motioning ahead of her, on the surface saying “after you” but wanting to punch him in his smiling face. What the fuck was he doing here?

  “I don’t appreciate your presence here,” she said when they had left the crush of the dining room and were walking toward a more quiet place that turned out to be her office. More than anything she hated public scenes, so whether or not Anderson was going to cause one, she
wanted their talk to be private. Rémi opened the door to her office with its key and waited for Anderson and his bodyguard—not Frank or Todd—to come in before closing it firmly.

  Rémi sat down behind her desk. “Why are you here?” she asked when they stood alone except for his bodyguard, who lurked by the door.

  Anderson sat in the chair before Rémi’s desk, though he hadn’t been invited to, sprawled his legs in the creaseless white slacks and brushed a speck of invisible dirt from his knee. “To show you the same courtesy you showed me a few weeks ago when you paid me a visit.”

  He took a cigar from his breast pocket. Within moments his bodyguard was before him, half kneeling to clip off the end of the pale man’s cigar then catch flame to it with a gold butane lighter. His cheeks sank in as he puffed, once. Twice. Then he squinted at Rémi through the smoke. The bodyguard moved back to his place by the door.

  The bit of smoke drifting to her nose made Rémi inhale more deeply. Cigars. She missed them even more than cigarettes. “If it’s all about reciprocity then it would be my turn to drop a load of rats and their shit in your place of business. Just to make it more lively.”

  He didn’t bother to deny it, only smiled slightly as he puffed his cigar and took in the details of her office, lingering too long, Rémi thought, on the closed door to the bedroom behind her.

  “At any rate, Ms. Bouchard, I was just passing through. About the incident at my club with Franklin and Todd, I let the more unfortunate part of my nature get the better of me. Regrettably.”

  The “unfortunate part of his nature.” That’s what he called almost killing her in the stinking alley behind his club? Her hand fisted against the desk.

  “Don’t take things too personally, Ms. Bouchard.” He blew a smoke ring, and it traveled lazily upward, circling like a devilish halo above his head as he leaned forward. “I hear you’re practically running this club on your own now.” Anderson paused. An indecipherable look flashed across his face. “You’re doing a good job.”