The Distance (3 page)

Once the downstairs and the grand ballroom on the third floor were decorated and the last delivery person filtered out, I shut the door and chuckled as I took in the scene before me. It was festive, no doubt about it. The curved banister leading to the second floor landing was lined with dozens of balloon hearts and foot-long dicks, and I’d had the party company place a dozen of the giant peens randomly around the spacious foyer. They looked like a big, pink, dick forest.

Someone knocked as I was admiring the décor, so I threw my arm around the nearest towering peen and struck a pose. When I swung the door open, River Flynn-Hernandez, who was both the caterer for the party and a friend of the family, raised an eyebrow at me and said, in an accent that was an interesting mix of California surfer and Louisiana drawl, “Nothin’ that happens at Nana’s house surprises me anymore.” I could understand that. Anyone who visited regularly knew to expect the unexpected.

He placed several canvas grocery bags just inside the door. I followed him out to his van in the driveway and asked, “Where’s Cole?” River and his boyfriend worked together and were usually inseparable.

We both picked up crates of produce, and as we carried them to the house he told me, “Cole’s not coming. It’s okay, though. I just got off the phone with Trevor, and he said he’d come early and help me cook.”

“Is Cole okay? He didn’t catch that flu that’s going around, did he?”

“He’s fine.” River just left it at that and took a right turn into the big, sunny kitchen.

As I helped him unpack the boxes onto the long, granite-topped kitchen island, I said, “Your brother’s here.” I pointed to the backyard with a bunch of carrots.

“I know, I saw Skye’s truck.” River’s long, sun-streaked brown hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and he tucked an escaped tendril behind his ear as he said, “I’ll go out and say hi in a minute, some of this stuff needs to be refrigerated.”

When everything was unpacked and the refrigerator was loaded, he said he needed to run back out to his van for something, and I told him I’d be in the backyard. I paused to check my reflection in the gleaming chrome of a giant espresso machine Ollie had bought the week before. I’d been growing out my blond hair, and pulled off my baseball cap and tried to finger comb it a bit before giving up and putting the cap back on. I then pulled down the zipper on my hoodie, but what the hell did I think I was doing? I was built like a sixth grader, so it wasn’t like I was going to impress anyone with my manly pecs. The fact that I was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘You suck. I like that in a man’ really wasn’t going to impress anyone, either. I pulled the zipper up again before grabbing three bottles of water from the fridge and heading outside.

Funnily enough, the peen theme continued out in the yard. Two long rows of Italian cypress trees lining a wide, paved path had been trimmed into tidy columns, and each was flanked by a pair of round shrubs. That horticultural gem had been dubbed Cockhenge at some point, and while Nana swore she hadn’t had them trimmed to look like cocks on purpose, she’d ended up liking it and had left them that way.

At the end of the long pathway, Cockhenge culminated in a recently-added stone and concrete platform. A huge metal sculpture of two male faces in silhouette was under way on top of that base. The face on the right was tilted back and the other face hovered above it, held up by a thin column of metal whose curve suggested the front outline of a neck. The silhouettes were almost but not quite meeting in a kiss, and the lips of the face on the right were parted slightly, as if in anticipation. Even though the sculpture wasn’t even halfway done, it was already gorgeous.

The artist, a cute guy named Skye with shaggy, blue hair and a quick smile, was prying a piece of metal off the face on the left when I stepped into the yard. He did that a lot. He was a total perfectionist when it came to his artwork, and if he didn’t love something after he welded it in place, he went after it with a crowbar and tried again.

Skye had been working on the sculpture since early December. He was at Nana’s house three or four days a week, usually accompanied by his husband Dare. They were such a cute couple, so obviously in love and completely devoted to each other.

Dare was a dancer, and had been choreographing a routine with a friend while his husband welded. When I came outside, he took a break and picked up a towel to wipe the sweat from his face and short, brown hair. He taught classes to earn a living, and was also working on an original ballet production with the all-gay-male dance troupe he’d been assembling.

That day, and at least a couple times a week, the couple was joined by a dancer named Haley, who was helping with the choreography. Skye and Dare usually worked out of a warehouse in Oakland, but Nana’s house was pretty centrally located in the city, so it was a good place to meet up. Nana encouraged that, of course. She loved having lots of people around.

Haley was a tall African-American guy with a muscular body, who wore his hair in short dreadlocks. He was undeniably sexy. I was trying to stop crushing on him though, because he clearly thought of me like a kid brother. At twenty-four, I was only three years younger than him, but I got it. I was short, skinny, and looked like I was in my teens. No wonder I wasn’t even a blip on his radar.

They all stopped what they were doing and said hello when I joined them, and thanked me as I handed out the water bottles. I was also greeted by Skye and Dare’s dog. The black and white boxer nuzzled my hand until I scratched his ears, then went back to sniffing the landscaping.

Even though it was a sunny day, there was a bit of a breeze, and the dancers pulled on sweatshirts over their tank tops before taking a seat on a couple patio chairs beside the sculpture. “Aren’t you guys freezing out here?” I asked as I sat down on a corner of the stone and concrete base. “You can move into the ballroom upstairs if you want to.”

Dare said, “It’s really only cold if we stop moving, which we never do for long.”

“Plus, you want to stay close to your hubby,” Haley said with a teasing grin.

“Plus that,” Dare admitted. Skye sat on his husband’s lap and kissed him on the tip of his nose.

“It’s a good thing I like you two,” Haley told them as they smiled at each other. “Otherwise, I’d pretty much be going into a sugar coma over here. Speaking of which, I’m having serious doubts about this Valentine’s party tonight. The entire holiday is just this big, glaring reminder for us single people that we’re alone. If it wasn’t also a celebration of your wedding anniversary, I’d give it a skip and spend the rest of the weekend on my couch with a frozen pizza, a bottle of tequila, and reruns of the Golden Girls, in a show of solidarity with my single brothers and sisters everywhere.” Man, could I relate. I almost volunteered to be his date for the party, but I didn’t want him to feel like he had to say yes, just because I put him on the spot in front of our friends.

River stepped out the back door just then, and as he came toward us down the path, Skye called, “Hey, bro! Where’s Cole?” I glanced from one to the other. They were half-brothers, and looked nothing alike. Skye was fair-skinned with blue eyes, while River’s darker coloring reflected his father’s Latino heritage. They’d even grown up in different parts of the country, which meant only River spoke with a drawl. They were really close though, and I envied them. I missed my brothers and sister every day.

River sighed as he dropped onto the patio chair beside Dare’s and said, “I don’t want you to make a big deal out of it, which I totally know you’re going to, because you’re like that.”

“Make a big deal of what?” Skye asked.

River looked at the ground as he said, “Cole and I have been havin’ some problems. He’s sleepin’ on his friend Miranda’s couch these days.”

Skye exclaimed, “Oh my God! Are you two breaking up? I’ve never even seen you bicker!”

“Okay,” River said, drawing a circle in the air around his brother, “this is you making a big deal of it. And just because we never bickered in front of you doesn’t mean everythin’ was rosy. Cole’s a very private person. He barely even showed me what he was feeling, so he sure as hell wasn’t going to share our problems with you or the rest of our friends and family.”

“But how could he just move out?” Skye asked.

“He’s been really unhappy,” River said. “I knew something was bothering him, it was obvious for weeks. But instead of fixing it, I fucked it all up. I tried to get him to talk about it, but he wouldn’t. That was so frustrating. After a while, without even realizing what I was doing, I started picking fights with him about meaningless shit, like never replacing the empty toilet paper roll or forgetting to pay a bill, which was totally asinine of me. Eventually, it dawned on me why I was doing that shit. I was pissed off at him because he wouldn’t fucking talk to me, and that anger kept leaking out in these stupid little ways. As if a roll of toilet paper is ever reason enough to snap at someone.”

“I get why you were annoyed, though,” Skye told him.

River scrubbed his hands over his face, then leaned back in the chair as he said, “When I realized I’d been acting like a douche, I went to see Cole and tried to apologize, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Meanwhile, I still don’t know what the fuck is going on with him or why he started withdrawing from me in the first place, because he still won’t fucking talk to me.”

Haley asked, “So, does this mean you two have broken up?”

River shrugged and told him, “I don’t know. Things are just up in the air at this point. I have no idea what’s going to happen.”

His brother said, “I’m so sorry you’re going through this. Is there anything I can do?”

“Just help run interference for me at this party. A lot of people we know are going to be here to celebrate your anniversary, and I really don’t want to have to tell each of them what I just told you. Cole would fucking hate it if everyone knew his personal business. So just, I don’t know, tell people he’s home with a cold or something. I realize I’m asking you to lie to our friends and that’s totally shitty, but if I have to tell fifty people my problems, I’m gonna fucking lose it.”

Skye said, “Alright, the official story is that your boyfriend’s home with a cold. That’s all anyone needs to know.”

I chimed in, “When you get ready to cook, I’ll help you. I’ll just have to pick Nana up when she’s done at the salon, but that won’t take long and then I can do whatever you need me to. I don’t want you to stress about this event when you already have so much on your mind.”

“Thanks, Jessie. I appreciate it,” he said.

“We’ll all help you cook,” Skye said. “I’ll just have to get cleaned up first.” He was wearing denim overalls and a blue thermal shirt with the sleeves pushed back, and was definitely on the grubby side after a day of wrangling pieces of rusted metal.

“Great. Trevor’s also going to help out, so we’ve got the catering gig covered. Now everyone stop staring at me, please,” River said, shifting uncomfortably. “Talk amongst yourselves. Here’s a topic: Jessie racing his teensy car tonight. Is that really happening?”

I raised an eyebrow at Skye and said, “Way to keep a lid on that.”

“I just told my brother, but don’t worry, we all made sure it didn’t get back to Nana.” Dare and Haley knew too, since I’d let it slip while I was talking to the three of them.

“I don’t think Nana would disapprove of you going back to street racing,” River said. “I don’t think she disapproves of much at all.”

I said, “No, but she might want to join in and I wouldn’t want her to get hurt. Nana’s the kind of person who’ll try anything once.
Anything
.”

Haley looked skeptical. “There’s no way she’d want to race. She has to be, what, eighty years old?”

“Yeah, but that makes no difference. All of life is one huge bucket list to Nana,” Skye told him. “It’s kind of great, actually, but that list probably shouldn’t include drag racing.”

While Haley mulled that over, I turned to River and said, “That ‘teensy car’ is going to shred the competition tonight.”

“You’re not going to the party?” Haley asked.

“I won’t be gone long. I’m just going to slip out, destroy my competitor, and come right back.”

“Dude, it’s like, a thirty-year-old Honda Civic. How’s that going to outrace anything?” River asked.

“She
was
a thirty-year-old Civic,” I told him. “Now Sharona’s a race car. Every single system in that car has been replaced, rebuilt, and upgraded. She can’t lose.”

“You sound pretty confident,” Haley said.

“She’s ready. I am, too. I’ve been away from racing for over a year and I’m dying to get back to it.”

Skye winced at that. “Unfortunate choice of words, Jess, since your last race ended in a crash.”

Haley asked, “What happened?”

“Another driver happened. My tire blew just as I was coming off the line, which would have been alright. I wasn’t going that fast yet, so I could have held it together. But this asshole named Trigger clipped my fender right in the middle of that and my car rolled. I was thrown clear, so I was basically okay except for a limp that took two months to go away, but my car was totaled. I loved that car,” I said, shaking my head. “I spent over three years and a small fortune perfecting her and had just gotten her to the top of her game.”

“Not to trivialize the rest of that, but Trigger? Really?” River asked.