by Fiona Zedde
“Babe…” Rémi began.
“No, it’s okay. This looks intense and I’m sure she’d rather talk about it privately than have me here.”
Rémi didn’t protest any further. Both she and Sage knew Claudia was right. Although she wasn’t sure that once she got that privacy, she could say anything. A weight of sadness and betrayal pressed down on her chest.
“Thank you, Claudia.” Despite the shards of agony rattling inside her, Sage reached over to squeeze the woman’s arm.
“You’re welcome, honey. I hope this can be fixed, whatever it is.”
The car drove in silence for not long enough, the big and damn near silent engine taking them away from the theater through downtown Miami, into Coconut Grove. Claudia climbed out of the car, her purse in hand, and Rémi got out of the car, closed them both outside in relative privacy for a few seconds before Rémi climbed in the driver’s seat and pulled back out of the driveway. She heaved a sigh.
“So, tell us. What’s going on with you two now?”
Sage’s heart knocked in her throat, stopping any words. Was she just being completely stupid?
“Apparently, Phil is straight now.”
“What?” Rémi turned all the way around in her seat. It was a miracle the SUV didn’t jerk into another lane.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Dez said. “Start from the beginning.”
“This is the beginning.” Or the end. “I saw her about to toss her panties at that guy from the movie. Then I called her on it. She didn’t deny wanting to fuck him.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s straight,” Dez said.
“If she’s into dick now, it doesn’t matter what else she fucking calls herself.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a little unreasonable?”
“Seriously?” Sage opened her eyes to peer at Rémi.
“Yes. Claudia is bi, you don’t see me having a damn coronary over it.” She jerked her head in Dez’s direction. “You remember Dez went off with that Ruben dude a few years ago. So, what?”
“So what?” Sage sat up, looking at both her friends like they lost their minds. “You’re not in a damn open relationship, that’s what. You don’t have to eat your girl’s pussy knowing that you might suck too hard and end up with some guy’s jizz in your mouth.”
Dez rolled her eyes. “Don’t you two practice safe sex with the randoms you hook up with?” Her look said she was well-prepared to judge Sage if the answer was ‘no.’
“We do, but that’s not the point.”
Rémi muttered some choice curse words from the front seat.
Silence fell into the SUV and it rambled on. It felt like most of Miami passed by the windows—Little Haiti, Miami Gardens, North Miami Beach. The darkness flared with the lights of the city they passed, the little strip malls, other cars, people still waiting on buses, bicycles laboring by illegally on the sidewalks. Sage felt drained. Empty.
Days before, she’d been thinking again about marriage, something Phil had never mentioned but Sage knew she wanted. At least she’d talked about having a baby and what that would mean for the kind of life they now had.
As a child of parents who’d loved her but pretty much left her to her own devices, Sage was apathetic about being a parent herself. She didn’t have any particular desire for a child, and definitely had no gift at child-rearing either. But after the initial shock of finding out that Phil did want kids, she was willing to change their lives to nurture one. She was willing and ready to get married.
Not now though.
“I was going to ask her to marry me,” Sage said.
Dez squeezed her thigh. “You still can.”
Sage damn near shook her head off. “The hell I can.” The cloak of bravado she wore felt heavy and unwelcome—this was Phil they were talking about, for God’s sake!—but she couldn’t shrug it off. It was all that held her shattered insides together. She clenched her fist hard enough for it to hurt.
Rémi made a sound like steam again, the breath leaking from between her teeth in a long hiss. “You’re being really stupid right now.”
“Yeah, you are,” Dez naturally agreed.
Now Sage rolled her eyes. Of course, they were agreeing with each other. The two of them had always been close, even after the fiasco that led to Rémi falling in love with Dez’s mother. They had repaired that rift and were tighter than ever.
If it had been Sage in that position, it would have been a forever kind of loss. Something beyond repair. Her mother had always accused her, rightly so, of being unforgiving. The girl who’d stolen Sage’s jacks when she was barely six years old was still on her shit list. On visits to Jamaica, she barely tolerated the girl’s presence, preferring to go and walk down the lane with tick-ridden dogs than pretend she wasn’t still pissed at something the girl did when she still had baby teeth. It was a flaw. But one Sage wasn’t about to correct. She probably wouldn’t even know how.
The car hummed beneath them. From beneath her half-closed lashes, the world came at her in glittering, barely discernible circles. Nothing clear. Everything beautiful. She wanted things to stay just like that.
“What are you going to do?”
Her eyes fully opened to Dez’s grim look. Mouth tight, cheekbones sharp, the light from outside the window alternately shadowing and revealing the glittering intensity of her eyes.
“They’ll do what they always do,” Rémi said, her voice rough with impatience. “Fuck it out then talk it out.” She’d seen enough of Phil and Sage’s fights to know exactly how something like this usually went.
“If the thought of her fucking a guy is what’s got your boxers in a bunch, then close your damn relationship. Didn’t you mention suggesting that to her one time?”
A while ago, Sage had said something about closing up their open relationship, but she’d been feeling sentimental after hanging out with her monogamously coupled friends at an evening picnic. Phil had been off meeting with some girl or other and the picnic had been a last-minute thing, arranged so the couples could have an easy evening together. Phil couldn’t make it, so Nuria had been her replacement, showing up with her game face on, even dressing the part in a retro 1950’s dress, complete with polka dots and a big red bow at the waist. She carried an old-fashioned picnic basket, swinging it cheekily as she walked over the grass to meet them. Nuria was a good sport about being the replacement. As always, she was great company, telling jokes and trying to scandalize them all with tales of her latest sexual adventure.
But, for Sage, it wasn’t the same without Phil, her partner, the woman she could easily imagine being her wife.
“She and I can’t have a closed relationship,” Sage said now to Dez and Rémi. “That wasn’t our agreement.”
It was an agreement they made over ten years ago when Miami was just an endless buffet of pussy they both wanted to gorge themselves on.
“I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn,” Dez said, finally dropping limply into the seat at Sage’s side. She tapped her fingers on an upraised knee and exchanged a glance with Rémi in the rear-view mirror.
At that look, something inside Sage broke open.
Rémi and Dez were close. Partners. Not the closeness of lovers but something that nothing could crack in two. Unlike her and Phil.
Sage sat up, squeezed her eyes shut and opened them, blinking away an annoying and unwelcome onslaught of tears. “Let me out here.”
“What?”
“I just need to walk. This little drive isn’t helping. I can’t stand to look at you right now, either of you.” She reached for the door handle. “Stop the fucking car and let me out.”
The worry on Dez’s face split her in two. She grabbed the handle and squeezed. The door clicked open.
“Fuck!” Cursing, Rémi swung the car into the far-right lane with a squeal of tires then slammed on the brakes. Sage jerked forward in the seat, the seatbelt catching painfully across her chest. Next to her, Dez clutched at the “oh shi
t” bar and stared at Sage, shock and fear on her face.
“What the fuck are you doing?” She shouted. “Are you trying to kill yourself? Kill us?”
But this wasn’t about them. Why couldn’t they understand that?
The SUV was still, its engine running. Rémi twisted around to glare at Sage, eyes glittering. “What the fuck are you smoking? Are you high?”
A fury of car horns blasted behind them, more tires screeched against the pavement. Sage shoved open the car door and jumped out, ignoring the curses raining down at them from the dozen or so cars that had stopped just in time behind them, the onlookers from the sidewalk, people rubbernecking from other lanes.
Dez jumped out of the SUV behind her and followed, the heels of her boots clicking furiously against the sidewalk. “One of these days your fucking temper is going to get you in trouble!”
“Not today!” Sage jammed her hands in her pockets. “Don’t follow me. I have my phone. I’ll find my own way home.” She shouted the last over her shoulder and cut through the empty bank parking lot. Still, she heard the sound of her friend behind her, honking horns that told her Rémi hadn’t put the SUV back in gear to drive away. “Fuck off! Both of you. I’m serious!”
Then she ran.
She didn’t know where she was going. She just had to get away from their well-meaning stares. Their logic. Their fucking happiness.
Neither of them knew what she was going through. They probably never would.
Sage ran.
The breath huffed from her parted lips. Her dress shoes slapped hard against the pavement with every step and, already, her feet hurt. But that pain was nothing compared to what was happening inside her chest. She ran through another parking lot, her feet catching in the manicured shrubbery. She tripped and stumbled against a pine tree and the bark scraped her palms.
“God dammit, Phil!”
She screamed and ran on and ran and screamed, mourning the loss of a future she hadn’t even realized she’d been counting on.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Late, late that night, Sage knocked on a door across town. The walk there had been long, but she needed it. Unlike what her friends probably expected, she didn’t rush home to confront Phil. She didn’t get blind drunk and try to fuck her way through the bar either.
It was late. Well past the time any of her friends would’ve come back in from a night’s debauchery.
The door opened.
“Come in, sweet.” Nuria shoved her hands in the dark spill of curled dreadlocks and moved them out of her face. She tied the belt of the shimmery satin robe around her waist. She looked tired, worried. “I’m glad you came here.”
It was obvious Nuria hadn’t been sleeping. In her massive, sunken living room, the TV blared the lurid details of a murder gone wrong. A sign of her addiction to crime TV. The smell of coffee wove through the persistent scent of the fresh flowers she always kept in her condo. A bouquet of bright red roses sat on an antique side table. Without looking, Sage knew there was another bouquet of flowers in the middle of the kitchen table, just as red, just as beautiful.
She pulled off her jacket and shoes, and left them by the door.
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping or partying?” Sage asked.
Nuria made a noise of irritation. “How can I have a good time knowing you’re running around Miami like a crazy person in God knows what kind of emotional state?” She ran her hands through her hair again and went into the kitchen. “What kind of friend do you take me for?” she muttered as she walked away.
When she came back, Sage was sitting on the couch, pretending to watch the saga unfolding on the onscreen. High school sweethearts involved in a torrid and apparently deadly three-way with a teacher from a nearby school.
Nuria pushed a hot cup of spicy hot chocolate into Sage’s hands and curled up on the couch with fresh cup of coffee.
“You want to talk about it?” Nuria asked.
“Not really.”
“Okay.” Nuria sipped her coffee and turned her attention to the TV.
The actors playing the high school sweethearts looked more thirty than eighteen but they were putting their all into the performance, including the simulated sex scenes with the “teacher” who lured them away from their honor society lives into a world of sin.
“Phil told me she was bisexual today.”
From the look on Nuria’s face, the total lack of surprise, she must have already known. She pressed the coffee cup against her lower lip, giving Sage her full attention.
“You already know?”
Nuria shrugged. “I suspected when she started asking me these random questions about being bi about a year or so ago.”
A year? Sage swallowed the surge of temper with a mouthful of the hot chocolate.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Nuria gave her a look and she had to turn her own gaze away. Her friend had her own code of ethics, no matter how fucked up they may seem to other people. And she was a vault when it came to keeping secrets.
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Sage muttered, holding up a defensive hand before Nuria could say anything. “But we’re talking my relationship here.”
“Yeah, but we’re also talking about Phil’s life. Her choices and her self-discovery. I figured she’d tell you when she was ready.” Nuria sighed and made a regretful face. “I’m assuming the way it all came out in the open wasn’t ideal.”
Sage remembered that smug-ass actor with his long hair and Hollywood face, grinning at Phil like he was already imagining what she looked like in his bed. She clenched her jaw. Then told Nuria everything.
“So, no, it wasn’t ideal.” Sage ran her fingers over her short, tight curls. The headache that had exploded in her skull at the theater pounded even harder behind her eyes.
“This isn’t what I want,” Sage said. “She knows this.”
“It’s probably why she was worried about telling you.” Nuria sounded so reasonable Sage wanted to spit. “So, what are you going to do?”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Act like an adult?” Nuria raised an eyebrow.
Sage bristled. “I’m already dealing with this shit like an adult.”
“I’m not giving you adult points for not beating up a stranger in front of reporters if that’s what you’re after.”
Sage had been proud of the fact that she hadn’t swung on the pretty actor. Both their muscles came from the gym. She took kick-boxing classes, but he undoubtedly had security. It might have been an even match.
Nuria snorted impatiently, put her coffee cup down. “I’m serious, you know. You have to do something. Running off into the night like a spoiled kid won’t cut it.”
“I really don’t need your lecture, Nuria. That’s not what I came here for.”
“Then why did you come?”
Sage honestly didn’t know. For a friendly ear? To talk with someone who was bisexual and gain some insight into what just happened to her relationship? To have a friend listen and take her side of things?
Nuria might be Sage’s best friend—they were two island girls who formed a strong connection from the day they met—but she was also a friend to all of them. Phil included.
A frustrated breath huffed from Sage’s mouth.
In the sofa, Nuria just draped the robe over her legs and blew at her coffee.
“How come I didn’t know this about her?” Sage paced from one side of Nuria’s living room to the other. She wanted to wail and scream like a kid having a tantrum. “She—we’ve been together for twelve years. I’ve seen her fuck. I know she likes women…at least I thought she did. Now I find out she’s straight.”
Nuria scrunched up her face. “How do you bypass the obvious choice—that she’s bisexual—and go all the way to saying she’s straight. No one fakes pussy-lovin’ that much.”
“But bi? For real?” Before she could stop herself, she made a sound of disgust.
“Excuse me?” Nuria didn’t move but he
r face tightened and the hold on her coffee mug became far from relaxed. “Did you just forget who you’re talking to?”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“I have a lot of assumptions, apparently,” Nuria said. Her voice was tight now. She got up from the couch with her coffee and left the living room in a swirl of blue and gold satin. The loud gush of the faucet came from the kitchen, then she came back with a glass of milk. No coffee.
She settled the slippery cloth more firmly over her shoulders and sat in the corner of the sofa to give Sage her complete attention. “Tell me what you meant. I don’t want to assume anything.”
“Nuria, you know I don’t have any problems with you being bi.”
But sitting between them was the awareness that despite having had an initial attraction to Nuria when they first met, Sage had never tried anything with her. Although Sage wasn’t sure how she first formed the preference, she’d never willingly got involved with a bisexual woman. Whether it was for sex or anything with long term potential. She flirted like crazy with bi girls, but that was as far as it went.
“But you’re disgusted by Phil now? That’s what I’m getting from this conversation.” Nuria gripped the glass of milk more firmly between her hands but didn’t drink from it. “She hasn’t changed at all. She’s the same woman you supposedly fell in love with, the same woman you damn near asked to marry you last spring, but now because she says she might like a little dick in her life, you’re ready to write her off completely?”
Sage wouldn’t put it that way exactly, but Nuria was relentless.
She continued, “If your so-called love can disappear that quickly, then you didn’t call it by its right name.”
“Don’t bust my balls about this, Nuria,” she muttered. “This isn’t what I need from you right now.” The headache was threatening to split her head open now. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed both knuckles against her forehead.
Nuria’s face turned hard. “Then what exactly do you need from your bisexual friend who you just told you’re disgusted by your girlfriend’s newly realized bisexuality? Tell me, what exactly do you need that I’m supposed to provide?”
